Tuesday, June 1, 2004

BLOG THREE HUNDRED SIXTY-FIVE [in 375 days!]

In English 25 I distributed progress reports, generated from the EasyGradePro program I use for record-keeping and grading. Since the second midterm is tomorrow, I want students to be clear on where they stand. Most of the points in the course are still to be earned, but many are still shocked by seeing that failure to turn in an assignment, thus getting a 0, does bad things to averages. Fortunately, there's lots of opportunity to complete work and earn decent grades.

I don't recall that I've discussed grading philosophy here very much. When I began teaching, I used letter grades for individual assignments and then did some kind of "rule of thumb" averaging to create final grades. The numbers person in me found this too squishy, so I found ways to produce scores for all the work and then I could use numeric averages. At the time, several ideas were afloat about grading. One was "non-punitive grading", which meant we gave A, B, C or NC. The D and F grades were eliminated, largely as a response to the draft during the Vietnam War. But some of us found the philosophy sound. It was enough that a student spent a term in a course and earned NC. Adding a punishment of negative grade points seemed unnecessary. But a cry went across the land that if you didn't flunk students, you had no standards. A Stanford professor of education, appointed to the state Community College Board of Governers, led the effort to restore the D and F. I testified against the idea at a hearing in Los Angeles, to no effect. Stanford also dropped its NC grade in favor of D and F. Such is educational progress.

The other idea affecting grading was the concept of mastery learning, one that was adopted by many teachers in the 70s and 80s. The notion was that a course consisted of so many discrete elements of learning. These could be broken out and taught. When a student had mastered all the elements, an A was awarded. Lower grades came if you did not master every element. This approach gave great emphasis to effort, but might not recognize real ability. So I devised a scheme that had elements of both mastery learning and a traditional grading scale. Some writing activities would earn full credit just by being completed to specifications. No qualitative judgement would be made. Then other work--the formal papers--would be graded against a scoring rubric. Thus, a student who was diligent could earn 100% on the "mastery" elements, which could offset a weaker performance on the graded elements. While no system is ever perfect, I've found this approach works pretty well, motivating students to complete all work and to do their best on papers and midterms.

This approach also allows me to avoid grading on "participation"--I've always seen that as another squishy concept that really just gives an instructor a wild card to reward or punish students according to some undefined criteria. My "mastery" assignments spread throughout the term, and there's no make-up for the in-class writing. A student who cuts a lot will end up losing points here, but I don't have to keep track of "participation"--and I don't have to listen to excuses of family crises and work demands and car breakdowns and all the other "stuff happens" that each of us faces. I did get a fresh excuse this quarter from a student who missed a lot of work. His explanation? "I've been sprititually bankrupt lately." That measures out to an F in the current grading scheme.

In English 1C, I collected the magnum opus "dumps" and scheduled the conferences over the drafts starting tomorrow. This will keep me hopping pretty well through next Monday. We carried over the discussion of Rupert Brooke's "The Soldier" and I brought in Wilfred Owen's "Dulce Et Decorum Est" to give another example of a WWI era poem. I was struck that Brooke died at 28 and Owen at 25, emblems of an entire generation destroyed in war. Then Kevin presented Mos Def's "Mr. Nigga", playing the CD through Michael's laptop. That opened up the question of who can use taboo words and under what conditions. Then Dyson presented poems from an 8th century Han dynasty writer. He and Qin noted that a cultural ideal of the time was to be a writer, a musician and a martial artist--it took the French a 1000 years to come up with a similar embodiment in the form of Cyrano de Bergerac. Finally, Rudy offered us Edgar Allen Poe, focusing on The Raven, which we did in read-around style, a stanza to each of us, with the entire class chiming in on "nothing more" or "Nevermore". The idea here is to get everyone to see how accessible and fundamental poetry is--the most ancient form of both written and oral literary expression. And you can be certain I made clear that no culture can tolerate poetry police.

