. . .but something kinda like one. Something that I forgot I had or (a more likely scenario) something I never knew I had or (also quite likely the case) something that I wasn’t even necessarily supposed to end up with at the end of a session . . . unlike the happening cards--they were texts I made sure that I got back at the end of a class session, texts that I have made a point of holding onto all these years.
Coming to this particular find: The members of the 486/686 course have been asked to read (along with two other landmark essays on writing process) Berthoff’s “The Intelligent Eye and the Thinking Hand” for tomorrow’s class. In this piece, Berthoff mentions her 1982 publication forming thinking writing and this, in turn, reminded me that I had that text on my shelf and hadn’t picked it up in a couple of years. More specifically, save for packing it up, moving it here and unpacking it, it was a text I hadn’t touched since the spring of 2004. I’m guessing that I had been reading Berthoff (or had been planning to) the day I met with the members of this particular presenting group. I also imagine that they handed me their list of “possible activities” having every intention of getting it back from me when the meeting was over but that one thing led to another and that I ended up using their text as a book mark for Berthoff. In any case, years later, the text drops from Berthoff’s text and what I want to say (but, of course, I can’t) is that the undated, anonymous text has, for the past three years, marked the space between pages 10 and 11 where Berthoff writes:
“Composing is putting things together. . .figuring out relationships, working out implications, drawing conclusions. . .Making sense of the world is composing. It includes being puzzled, being mistaken, and then suddenly seeing things for what they probably are; making wrong—unproductive, unsatisfactory, incorrect, inaccurate—identifications and assessments and correctly them or giving them up and getting some new ones.”
Finding this particular text (meaning the undated, anonymous one, not Berthoff’s), makes me think about all of the “like” kinds of texts I will not likely find. At all or at least anytime soon. Ironic that it never occurred to me to take better care to solicit and archive the texts students produced before, while or after working on the group presentation sessions since they have been, almost without exception, the most exceptional class sessions I have witnessed—sessions that, more often than not, provide course participants with opportunities to complicate, enrich and extend, largely by way of enacting the assigned readings. This, as opposed to what usually happens on non-presentation days when we discuss (blah-blah-blah-Zzzzzz) in class, as a class, the assigned readings.
Drift alert: The more problematic aspects of my in-class practice were first underscored for me by a student named Jason at the end of the spring 2000 session. At the end of his portfolio, he wrote about what “a shame” it was that the class had end up being so traditional. “Sure,” he admitted, “maybe the final products we produce and the processes we use to produce those products were different enough to get us thinking about traditional ways of composing. In the end, it was just too bad that this course had to be so traditionally-run in terms of having students read and then discuss the readings in class.” After reading this, I met with Jason and a few other members of that class. “What else would we do?” I asked. Their (more or less collective) response: We don’t know. You’re the teacher. But there have to be other options (meaning beyond talking and/or writing about readings), don’t you think? [Of note—the fact that I assigned readings was never an issue—or if it was, it was never mentioned.]
Problem is (and has remained) that class sessions during which students are not allowed to communicate through speech or writing are not (dare I say it?) efficient. They are frustrating, slow, cumbersome. Trading on images? Trading on song- or sound-bites? Trading on images and songs? Bringing in an object that somehow represents one’s response to an assigned reading? Fine, fine. But where do we go, what do we do, how do we make sense of it all (or make sense of it to each other) when we are finished looking at, touching these artifacts? Or maybe that's enough?
