An Appeal to Community College Students: Don't be Fooled!

As an educator who interacts constantly with college-aged students, and as a parent of three children who are in their early twenties, I am disturbed by President Obama's shameless attempt to manipulate young people by holding political rallies disguised as "official White House events" at community colleges.

In fact, the more I listen to this man on the campaign trail, the more alarmed I become. It is increasingly apparent to me that Obama's "power to persuade" is a deadly concoction of charm and fallacious reasoning, made all the more potent when presented to gullible students who, simply by virtue of being assembled together in a stadium or auditorium, are vulnerable to the insidious "bandwagon" fallacy. When the president of the United States mocks and ridicules people or ideas you might otherwise respect, either because of family tradition or personal convictions, and when everyone around you laughs and cheers and jeers, are you going to be among the few who "sit on your hands" or shout out a dissenting "boo"? Most twenty-somethings wouldn't. Most fifty-somethings wouldn't.

Again, the word "shameless" comes to mind. Obama, correctly assuming most of these students are either ignorant of or disinterested in facts and taking full advantage of social mores (what college kid would shout "boo" while a popular, witty, charming president is speaking?), is able to make overtly false claims with virtually zero accountability. And even if those claims are rightly disputed in the next day's right-wing news outlets who are vetting and fact-checking the president, little matter. He's moved on, the kids with their short attention span and Twitter and Facebook have moved on, the mainstream news outlets aren't interested, and the beat goes on. The 24/7 information cycle is all and only about image, not substance.

Critical thinking is in danger of becoming a lost art. The more time we (educators) spend focused on "diversity" and "tolerance," the less time we spend teaching students how to understand an argument, recognize and challenge logical fallacies, and refuse to be manipulated.

Here's an assignment for the English classroom. Rather than holding feel-good discussions about diversity, let's analyze campaign stump speeches, particularly Barack Obama's. We could practice on the 3-minute clip below. How many logical fallacies can you identify?

Here's a partial list: appeal to pity; appeal to fear; bandwagon; begging the question; confusing chronology with causality, either/or reasoning; equivocating; failing to accept the burden of proof; false analogy; hasty generalization; over-reliance on authority; oversimplifying; personal attack; red herring; slanting; slippery slope; sob story; straw man.

President Obama, speaking at Prince George’s Community College in Ohio, this week.

Who Decides What We Should Be Aware Of?

Received the following in my in-box this morning from Michael Mufson, professor of theater at Palomar, sent on behalf of the PC3H Committee (and no, "PC" is not short for politically-correct, though it should be). Addressing the entire Palomar College community, including classified staff, counselors, administrators, faculty, district counselors, deans, directors, distinguished Governing Board members, Mufson writes: 

April is LGBTQ awareness month at Palomar and we are hoping to create a broad discussion amongst classes, faculty, staff and community about gender and sexuality in American culture.  We are planning a series of events to spark discussions across many disciplines.  An essential part of the project is participation of many classes in the discussion. There are many ways you can participate:

•  Have a discussion on any LGBTQ topic and encourage your students to share their thoughts on the blog.

•  Encourage students to use the blog for pre-writing or free-writing process and discussion

•  Give extra credit to students for attending one or more of the events.  Encourage them to post a response on the blog.

•  If you already have a written assignment that relates to the topic, post some quotes or conclusions from the assignment on the blog.

•  Create a written assignment that relates to the topic, post some quotes or conclusions from the assignment on the blog.

In these stressful times, it is important for us to remember that education is more than student learning outcomes and career training for corporate America.  This project is an expression of the ideal of education.  Let’s put the community in community college.

My initial thoughts:

Mufson's suggestion that faculty and staff incorporate discussions on LGBTQ in our courses is absurd, especially when you think in terms of your own course content (Physics? Calculus? Library Technology?). Our job as educators is to teach our course content, not to incorporate social values of any sort, no matter how commendable, that are not relevant to those objectives.

I have a feeling that Stanley Fish, who wrote Save the World on Your Own Time, might disagree with Mufson's final statement about education being more than learning outcomes and/or career training. Fish's entire book revolves around a simple thesis: Our job as educators is to teach content related to our own discipline, along with analytical skills related to that content. That's it. If we have passions or beliefs or morals or values that we want to fight for or protest or advocate, that's fine. Do it on your own time, and in your own name, not in the classroom and not as a representative the institution where you teach.


