Iowa Notes I (My own classwork)

Ivanic:

Writing is an act of identity in which people align themselves with socio-culturally shaped possibilities for self-hood, playing their part in reproducing or challenging dominant practices and discourses, and the values, beliefs and interests which they embody (31-32)

...we should address our talents as explorers and explainers to those texts which evidence crucial moments in discourse where participants may be placed at social risk during communication, suffering disadvantage in consequence of the inequalities of communication (viii-ix)

...when working with mature students, multiple and conflicting identity in writing is hard to ignore (6).

However, individuals do not define themselves entirely in terms of group membership(s). They also have a sense of themselves as defined by their difference from others they encounter. (14)

I wrote like a cross between Raymond Carver, Kurt Vonnegut, and James Baldwin for a long time. 

Textbook that I used: The Writer's Presence.

Cover Image of that textbook

Introduction to Lopate's The Art of the Personal Essay

Baldwin:

But then, I was seriously under the impression that each book--simply by nature of the fact that it was a book--held a meaning, a point, a lesson, a moral, and that that point or lesson was something which I was to dig for, it was something to be uncovered--found and named. 

Carver:

Each week Kate brought in a bag of mirrors for the English Intensive students to use in their pronunciation practice. I asked Jon if using the mirrors might help. He seemed willing to give it a shot. I pulled out two mirrors, handed one to Jon, and kept the other for myself. I held it up to my face and began speaking into it. Rock and roll. I watched my mouth move. I felt for my tongue to see what it was doing just as Kate had demonstrated in class. Rock and roll. I placed my hands on my cheeks to see how my jaw moved when I said it. Rock and roll. I watched my tongue move in the mirror to see if it was moving up, down, in or out of my mouth. As I did this, I explained how it felt to Jon. He held the mirror up to his face and repeated after me. He tried to adjust what his tongue was doing to make it move like mine. Soon he began to get it. He said it, Rock and roll. Then he head it and he was saying it over and over and over again. Rock and roll. It felt good to hear him say it right. (Mark: Could you describe this in 1/2 the detail?)

Vonnegut

The year was 20181 and everyone was finally equal. They weren't only equal before God and the law. They were equal every which way. Nobody was smarter than anybody else. Nobody was better looking than anybody else. All this equality was due to the 211th, 212th, and 213th Amendments to the constitution, and to the unceasing vigilance of the United States Handicapper General. (quoted in one of my papers, from the short story "Harrison Bergeron"

Baldwin

Epigraph from paper, Human Relations

People who shut their eyes to reality simply invite their own destruction and anyone who insists on remaining in a state of innocence long after that innocence is dead turns himself into a monster. ("White Man's Guilt")

There is nothing more unbearable, once one has it, than one's freedom. 

Key Terms/Terminology

Demographics: The distribution, movement and flow of groups

Baby-Boom: 1946-1964

Class: Proximity to the means of production

Dichotomies: construction of either or zero sum gain, all or nothing, only one person gets the point

Agency: free will, per and rights of an individual in a society

Hidden Currriculum: refers to the unstated, implicit, sometimes unintentional messages transmitted to students through the content, routines, and social relationships of the school. 

Convergent/Divergent Thinking

Functionalism, conflict theory, interpretism

cognition

Meta-cognition

praxis

assessment

cognition

epistemology

volition

motivation

zone of proximal development

declarative/procedural knowledge

scaffolding

hegemony

multiculturalism

Committee of Ten

Mental Discipline

Merrill Act

John Dewey

Paolo Freire

social darwinism

cultural literacy

Brown vs. Board of Education

critical theory

FALL 1996

SPRING 1997 (RED FOLDER) 

Human Relations for the Classroom Teacher

Goals of Multicultural/Nonsexist Curriculum in Iowa

Five bullet points, among them: “Understand self and others as cultural beings acting within a cultural context” and “Understand how group membership helps determine values, attitudes, and behavior.

Why is Multicultural Education Essential?

