Jay Voss's blog

On the Virtues of Student Presentations

Jay Voss — Thu, 27 Mar 2014 20:47:17 +0000

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Jay Voss

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I currently teach Banned Books and Novel Ideas here at the University of Texas, a required course that is intended for undergraduates just commencing work in the major. The reading on my syllabus tends toward Slavic texts, namely various selections from Tolstoy, Dostoevsky, Kafka, and Nabokov. Such texts are challenging for students – both in terms of my students’ ability to decode the layers of irony spouted off by such characters as Dostoevsky’s Underground Man, and also in terms of the way these works often spotlight regional pride and arrogance. Imperial Russia, after all, has a phenomenal number of things in common with twenty-first century Texas, but digressing on this point is fit for another venue. The best way I’ve found to make these challenges most accessible to my students is to require each student to introduce class discussion one day each semester.

Perhaps the grandest recommendation this system offers is that it automatically insures that each student has an opportunity to voice his or her own interpretive concerns. Students in my class are allotted however much time they need to introduce the text – I suggest something in the ballpark of 10-15 minutes in my syllabus, but these presentations often go much longer. I merely require that individual students “introduce” the previous night’s reading. Students are subsequently free to go about this in any way they deem fit. Their burden of having to think about introducing material – without really any directing on my part – forces students to think about the text thoroughly and in ways that are important to themselves. Each semester, several students inevitably decide to ask their peers a list of questions. Others, however, have opted to show video, present a close reading of a text, or share personal information that illuminates the text and ultimately fosters class cohesion. Students like the system because they feel they’re in control of discussion. Which, if literature is valuable because it enhances our empathy, including everyone’s perspective in discussion is most necessary.

But, you might ask, how do I ensure that my own pedagogical imperatives are brought to the fore each and every day in class? Well, I’m always subtly directing conversation towards the precise things that I want to talk about, and if there’s ever a moment that needs and clarification or interpolation, I make sure we stop and muse over that particular moment. Maybe I ask my students a question about whatever text we’re reading in order to get them thinking in the directions that I think are important. Students are much smarter than we often give them credit for. If given a complicated text, as a group they will almost always be able to identify most of the important moments that deserve closer attention and “interpretive pressure” (to use a trendy phrase). All they often need is someone who can make sure that their reasoning is logically sound. In my own teaching, it has proved immensely valuable to discover a way to provide each student with just such an opportunity in class.

Engaging Different Types of Students

Jay Voss — Fri, 01 Feb 2013 06:08:45 +0000

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Jay Voss

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Dave Eggers

At this point in the semester we’re all sizing up our latest batch of students. Not every student is the student who quietly does all her reading and eagerly contributes to class discussion. In fact, I’ve found that students like the one I just described can sometimes be the least stimulating. What’s fun or interesting about a student who hangs on our every word, and who repeats for us exactly what we want them to say? For those of us who teach reading and writing courses, one goal of our pedagogy will inevitably be imploring our students to think critically about their place in the world. If our students merely do what we say, to what extent can we ever consider ourselves successful? From a more selfish perspective, what fun would education be if we didn’t learn things from our students? I learned rather quickly my first semester of teaching that one of the easiest ways I can destroy my credibility as an instructor is to pretend that I know everything, that my students have nothing to teach me. The pretension is exactly what the student hanging on my every word wants.

But of course we all know students on the opposite extreme, the students who challenge us in various ways. These come in many guises. They can sometimes think they know everything, and try to correct us whenever they think we’re wrong or whenever we misspeak. They can be the student who is rather vocal about not liking several days’ reading in a row, and thus provide us instructors with the anxiety that class morale might be dipping on account of a few contagious sour patches. They can be the students who are only in our courses for the requirement or a top mark. They can be the students who contribute nothing except for a blank stare at their electronic media. These types of students are often the ones who have most to gain from a basic reading and writing course, and more often than not they’re the students we’re likely to remember years later.

For the student who thinks they know everything, it’s important that we listen what they have to say. For the student who’s vocal about not liking much of the reading, it’s important that we press them on what exactly they didn’t like, which moments in the text caused particular friction, and to encourage them to articulate their opinions in more exciting ways. For the student who’s only concerned about their grade, we can assign reading that discusses how many tech entrepreneurs dropped out of university. For the student who’s recedes into their computing device or phone, we can encourage them to find their own voice based on experience, and to take pride in that voice while listening to the other voices around them.

I’m not a psychiatrist, but it seems important that we don’t hold students accountable for issues that likely aren’t their fault. Just as soon as we treat our students like anybody else we’ll encounter in our short lives, it’ll immediately become apparent just how much they have to teach us.

Class Discussion and Writing Due Dates

Jay Voss — Mon, 15 Oct 2012 05:16:45 +0000

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Jay Voss

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The New Yorker

This semester I’m teaching a composition class centered around The New Yorker magazine. The impetus for this course was that I wanted my students, who grew up with the immediate culture of the internet, to spend hours musing over longer arguments, and then try and rearticulate those arguments in a critical manner. This is a difficult task when one’s being bombarded with tweets and texts all the time from friends, as I know most twenty-first century students are. It’s an especially difficult task for undergraduates when the arguments in question are as subtle as The New Yorker’s. Another thing that's great about the course is The New Yorker is often an exemplar of good prose style, and I happen to think that good writing is a product of good reading. So it’s my hope that students will find something for them in the magazine, become captivated in the reading, and that this magazine’s good prose will filter into their writing. But I face a problem in the class on days in which writing is due: How should I ignite discussion of a particular New Yorker article after students have been up late hammering out the final sentences of their own writing?