And who determines that April is anything month? Why do LGBTQ people get their own month? Lots of people could argue for special acknowledgment of their disenfranchisement. What about "Unborn Human Babies Awareness Month" or "Religious Liberties Under Assault Awareness Month" or . . . ?

One wonders how Professor Mufson would feel if the college encouraged faculty to incorporate discussions about the rights of the pre-born or of persecuted Christians in his theater classes? My guess is he would opt out. As I will be this April in my English classes.


Sorry, but this is infuriating.


Note: posted this on my other blog (Ahem) as well. 

Left-Leaning Professors and Their Writing Assignments

My students are currently working on their second essay for my Freshman Composition class, a profile. I like teaching this assignment for several reasons. First, it's based primarily on "field" research, i.e., writing based primarily on the students' observation and interviews. Though somewhat time-consuming and labor-intensive, this kind of research has its own unique set of rewards, especially if the student picks a person or place to profile that is interesting to him (or her) personally or professionally. Students who already have their career goals in sight, for instance, tend to take full advantage of the opportunity this assignment provides them to observe and interview someone in their desired profession (e.g., teaching). Then again, students who really have no idea what they want, or how to benefit from this assignment, end up basically winging it: when I ask what their profile topic is they tell me it's their mother (even after I told them not to profile their mothers), or their boyfriend (ditto) or a concert (double-ditto). Or one day it's an amateur skateboarder (who happens to be their best friend), and the next it's a Kung Fu studio where he happens to work, which is problematic since a profile by definition is not about you, it's about someone or something else.

But I digress.

I started writing about this because this morning, searching for some sample profiles to show my students in preparation for our in-class critiquing activity, I literally stumbled on a gold-mine: an English professor named Dr. June Pullia from Louisiana State University, also teaches this assignment. She obviously teaches many of her classes online because she has posted a prodigious amount of documents for all the courses she teaches (including sample student essays, among them profiles, which I am planning to use in tomorrow's class discussion). This is obviously one overachieving professor.

I bookmarked her site and plan on returning. I like a lot of what she's doing and would like to incorporate some of her ideas in my syllabus and in future assignments. She does a really cool assignment which is team-based and research oriented, but highly original, where teams are assigned a decade in the life of the university to research and then create a booklet using MS Publisher. I'm not sure this is something I could do, primarily because of the technology required, but it might be something I could adapt.

Meanwhile, though, before moving on, I noticed she also requires students to write an essay in which they "Explain an Issue." How interesting. I'm teaching this same genre after the profile. I followed the link to the assignment. Here's what she wrote:

Write an essay where you explain an issue of interest to LSU students. An essay that explains an issue doesn't so much formulate an argument (an essay that advocates one particular position) as it explores a topic in depth by examining multiple perspectives about it. Thus, your research (and quest for outside sources--you'll need three, by the way) should lead you to find multiple points of view about this issue.

Very nice. Similar to my assignment. But then she starts talking about topics for this assignment. Like me, she's tired of essays that deal with the uber-controversial (and always poorly written) hot topics: gay marriage, abortion, death penalty, gun control, and the like. So she offers some suggestions that concern their own locality (Louisiana). I like that too. I wonder if I can think of similar local issues to steer my students to? Then she writes this:

At any rate, a good topic choice would be something that is currently in the news (so start reading newspapers and listening to NPR, and stop listening to Fox News! It's crap!).

Hmmm. NPR (good), Fox News (crap). Besides the fact that I find her word choice to be inappropriate in an academic setting (I always write "avoid slang, colloquialisms, and vulgarity" on my students'
papers), I'm not impressed with this professor's singling out Fox News as the type of news source to avoid. It can't be that it's because this professor is socially and/or politically liberal, could it? Even if that were true, professors are professionals. They are there to instruct, not indoctrinate, right? If Dr. Pullia believes stations like Fox News (italics used deliberately) should be avoided, she should explain why. There are plenty of reasons why I would steer my students away from Fox News, one of them being a conservative bias, but the more important one being the lack of depth in its reporting. However, I would in the same breath or paragraph include stations like MSNBC for the exact same reasons, with its liberal bent and its superficial reporting. I'd gladly direct my students to something like the PBS NewsHour with its fairly comprehensive coverage and intelligent debates.