Five bullet points, among them "equity and social justice" and "presence of multi-ethnic society"

Questions:

1. Am I doing anything in the classroom that promotes inequality?
2. If so, what can I do differently?
3. How can I empower my students to examine and challenge structures in our society?

Comments from Mark on my term paper: 

• "...tad informal/journalistic still at times"
• "What I hadn't counted on, though, was the fact that their language presented no opportunities for them to make the kinds of tongue and jaw movements that the English language requires; therefore, I had to find another way." (Mark writes draws an arrow to "the kinds of" and writes, "makes informal stronger (more academic) if left out"--this is another indication of his discomfort with the informality of my writing. He would have preferred: "What I hadn't counted on, though, was the fact that their language presented no opportunities for them to make the kinds of tongue and jaw movements that the English language requires; therefore, I had to find another way."
• "Could you describe this in 1/2 the detail?"
• too much description...this ain't creative writing it's human relations...stick to the point of the paper!
• You must be kidding, 4/5 of this paragraph = one sentence and it is a run-on. This isn't a journal!
• "It is fast, loud, the dialog moves in sound bites at times..." (Mark: arrow points to the misspelled word "dialog" and he writes "example of how lightly you are taking this--this an't a letter to a friend, it is a paper--formal spelling dialogue!")

Teaching Literature to Adolescents

It is one thing to sit down and plan out which books you are going to teach and in what order. That is easy. It is quite another thing to sit down and explain why you are doing what you are doing when yo play out those objectives and assignments. (Self Evaluation letter--teaching lit to kids)

This is the sort of assignment I would have and DID eat up:

"For your second assignment I'd like you to write the first chapter of a longer narrative--a narrative intended for an audience of young adult readers (ages 11-16). I'm using the word 'narrative' here because I want to leave open the question of whether you write fiction or non-fiction. But I want the intended audience for your piece to be clear: imagine them as young. 

My dad has been catching cats. I'm not kidding, really, he has. Dad came over and picked me up this morning and took me to his place. The reason sis I got in trouble with Mom for not coming home last night. She took my keys away and said "Call your father and tell him to come get you. I've had it." She was still giving me the old you-can-go-live-with-your-father routine when Dad pulled in the driveway and honked. Dad never comes inside Mom's house. He just waits in the driveway. I was glad to see him, it was an escape. It was then that he started talking about the cats.

For this assignment, I'd like you to write a relatively brief autobiography of yourself as a reader of literature. What I'm hoping for, of course, is a kind of sketch of how you've developed as a reader, that is, a sketch of someone who has a history as a reader, who likes certain kinds of literature (and not others), who reads in certain ways, (but not others), and who thinks about literature in some way that is characteristic... The most important part of this essay, though, is that it be about yourself, giving you an opportunity to think through some issues that you might not have considered before. 

As for my reading history, reading has always been an assumption in my life. I could bore you forever going on about the great books that I've read, or that mom and I used to read when I was a kid, but I won't. I have a history as a reader, and I have a successful history as a reader because reading was encouraged in my house... Trips to the public library were encouraged! Library cards were encouraged! All these things were encouraged at the same time that my mother and father made it a priority to situate themselves within towns which, socioeconomically speaking, we were always just on the margins of. I have done a considerable amount of thinking about the effects of my affluent upbringing, especially in terms of what it meant to my education. I grew up among rich kids for the simple reason that where there were rich kids, there were good schools, and while my parents may have been closer than many in economic class to those rich kids' families, they never lost sight of the fact that they were never quite as comfortable. 

Methods Reading

FINAL PROJECT: A reading unit in which I teach James Baldwin's story "Going to Meet the Man"

Interesting quote from my final course reflection:

I am also proud of some of the statements I was able to make as a teacher towards the end of the paper. I think that when you write something about how you are going to be as a teacher, or what kind of teacher you are going to be, it makes it different somehow. It makes you think about what is important to you. It is something about the act of declaring something in writing, like, I am going to be a teacher who is going to place enormous value on verbal communication. Then you have to ask yourself, do I really mean that? Is that true? There is something valuable in making these declarations and I am proud of that. 

