6 September 2018

Trying to do this daily hasn't been working out, but I will redouble my efforts to at least write twice a week! 

I've been teaching for 12 years now, give or take, and the difference between week 1 and week 3 never fails to surprise me.  Week 1 is full of boiling energy and frazzled expectations and new car smell, week 3 is when we start really getting to work. 

Week 2, for all intents and purposes, does not exist.

But by the time we get to week 3, the shock of newness has faded.  Some students have dropped, and some have already stopped attending, but those who remain are focused in a new way.  They're more attentive, more willing to participate...okay, that "more attentive" needs a bit of unpacking. In week 1, students stare with rapt attention, listening to every utterance and scrambling to make sense of it all, but often not quite understanding much.  By week 3, they might be a little more chatty with their neighbors,but that's because they've absorbed some of the rhythm of the semester and they're sharing their newfound wisdom with classmates. Also memes...but mostly newfound wisdom.  They're proud that they can turn to a friend and explain what's going on, and it's delightful to watch that maturation at work (even if it can be a bit distracting).

Everyone is preparing for their first major projects.  ENC 1101 will write rhetorical analysese, and they seem pretty stressed about it, but we've been going over examples and that's helping.  I've received a few office visits and a lot of emails, so I think this is going to go relatively well. 

ENC 3213 students are composing letters and memos.  I've assigned an unusual volume of work for this project (unusual for me) by increasing the document output from 2 to 3, and requiring proof of peer review and a reflection write-up.  I know the students can deliver, but occasionally low energy and participation leave me wishing they would ask more questions to clarify any confusion.  I worry about the margins.

ENC 3416 students are working on using "old media" (NOTE:  Define this a bit better in advance of the project...need to clarify if we're talking about pre-literate, pre-digital, pre-mechanical, etc...) to do "new media" work.  It's a weird experiment, and yesterday (9-5-18) things seemed to really click into place.  I'm excited to see the results!  Assignment includes proof of peer review and a process analysis / literacy narrative.

29 August 2018 - 3 Classes

Generally good sessions today covering some early-stage material in tech-comm and assignment introductory work in "Writing New Media." 

Both TC classes went quite smoothly.  Covered letters (part of a two-part "memos and letters" assignment), and introduced the first major assignment:  two letters, one memo, introduced to varied stakeholders.  Questions were germane, conversation was fluid, though I do feel like I talked too much....tends to be the way of it in early weeks. 

Writing New Media was a bit different.  Students did not do much of the reading, as I feared, and became frustrated.  My warnings regarding the density of the content were clearly a turn-off, so I'm going to find work that's a bit more gradually difficult.  Dropping them into Phaedrus was too much.  This week they have scholarly articles as well, but they are at least contemporary.

Turned class around with participatory exercises in identifying old media forms.  They got the hang of it quickly:  Song, dance, recitation, painting, sculpture...and then we identified old media purposes:  Community-building, identity, instruction.  The assignment is still perhaps a bit weirdly ambiguous for them, but I think most of them are getting it.  One student after class called the assignment "Caveman Memes," which was both hilarious and accurate - I'll call it that from now on, and reduce the Ancient Greek stuff by a bit.

Week 1 Reflections

I've been at FIU for a grand total of 14 days, and I'm already impressed with the students coming through here - hard working, attentive, and energetic. It's difficult to find coherent take-aways after just one week of teaching, and it's doubly hard to do that sort of reflection after the rushing energy of week 1, but I'm going to try to record my most salient thoughts.

1) I was advised early on that there may be some language difficulties here as it is a leading HSI / HSU, and most students speak English as a second language.  In my experience, however, my students are overwhelmingly able to understand me, and I them.  Whenever there *is* a communication breakdown, they have been quick to ask for clarification and to meet me in the middle. I owe it to them to learn Spanish, and will be redoubling my efforts.

2) I'm still learning my way around this campus, but it is becoming familiar.  My "dead reckoning" is a bit off as I have on more than one occasion assumed I was exiting, say, an east-facing door only to pop up in the north, but I'm working on it.

3) Teaching a hybrid course (three this semester in fact) is not without its own challenges, which I am learning to navigate.  The biggest issue has been coming up with online content worthy of replacing in-class discussion.  I will continue to refine this.

