Culture: March 2006 Archive Page

Still unconvinced of my suitability, he reminded me that the job involved backbreaking work and that the average person could not hack it. He warned me that I would leave the job daily with various aches and pains. I countered that I worked out regularly and that I was not afraid of a strenuous job, though I must admit I was starting to worry.

To prove my point, however, I showed him scars on my hands. "Are these the hands of someone who is not used to work?" I offered, looking him squarely in the eyes. The part I left out was that the scars did not come from hard labor but from falling on glass when I was in the third grade.

I was working so hard at creating a working-class persona that I felt like a fraud. But my responses did the trick, and he asked when I could start. --Eugene Thompson --Moonlighting (Chronicle)

An academic takes a package-handling job to finance a research trip overseas. There's an office recruiting day laborers and telemarketers that I pass every morning on my way to work, and I confess I've sometimes thought about stopping in...

Universities and colleges, including my own, have made retention a priority, encouraging faculty members to rethink what they do in order to foster student success. However, this is only half the effort needed, and may come too late for many students. Like the musical Chicago’s Velma Kelly, colleges and universities cannot be a one-person act in the musical Retention; they need their K-12 partners to get in on the action. --Russell Olwell --We Can’t Do It Alone (Inside Higher Ed)

The decline of handwriting and the rise of e-mail and text messaging has been highlighted in a new survey of media consumption in the digital age.

It suggests that half of written communication is by e-mail, 29% by text message and just 13% by pen and paper. --E-mail and text 'replace writing' (BBC)

But take a look at this detail about methodology: "The IPA TouchPoints survey was based on 5,000 people who updated an electronic diary every half-hour for a week."

If the data gathering mechanism is online, that is going to skew the data in favor of electronic writing.

Conference on College Composition and Communication -- Day 3 (Jerz's Literacy Weblog)

I spent some time shopping for books and taking long coffee breaks (though I don't drink coffee), so the blogging isn't quite as detailed as last time. Still, today I got a good idea for the panel I'd like to propose for next year, and I found myself saying that someone needs to write an annotated bibliography of weblog scholarship, and I actually started thinking about doing it. (If someone else is already doing that, please, please tell me so I can do something else instead.)

I was intrigued over dinner, hearing Mike Edwards say that his students know that Xanga is for "asian kids" and LiveJournal is for "rich white girls." Clancy Ratliffe also passed on a tip she heard as part of the "Where are all the women bloggers" issue -- "Men are from MovableType, women are from LiveJournal."

This is the first time I've been to a conference and found that I've known somebody on the dias or in the audience of every single session I attended.

But perhaps even cooler was when a stranger who overheard me talking about interactive ficiton (as I am wont to do) came closer, peered at my name tag, and asked whether I had written a text-adventure game that was entered in the 2001 interative fiction comp. It was Mike Duncan, whose Fusillade tied my Fine-Tuned for 18th place that year. He asked if I ever released a bug-fix version, and I assured him that I had. We spoke a little about the pending release of Inform 7.

• The History of the Future of Writing
• Changing Literacies/Changing Mindsets: Communicating Across Digital Difference
  
• Imagining a Transformed Reality: On the Web, Over the Airwaves, Around the Globe
  
• Calling All Bloggers
  

See also CCCC 2006 Day 2.

How Writing Centers Respond to Writers? Needs (CCCC 2006 Chicago -- Day 2)

Deborah Burns, Merrimack College. “Taking Care of Business: The Writing Center as a Site of Curricular Reform.”

Burns said that for years, the writing center had little impact on the business school. But a recent new program encouraging communications skills in business mandates inclusion of extensive writing activities, as well as other skills that can be learned effectively in a tutoring environment. Most of the faculty in business had no experience with writing-related pedagogy. Writing center provides “business writing fellows” for every writing-intensive business course. The most problematic area centers on business writing assignments – group composition. In a course “Business Enterprise,” a written analysis and PowerPoint presentation was required. Overwhelming majority of students (first-semester freshmen) found the work very challenging.