I've drafted a personal email to Dr. Pullia but I haven't drummed up the nerve to send it yet. Here's what I wrote (after a fawning personal introduction):

It occurs to me that you could have been more precise in helping your students understand what your criteria for "crappiness" are. While I don't necessarily disagree with you about Fox News being "crap" in the sense that it does not go into depth about issues the way NPR might and also the fact that it has a conservative bias, to be consistent, you might also have included comparable news programs that represent a left-leaning bias, such as MSNBC. In this way, students would be taught to understand that it's not the political leanings of a program per se that warrant its being deemed "crappy" but how information is presented. I believe it's important to teach our students how to think, not what to think, and as such, to be careful about exposing our own biases in our classes. Presumably you agree?

Well, that's actually somewhat disingenuous. Presumably she won't agree. I know it, and I know she'll know I know it.  So it's all a little game, which is why I'll probably chicken out.

Besides, some measly adjunct from across the country shouldn't have to be the one calling this woman to task. Someone in her department--her superiors, her colleagues--should be challenging her. Even if she's tenured, there should be some level of accountability. But that's the problem, isn't it? Her colleagues no doubt share her views, and as a result they would be utterly baffled by the distinction I'm trying to make here.

Midnight English Class?

An end note in one of Professor X's chapters took me to this article in the New York Times about a community college in Boston that offers a couple of late night classes due to high demand and overcrowding. I guess "late night" doesn't quite capture the meaning of of what's going on. The article focuses on a literature course that begins at 11:45 p.m. (that's a quarter 'til midnight) and lets out at 2:30 a.m.

I thought at first it was a typo, so I read more carefully. Then I went to the chapter notes to get the publishing information. The writer of the article is named Amy Goodnough. This has to be a joke, I thought. An Onion article, surely.

I went online. Sure 'nough, Amy Goodnough name comes right up as an education reporter for the New York Times. I located the article. It looks legit. But so many questions come to mind: Is there an evening administrator after midnight? (somehow I doubt it). What about security? Is there access to copy machines? What if there's a power outage? What if there's a medical emergency? I've had two students over the course of my teaching career who've had epileptic seizures. Is the health center open at 2 a.m.?

Somehow this doesn't seem right.

Thoughts on Teaching Writing

I'm about a third of the way into the recently published "memoir" by Professor X (In the Basement of the Ivory Tower: Confessions of an Accidental Academic). I'm sure I'll have more to say once I finish reading as the book represents one of those rare opportunities to read about something that's literally right up my alley, Professor X being both an adjunct professor and an adjunct professor of English. The similarities don't end there. Oddly enough, Prof X also did a stint teaching junior high, as did I. One of his funnier moments in the book is when he reminisces about teaching middle school:

As far as teaching gigs go, middle school is generally considered the bottom of the barrel. I liked it. Seventh graders were the worst, but I never tired of how they tortured you for a year, vanished for the summer, and reappeared in the much more reasonable guise of eighth graders. They would greet me warmly by name, shake my hand and ask about my family, as though we were all corporate executives (57).

 He's right about that! I remember marveling at the transformation that occurs between 7th and 8th grade. It's as if they mutate, sometimes right before your very eyes. For me, the distinctions were dramatic since I taught a combined 7th/8th grade class. In the same room would be just-turned-12 "Jimmy" (say), all smooth-cheeked, delicate-framed prepubescence, seated beside about-to-turn-14 "John" (say), sprouting facial hair and leg hair and exuding testosterone from every pore.

Professor X seems to have several points he wants to make in writing this book, one about the life of the adjunct and another about the art (or craft) of teaching writing, and particularly whether writing can be taught at all. But his primary focus seems to be about whether we (as in the collective "we") are selling students a bill of goods when we suggest that everyone should go to college. His last point is the one generating probably the most controversy, but for the moment I'm interested in the second point: can writing be taught?

This summer I'm teaching a non-transfer level (i.e., remedial) introductory English class "for students who want to develop fundamental essay writing skills, acquire an A.A. degree, or enter a transfer program, but who need further preparation in composition skills." This is definitely a hands-on class with plenty of opportunities for students to try their hand at academic writing with fairly low level of risk or consequence. We do quite a bit of hand-holding. For example, for their fourth out-of-class essay, I provided them with a selection of readings from which they would choose two or three as their "sources" for an argument. Part of the required elements for this last paper would be to cite from these sources using parenthetical citations and to include these sources in a correctly-formatted Works Cited page at the end of their paper. In short: a "research-based" essay, albeit without the research element and on a much smaller scale than the one they will be writing once they transfer into Freshman Composition.

