Rocket Science or Something to do with Best Practices?

I've come to expect a degree of whining and resistance in my GWRTC 103 classes, and, frankly, I understand it. GWRTC students are freshmen; freshmen often have limited experience with the expectations of college professors regarding workload and motivation. They also don't fully understand how workload and motivation equate to success. I do not expect to encounter such behaviors in an upper level class, however, and I am rather baffled and disheartened that I'm dealing with them in a class for teachers. So, let me begin to answer the question that seems to be on the minds of several students: What on earth does learning about the history of rhetoric have to do with learning how to teach writing effectively?


We teach a writing process that is firmly rooted in the offices of rhetoric described on p. 27. Yet we call it by different terms and have conflated a few of the offices. Why would we have done such a thing? What has happened in the last two centuries that would have precipitated such a change? Yes, I know. I am answering my question by posing more. Socratic method, anyone?

What do we gain by such dialectic anyway? What do our students gain, more importantly?

And then I guess there is the issue I raised last week about a teacher's responsibility in this, the 21st century. We are not merely responsible for teaching our students how to write. We are responsibe for teaching them responsibility, for teaching them how to be good citizens and contributing members of society. Didn't the Sophists, Socrates, Plato, and even Aristotle have a bit to say about the relation between rhetoric and virtue? Hmmm . . . something else to ponder.

Finally, here is one rather immediate reason it might be helpful to study rhetoric in a teaching writing class. (and I mean this more in a "big sister" kind of way than in a "I'm evaluating you" kind of way) By studying rhetoric, we learn about foundational principles such as rhetorical proofs, importantly, ethos. And ethos, you'll recall, refers to one's credibility. So, how much credibility does a teacher-in-training have if he/she whines about class assignments and doesn't bother to try to think for him or herself about why the material is important to a future career in teaching? (Yes, this is a rhetorical question.)

See you in class!

Teachers Expectations

The challenges presented by today's inclusive classrooms often lead teachers to teach "to the middle." How might this harm students?

Teaching to the middle is common when a teacher has 100+ students; in fact, such an approach is likely the rule these days instead of the exception. But I have seen the detrimental effects of such a practice.

My nephew, who is in his first year of college, is quite intelligent. He scored well enough on his SATs to receive scholarship offers from several local colleges. But he was a C student. Whenever his mother would admonish him for not doing better, he'd complain that he was bored or that the teacher thought "everyone in the class was stupid." He began to resent his teachers for not believing he (and everyone else in the class) could do better. But Paul was lucky. He had the support and resources at home to be successful. What about those students in the class who didn't have books at home? Or those who struggled to meet the demands of a curriculum that was not tailored to their needs?

I've also experienced first hand in my own class room the results of what I call the "feel good" curriculum of the late 1980s and 1990s (what Williams refers to as the "self esteem movement"). During my second year of teaching, I gave my AP English students a poem by Nikki Giovanni called "Ego Tripping (There may be a reason why)." The poem narrates several great moments in the rise of Western Civilization and attributes such progress to the presence of women. But during the class discussion of the poem, one of my students said it was about the fickle nature of women. I responded that the student was misreading and asked him if he had read the author biography that introduced the poem. He, of course, had not. This was a smart, confident student. I was not surprised that he stayed after class to talk to me about the poem. But I was shocked by his perspective of the situation. He said to me, "How can I be wrong? It's literature. I'm allowed to interpret it any way I want." I didn't know how to respond. Surely there are wrong interpretations of litature--those that can't possibly be supported by textual evidence and those that run counter to everything we know about an author and his/her oeuvre. But somehow, this student had been led to believe that anything goes in literary analysis. His teachers' refusals to tell him "no, not exactly" cheated him and prevented him from developing a fairly essential life skill--critical thinking!