I digress: I think all of the “possible activities” listed on the handwritten text above actually made the final cut for the group presentation. I filmed portions of this group presentation session and I do not recall nor do I see on film any other additional activities going on here. The handwritten text was composed during the preplanning stages of a group presentation that took place on April 22, 2004 and that was based on two articles: Wendy Bishop’s “Steal this Assignment” and Hans Ostrum’s “Grammar J, as in Jazzing Around.” Motivated in part by the readings (specifically so, the notion of play-work or “plerk” coupled with ideas about what it might mean to radically revise a “standard” text or practice) and in part by their classmates’ desire to have class on the quad before the semester ended, the presenting group decided to create an obstacle course that would be nearly impossible for their classmates to accomplish should they approach the obstacles in customary or usual-routine ways. Otherwise put, in order to successfully accomplish the obstacle course groups would be forced to radically revise their usual strategies for jumping rope, hula hooping, carrying an egg on a spoon across a stretch of grass, etc. Facilitating the changes to practice/strategy was this: Each component of the obstacle course needed to be accomplished while the team member performing the task held a plastic cup full of water. In this way, choosing who would do the hopscotch event was not simply a matter of deciding who was the best hopscotcher but a matter of determining who might be the best (quickest) hopscotcher and (steadiest) water-holder. After each event had been completed, the person who completed the event needed to write a couple of sentences about the event and/or the strategies that were employed for the event before the team could move on to the next event. In this way, the ability to think of something to write and to write it quickly was also crucial.
Coming to this particular find: The members of the 486/686 course have been asked to read (along with two other landmark essays on writing process) Berthoff’s “The Intelligent Eye and the Thinking Hand” for tomorrow’s class. In this piece, Berthoff mentions her 1982 publication forming thinking writing and this, in turn, reminded me that I had that text on my shelf and hadn’t picked it up in a couple of years. More specifically, save for packing it up, moving it here and unpacking it, it was a text I hadn’t touched since the spring of 2004. I’m guessing that I had been reading Berthoff (or had been planning to) the day I met with the members of this particular presenting group. I also imagine that they handed me their list of “possible activities” having every intention of getting it back from me when the meeting was over but that one thing led to another and that I ended up using their text as a book mark for Berthoff. In any case, years later, the text drops from Berthoff’s text and what I want to say (but, of course, I can’t) is that the undated, anonymous text has, for the past three years, marked the space between pages 10 and 11 where Berthoff writes:
“Composing is putting things together. . .figuring out relationships, working out implications, drawing conclusions. . .Making sense of the world is composing. It includes being puzzled, being mistaken, and then suddenly seeing things for what they probably are; making wrong—unproductive, unsatisfactory, incorrect, inaccurate—identifications and assessments and correctly them or giving them up and getting some new ones.”
Finding this particular text (meaning the undated, anonymous one, not Berthoff’s), makes me think about all of the “like” kinds of texts I will not likely find. At all or at least anytime soon. Ironic that it never occurred to me to take better care to solicit and archive the texts students produced before, while or after working on the group presentation sessions since they have been, almost without exception, the most exceptional class sessions I have witnessed—sessions that, more often than not, provide course participants with opportunities to complicate, enrich and extend, largely by way of enacting the assigned readings. This, as opposed to what usually happens on non-presentation days when we discuss (blah-blah-blah-Zzzzzz) in class, as a class, the assigned readings.
Drift alert: The more problematic aspects of my in-class practice were first underscored for me by a student named Jason at the end of the spring 2000 session. At the end of his portfolio, he wrote about what “a shame” it was that the class had end up being so traditional. “Sure,” he admitted, “maybe the final products we produce and the processes we use to produce those products were different enough to get us thinking about traditional ways of composing. In the end, it was just too bad that this course had to be so traditionally-run in terms of having students read and then discuss the readings in class.” After reading this, I met with Jason and a few other members of that class. “What else would we do?” I asked. Their (more or less collective) response: We don’t know. You’re the teacher. But there have to be other options (meaning beyond talking and/or writing about readings), don’t you think? [Of note—the fact that I assigned readings was never an issue—or if it was, it was never mentioned.]
