Thought maybe I should post this:
“There lives more faith in honest doubt, believe me,
than in half the creeds.” –Alfred Lord Tennyson
88% of
statistics are made up on the spot. Including
that one. We continually receive
messages, and accept many of them without question. In my English composition classes, I stress
doubting as the means for what Paulo Freire calls conscientization—coming to a
mature, understanding relationship with the communication around us and being
willing to engage with and challenge it, including even the messages coming
from myself, the teacher.
Recent
understanding of texts has extended beyond mere verbal media, so we are not
limited to reading words in my class. We
begin with exercises in reading body language, weather, charts, tone of voice,
and even styles of jeans. I like to put
off the first paper for a few weeks because a very important part of
communication is, rather then simply waiting for a turn to speak, actually
listening before responding. We start
out with only summaries of items they read because, as one of my students once
said, “You have two ears and one mouth, so you should listen twice as much as
you speak.” Later, though, I invite them
to respond in writing to the texts we view/read in weekly “responses” (I’m
particularly resistant to calling them journals because students can never
truly journal when I’ll be reading it).
The other
end of communication is the audience reception, so I place every assignment in
an authentic writing context in which students are graded by how well they
accommodate their audience. Our first
paper is an analysis of a magazine advertisement, and the audience is an
English professor, indicating requirements like MLA formatting and a clear
thesis statement. The next assignment is
an argumentative article geared toward an audience of their peers, for
publication and circulation in a mini-magazine across campus. This assignment invites home discourses and
inventive problem-solving. Third, their
last major writing assignment (before departmental final exams) is a business
letter of persuasion, in which they choose something regarding education that
limits them (“never accept the unacceptable”), and they collaborate in groups of
3-4 to design a professional letter, suggesting solutions, and then make a
group presentation to the class.
However, teaching
at a community college has recently led me to revise the end-of-the-semester
“paper that incorporates sources.” I
used to assign magazine articles written for the magazine of their choice, in
which they would use magazine formatting, art, pull-out quotes and appropriate
discourse. I really enjoyed getting
those assignments in because they were so fun to read and evaluate; however,
due to student interest at my college, I’ve switched to a Personal Research
Paper. In this paper, students compile
information on their chosen careers; this information ranges from the money,
GPA and time that will be required of them to job market projections and the
average age of retirement within their career choice. I’ve gotten some pretty enthusiastic thanks
for this assignment, so I include it as an option at the end of the semester.
The mark of
a good teacher is when she has taught her students to question even her own
assertions, so I encourage my students to challenge my statements and even my
assignments. The result is that they
have more of a hand in choosing course materials. By the end of the semester, our classes are
comprised almost solely of the information that students bring about social
issues and current events. In effect,
they teach me, and I in turn challenge them to organize their thoughts into
something they can communicate clearly.