Teaching Themes, Working with Readings

1. Teaching Themes, Working with Readings Terms, Concepts, Interpretation— The Works!

2. What the good book sez… “English 104 is a course in writing emphasizing critical inquiry and research. Since intellectual work typically emerges from sustained processes of inquiry undertaken by communities of learners, each section of ENG 104 will model these processes by taking as a point of departure some broad theme: an area of public concern involving questions of general significance. Class members will work together to investigate, share findings, and advance views on aspects of this theme. ENG 104 fulfills the first-tier of the University Writing Requirement and prepares students for the writing assignments they will encounter in a variety of other courses, including the second-tier, writing-intensive course that completes the Graduation Writing Requirement.”

3. What we’re after, I think: The values of academic culture are not the conclusions we draw but the drawing of conclusions from the evidence before us—more exactly, the drawing of conclusions from the possibilities of evidence before us that we make into evidence enabling something worth saying. (James Slevin) If we wish to focus research writing courses on inquiry and the discovery of knowledge, a better genre to assign would be the well-known, if not well-defined, genre of general analytic nonfiction. Its purpose is the critical examination of social phenomena from the point of view of current theories; the mode of writing is analysis, synthesis, hypothesis, and comment, not primarily persuasive or informational.… It is a genre that college-educated people are supposed to be comfortable with, and it is a genre that allows students in writing classes to move the base of their inquiry beyond the bounds of their personal experience. (Marilyn Cooper)

4. What we’re getting from students: For the past four years of my life I had attended a private, all-male Catholic school. To get a better understanding of where I’m coming from, the words in BharatiMukherjee’s essay, “American Dreamer,” describes it best in saying, “I found myself in a society in which almost everyone was Christian, white, and moderately well off” (Mukherjee 129). The thought of being put through that rigor may make some cringe, but for me it was a way of life.

5. Some antithetical habits and tendencies: • A habit of making a first essay assignment that does not emphasize or even require working with shared readings. • A tendency to stipulate a set number of references to shared readings without providing for their purpose and manner of use. • A tendency to assign readings that are subject to class discussion but not to use in a writing project. • A habit of making assignments calling for unshared reading (“outside sources”) without first having first worked at length with shared texts. • A tendency to assign the “photo essays” as a final project in ways that do not feature sustained, discursive review of and reflection on the semester’s shared inquiry, especially shared texts (the senior slump syndrome). • A habit of using shared readings as models (“go and do likewise”) without also providing for their use as source and/or target texts.

6. Source and Target Texts • Source text: one from which key terms, generalizations, theories and methods are drawn (the “theory” in general analytic nonfiction) • Target text: object of analysis and interpretation, to which theories and methods are applied. Invite students to write about (target), through (source) and like (model) the texts they are assigned to read.

7. Berthoff’s Circle of Concept Formation

8. Routine activities in concept formation • A notebook (double-entry?) in which observations, responses, set pieces, trial runs, and second guesses of many sorts are entered—in class as well as at home. • Frequent short stints of in-class writing for several purposes: • To say again solo what got done in pair or group work, using the assignment as a prompt; • To recapitulate what went on in class discussion, putting key moves and complex threads in one’s own words; • To rewrite a paragraph from an essay in progress, in light of class work—before-and-after passages.

9. More routine activities • Make lists, sort into classes, draw oppositions (put a line down the middle of the page) • Track key terms and repeated instances • Identify turning points and moments of significance • Give questions for second readings, answered in writing, subject to class discussion, applicable to essay assignments • Make comparison matrixes, exfoliating them into passages • Brainstorm classification schema for key objects or entities • Write interpretive paraphrases—routinely!