All in all, I'm very happy to be at FIU, and I'm looking forward to the challenges this institution will present.

Syllabus Cool-Down

Every semester, I write new syllabuses (syllabi?  Silly-bye?), and every semester I have to talk myself down with the following reminder:

1) you can't cover everything
2) the harder you try to cover everything, the less service you'll do to anything
3) you can go back and change it later

This is just a heads-up to any instructors who, like me, are spending time right now trying to get their courses together and are flipping out over making sure every detail is perfect.  Let's all take a deep breath and a step back. 

Trust the students to do the work and to do it generously.  Approach it like a game, treat it like fun, and it will be fun.  Treat it like a prenuptial agreement, and it's going to provide all the joy of a root canal.

Tomorrow I'm going to spend some time blogging here to remind myself that this can be a really exciting part of the school year.  PROTIP:  D&D and Syllabus design are actually *really similar*

Uni-Versity

An old chestnut, which I'll paraphrase, claims that any artist mostly makes the same piece of art over and over again.  Change this character from brunette to blonde, change the setting from New York to LA, but so many of the tropes and premises will remain the same that an oeuvre will emerge appearing as a consistent whole from all the disparate parts.

I'm starting to see that over the span of a teaching career, a teacher / instructor / professor (pick your title) in fact only teaches one class.  There are particulars which I might narrowly ascribe to praxis (practice or material skill) like, say, MLA formatting, resume "tone," and SEO optimization, but then there is the theoria (theory, uber-knowledge) that runs through all of it, and *that* is what we're really teaching.

So for me, for example, it doesn't matter much whether or not I'm teaching first-year composition students or advanced creative writing students, I'm always going to teach the things that I think are most important:  Critical skepticism, generous reading, evidence-based arguments, and contextual awareness.  I will always demand that students read both with and against the grain in order to understand the fullness of what they encounter.  I want them to back up every assertion not with hearsay or superstition, but with measurements, observation, research, and experience. 

Most of all, I want them to be aware of how their writing connects to the world around them. I want them to see how the life they have lived infuses that writing, and how that writing will in turn leak out into the world to change it. 

That's the point of every Dr. Tiger class.

Critical Need

We live in contentious times, though I'm not asserting this as a statement of exceptionalism in favor of the early 21st century.  No doubt contentious times have come before and, should we keep from eradicating our species, will come again (or, failing that, will come for the newly evolved cockroach-people millions of years from now).   

Before I launch into a tirade about the importance of research and critical thinking, I'm going to rattle off two bits of homespun which probably makes the point a whole lot better:

1) We've got two ears and one mouth for a reason. 

2) It's awfully hard to hear anything when your lips are moving. 

In the last 24 hours I've had two of those delightfully disgusting internet encounters wherein someone reads an offensive headline or sees a challenging image and decides to speak out rather than to dig deeper.  

In the first case, it was Michael Hariot's article "White People are Cowards" over at The Root.  It's a provocative title, for sure, and the content addresses how it's probably not the smoothest rhetorical move, but the reader in question decided to fire off a string of personal opinion attended as rebuttal to the author directly in the article's comments (it was a late comment, and as of yet hasn't gained any traction, so no sense really looking for it).  The respondent's allegation primarily hinged upon some shopworn whataboutisms (what about black-on-black crime?  What about Obama? etc.) which, had this person actually bothered to read the article generously and thoughtfully, they would have seen were addressed.  Failing that, ongoing scholarship and journalism also addresses these points.   

The second case was pretty similar - it was in response to pictures of newly erected detainment centers along the southern US border side-by-side with pictures of the Auschwitz concentration camp, remarking on the similarities and the apparent historic inevitability of murderous escalation. The respondent in this case "sealioned" their way through a comment thread before being dismissed from the conversation. The answers to any and all of their questions were just a short Google search away, but instead they wasted their energy in an unproductive attempt to insult and derail. 

But if you're too busy typing up angry screeds on the internet, you won't bother to go do supportive reading.  If you're too busy running your (figurative) mouth (by which I mean fingers on a keyboard) you won't use your (again figurative) ears to listen (by which I mean eyes to read...really could have thought this through). 

Our job as educators is to teach active reading and cautious response.  It's not about being nice or polite (although that's pleasant), but about acknowledging the sticky, liquid work of knowledge-making.  It's about taking time and walking cautiously to a conclusion rather than jumping.  