There's been a lot of response to Saturday's blog on the "criminalizing writing" issue. I'll try to report a lot of it in tomorrow's posting.

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Monday, May 31, 2004

BLOG THREE HUNDRED SIXTY-FOUR

"Whatever we call the form--autobiography, memoir, personal history, family history--writing about one's life is a powerful human need. Who doesn't want to leave behind some record of his or her accomplishments and thoughts and emotions? If it's a family history it will have the further value of telling your children and your grandchildren who they are and what heritage they come from. Writers are the custodians of memory, and memories have a way of dying with their owner. One of the saddest sentences I know is 'I wish I had asked my mother about that.'" [p. 6] • William Zinsser, Writing ABout Your Life, 2004.

Most cultures enshrine days of remembrance, days of the dead, occasions on which a special effort is made to remember. It's not really an accident that the readings for my English 1C course this quarter all capture important stories of the dead: Homer's The Odyssey, Dave Eggers' A Heartbreaking Work of Staggering Genius, Michael Chabon's The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier and Klay, and Art Spiegelman's Maus. One of the most powerful moments in Homer comes when Odysseus enters the Underworld (Hades or the House of Death) and encounters his mother's ghost. Eggers account of his hysterical scattering of his mother's ashes in Lake Michigan creates a moment you want to look away from, but you keep reading. And Speigelman ends Maus I calling his father "Murderer" because Vladek had destroyed Artie's mother's diaries, the written memory that might have remained. Joe Kavalier ships around the world in a casket with a golem to preserve an important cultural and religious artifact--and he never sees his mother again.

So this Memorial Day should be a writer's day. Commit important memories to writing so that they become part of the collective memory. Become, in Orson Scott Card's conception, a Speaker for the Dead, one who explains and justifies a person's life.

B and I went to Alta Mesa Cemetery here in Palo Alto to put flowers on the grave of our son Gregory. We cut a nice bouquet of Peruvian lilies from the front yard where they have grown for many decades, even before we moved into the house. I always find it more comforting to bring flowers Gregory had seen, rather than those from florists.

As for written memories, I've already done that in BLOG FIVE and BLOG 320 so I'll let them serve for this day, too.

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Sunday, May 30, 2004

BLOG THREE HUNDRED SIXTY-THREE

There's more discussion at Cindy's regarding the criminalizing of student writing. I've gotten some supportive responses to yesterday's posting, which I'm trying to disseminate as widely as possible among writing teachers and writers.

In his May 29 posting, Mike at vitia reports from Austin, Texas, and the Rhetorical Society of America meeting. His report on one session has, as he anticipated, caught my interest. Mike writes:

Brereton contends that an academic community of sufficient size and a contingent of graduate students are necessary for the development of new ideas in rhetorical theory; if all you have is freshmen, then all you need is a textbook, not a treatise. (Those who know John at Jocalo's perspective on the diverse needs served by higher education can probably at this point sense his hackles rising.)

Actually, I don't have as many hackles as I used to so there are not as many to rise. But the Brereton viewpoint strikes me as relatively self-serving, though quite a common viewpoint among senior university scholars. Coupled with Mike's report on Thomas Miller's paper describing the undergraduate English curriculum, I'd like to offer another way of thinking about building knowledge in composition and rhetoric.

Brereton makes the common error that knowledge can only be created by a small group of scholars focusing intensely on a given area, subjecting it to deep reading and critical scrutiny. This is essentially the graduate seminar model of knowledge building. It heavily favors knowledge built from reading and reflection, especially because the graduate students usually don't have much practical experience to work with.

Medicine and management build significant knowledge out of practice, including deriving theory from practice. Shoen and others demonstrate how this process works. They also suggest the process applies to education. Over the past 40 years, most of the teaching of college composition has taken place in community colleges. Community college writing programs encompass a much greater range of student preparation, ability, and interest than the university first-year composition course. As a result, community college curricula have had to respond to the great diversity of students. The usual university critique has been to say these aren't really college students (if they were, they'd be in the university, right?), so university writing theorists and researchers simply ignore these students and programs.