10. Berthoff’s Classification Schema

11. How about a course theme? Anthony Petrosky (of Ways of Reading fame): “I start by imagining a project that might engage me as much as it might engage students.” “For me, then, it is a matter of beginning by imaging a course where students write about something, critique it, and write in imitation of it.” • The theme calls for readings as source, target, and model texts. • It calls for concept formation: naming, defining, opposing

12. My candidate: Human Nature! First brief take on an essay assignment: What does it mean to be human? How do we humans define ourselves with respect to what we’re not? What evidence can we adduce for our views of what’s human or not? The core readings for this project have in common a concern with how humans may become other than human—dehumanized, differently habituated, drawn away from what we deem our defining traits. In your essay, you’ll draw on these readings to advance a tentative view of what it means to be “human,” discussing this view, considering how it relates us to other-than-human entities, and applying it to situations you’ve encountered personally or otherwise learned about. Readings: Sarah BlafferHrdy, “Mothers and Others” Stanley Milgram, “The Perils of Obedience” Ellen Ullman, “Dining with Robots”

13. What do you mean, “discuss”? Anne Berthoff says: “Discuss is a favorite word with teachers, and what they generally mean by it is something like this: ‘Look at this idea or problem or issue or structure carefully; look again to see how it relates to others you have studied; consider the implications of this particular case, how what you could say of it applies more generally to other such cases.’” Berthoff’s heuristic for discussing: HDWDWW (How Does Who Do What and Why?)

14. A set piece in interpretive paraphrase Early in an essay by Edward Abbey, you read the following: In my case it was love at first sight. This desert, all deserts, any desert. No matter where my head and feet may go, my heart and entrails stay behind, here on the clean, true, comfortable rock, under the black sun of God’s forsaken country. When I take on my next incarnation, my bones will remain bleaching nicely in a stone gulch under the rim of some faraway plateau, way out there in the back of beyond. Here at the outset, you can begin already to characterize this writer. Write down two or three initial observations, however general or specific, based on what you’ve just read.

15. In my case it was love at first sight. This desert, all deserts, any desert. No matter where my head and feet may go, my heart and entrails stay behind, here on the clean, true, comfortable rock, under the black sun of God’s forsaken country. When I take on my next incarnation, my bones will remain bleaching nicely in a stone gulch under the rim of some faraway plateau, way out there in the back of beyond. Looking out on this panorama of light, space, rock and silence I am inclined to congratulate the dead man on his choice of jumping-off place; he had good taste. He had good luck—I envy him the manner of his going: to die alone, on rock under sun at the brink of the unknown, like a wolf, like a great bird, seems to me very good fortune indeed. To die in the open, under the sky, far from the insolent interference of doctor and priest, before this desert vastness opening like a window onto eternity—that surely was an overwhelming stroke of good luck. Write a sentence making a general observation about Abbey’s writing based on these two passages, one that generalizes about related elements or focuses some impression about his subject, attitude, or style.

16. Here’s my general observation: In his embrace of all nature’s processes, including its grim and morbid aspects, Abbey sometimes takes special delight in the prospects of his own extinction. Briefly list any phrases from the passages that you believe may have given rise to this statement. Now take your observation (revising it, if you like) and similarly list passages that give rise to it.

17. Here’s a paragraph discussing my observation: In his embrace of all nature’s processes, including its grim and morbid aspects, Abbey sometimes takes special delight in the prospects of his own extinction. About the dead man at Grandview Point, he says, “I envy him the manner of his going: to die alone, on rock under sun at the brink of the unknown, like a wolf, like a great bird, seems to me very good fortune indeed.” He also states, “When I take on my next incarnation, my bones will remain bleaching nicely in a stone gulch under the rim of some faraway plateau, way out there in the back of beyond.” What do you think?