It's about listening about twice as much as we speak. 

Share and Share Alike

Never underestimate the power of a good conversation. 

I ran into a colleague today who has been having a bit of trouble teaching technical communication.  This is a topic well within my wheelhouse--not so much for my colleague.  

We talked shop for a few moments and I passed along a few pointers, tips, and tricks.  Later that day I sent along some class notes as well.  Hopefully that's useful for them, but here's the kicker:  It was really useful for me! 

To be frank, I wasn't really feeling my oats today.  I had a late start, I didn't feel particularly focused, and I mostly just wanted to slack off for the afternoon.  On top of that, I forgot the text I'd been annotating for my own reference (Wysocki, Johnson-Eilola, Selfe & Sirc's Writing New Media - highly recommended).  It looked like a real washout session. 

But talking about the craft of writing and our involvement in the classroom recharged me.  It was a warm-up.  With the relatively easy task of recounting what had worked in the classroom, I was able to push ahead and make something interesting and useful (in this case: assignment sheets).  

The lesson today, then, is to take the little opportunities to discuss the work, because that is also in its own way the work that needs to be done. 

New Media Literacy

Starting in 2018, I will be teaching a course in Writing for New Media.  I'm excited because it's an opportunity to push past the obvious utterances like "new media = web" and "short paragraphs, use 'you' a lot," and to actually dig in to what we mean by all of the terms in the title.

For example, when we say "new," do we mean the 21st century?  Because the tools and techniques of 2001 have already been pushed aside in favor of emerging practices and loci.  Don't believe me?  Go update your LiveJournal and tell your buddies on Friendster.  Do we mean the 20th century?  Shall we challenge our conventions of telegraphy?  And do old mediums ever really die?  Do they evolve? 

The Ship of Theseus:  Take the telegraph, keep the tele, remove the graph, add a phone, drop the phone, pour in bits, drop the tele (Greek:  far off / far away), make it immediate...is it still the same ship? 

As for media, that term implies a middle -- something in between (media - medium...something between the observer and the thing) and of course in the postmodern we know that everything is itself a thing.  There is nothing BUT media such that the thing itself is media. 

So given this mind-boggling weirdness, what will it mean to write? 

I am challenged to theorize my praxis like never before. I have written for the web, for television, and of course for "traditional" (whose traditions?) publications, but now I will be looking for consistent threads, recursive tropes, a persistent zeitgeist, and simultaenously points of departure and fragmentation.

The ecology of new media, teaming with life - let's dive in!

Introduction

Hi! I'm Dr. Vytautas Malesh, and this is my teaching blog!

Most instructors / professors / teachers keep some sort of running log of their ups and downs in the classroom. They keep track of notable students, reflect on lesson plans which really worked, and toss links and other ephemera onto the page to save for later.

My own teaching journals in the past have been pretty jumbled -- quite literally shoeboxes full of notes, old bank boxes stuffed with forgotten portfolios, salvaged emails downloaded into word docs...you get the idea.

I was inspired by one of my high school teachers, Ms. Anne Gautreau, who in 2017 recounted to me a story of one of my own eureka moments over twenty years ago brought into the present through her excellent sense of posterity and commitment to record keeping.  That is to say that she bothered to write down something remarkable shortly after it happened in the classroom, and carried that story forward to improve her own teaching.

And so I'm following the lead of a very, very good teacher in the hopes that I will be called the same. 

So who is this blog for? 

FOR ME:  This is an ongoing record of success and failure, of what works and what doesn't.  It's a place to brainstorm, to recollect, and to review.

FOR STUDENTS:  You can see through these pages that your instructors are, in fact, human beings with feet of clay who (often) err, and who adapt and learn from our shared classroom time just the same as you do.  If you happen to read this blog, you might get a little context and color for our classroom work and assignments, and you might find that missing idea or two which will help you make it all click. 

FOR TEACHERS:  We're all in this together - I can't meet every other instructor of writing for coffee, crullers, and commiseration - this is the next best thing, and in some ways an even better thing since here we have assembled notes, comments, fresh impressions, and even a link to a lesson plan or two. 

So if you're reading this far, thanks!  I can't promise this blog will be of interest to anyone but myself (and not even always that), but I can promise to be honest and to try to make something good.