Specialization does produce important knowledge. But generalists have important contributions to make, too. As I usually do in this blog, I'll use my own experience to illustrate. My B. A. degree was in English literature, with minors in history and philosophy. My M. A. was also in English lit, with a minor in linguistics. My doctoral program at Stanford was in English as a Second Language, with a pretty good grounding in both psycholinguistics and sociolinguistics. As an undergraduate, I was also a journalist for four years, ending up as editor-in-chief my senior year. I never had formal coursework in composition or rhetoric. As a teaching assistant, we had regular seminars on teaching practices and a gang office where lots of teacher-talk developed among the graduate student teachers.

But the departmental ideology in a community college is very different from that of a university. Everyone is a generalist first. Every faculty member is the equal of the other. We don't have the "coverage" issues that Gerald Graff documents so well in Professing Literature. Everyone teaches composition, both developmental and first year. And we have been encouraged to develop broader teaching areas, one of the ways to keep alive professionally in an environment of introductory courses. When I first taught, I did only composition courses. Then a colleague and I wrote the ESL curriculum and I started teaching that (I'd done it for two years in graduate school). The same colleague and I wrote Introduction to Linguistics, and I've taught that for more than 35 years. Then I got a turn at Introduction to Poetry. Because only women had taught Children's Literature, the feminist department chair asked me if I wanted to give it a try. I did--and had a ball, developing a humanistic approach to the course. Later I taught the earlier segments of British literature. Then we revamped the developmental program, separating reading from writing. That meant developing a specialty in the teaching of Developmental Reading. So I did that, too. My ESL and applied linguistics training were very helpful here. Then I had an NEH seminar with W. Ross Winterowd and was introduced to the developing literature on composition and comp theory. That led me to revise many of my teaching practices. Once, when I was a dean, I took over a speech class for an ill colleague and finished the term. I worked with another colleague to create a Technical Communication program, with a sequential curriculum. In the 90s, after teaching for 30 years, I volunteered to revive the student newspaper and rebuild the journalism program, so I taught newswriting for several years. In the late 1980s, I was a Josephine Miles fellow at UC Berkeley, which allowed me opportunity to get insights into the New Historicism and some of the other currents in literary theory. Then a sabbatical, coupled with appointment as a Research fellow at Berkeley, allowed me to research the History of Freshman English in California.

What I would claim is that all this generalist experience gives me a substantial grasp of the complexities of getting adults to become more rhetorical, to use writing in more conscious ways to more deliberate effect. If we were being really smart in higher education, we'd be finding ways to connect top university theorists and researchers with experienced community college teacher-scholars. I believe such a program would have an even better chance of contributing to the development of rhetorical theory than the one Brereton describes. Unfortunately, disciplinarity works against this direction. Also, state legislatures provide no financial incentive for such collaborations. The result is that in most states, the various segments of higher education lobby against one another for public tax dollars. We may have all learned to share in kindergarten, but the lesson seems lost on decision-makers in higher ed.

My keynote speech at the 2001 CCCC conference in Chicago argued for increased collaborations between university researchers and community college writing programs. So far, I'm not aware that I've persuaded anyone to make that move. But I'll continue to press the case. I think younger scholars, like Mike, are more open to creating new models. And certainly blogging opens up the lines of communication. I've had more dialogue with doctoral students this past year than in the preceding 20 years. I think that's a good thing.

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Saturday, May 29, 2004

BLOG THREE HUNDRED SIXTY-TWO

FEAR ITSELF! said President Franklin Delano Roosevelt. That's what we must fear. And I think it is upon us. Cindy at making contact commented on the case before the California Supreme Court involving George T and 'Faces', his poem, for which he was incarcerated in Santa Clara County juvenile hall for over 90 days. I posted a comment there, but realized there's quite a pattern here in the San Francisco Bay area, in some ways the most liberal place in America. FEAR ITSELF shows its ugly face in these developments of just over a year.

