10/29 How can we learn from what we do/ teach? How can we continue to better ourselves as teachers? What are some ways in which we can become “reflec

It is important to have an ideal of teacher model in one’s heart in order to become better teachers. However, the ideal is often a combination of the good teachers we have had ourselves. Looking back and reflecting, the most important skill to be a good teacher should be the ability to reach out to his/her students. The students should feel comfortable in the classroom for a good learning experience to take place. Taking into account different learning styles and molding one’s syllabus and teaching techniques accordingly help us improve as teachers.
Writing reflectively on one’s teaching also help see patterns of strategies that work and that do not and identify ones prominent teaching style. It is also important to learn from what has not worked and try to mould it to work. Understanding the students as audience is also helpful for developing as a teacher. Above all, a teacher should be able to learn from the students and grow with the students.

10/22: What should a FYC teacher come to class knowing? What should a FYC student come to class knowing? How can we prepare for “Plan B” when they don

I believe that both the teacher and the student should wear their formal identity in a classroom situation. This helps for both the parties to express expectations, and also maintain discipline. For teachers, it is important to know that they are mentors and will have to work along with the students throughout the course. The students in-turn should understand the utility of the course and study to succeed not only in achieving high grades, but also actually learning along the way.
Teachers should come prepared for the lesson and have a lesson plan in hand. Students should come having read the assigned reading and having done the required assignments. This happens at an ideal level. In reality, teachers sometimes do not have a steady lesson plan and have to make a mental plan , and the student do not read the material and are unresponsive in class.
Thus every teacher should have a Plan B in hand. A teacher should be able to judge the responsiveness of the class and steer the discussion and the activities accordingly. A successful teacher should always be able to make last minute changes to the lesson plan to match with the flow of the class. Yet it is not ideal to change the teaching strategy completely o suit one student or a group of students. This would confuse the other students and the teacher will never be able to develop a style of his/ her own. Thus a teacher should understand when to stop making adjustments and be firm.
Thus, a blend of strategies and techniques to suit the multiple intelligences of the students and recognizing learning patterns in students are crucial for a successful teacher.

10/15: Why I grade the way I grade?

I grade very leniently. Often, I have been told that my grading shows ESL traits, and is not fit for mainstream First Year Composition. My personal comments on my grading style are that I try to see the student’s effort in the writing. Sometimes it is evident that the student is just writing to fulfill the assignment requirements and the quality of work reflects the lack of interest on the student’s part. Writings produced by such students are usually full of mechanical errors, and lack in critical thinking and response to the topic at hand. Due to the arider writer system here, graders are not in touch with the students, and this judgment becomes difficult. Students also display the above traits when they don’t understand the assignment, or are at a writer’s block and need help wit writing. Teaching writing should be an individual activity instead of a classroom situation. However, due to lack resources and time, and the huge number of FYC students this system cannot become a reality.
Coming back to grading, I have adjusted my grading style to suit the impersonal nature of the Raider Writer system. I usually look for coherence and connectivity in the student’s writing. I try to identify patterns of grammatical errors and let the student know. Unless, it is a final draft, I do not count off points for grammatical and mechanical errors. I also tell students to rephrase a few sentences to add clarity to the writing. But I am careful about doing this as I do not want to influence the student’s writing style. Unless I see a clear lack of writing ability or technique, I try to guide my students to develop their own style in the operating framework.

10/6: Technology and Literacy

Selfe’s main argument is that inequality if education in the United States supports and is supported by the Capitalist class system. Introduction of computers and encouraging computer literacy has created a further divide between the rich and the poor societies of the country. Selfe’s article remind me of a book I read called “ Savage Inequalities”. The book records vividly the distinctions between the rich and the poor school district of the country. It is almost a viscous circle that richer districts get more funding from the taxes whereas the poorer districts lack in technology and other necessities due to low funding by low Taxpayers. Thus rich schools get richer and the poor schools remain poorer. The unequal distribution of funding creates generations of school dropouts and unsuccessful academic careers due to unavailability of teachers, teaching materials, and of course, technology that has become a part of everyday life for most students. Selfe asks the reader to pay attention to this inequality and try to remove them by introducing technology available to the richer schools. However, these children belonging to the poorer classes have a long way to go to bridge the gap. More attention need to be given to their everyday needs, their home environment and care in school so that they feel safe and grow to like education. After this is achieved, introducing modern technology will definitely help improve their academic life and strategies such as critical thinking can be developed. But first comes, the basic needs!

