Interests:http://www.sustainablemommy.wordpress.com - our growing family - gender justice - progressive politics - National Public Radio - literature - history - public policy - travel - caffe au lait - shiraz - running - bargain hunting Expertise:Writing creative non-fiction - listening to alternative points of view - consuming audio books during my commute Occupation:Grad Student Industry:English - Rhetoric/Composition
Is it just me or is Sarah Palin's resignation speech a train wreck of mixed metaphors and incoherence? Is she speaking in code? Maybe she's been recruited by the CIA and this is her first assignment--she could be the agency's undercover mass communications person who sends directives to all the field agents via coded speeches. Or maybe she's sending subliminal messages to all our brains. Maybe if we played her speech backwards we'd hear, "Buy duct tape and plastic. Buy duct tape and plastic."
That must be it. She has no problem finding her way into the media spotlight. Both her political friends and foes are sure to pay attention--if not out of devotion, then out of derision.
Smart move, CIA. (How lucky for 3M and the Association of Plastic Manufacturers!)
But wait--here's another, far more disturbing idea--she is 90% of my students, all grown up. Incapable of sustained intellectual engagement and proud of it, confusing style with substance and stringing together cliches like random, shiny baubles.
Maybe I should ease up on my critiques of their carelessly flung together compositions. Maybe it's not just a typical condition of immaturity. Maybe they're merely following in the steps of their elected officials.
I don't have the sentimental connection to Michael Jackson's memory that most of our generation does, so his passing doesn't invoke the sort of memorials made by those who have been awed by his talent as they were growing up. Indeed, in the circles where I was raised, Michael Jackson was more or less a symbol of all that is wrong in this sinful world.
But putting aside the judgment of his character, I've realized he offers an important lesson for today's wired generation. Numerous news reports mention the hours and hours he spent perfecting his craft. He didn't let natural talent keep him from learning, adapting, and working the necessary hours to become even better.
One of the things I've learned while writing my thesis is that in many ways my mental habits have been as affected by twenty-first century technologies as the freshies I am tempted to skewer. I want to skim instead of reading and re-reading to absorb content, style, and approach. It would be so much easier to write out a chirpy blog post than to research, plan, draft, revise, and adapt 70 pages of text. I want to click over to another site, another blog, another Facebook page instead of thinking through the complexities of the large and unwieldy topics of discourse and networks and self-determinism.
There's a part of me that wishes my advisor would say, "Hang it up. You have no idea what you're doing, you don't have what it takes, and you'll never get it." I would be off the hook and could go back to my comfortable blog reader where I can effortlessly skip from outrage to delight to bland amusement with just a tap, secure in knowing I don't have "it." No more struggling to commit complicated ideas to paper. No more anxiety over using academic lingo correctly. No more sweating about referencing the work of people I know personally and worrying I'll totally distort their words.
That's why the myth of talent can be so intoxicating. It whispers in our ear, "If at first you don't succeed, don't bother." The myth of talent says, "If it's worth doing, it'll be super easy." (As you can see, the myth of talent isn't terribly witty.)
But people like Michael Jackson (actually, most everyone who is good at what they do) remind us that even if you have boatloads of innate talent, you aren't going anywhere unless you work it. Which makes the whole question of "having it" pretty much irrelevant.
Talent or no, success requires work, determination, and a willingness to get it wrong a few times along the way.
And now that I've pretty much contradicted my earlier post, I'm going to put away my soapbox and get back to work.
"The goal of life is to take everything that made you weird as a kid and get people to pay you money for it when you're older." - David Freeman, screenwriter
This quote on the Wizard of Ads site got me thinking--what made me weird as a kid? It's hard to know what was just being a kid and what made me _weird_ as a kid, but a few things came to mind.
When I was four or five my Mom taught me how to spell my name, plus she taught me two bonus words, "big" and "little." I scrawled my name on almost any available surface, but in classic middle-child mode, I couldn't decide if I should write "big" or "little" next to my name--it all depended on who I compared myself with. So I used both adjectives.