The Academy of Art University in San Francisco has been Expelling Edgy Students as this detailed discussion in the San Francisco Bay Guardian shows. Both cases involve students submitting fictional stories in college writing courses. In both cases, students were dismissed and the faculty member's employment has been jeopardized.

Then this week in Walnut Creek, over the hill from Berkeley, we find an Eighth grader handcuffed and arrested by police in front of his classmates for putting an animated cartoon on the web --FROM HOME!--that ended with the suggestion that he kill his teacher and pee on him. The teacher had called the boy "quite a peacock" in class, so the boy decided to use "pee" and "cock" to make fun of his teacher. The boy's mother suggested the animation was in the manner of a "South Park" piece.

And also in the past two weeks, though not involving school writing, in San Francisco we have this report of an art gallery owner attacked because she displayed a painting based on photographs from Abu Ghraib. These developments should be deeply disturbing to anyone involved in the teaching of writing and in developing honest expression from students.

[ADDED 5/30/04: My good friend Jerome Garger (retired from Lane Community College in Eugene, OR) sent this New Mexico example after he read my original posting. Doing some googling, I found this district and student response. Whatever the facts--and the ACLU presence indicates there are SOME First Amendment issues here--the situation suggests writing professionals need to provide some clear guidelines to defend both students' and teachers' rights to write.]

Today, in the San Francisco Chronicle, I read Jane Ganahl: Wordsmiths rage, a report on a gathering/reading this past Wednesday evening by 14 writers in San Francisco. That occasion inspired me to assemble these pieces of Violent Writing, every one of which is urged upon children and students. How can we ask our students to read great literature and then criminalize them when they respond, on occasion, with the angry bitterness of Hamlet?

Clearly, we're not dealing with the proverbial "isolated incidents" here. FEAR ITSELF is loose in America and it needs to be addressed, strongly, powerfully, by all of us who teach composition and encourage written expression.

First, I'll ask readers of this posting to read all the links. Experience tells me that most do not follow links, but the heart of this posting lies in the details of what has been happening when students express deep feelings, dark thoughts, or make fun of authority figures, such as teachers.

Second, I do not want to suggest that any of these situations are simple or easy to handle. Students who are depressed or who face emotional trauma often need to express their feelings and ideas--and they often are looking for honest responses from their readers, whether classmates or teachers. When a young student gives vent to deep anger or rage, an adult should pay attention. The writer should be able to explain his or her purpose in writing. Parents should be contacted. Staff psychologists should be consulted. BUT CALLING THE POLICE SHOULD NEVER BE A FIRST RESORT IN RESPONDING TO A POEM OR STORY! The administrators and school board members who say they "have no choice" are dangerous people. They have choices and they are making bad ones.

Third, I think our professional organizations need to address these situations, with both resolutions and guidelines on ways to respond to student writing. MLA, CCCC, and especially NCTE should be called upon to develop statements to guide teachers, administrators and law enforcement officers on the best way to respond to Violent Writing. This year, I chair the Resolutions Committee for NCTE. I want to solicit ideas from a wide range of teachers to clarify the difference between written expression and violent action. Since NCTE represents teachers at all levels of American schools, kindergarten through university, it is well suited for this purpose. But CCCC should certainly consider a position that would help college composition teachers who might face the situation of those at the Academy of Art University.

Finally, I'm going to ask readers of this posting to propagate it on whatever lists of writers and teachers you participate in. I'm certain there are a range of views on how best to respond to difficult and challenging student texts. But the writing professionals should put their best thinking together to help both the public and the police understand that criminalizing writing is not acceptable. Let's have a grand discussion--and then let's focus our best thinking into resolutions and guidelines that make pedagogical and humane sense.