Problem is (and has remained) that class sessions during which students are not allowed to communicate through speech or writing are not (dare I say it?) efficient. They are frustrating, slow, cumbersome. Trading on images? Trading on song- or sound-bites? Trading on images and songs? Bringing in an object that somehow represents one’s response to an assigned reading? Fine, fine. But where do we go, what do we do, how do we make sense of it all (or make sense of it to each other) when we are finished looking at, touching these artifacts? Or maybe that's enough?
I digress: I think all of the “possible activities” listed on the handwritten text above actually made the final cut for the group presentation. I filmed portions of this group presentation session and I do not recall nor do I see on film any other additional activities going on here. The handwritten text was composed during the preplanning stages of a group presentation that took place on April 22, 2004 and that was based on two articles: Wendy Bishop’s “Steal this Assignment” and Hans Ostrum’s “Grammar J, as in Jazzing Around.” Motivated in part by the readings (specifically so, the notion of play-work or “plerk” coupled with ideas about what it might mean to radically revise a “standard” text or practice) and in part by their classmates’ desire to have class on the quad before the semester ended, the presenting group decided to create an obstacle course that would be nearly impossible for their classmates to accomplish should they approach the obstacles in customary or usual-routine ways. Otherwise put, in order to successfully accomplish the obstacle course groups would be forced to radically revise their usual strategies for jumping rope, hula hooping, carrying an egg on a spoon across a stretch of grass, etc. Facilitating the changes to practice/strategy was this: Each component of the obstacle course needed to be accomplished while the team member performing the task held a plastic cup full of water. In this way, choosing who would do the hopscotch event was not simply a matter of deciding who was the best hopscotcher but a matter of determining who might be the best (quickest) hopscotcher and (steadiest) water-holder. After each event had been completed, the person who completed the event needed to write a couple of sentences about the event and/or the strategies that were employed for the event before the team could move on to the next event. In this way, the ability to think of something to write and to write it quickly was also crucial.
As one might expect, certain obstacles were easier for one person holding a cup of water to accomplish (at least unaided by others) than were others. Rolling in the grass (as pictured here) or hula hooping with a full cup of water, for instance, proved difficult (if not impossible) until groups began to discover that there was more than one way to roll from point a to point b with a full cup of water (somersaulting quickly proved impossible) or to make sure that the hula hoop “made at least three complete rotations around the body.” Since the only hard and fast rules had to do with writing two or three sentences about each component of the obstacle course after it had been completed and making sure that only one person (i.e., the person who was technically performing the obstacle) held the full cup of water, groups quickly learned that having someone stand still holding the full glass of water while other team members rotated the hoop around his/her body was not cheating but improvising, radically re-visioning what it meant to hula hoop. It became and remained a question, however—one that actually made it impossible to declare which group, exactly, won—if taking water into one’s mouth during an event and then spitting it back into the cup when the event was over was or was not cheating. Otherwise put, while the presenting group members intentionally wrote the directives for each task in ways that were, or could be, open for interpretation and improvisation, no one thought what to do had one of their classmate’s attempted to revise the system in this way. Given my fondness for class sessions where we end up discussing readings, writings and in-class activities, my favorite part of the session (next to not being picked for a team which, in turn, allowed me to film most of the session. . .although I'm not sure if not picking me to be on a team was an oversight, a result of my having the camera and/or a deliberate strategy for those invested in winning) was the discussion that followed the doing of the obstacle course proper. A few students stressed how excited they were (at least initially) at seeing the obstacle course, getting (finally) to have class on the quad, etc., and how that excitement was tempered a bit after learning about the “catch” of having to keep the glass of water full and having to write something about the obstacle and/or strategies employed after completing each event. Finding that the obstacles were neither as easy nor as fun to accomplish as they first thought they would be was something many found frustrating, something that would, at least initially, make the session feel more like work than play or plerk. Yet after inventing ways to work with (or around) the directives the presenting group provided them with (and perhaps more importantly, after realizing that this—meaning revising strategy and improvisation—was not only okay but encouraged in this context) the writings and the full cup of water especially became more accepted/acceptable aspects of the session.
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