Some kids want to be doctors, nurses, firefighters or farmers, but I wanted to be one of those cool cashiers at the grocery store. Clanking silverware together sounded almost like an old-fashioned cash register.
Paisley drove me nuts. I could have endlessly searched it to find just one tear-drop in a satisfying symmetrical oval shape. But I never did.
So why did I ever consider going into writing? I was meant to be an indecisive anal retentive bean-counter.
In my Theories of Composition class last spring, I was known for always asking, "What about assessment? How do you grade this kind of assignment?" The prof was probably frustrated that I was more focused on the product than on the cool new process he was trying to teach us.
But this semester has confirmed that my questions were timely--if not ideal.
It seems that the current crop of incoming college students is fixated on grades. This is not to say they are all over-achievers, but instead that their anxiety is marked by a disturbing amount of hostility and belligerence. They think they should be able to order up an A as easy as a latte. The logic seems to go, "Satisfactory equals success, so doing the minimum required should get me an A." At the same time, the assignment, the syllabus, the instructor's feedback, the textbook are all extraneous and decidedly ignorable.
According to anecdotal evidence, this attitude is turning up in many classrooms across campus and at other universities as well. It might be written off as that generational condescension on the part of instructors that assumes those coming up the ranks behind them are lazy slackers because they don't have to walk to school in knee-deep snow up the hill both ways. But even if that plays a role, it doesn't explain the threats, the demands, the overt rudeness that some of us are observing.
Some say it's just the spring semester--by this time freshmen have a better sense of how to play the system and winter is making everyone cranky. This is very true, but spring semesters have been around forever.
In my experience, many students seem to be approaching writing with the expectation that fact recall is good enough--that stating the obvious is technically correct, therefore it deserves an A. This expectation is perplexing because the multi-media/multi-tasking capabilities of this generation should mean they are also the most mentally agile generation as well, able to question and engage with issues. But there's little evidence to support this supposition.
So why are students with so much unprecedented information available to them so disengaged?
It occurred to me that this infatuation with the obvious and unmerited As might be tied to No Child Left Behind methods. When your academic success is measured in pass-fail terms by the number of bubbles you correctly fill in, you learn to expect that all important questions in life have one simple answer--as if this developmental stage wasn't already marked by absolutist thinking (or non-thinking). Bubbles don't ask you to think critically or to make interdisciplinary connections, nor do bubbles give you feedback which you use to rethink and revise your project. Passing or failing a test becomes so monumental that learning a process is no longer important. Disappointing grades are no longer steps in the road to success, but barriers to be avoided by any means necessary. Instead of seeing tests as tools for assessment, they become meaningless hoops to jump through.
This morning I read an article written by a high school freshman teacher, Consumed by Failure. Apparently this condition bites long before college. Sarah Fine writes,
Failing and failures: The point I am trying to make is not about these words. It is about the way in which these words reflect a profoundly limited, and limiting, concept of school performance. When we define success as the lack of failure, we confine ourselves to mediocrity. When we define failure as the lack of success, we doom ourselves to despair. The binary vision of No Child Left Behind was useful when it came to exposing underperforming schools and establishing baselines for proficiency, but it has inhibited the ability of school communities to orient themselves around assets and progress—and this orientation is crucial.
I would like to think that I am not in an adversarial relationship with my students, that my assignments and feedback are useful tools for their academic and professional success. But what if I'm trying to give them tools they're simply not ready for--like giving microscopes to toddlers? How can I expect them to write thoughtful and reflective essays if they have no idea how to be thoughtful or reflective? Is it possible to teach them to think and to write in one semester? How can they learn at the college level if they don't come prepared to engage in larger issues in a meaningful way?
The bigger question might be-- How much more damage are we willing to let NCLB do to the minds of American young people?