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Friday, May 28, 2004

BLOG THREE HUNDRED SIXTY-ONE

Now that the end of the quarter and the academic year are in sight, I'm thinking ahead to a summer off. I haven't done that in a while, so I'm really looking forward to it. Most academic institutions have already begun their summer, but De Anza is the Last College in America. Finals end June 25, with graduation the following day.

Of course, for me, a "summer off" means having time for research and writing projects that I want to pursue. One of the genuine freedoms of teaching in a community college lies in being able to write what I want about what I want. If some of it turns out publishable, all to the good. But I have no "productivity" pressures on me to publish articles or books. The other side of that can be found in the number of projects that I have in various forms of completion, conception, incubation. Here are the possibilities:

• Practical Writing, a textbook for developmental composition with readings. I completed this manuscript last fall and used much of it in my English 100B course Fall Quarter. After dragging out the review process (a third round), the new editor at Longmans decided to drop the project. In my view, the matter was handled very badly, so I've just sat on the material, trying to decide whether I want to enter the maw of major publishers again, or look to some kind of web-based publication. I'm still thinking this one over.

• I've committed to preparing a brochure on the District Mission Statement for Chancellor Martha Kanter to be ready for the opening of classes in September, 2004.

• My Timothy Hopkins project looks very inviting. Since I learned he was involved in the cover-up of the poisoning of Jane Stanford back in 1905, I'm thinking I should go camp out in the Stanford archives for a few weeks and really flesh this story out.

• I'm overdue to produce a paper/article/monograph on the History of Freshman English in California, based on sabbatical research I did about ten years ago. I've got boxes of xeroxed material, but I'd probably need to do some update research to get this in publishable form.

• Two projects I want to get to, though it probably won't happen this summer, relate to my late son Gregory. I want to produce a book of his sketches, drawings, paintings and writings. The material has been stored in a cabinet in the workspace we once shared, and where I now work. The other project relates to the achievements of those who have died young. Don't want to detail this because the idea is too portable.

• This blog wants to be a book, or an e-book, or a blog book. About 20 years ago, I wrote an outline for a book titled "Developing Writers; The Autobiography of a Writing Teacher." Here are my headings: 1. Introduction; 2. Early Experience; 3. Early writing - high school; 4. Early writing - college; 5. Early teaching --graduate school; 6. Fulltime teacher - community college; 7. Teaching Writing: Context of political activism/cultural change (60's); 8. Teaching Writing: Context of insights from other disciplines, from new tradition of research on writing, writers; 9. Teaching Writing: Crisis in Literacy, Crisis in Education; 10. Teaching Writing: The New Age (programming, word processing); 11. Teaching Writing: The Citizen-Writer/Public expression is cornerstone of democracy; 12. Summing Up: Teaching Writing as Eclecticism. I even started the introduction. Rereading it now, in the context of having written A Writing Teacher's Blog for a year, I'm struck by these two passages (written on our IBM Selectric):

• Perhaps the first issue I need to address is the focus on the teaching of writing. Of necessity, I'll have many things to say about writing itself, but I want to emphasize the problems and possibilities inherent in teaching writing (and consequently learning writing). I'm keenly aware that many writers (especially those often called "creative") state flatly that you can't teach writing--that it's a gift, a God-given talent that can be encouraged, but that "if you ain't got it, you can't learn it." Well, I'll make several concessions to that idea, but finally I reject it, at least in such absolute terms. Simple observation will demonsrate that some people use language with much greater facility and fluency than others do. Those differences are probably the result of some complicated mix of heredity, child-rearing practices, and cultural values. (I'll have something to say about each of those elements, but fear not: I will not try to solve the great "nature-nurture" mystery.) I also think it's true that some people have a gift for story-telling, that others seem especially endowed with the ability for image-making in words. So my concession is this: I acknowledge artistic genius. There are some individuals who are not taught the important things about writing because they kn ew them long before anyone tried to teach them. And the aspects of writing these individuals learn are probably the most trivial aspects of the writing process: standard spelling, handwriting, manuscript form.