18. Here’s an improved version: In his embrace of all nature’s processes, including its grim and morbid aspects, Abbey sometimes takes special delight in the prospects of his own extinction. He imagines himself in the place of the dead man, claiming to “envy” the “very good fortune” of a lonely death on sun-beaten rocks, and seems content to think that when he dies, his “bones will remain bleaching nicely in a stone gulch… way out there in the back of beyond.” In part, it seems as though the very inhumanness of such an end is what appeals to him: in aspiring to die “like a wolf, like a great bird,” he rejects “the insolent interference of doctor and priest,” agents of society who would deny natural morbidity, whose noisy human ministrations would smudge the “window onto eternity” that Abbey finds in desert silence and space. What’s changed? With what effects? (Interpretive Paraphrase!) [Students proceed to work their own general observations into paragraphs after this manner.]

19. Even if we manage to survive what most people are worrying about—global warming, emergent diseases, rogue viruses, meteorites crashing into earth—will we still be human thousands of years down the line? By that I mean human in the way we currently define ourselves. The reason our species has managed to survive and proliferate to the extent that 6 billion people currently occupy the planet has to do with how readily we can learn to cooperate when we want to. And our capacity for empathy is one of the things that made us good at doing that. […] The capacity for empathy is uniquely well developed in our species, so much so that many people (including me) believe that along with language and symbolic thought, it is what makes us human. We are capable of compassion, of understanding other people’s “fears and motives, their longings and griefs and vanities,” as novelist Edmund White puts it. We spend time and energy worrying about people we have never even met, about babies left in dumpsters, about the existence of more than 12 million AIDS orphans in Africa. Sarah Blaffer Hrdy, “Mothers and Others” Write an interpretive paraphrase with quoted phrases embedded, explaining what Hrdy believes to distinctively human.

20. The problem of obedience is not wholly psychological. The form and shape of society and the way it is developing have much to do with it. There was time, perhaps, when people were able to give a fully human response to any situation because they were fully absorbed in it as human beings. But as soon as there was a division of labor things changed. Beyond a certain point, the breaking up of society into people carrying out narrow and very special jobs takes away from the human quality of work and life. A person does not get to see the whole situation but only a small part of it, and is thus unable to act without some kind of overall direction. He yields to authority but in doing so is alienated from his own actions. Stanley Milgram, “The Perils of Obedience” What to Milgram appears to be “fully human”? How does this compare with what Hrdy regards as human? Write an interpretive paraphrase comparing what you take as their views.

21. The real problem with having a robot to dinner is pleasure. What would please my digital guest? Human beings need food to survive, but what drives us to choose one food over another is what I think of as the deliciousness factor. Evolution, that good mother, has seen fit to guide us to the apple instead of the poison berry by our attraction to the happy sweetness of the apple, its fresh crispness, and, in just the right balance, enough tartness to make it complicated in the mouth. There are good and rational reasons why natural selection has made us into creatures with fine taste discernment—we can learn what’s good for us and not. But this very sensible survival imperative, like the need to have sex to reproduce, works itself out through the not very sensible, wilder part of our nature: desire for pleasure. Can a robot desire? Can it have pleasure? As I picked out six limes, not a bruise or blemish on them, it occurred to me that I was not really worried about robots becoming sentient, human, indistinguishable from us. That long-standing fear—robots who fool us into taking them for humans—suddenly seemed a comic-book peril, born of another age, as obsolete as a twenty-five-year-old computer. What scared me now were the perfect limes, the five varieties of apples that seemed to have disappeared from the shelves, the dinner I’d make and eat that night in thirty minutes, the increasing rarity of those feasts that turn the dining room into a wreck of sated desire. The lines at the checkout counters were long; neat packages rode along on the conveyor belts; the air was filled with the beep of scanners as the food, labeled and bar-coded, identified itself to the machines. Life is pressuring us to live by the robots’ pleasures, I thought. Our appetites have given way to theirs. Robots aren’t becoming us, I feared; we are becoming them. Ellen Ullman, “Dining with Robots” Write an interpretive paraphrase describing Ullman’s shift in perspective as evinced in these passages.

22. Interpretively paraphrasing Berthoff:There must be something present from the beginning of what you want to come up with at the end (or something like that)….