Students placed in a 3-5 member work group; meet with “business writing fellow” in group tutorials. Often only 1 or 2 of the group members would actually show up; some became frustrated by the idea that the writer had to be present in order to get feedback. (They wanted to delegate to the “best writer” in the group.) Not all students participated during writing tutorials – some IMed, took phone calls, or just sat there. Business faculty didn’t have a problem with the “best writer” model, since that was the model they all used themselves when in graduate school. (This works against the course goals, that expected all students to demonstrate writing proficiency.)

Burns explained her efforts to work more closely with the instructor. I’m sure her business colleagues can, with her guidance, easily see the benefits of apprenticing, scaffolding and the practical functions of group tutorials. She ended with an anecdote from a tutoring session following the new, improved integration of the writing center’s resources. During that session, a non-participating student answered his cell phone for the second time. His classmates turned to him and said, “Come on! We need to get this done.” I enjoyed hearing her success story, since it reminds me of the progress I saw happening during the years I spent at the University of Toronto, in what was then the brand-new Engineering Writing Centre.


Mary Zdrojkowski, Eastern Michigan University. “Laughing Matters in Writing Centers.”

Zdrojkowski’s dissertation is on institutional uses of laughter. Started out with “I’m Mary Zdrojkowski, and you’re not,” but didn’t smile. Then she commented on the fact that some of us thought it was funny, but most didn’t. She also invited those in the audience who might have expected a talk on how to use humor might instead be interested in going to Deborah Tannen’s talk.

Showed a video clip of a tutoring session where a student and tutor discuss whether to indent paragraphs. The student told the tutor that the tutor is wrong about something, but it came out easily and both were laughing about it. Literature studies of irony, sarcasm; philosophical questions of humor (superiority, incongruity, aggression). Tutors, when speaking to each other, can be sarcastic. Zdrojkowski noted that tutors who inadvertently offend students during a tutoring session might backtrack and recast their comment as a joke.

Made a distinction between humor and laughter. Things can be funny without laugher, and people can laugh at something that’s not funny.

Notes that doctors rarely laugh, but that patients laugh regularly in the initial interview when they tell the doctor where their pain is. Students will also laugh, at the precise moment when they “lay their souls naked” and express their feeling that they can’t write.

It found it easier to make sense of the heavily marked-up transcripts (with symbols indicating “smiley voice” or pause in seconds than it was making sense of most of the videos (because the video was unclear and it wasn’t always clear to me at first who was the student and who was the tutor), but I did enjoy seeing the contrasts. One very nervous student makes jokes at her expense, and before long the tutor and student have bonded over laughter; a hostile student leans back in his chair and complains about the professor, and keeps complaining (and laughing) while the tutor responds with stony silence.

I’m feeling tantalized, since I’ve always been interested in linguistics. But we’re going through the clips so quickly that I’m not sure I’m absorbing what I’m supposed to be getting out of watching these clips, or how she herself uses these. She answered that in response to a question from the audience. I think I would have rather watched fewer clips and heard more of her evaluation and conclusions. Nevertheless, her presentation made me think very carefully about the power imbalance when a student comes to me for tutoring. (Of course, I also sometimes hear students complaining about the writing center.)


Laura Patterson, Seton Hill University: “Let them Do Research! Two Uncommon Approaches to Teaching Research in a First-Year Writing Course.”

Patterson began by discussing the context of the panel. She feels she is the odd woman out because of the four panelist, she is not a writing center coordinator. Patterson noted some of the problems associated with getting students to do research on cultural identities. The students felt overwhelmed when being asked to consider cultural identities for the first time, much less asking them to think about it on a critical level. Students were so stressed that instructors felt they were pushed into a counselor role. She noted that for the 3-page research project that was the culmination of the first semester of the course, she asked students to choose a stress-release activity, and to research that activity, in order to address the question, “How does this activity reduce stress?”