9/29: Response to Take Twenty Video

Surprisingly, the teachers have remained interested in teaching writing for many years. Usually, teachers like to teach or experiment with new topics related to their area of expertise. One has to really be dedicated to teaching to like teaching the same kind of courses over this long a period.
What is more interesting is that the teachers do not complain about their students. If the students are not doing well, they turn to their own teaching methods to see what is missing. I am greatly inspired by this. It is very easy to blame your students for not performing and not even thinking once about your own teaching technique. This is a common phenomenon, yet the video showed how wrong this is. I have learned to keep a teaching journal and I regularly post my thoughts in it. Sometimes I show frustration on the students for failed activity.I have always come back to the realization that if I could have planned my class in some other ways the students would have learned better. Like writing, I feel that teaching too is a work in progress. We learn everyday and from every student. This should be the motto of every teacher who intends to take teaching as their profession.

9/22: Writing Process

Much like our authors, I can describe my writing as recursive and overlapping. I find it hard to figure out an algorithm for my piece of writing. An essay might have its own structure relative to its genre, but the content and its organization would be difficult to fit into an algorithm like a machine. For me writing is spontaneous, thus, my mind cannot focus on a fixed structure.
During my school days, we were taught that good writers are born naturally. One needs to have talent to succeed in writing. I think evaluation of creative writing was also somewhat arbitrary. Like many other, I also grew up believing that writing is not my niche.
My first teaching assistantship as a tutor at the Writing Center at my previous university, taught me to see writing in a whole new light. I learned that a person can become a good writer through learning some strategies and implementing them successfully. Of course, practice is a big part of it. Also, to acknowledge a piece of writing to being a work in progress helped me to develop as a writer. I now write more freely and confidently. I now recognize my writing style, and can work on developing one consciously.

A Thought

Philosophically, I am taking an ‘introvert path’ to locate myself in the affairs of things and it would be a while before I sounded conclusive on that. As a person I like to follow rules, and occasionally bend them if they solved a greater cause. And I think this is one of my porous traits that influence my overall pedagogical and literacy beliefs as well.
Academically, I have a strong grounding: M.A. in English Literature, M.A. in Teaching English as a Foreign Language, a computer Diploma and a K-12 licensure. But this identity is not an end in itself. In India, and in our Hindu culture, we learn to worship education as a form of a deity. As a wont, the worship is meant to inculcate the sense of shared identity with anyone who is in distress; and through the blessings of knowledge, the person worshipping the deity is to salvage the distressed conditions.
I hail from a middle-class, educated Indian family. I was a latch-key child but never hankered for parental love because I got it plentiful. In most Indian families, education takes the center stage and my family was no exception. My mother started her career as a professor in Economics in a very prestigious institution and my father worked in a private organization in an executive position.
My education began at home through listening to children’s stories, mythology, and history long before I could understand the differences among these fields. These stories, and some famous Bengali poetry and nonsense rhymes created a world of far away and fantasy for me. The single most motivating factor for me to learn to read and write quickly was the fact that my parents refused to tell me the stories I loved once I began to go to school. They maintained strictly that I should read them myself. Being a single, latch key child, I did not have much to do after I came back from school than read. Soon I became the favorite student of our school librarian, and sometimes she kept the books I wanted aside for me.
At first there were fairy tales from Enid Blyton and Bengali literature, and then there were historical fictions and detective stories which lead me to more serious literature both in Bengali and English.
As I was completing school there was lot of debate over what I should chose as a profession. My father strongly encouraged me to become an accountant like him, but I could not see myself adding and subtracting numbers maintain balance sheets for the rest of my life. My love for literature was so strong that I defied him and went on to get a BA in English Literature and then a Masters. I went on to teach school, and briefly college in India. I had always enjoyed reading and teaching literature but reading literary theories and applying them to these beautiful pieces sometimes killed the aesthetics of the work. Soon I became detached from literature as a discipline and looked for other avenues to follow professionally.
Being a teacher, I realized that I needed some formal training in teaching. Also, the aspect of language had started intriguing me. I thought I found my niche. Though English is widely learned and spoken in India, it remains a foreign language. While I was teaching in school, I started to wonder if there were strategies that would make foreign language teaching more effective for both students and teachers. Teaching language strategies have not yet emerged as a field in India. At that time I learned of the disciple of Teaching English as A Second Language in USA, and applied to study in the United States. I got here, and have been pursuing studies in linguistics since then.
I am indebted to my parents for encouraging me to read from such an early age, and to my grandparents for telling me those wonderful stories to kindle a lifelong interest in reading.

