Two-Year College English Association (TYCA): Attending regional conferences

Two-Year College English Association (TYCA): Attending regional conferences

I'm also back from attending two TYCA regionals: TYCA Midwest in Chicago at the beginning of the month and TYCA Northeast in Philadelphia a week ago. They were both exciting and stimulating conferences with lots of energetic and interesting presentations.

But I attend all conferences now differently than I did in the past: as editor of TETYC I'm there in a role I can only describe as "talent scout." I arrive with a bunch of sample issues and a ton of my business cards, and then I try to "sign up" presenters to convert their presentations into article submissions to the journal.

And here's what I'm interested in hearing more about: I sense a reluctance to take the plunge and submit an article. Why? I know how busy two-year campus English faculty are, but these are folks who have carved out the spare hour before the sun comes up (or after the kids go down in the evening) and have created a conference presentation. One more step, and it's an article. So I don't think it's the time element.

At both conferences, I chaired panels called "How to Publish in TETYC (Or at least enhance your chances)." I borrowed a great panel idea that Sharon Mitchler created for last year's 4Cs when she, I, Greg Shafer (Michigan), and Alexis Nelson (Washington) spoke on the same subject. Not to bore you with the details, but Martine Courant Rife, in Chicago, and Barbara Morris, in Philadelphia, both on the panels as recent first-time authors in the journal, made the same point: they had submitted manuscripts in order to put themselves on the line, to experience the evaluation process just as their composition students were doing in their own writing classes. Both Martine and Barbara received feedback, revised, and ultimately published, but their message was that the experience paid off in their teaching. They could empathize anew with anxious students, and, better yet, they could share their own ups and downs as writers with their students.

That's what initially got me into submitting my own work --the desire to gain legitimacy in discussing writing with my classes. Sort of a "been there, done that" which I could share with them. And students do listen to those stories of anxiety and success and, yes, rejection. Martine and Barbara urged the participants at our sessions to give it a try. Sounds about right to me.

Jeff Sommers

New Link

A future contributor suggested that the following link be added to our sidebar: Friends of Writing Center Journal. Done!

The Image of the English Teacher

"Robert Frost. Asshole!"

This, or something close to this, is what AJ, the son of New Jersey crime boss Tony Soprano says in a well-earned moment of exasperation in season three of The Sopranos. In the scene, poor AJ is laboring over an essay due the next day on, what else, "Stopping By Woods on a Snowy Evening." Soon, AJ's older sister Meadow walks in and offers her help. Meadow is in her first year at Columbia. (In a later episode, in response to her mother's complaint that she's getting a C average, she quips, "You try taking Intro to Semiotics.") Armed with a ready hermeneutic, Meadow quickly explains that the snow equals death. It's a death poem, she explains. With answer in hand, AJ goes on to write his essay.

I read the scene as a pretty accurate representation of what the public thinks about English courses. There is the idea that the poem can't simply be literal. Along with this assumption is the idea that it is then the critic's (or poor student's) job to unearth what the poem is "really" about, to fill in the other side of the equation. Snow=death. Most importantly, though, the scene dramatizes the student's subservience to the text. English courses are about the reading and interpretation of texts rather than getting students to produce writing.

Meadow is a sophisticated reader and writer, but she isn't really interested in thinking about the questions the poem invites readers to ask--questions that can't be met by plugging answers into some preset scheme. Nor is she interested in understanding how a poem (perhaps unlike any other genre) can embody a problem in language. Finally, she doesn't want to help AJ join a dialogue about Robert Frost, where there is something at stake beyond a narrow reading of the poem. But, hey, Meadow has got other stuff on her plate. I don't know that I could concentrate on Robert Frost if I had Tony Soprano for a father.

I'm not interested in offering an extended explication of "Stopping By Woods on a Snowy Evening." Rather, I want to think about how the public thinks about English. How do we do a better job of explaining what we do--both as scholars and teachers? The Sopranos scene led me to think about other popular representations of English instructors in film or television. I think they can be boiled down to two basic types: the anti-institutional Romantic (think Robin Williams in The Dead Poets Society) or the severe, rule-governed teacher who stands as an obstacle to the student's true love of literature and writing. As English teachers we are hopelessly outmatched. How can we compete against film and television?

I am reminded of Kathleen Blake Yancey's argument in her book Teaching Literature as Reflective Practice. She draws a distinction between the delivered curriculum and the lived curriculum. A mistake instructors often make is to think that what they deliver corresponds with what students are hearing. I wonder to what degree popular images of the English teacher that circulate in our culture serve to obstruct our efforts. A colleague recently had a student drop her course because she claimed it ruined her love of literature. This fits perfectly with the second image of the English teacher I described: the teacher as institutional obstacle to the student's love of language.

So how do we do a better job of explaining what we do? How do we compete with The Sopranos and The Dead Poets Society? Do we need our own television show? (Math has one, the show Numbers.) Because the public often fails to understand what we do, it makes it very easy to misrepresent our efforts to move beyond a current-traditional paradigm of teaching literature and writing. The public can cry, "We need to get back to basics, back to standards" without any sense of what we've been talking about for the last thirty years.

How do we repond to Katrina?

Has anyone heard from folks in Mississippi, Lousiana and Alabama? I've seen a post from Sharon Gerald over at Composition Southeast, but that's all. I understand that there has been no communication at all from the schools along the gulf....no big surprise, but has anyone heard from further north in Mississippi and Louisiana?

The Sounds of Silence

Must be the end of the semester. It's awfully quiet around here.

With the End in Sight, Thoughts on Next Semester

I think one of my primary coping mechanisms for end-of-the-semester burnout and craziness is to start thinking about the next semester--what I'll do better, what I'll do new, what I'll undoubtedly end up doing the same (though Aunt Joanna's tonic sounds promising, too). Somehow, the paper grind at the end and its accompanying disappointment as I discover how many students just didn't get "there" is easier to deal with if i fantasize about the future. So, I've been thinking about the fall and some of things I'm looking forward to doing, like teaching Tim O'Brien's The Things They Carried and Diana Son's Stop Kiss. But mostly I've been thinking about whether or not to blog in the classroom, and if so, in what manner--individual student blogs, group blogs, a community blog, etc.

There's been a lot of talk recently--much of which I haven't fully read yet from lack of time--about whether blogging is best for what we do here: connect as academics who teach in a particular discipline. As someone who started blogging because it looked like a great classroom tool but then became a blogger for its own sake, I have to admit that I'm leaning toward that philosophy--that blogging works best in spaces like these. But am I right?

I want you guys to help me decide whether to use blogs in the fall, so I'm asking. Who intends to blog in the classroom in their next semester and in what form? And why?

Call for Materials Re: Visual Rhetoric

Please note the following request from Kathleen Hardiman at Red Rocks Community College:

I'm currently working on a website project as part of a technology-related Fellowship and I'm in the process of collecting material related to visual rhetoric (aka visual literacy) exercises. This website will be a useful portal offering resources in writing, literature, and creative writing geared toward community college instructors.

If you have any exercises that bring visual or popular culture into your classroom, I'd love to add them to my growing archive. These can be handouts, worksheets, or just ideas that have proved successful.

Please email any exercises to hardiman@colorado.edu. Many thanks!!