The assignment was very structured, more than Patterson would have liked, but she finds this structure necessary for this particular project. She noted that the project is not really about cultural identities; some students resisted, with one student claiming not to have any stress in his life. (Patterson’s response: “I want to be you!”) Some students found that a particular activity didn’t reduce their stress. Perhaps due to the self-help culture, students “did buy in from the outset.” Practicing that stress-release activity was a kind of primary research. The project requires ongoing analysis. Requires the first-person voice; students wrote far more than 3 pages; reported benefits in other classes; were eager to share their results; students felt they had “done something purposeful with their research.”

Patterson remembers this as a “very positive time in the classroom.” Ended with the image of her on the floor with her students, during a student presentation on yoga.

Kim Pennesi, Seton Hill University. “Let them Do Research! Two Uncommon Approaches to Teaching Research in a First-Year Writing Course.”

Her biggest challenge as writing center administrator is getting students to buy into the writing process. Students who expect to drop off a paper and get it proofread, or they are interested in the superficial mechanics of the process, without worrying about the underlying principles. Student attitude to research: “After writing my paper, I always have a hard time trying to plug in my sources.”

Pennesi had students do the prewriting, but instead of actually writing the paper, they simply wrote and presented a reflection paper on their experience. She shared a detailed checklist of what she asked her students to do. Pennesi noted that, since SHU is switching to a one-semester first-year course model next year, she’s not sure what to do with what she’s learned about replacing the research paper with a reflection paper.

“Oh, no,” I exclaimed several years ago, when a student in a composition class stepped out afterwards to explain that she had been absent because her grandmother had died. “Another dead grandmother!”

The girl immediately burst into tears.

Of course I wished I was dead. The student’s grandmother really had died. Or else her granddaughter was a good actress. But you want to try to avoid being too cynical about excuses, especially those involving death. Question these particular excuses and you may as well be questioning respect for the dead or the suffering of those left behind. --Terry Caesar --The Time of Dead Grandmothers (Inside Higher Ed)

"We also wanted your cubicle to give you a little shred of dignity and recognition and acknowledge you exist because you're probably not getting that from your co-workers or your boss. So we've built in a mechanical flower that's acoustically activated. When you're gone, it's wilted. But when you come in, it's acoustically activated and pops up to attention, might even shudder a little bit with happiness.

"Even your wastebasket will kind of vibrate with happiness when trash is thrown into it. So you want the cubicle to love you and care for you, kind of a womb experience." --Scott Adams --Scott Adams: Dilbert's Ultimate Cubicle (CNN)

From 2001. Still pretty amusing.

"He'd tell us, 'Now, 20 rows down, the accounting's hard as granite?it's the hardest thing an office man can stand,'" said Huddie Ledbetter, one of Peters' former trainees, "'but you keep your pencil sharp, and you keep your pencil working. It's the life of a numbers-crunchin' man.'"

Sources say Peters, who was born to poor temp workers in eastern Virginia, would often go to offices where his mother worked and sit on her knee. According to his family, he once took up her pencil and said, "Pencil be the death of me. Oh, Mommy, this pencil be the death of me." --Modern-Day John Henry Dies Trying To Out-Spreadsheet Excel 11.0 (The Onion (Satire))

Brilliant. Utterly brilliant.

"The Excel spreadsheet started off to working, with its hourglass running hard there on the screen," Broonzy said. "But old Wally Peters had his pencil filling columns, throwing graphite off like locomotive steam."

I have noticed many people at fest, such as shopkeepers, pull out what they believe is their most formal language when the royalty visits them. This often means they struggle along with "thee/thou" in addressing the King & Queen when they should properly be using "you" (the phrase "Thy Majesty" doesn't make sense, does it? It's "Your Majesty."). We don't criticize them--they are putting forth an effort. But now you all know that it's (grammatically!) easy to address the nobility--just use the modern "you" form. --Renspeak Language Guide (Rosalily's Renfest Regalia)

Soon my students are going to write a sonnet, and some of them are going to want to echo the antiquated language.

If they do, this guide will help them avoid the cringe-inducing mistakes one often hears at Renaissance fairs.