Voice

The question is how do we define voice in academic writing. Academic, in-class writing, such as term papers or short assignments are always bound by so many criteria,that in order to succeed, one has to follow the voice set by these criteria.To roughly define voice, one could say that it is a very private space in which the author inhabits.As Dr. Rickly was saying in class today,by taking chunks of academic writing from here and there, she managed to pool a paper which had the voice of an academic paper, and it got published.Therefore,one can conclude that there is no place for this private space in academics. I would like to say that academic writing in-general is voiceless, or rather trained to be voiceless. But as it was mentioned in class today, there is a recent shift towards voiced writing in academics. Given this premise, a teacher of composition is now faced with the concern of how much voice should be a standard for academic writing. As Elbow points out that to create voice in your writing you need to forget the audience and get it all out on the paper. Then refine it later. My question here is when you are going back to revise it, are you not losing some of that voice to conform to academic standards?

Also, a pertinent point in class today was that if freshmen, of eighteen or nineteen years of age have a well formed voice? If not, then how can/ or how well can it be reflected in their writing. Then, the concern of liking and not liking your own voice also comes into play. Most people as Elbow points out are at first not comfortable of their real voice. He does say that one grows more comfortable with time, and with lots of free writing, but sometimes writers, especially, a writer belonging to the minority culture might never feel at home with his own voice within a dominant cultural setting.This can perhaps be attributed to the lack of contact zones within the setting.

To conclude,it is important to have a voice, otherwise honesty in writing is lost,but it is also important to train that voice to meet academic criteria.

Constructs of First Year Composition

First year composition courses can be viewed as an introduction to the key writing/ rhetorical concepts that can be applied within and across disciplines. First year composition is taught with the basic premise of making students equipped to use academic writing conventions. Other learning outcomes for FYC are critical reading, writing connections, shaping and communicating meaning and effective use of reflective practices.
Given the basic premises, all FYC programs should aim at teaching the meaning making process through writing. Students in the academia need to understand the power of writing as a medium of communicating their ideas effectively. Our FYC program is built on little blocks of writing concepts like summarizing and paraphrasing that build up to a bigger idea of creating an argument with a proper thesis and its components.

Here, I would like to point out that we are not really giving expressive writing a chance as we are focusing on formalist writing more. But I believe, we can include some kind of expressive writing in class in forms of free writing or journal writing. This will not only give students a chance to explore into their creative dimensions, but will also strike a balance to the kind of formal writing they are doing. Writing for me, is the methodology and the assignments a tool to foster an intellectual consciousness among students and organize their social space.

A Working Philosophy of Composition

My personal teaching philosophy centers on the idea of creating a way to democratize a discourse community by empowering each member with the tool of language. My pedagogical beliefs rest with this critical power of composition writing that accounts for a historical shift in understanding the rhetorical elements.

Philosophy of composition is closely allied with the rhetorical elements of language act in its very conception. The rhetorical aspect of language act can be defined as comprising speaker/author; listener/reader; text; context. Theorists and scholars, however, have explicated these basic level concepts to theory level discussions. Hence, we see Richard Fulkerson’s expressive, mimetic, rhetorical and formalist applications of composition; and, James Berlin’s constructs of Classicist, Expressionist, Current Traditionalist and New Rhetoric. The philosophy is a combined voice that not only affirms that truth is not proprietary, but also that its existence is collaboratively created by the author, the audience, the language, and the reality.

I view composition as a discourse in progress enacted through writing. In composing, we deal with words that are semantically manipulative in terms of contexts: cultural, social, and political. Similarly, syntax and diction play a key role in influencing the act of composing a (written) text. So the composition for piece of historical drama would receive different varied interpretations based on the genre in which the composition is made. In view of these major epistemological constructs, the philosophy of composition can emerge as a function of one or more dominant elements of language act. For me, the starting point of shaping my own teaching philosophy is the notion of liberatory pedagogy. It aims at a collaborative approach to meaning making process. Under this notion, the teacher can serve as enabler of “socially constructed” knowledge, rather than acting as constraining force.

In closing, I would like to respond to the question of three important concepts that play key roles in my teaching—
“growth” (as an evolving nature of the act of composing); “process” (distinct from the recursive aspect, but more as a tool of inquiry into a context/subject matter); and “tone” (as creating a unique content in writing through an informed act of selecting and ordering diction and information).

First in the Block

This is my first ever attempt to blogging. I'm excited about interacting in this space with all of you, and at the same time, want to see how writing compostion animates through blogging.