---

It occurs to me that part of the reason why I felt entitled to write that snarky review of the PDF was because I was learning to write units and to reflect on them that spring of '97--one for Teaching Lit to Kids and one for Methods Reading. In these courses the final projects were units in which you set out the what, how, and why of teaching something. Then I had to write these reflection letters on the work. I was doing a lot of important experimentation and thinking and reflecting and praxis was a key word for me. None of that was a part of what was happening at the PDP

FALL 1997 (BLUE FOLDER) 

Educational Psychology

Our text supports the idea that learning is affected by both biological and environmental factors and yet historically, the emphasis has been placed on biological ability as a key determinant of performance. With the rise of such theorists as Gibson, who presents the idea of the affordance that learning is often the result of an individual interacting with the environment (which does, incidentally, contain a biological component, but which emphasizes the environment) we have come to see that learning, while admittedly biologically-influenced, is highly environmentally influenced. We have come to learn that biological factors should be viewed more as potential, in another words, as a means to learning, not as an ends. Potential can only be realized if the student is presented with a good environment which stresses the use of strategies, the generation of motivation and volition, and a constant building-on of prior knowledge (this is an essay, from a blue-book--a mid-term or final, most likely)

The debate between Gilligan and Kohlberg over Kohlberg's theory of moral development centers around the role of care and interpersonal relationships in moral development testing. (Thought Question 9.2)

A comment taking from one of my Thought Question responses:

Excellent essay, but I'm not convinced that (a) competition is always bad or (b) that cooperative learning is always good. Also, the notion of multiple intelligences is a peculiarly American notion -- from E.L. Thorndyke (1903) --> Thurstone (1938) --> Grulford (1957) --> Horn (1975) --> Gardner (1988). The main objection to such a scheme has always been an empirical one: The various "intelligences"  overlap considerably. When the overlap is taken seriously, the profile accounts for only a small percent of the variation.

A note in one of my Thought Questions: "As not a whole lot of space was dedicated to the topic of multiple intelligences in the text and as I have not read any of Gardner's work, I found this question a bit difficult to answer. I hope drawing upon my own personal experience was appropriate." --This Thought Question received the lowest score of any I wrote (2).

Fundamentals of Education

Literature and Art

There is a quote that I use as an epigraph for my essay "Digressions on the Writings of Virginia Woolf"--my final paper for the course. It's from Philipp Lopate and it explains why Mark Schuster really did not like my writing:

Another technique of the personal essay that serves both structural and comic functions is the digression. The chief role of the digression is to amass all the dimensions of understanding that the essayist can accumulate by bringing in as many contexts as a problem or insight can sustain without overburdening it. The digression must wander off the point only to fulfill it...Some of the essay's comic irony derives from a self-consciousness about digression, the joke being ... that the writer cannot stay on the point but most garrulously blab about everything. ("The Art of the Personal Essay")

In her esssay "Montaigne" Virginia Woolf writes, of the work of the great French essayist, Michel de Montaigne, "[to Montaigne] laws are mere conventions, utterly unable to keep touch with the vast variety and turmoil of human impulses; habits and customs are a convenience devised for the support of timid creatures who dare not allow their souls free play" (60). Free play. Free play in one's writing, it could be said, was something Virginia Woolf as well as Montaigne valued. And so I've decided that in my attempt to understand Woolf's writing I shall involve myself in some "free play." Gone will be the explicit habit of thesis; gone will be the custom of argumentation (yet each may exist implicitly). I see my job here as one of documenting my understanding of Woolf's writing, specifically her essay writing. This documentation, I know, is going to lead me off on some digressions. But to digress is to essai and so, to truly understand this process of the essay as Woolf (or Montaigne) may have envisioned it, I too must involve myself in what Woolf refers to as "the journey" of writing. (This is the first paragraph of my final paper for the course.)