• I want to examine what drew me to and prepared me for my life as a teacher of writing. In the past century, many writers have examined their motivations and processes as writers (George Orwell, Kenneth Roberts, Joan Didion, Virginia Woolf come immediately to mind). But the role of the writing teacher is obviously quite different from the role of the writer. And so I believe that a careful and thorough account of the motivations and development of one writing teacher could shed some valuable light on both the nature of writing and the act of teaching. Since both the standard of literacy and the quality of schooling are continuing matters of broad national concern, I want to believe my efforts here can make some helpful contribution to both of these important issues.

When I started writing the blog last May, I had forgotten about this outline, though no doubt the thinking I did then informed what I've been doing here. I found the outline in September when I dug out some old teaching journals I had done in 1979-81. But I didn't really re-read it with any care until today. While my outline will serve to trigger the material I want to deal with, it's not a good plan for a book. That's something I'll have to work on during the summer. I do have another framework I designed for a staff development website that I've never posted. The categories for that are CONTEXT, TEXTS, TASKS, TECHNIQUES and TESTS. I think something along that line would be more useful to writing teachers.

Well, that's probably four summers worth of projects, but I like entertaining the possibilities. Come September, we'll see just which ones I pursued.

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Thursday, May 27, 2004

THREE HUNDRED SIXTY

At De Anza, graduation is still a month away. Most of the country's colleges have already ended spring term, and "commenced" as we have come to call the end of a college education. As a public service to those who haven't been to a graduation yet this month, here is Jon Stewart's commencement address at his alma mater, William and Mary, in wonderful, restored Williamsburg, Virginia. [I visited there before Stewart was born.]

In English 25 this morning, we wrapped up the consideration of Change in language by looking at Old English representations of the personal pronouns, the demonstrative pronouns, the interrogative pronouns, and the strong and weak declensions of adjectives. In each case, I asked students to produce the modern English equivalent. The most interesting feature for me is the Dual form of the personal pronoun, wit and git, meaning "we two" and "you two". The dual has long disappeared from English, but it remains psychologically vestigial. Students also turned in their digests summarizing the Oxford English Dictionary entry on "nice." The entry runs over two pages, with 17 different meanings. This assignment blows most students away and makes saying "Have a nice day" a bit more self-conscious. In browsing the blog of colleague Dan at De Anza Music I found this link to a nice piece on grammar (Chomskyan view) and grammar (Miss Fidditch view), titled Steven Pinker's Grammar Puss.

We had an English department meeting at 12:30 p.m. where we considered a proposal from Foothill College to create a Faculty Service Area in Creative Writing (I'll be on a committee to revise the proposal, meet with Foothill faculty and return for decision in a month), a new written departmental policy on forming hiring committees, and a contentious discussion of scheduling issues which will continue to future meetings. I had to leave before the meeting ended to get to class.

In English 1C, I began by reading the opening chapter of William Zinsser's new book, Writing About Your Life, which includes his wonderful claim that "risk has always been my safety net." Zinsser's ideas about how to find material for memoir writing speaks directly to my students who will be writing their "dumps" this weekend. They have to produce at least six pages of draft material for their Magnum Opus essays.

Then we returned to our "hometown poetry" presentations. First up, Jenn gave us three pieces from Joni Mitchell, including playing a recording of "Both Sides, Now", the 1969 classic. Then I suggested we play it again and sing along. That was kind of fun. Next, Qin read "Thinking of You" b y Su Tung Po, first in Mandarin and then in English translation. Then he too played a recording of two famous singers rendering the song. Michael introduced us (including me) to Frank Sunseri, a California sculptor, poet, panflutist and craftsman. Sunseri is a native of Stockton, but lives on the Monterey Peninsula. Aesun brought us T. S. Eliot, reading "The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock" and then playing a recording of Eliot himself reading "The Hollow Men." We rounded the afternoon off with Simon offering a poem by Rupert Brooke, "The Soldier." We'll continue discussion of the poem on Tuesday and I'll bring in Wilfred Owen's poems to show work actually produced in wartime conditions.

