Face to Face on my Horrible Draft

English: South facade of the Temple of Artemis seen from the South Theatre in Jerash, Jordan (Photo credit: Wikipedia)

A couple of days after the peer review on my critical analysis draft, I read it again.  Suddenly, it was horrible.  I don't know how this happened.  So, I went to my conference with Dr. Toffee last week under a cloud of angst.  It wasn't too bad.  She suggested a few tweaks for my thesis statement, and -- for once -- I saw what was wasn't working in the way I had put it.  She liked my explanation of my critical model, especially the parts about Artemis and Atalanta; I was kind of nervous about that, so it was a relief for me.  The analysis has to be reorganized some.  I need to put in a few references to other scenes from The Hunger Games to show that it's not just in the scene I'm focusing on that Katniss is following the archetypes.

All in all, it went okay.  I guess the draft wasn't as horrible as I thought.

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Peer Reviews

Peer Review opening illo for UA/AU - Canada (Photo credit: albyantoniazzi)

Yesterday we had the peer review workshop for the critical analysis paper, and my reaction was mixed.  My reviewer (who said he had seen The Hunger Games) seemed to be in a big hurry to finish, and the comments he made weren't all that helpful, at least not from what I can see.  Along with answering the questions on the sheet we were given, we also had to answer three questions from the author of the paper.  My questions were 1.  do you understand the thesis?  2.  Is there enough stuff about the myth crit model or did I forget something?  3.  Does the analysis make sense?  I think that part of the problem is the way I wrote the questions.  He gave yes-and-no answers, and I don't think he gave them any thought.  Oh well.

On the other hand, the paper I reviewed taught me a lot.  It was not by the guy who was reviewing mine, which was a good thing, since if I had gotten his review after working so hard on mine, I'd be really pissed at him.  Anyway, I think I learned as much from the things in the paper that were bad as I did from the good stuff, mostly because I did some of the bad things, too, but I didn't notice them in my paper until I saw someone else do it. 

Next week is the conference about revising my paper.

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Rethinking Teaching the Research Paper

Term Paper Galore (Photo credit:
Bright Green Pants)

Rhonda is taking a brief vacation before the summer term begins, so this seems like a good time to explain a few things.  This blog began as nothing more than an example of a first-year composition student's research journal, but along the way I've received comments and emails from other instructors all across the country, and the question most of them have has to do with my assignment for the research project.  I'll have to give a brief background as to how I arrived at this point.

Like most of us who teach the first-year comp courses, I began by allowing students to select their own topics (with the usual few taboos), most of which had no academic significance, and then I watched most of them flounder around as they produced papers that didn't do what research papers are supposed to do and were quite boring on top of it.  Additionally, I could not guide them as well as I wanted to, since I generally had little expertise in their topic areas (i.e., I didn't know the important scholars in the field, and so on).  This situation was not preparing them at all for the reality they would be facing in other courses as they went on.  Imagine a sociology class, for example, where you were told that you could pick any topic! 

After a few years of frustration, I began looking for ideas on how to give them a more realistic assignment, one that could be accomplished within the time available both inside and outside the course.  This was not an easy task, for many reasons.  First of all, how could I give them a realistic paper assignment without having to teach what would essentially be another course within the course?  I thought back to my own experience as a first-year student, and I realized that what I had been taught about teaching this course in grad school was nothing like the way I had learned to write a research paper back in 1974.

When I started college at what is now UIC but was then the University of Illinois at Chicago Circle Campus (I still think of it as Circle), I was a sulky 17 year old with a load of adolescent resentment.  So, when I looked over the section list for the research paper course, I selected one that had the intriguing title, "Visions of Hell."  It fit my mood.  It was taught by a doctoral student, whose name I cannot now recall, and over the ten-week term (Circle was on a quarter system rather than semesters) we read several works of literature that had to do with, well, visions of hell.  The research paper assignment was to pick a particular work and analyze its specific vision of hell based on criteria that we developed in class as well as criteria we found through research.

In the intervening years, the idea of the research paper course being a literature course gradually began to die out, for a bunch of reasons that I won't go into here, and I think this was part of the problem.  I was taught to write a paper that analyzed a specific object (in my case, a work of literature, but it could have been a population, a natural phenomenon, a political event, whatever) using a method developed from authoritative sources in relevant areas in order to arrive at -- tah dah!-- new knowledge.  The fact that I learned this using a work of literature did not matter:  the overall concept is the same for anything under analysis, in any discipline.

At my current school, where I cannot require students to buy additional texts beyond the mandated ones (which are not literature-based), I had to come up with an assignment that would rely on material available to them without purchase.  A few quick in-class surveys revealed that my students ALL had access to films, which they also enjoyed (a plus when you are already making them read a lot of unfamiliar and often difficult material in their research).  I'm a film buff myself, so I went with that.  I set aside three or four class periods to do a brief lecture/demo of several critical approaches (gender, cultural, and disability studies, myth crit, and shame theory) and prepared a list of films (ones I either owned or could borrow from family or friends) divided into those approach categories. 

The results, so far, are almost all positive, and the best one has to be that my drop rate has gone down dramatically.  Most of my students are finishing the course with a passing grade, and all of them are producing actual scholarly work, creating new knowledge.  It's rarely breathtaking new knowledge, but they are saying things about these films that nobody has said before them.  Their critical thinking and revision skills are vastly improved, based on what I've read of their work.

Of course, there are some negatives, mostly coming out of them being pushed out of their comfort zones.  They come in expecting to do the same kind of research they did in high school, and some of them like to blame me for making them work harder than that.  That hasn't changed from the method I used before.  Overall, I'm pleased with the way things are going, but I've been making constant adjustments in the course since making the switch.

So, if you were wondering what Rhonda was talking about in some of her posts, the mystery is solved.  I am collecting data as I go along with an eye to an eventual article.  We'll see how it goes.

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A Teacher Thanks Matt Damon for his Support

Image by claire_h via FlickrI happened to watch the news yesterday (I don't do that very often, since I have high blood pressure; I find written sources are less likely to make it rise) and caught a story on Matt Damon's encounter with an obnoxious reporter who was anything but objective about teachers.  His comeback was priceless!  (watch it for yourself at http://news.yahoo.com/blogs/lookout/actor-matt-damon-defends-teacher-tenure-testy-exchange-211042801.html, where there is also a link to the speech he gave at the Save our Schools rally earlier this week.) 
Obviously, I agree with him.  While I don't teach at the K12 level, I have listened to my colleagues who do, and I have seen the results of the policies Damon decried in the students who enter my college classroom each fall.  Many of them have no idea how to be students.  All they know is how to prepare for standardized exams.  Unfortunately for them, life doesn't offer that option very often.  Daily living requires critical thinking skills that cannot be developed by drills.  
I cannot thank Matt Damon enough for using his position in the public eye to draw attention to this problem.  Now, does somebody want to tackle the fact that around 50% of all college courses in this country are taught by part-time faculty, which has resulted in the elimination of many full-time positions at a time when enrollments are exploding and faculty jobs should be increasing?
If you are shopping schools for yourself or your child, be sure to ask what percentage of the faculty is full time and how many courses are taught by grad students instead of instructors or professors.  It matters.

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