My students this semester run the gamut when it comes to writing skills. Since this is a class designed for remediation, I do teach with remediation in mind, even though at least three of my students could have by-passed the class and gone straight to English 100. I'm not entirely sure why these students enrolled in English 50. Some perhaps tested in, but some enroll by choice, either to "bone up" on skills they've forgotten after having been out of the classroom for a while or simply to take advantage of the opportunity to supplement their current education at a reasonable price. Such is the case of Justin, a home-schooled high-school student who seems to be skating through the course-requirements, and I mean that almost literally. He actually seems to enjoy the class, likes to write, is playful with language, confident enough in his abilities that he experiments with style, deliberately breaking the traditional rules of writing (e.g. fragments) in order to create interest and freshness. Sometimes he overdoes it, and I let him know when overuse of one type of style wears thin (e.g., fragments).

The majority of my students, however, are beginners. Several are second-language students, primarily Hispanic, many of whom can barely craft a paragraph while others can write decent papers but still have to deal with the first-language interference that obscures meaning. I have older students in their late twenties or early thirties, some of them veterans, some parents, some single, some married. And of course I've got the fresh-out-of-high school kids who probably didn't pay too much attention during 10th grade English. So here they are spending a couple of hours four days a week with me.

Professor X writes eloquently of all these students. And though he tries to be gracious, he clearly believes many of them are "in over their heads," as he puts it. He writes, "What I encounter regularly in my students' writing are yawning canyons of illogic and error (78)." He asks, "If you do ninth-grade work in a college classroom, does it automatically become college work?" (81).

I've been teaching composition now (part-time, it must be said) since the early '90's, first at the junior high level and then, starting in 2000, at the community college level. I often work with unskilled writers. Even when I'm teaching transfer-level English, many of my students are under-prepared. I typically have to start from the very beginning: teaching them to read critically, to analyze text, to extract meaning from the written word. I teach them to formulate and articulate their ideas in a reasonably coherent way. In remedial classes, I work at the sentence level, the paragraph level, the basic essay level. At the transfer level, I'm still addressing problems that students long ago should have mastered. It's not glamorous work. I am not always successful. Like Prof X, I get frustrated by the sheer ordinariness of the prose, annoyed by the lack of originality, the level of (to put it bluntly) incompetence.

But then, once in awhile, a student will surprise me with what can only be described as eloquence. It happened again this week as I was preparing my English 50 students for their final exam, an in-class, two-hour, hand-written, prompt-based essay. I gave them an article written by a virulent anti-war activist named Andrew Tonkovich ("Learning to Say No to the Military"), in which the author argues against military recruiters coming to high schools. I had hesitated before giving my class this article. At least three of my students are veterans and another is a military wife. By giving them what amounted to an anti-war screed, would they think I espoused this view?  But I distributed it anyway with a simple disclaimer and let them have at it. And while many of the essays they turned in two hours later were unremarkable, several of them (not surprisingly those written by those who had served their country), were impressive. One student, disagreeing with Tonkovich, concludes his essay as follows:

In closing, as a veteran myself, I have seen first hand the trauma and horror that war holds. I understand that no parent would want their child to experience the darkest depths of what man can do. But someone has to do it. Someone has to go fight the bad guys. Someone has to defend the flag. And if we are going to send some teenager or young adult over to die for us, shouldn't they know we support them, love them, and thank them for doing it? When they return from an 18-month tour in Iraq, don't they deserve a high school gym chanting "USA! USA! USA!" instead of some kid preaching his father's beliefs? Thomas Paine once said, "An army of principles can penetrate where an army of soldiers cannot."

I'm not sure if his last quote undermines or enhances his argument, but I'll give him the benefit of the doubt (this was an in-class, hand-written essay, after all). I teared up a bit as I finished his essay. I'm a parent, after all. And the parallel structure. Well, I'm an English teacher, after all. Lovely!

Can writing be taught? I've seen it happen, though sometimes I don't know if fault or blame or credit can be laid at my feet or if the student would have eventually succeeded on his or her own. Maybe it's not what we teach or how we teach but that we teach. Perhaps classrooms are like petri dishes where students are placed and instructors add the nutrients and the right environmental conditions and then something almost biological happens--like writing.

That's it. Teaching writing is like a science experiment. Good writing grows, like bacteria, when all the right ingredients are present.

I always knew English and Science would marry.