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Wednesday, May 26, 2004

BLOG THREE HUNDRED FIFTY-NINE

Today, I showed a video titled "The Mother Tongue," the second episode in the PBS series The Story of English, narrated by Robert MacNeil. These videos do a great job of documenting key concepts in the early development of English, as the Angles, Saxons, and Jutes merged south of the Danelaw, shaping the language that was first made national when Geoffrey Chaucer wrote and published his Tales.

In the afternoon, I created a list of all Honors faculty and others supportive of the Program. Then I scheduled a meeting room, wrote a letter, made 65 copies, addressed them personally to 50 colleagues and about a dozen administrators, and then distributed them into mailboxes in the Admin Building. When you are a one-person operation running on a shoestring, that's the way work gets done. I've invited everyone to a meeting next Wednesday afternoon where I'll be soliciting help and advice for expanding the Honors Program next year.

Tis the season...

Just two years ago, on June 7, 2002, I sent this letter to the San Jose Mercury News:

Editor:
Following Messrs. Cheney, Mueller and Rumsfeld's recent admonitions to "remain vigilant," I checked under the bed when I got up this morning. Then I looked in the toilet tank, felt under the socks in my drawer, reconnoitered the back of my closet, and turned out each of my pockets before leaving the house. Of course, I opened my trunk lid and checked under the hood of my car before driving to work. I trust my vigilance on behalf of Homeland Security will keep us all safe. Certainly, it's a fine distraction from asking U. S. intelligence agencies to do a better job of analyzing threat data.

Sincerely,

John Lovas

So today Messrs. Ashcroft and Ridge are telling us again that we should be on high alert for an attack this summer, sometime in the next few months. Of course, there's no possibility that this effort to get everyone jacked up and even more fearful could be a distraction from the mess that Cheney and Rumsfeld have made in Iraq. Whatever--I'm ready! [I happened to see the final 15 minutes of "American Idol" this evening. Now THERE'S a major distraction--those audiences were not paying attention to Ashcroft/Ridge. And a winner named Fantasia? C'mon, you couldn't write that stuff.]

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Tuesday, May 25, 2004

BLOG THREE HUNDRED FIFTY-EIGHT

In English 25, we formed groups for attacking Noam Chomsky's On Nature and Language. Chomsky is always a demanding read, so I break the book into 10 segments and ask groups of three or four to give an oral digest of each segment. This keeps everyone involved--and everyone shares the process of trying to understand Professor Chomsky's minimalist program.

In English 1C, we began the poetry anthology by student choice. Each student brings in a poet they like, tells us something about the poet and reads two or three examples of their work. This really opens up the canon. Adriana brought in Alice Walker; Jane brought Li Qingzhao; Kash brought an Urdu poet, Allama Iqbal, who published two books in English; Mark presented David Bates, a nineteenth century American poet who wrote for young people (and had one poem parodied by Lewis Carroll); and Nadine brought us Tupac Shakur. The first time I did this (and we had poems in Russian, Persian, Mandarin, Spanish, German and Swedish that year) one student summed it up this way: "Cool, hometown poetry!" I love that concept.

On the department listserv, we continue to fuss about plagiarism. The latest trigger is a report from Student Services staff to the Academic Senate in which the claim was made by these staff members that "De Anza has developed an international reputation for being lenient on plagiarism." I have no idea what data supports that. I wasn't aware that U. S. New & World Report had created a plagiarism leniency chart. But since Cindy at making contact has turned me on to googlisms, I hereby present the Googlism for De Anza report. Not a single mention of plagiarism leniency there.

And at dinner time, I attended the second Parents' Night with probably 200 attendees, mostly students headed here in the fall. They scooped up just about every piece of Honors Program literature I had.

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