Here's a little bit of writing about my teaching that is illuminating in terms of my values:

This year I'm teaching two sections of Freshman Rhetoric here at the University of Iowa. In my classes we write essays, personal essays, all kinds of essays. We deal with many of the same kinds of issues regarding the production of non-fiction as Virginia Woolf did. (p. 2)

Phillip Lopate: "to essay is to attempt, to test, to make a run at something without knowing whether you are going to succeed" (xlii)

In my essay "Research Findings: Getting Metacognitive" I write, 

I have been, for sometime, fascinated with the form of the essay, specifically the personal essay. This semester I have taught two sections of Rhetoric 10:001 and my students have written essays, two personal essays and one more formal researched personal essay. I, on the other hand, haven't sat down and cranked out a personal essay in over a year. But then this opportunity came up to do a research project. I knew that Virginia Woolf was an essayist as well as a novelist. I had read her essay, "The Death of a Moth" (which interestingly I didn't use in my paper) in the anthology I used in Rhetoric this semester. What guided my desire to learn about Woolf's essays was the goal of connecting the work I had done in my writing classes in college to the work I had done learning about the teaching of writing here at the University to the work I was doing in my Rhetoric classes with my students. This progression began with my own experiences for years ago when I attempted to write my own first personal essays to the present, when i was trying to teach students who to write personal essays. And so I want to know, what was Woolf's contribution to the form? What did she do differently? What did she add? How could I use Woolf's work to help inform my own work?

SPRING 1998 (GREEN FOLDER) 

Language and Learning (Jim)

A wise man once said, "If you want to teach a subject, go teach in the University. If you want to teach people, go teach in a high school." Well, that's not exactly how the wiseman said it, but it's damn close. This quote resurfaced in my consciousness as I reread the last chapter of Peg Finders' book Just Girls: Hidden Literacies and the Life in Junior High this evening. What do i want to teach? Subjects? Or people? (Final exam)

And an example of fairly proficient academic writing:

In her book Just girls: Hidden literacies and life in junior high, Peg Finders helps us understand this dilemma of conflicting literacies. One of the things Finders discovered in her research on the literate practices of adolescent girls is that "girls perceptions of the social consequences of their actions directly affect their classroom behaviors." Social roles beyond the classroom directly influence those within." (118) Here Finders gets to this issue of competing (and conflicting) classroom agendas--or literacies. On the one hand, there is the discourse of the school whose job, on some level, is to promote the "official" literacy of the culture. On the other hand, there is what Finders identifies as an "unofficial" adolescent literacy whose very nature exists as a way of countering the "official" discourse of the school. Finders identifies this "unofficial" literacy as those practices which students devise to counter-strike against the doctrine which is forced on them by their teachers in particular and by the school in general. What we learn rom Finders' study, then, is that there are powerful social interactions which are enacted in and out of the classroom, among peers (and over which teachers have little control), which affect students' abilities to learn. (final exam)

Methods English (Jan)

Anticipatory Set, Objectives, Input, Modeling, Checking for Understanding, Guided Practice, Independent Practice, Closure, Evaluation

It occurs to me that this list captures a sense of everything that I came to believe and know at Iowa (from the syllabus):

1. Teachers of language arts reflect critically on their own apprenticeship of observation as students. Through careful reflection and introspection, they become consciously aware of the personal history, assumptions, preferences and practices influencing their curricular and instructional choices.
2. Teachers of language arts integrate reading with studying language, writing, speaking, viewing and listening.
3. Teachers of language arts conduct formal and informal research designed to refine and modify their approaches to teaching and learning. They pose questions based on changing student needs and changing teaching contexts; they conjecture about solutions, experiment with new techniques; they test hypotheses; they engage in dialogue with other teachers about teaching and learning. 
4. Teachers of language arts are sensitive to the multicultural make-up of American society and consider their curriculum and instruction based on that realization. 
5. Teachers of language arts are active readers and writers and learners who model those behaviors and enthusiasm to their students.