Some might chide me as foolish for not having my students submit electronic versions of their writing on days that class doesn’t meet, the implication of this being that precious class time doesn’t become a nap making up for the night before. But the world awaiting my students after college won’t work like that. They’ll be expected to manage their time in a way that allows them to accomplish multiple tasks, and orient their production to proffer complete items randomly in the middle of the day. Seeing that this is something one learns only with practice, I’m not really inclined to make work due “by midnight on Friday.”

I had to deal with such a scenario this past week. At the start of class last Wednesday I polled my students to find out who completed the day’s reading in addition to the previous night’s writing. Only about 11 hands went up in the air, roughly half of the class. What I did was have the class count off in fours and split up into groups of 5 students, and each group was to take 35 or 40 minutes and outline the day’s New Yorker article. It happened to be about a Houston-based neuroscientist, and the piece ends with the scientist traveling to London to hang out with Brian Eno and a bunch of drummers. Not only are the articles subtle enough to get students scratching their heads, but surprise trips across the ocean to be with 1980s rock stars can be hard for students to analyze rhetorically. So, as my students split up into groups and began their outlines, I also asked them to figure out how the final part of the article was functioning as part of a coherent argument.

At the end of 40 minutes each of the groups was only the right track, and 3 of the 4 had successfully determined why Brain Eno was cropping up in an article about a Houston neuroscientist. This was an especially helpful experience for my students that are struggling with the New Yorker’s subtlety. It is my hope that they don’t give up, and subsequently the next time they see the rather simplistic rhetoric of, say, a presidential candidate, they’ll see right through it. Not to mention my other great hope – that all the good reading improves their writing.

The End-of-Semester Talk

Jay Voss — Tue, 14 Aug 2012 03:05:50 +0000

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Jay Voss

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Storyful.com

Towards the end of the semester, I always like asking students to reflect upon what they have learned and to assess the value of it. This is probably a fairly standard practice – I remember teachers doing it to myself since second grade – but it seems more necessary in these days of budget cuts and attitudes fostered by entitled entertainment. Big pictures are good, especially when you’re teaching rhetoric to a room full of science and business majors. The moment for this reflection always comes at that point in the semester (for myself and my students) inwhich work isn’t divinely inspired but rather fragmented and hurried, an ethic not necessarily lending itself towards deliberation. This semester I was just thinking I’d have the moment with my students during the last week of classes, before they ran off to jump their last hurdles of library books and/or end up in the pool. But then a cup of coffee got me thinking.

I was at Starbucks and had just read Paul Krugman’s recent column, “The Amnesia Candidate” (22 April 2012). The article is a thoughtful evaluation of Mitt Romney’s most recent campaign rhetoric, and is especially efficient in the way it attacks the former governor for blaming some of Bush’s legacy on Obama. While Krugman does concede that Obama could have handled economic matters differently, he ultimately concludes by asking “Are the American people forgetful enough for Romney’s attack to work?”. This is a complex question. You hear cynics complain all the time that American voters have a 6-month attention span, which is often compromised by consumer culture’s narcotization. I think this is probably true to a degree, but how could it not be given technology’s onslaught of information? It isn’t so much a question of whether or not voters can recall that Romney’s speech was given in a warehouse which was shut down during the Bush years – to suggest as much is to blame the average American voter for not having the mind of a Princeton professor, which would be ignorant. “Work” here, it seems to me, is a question or whether or not Romney can emotionally engage his base. The more that Americans are thinking critically about their environment, the more likely they are to realize (not remember) that the president has very little to do with the economy.

This got me thinking about the goals I set for my own students, as well as why the University of Texas might require first-year non-majors to take a basic composition course. I investigated Romney’s rhetoric a little bit, found a new TV ad that advances his “Obama Isn’t Working” slogan and sought out the warehouse speech that Krugman takes him to task for. I printed out eighteen copies of Krugman’s Op-Ed and was ready to have “the talk” with my students. The discussion opened with a general discussion of what they learned over the course of the semester, which as a group they had no problem recalling all the various concepts. It was hard for them to contextualize this learning, however. Obviously, some said that it’d help them write better in the major, etc. But not a one of them could tell me why such a course was required at a public university, nor why Thomas Jefferson and Benjamin Franklin insisted upon similar programs of study when they founded the universities of Virginia and Philadelphia.

We started with Romney’s latest TV ad. The students had a lot to say about how it resembled a movie trailer, and how its particular unemployment statistics for North Carolina weren’t necessarily impressive (“that’s only the amount of people that can fit inside the Longhorns football stadium”). When we got to Romney’s speech, my students nailed most of the points that Krugman makes in his Op-Ed. The only point of Krugman’s they didn’t get to was the question of whether or not “the American people are forgetful enough for Romney’s attack to work.” My students weren’t eligible to vote back when Bush was in charge, and I got the impression from them that there were more important things in high school than reading the morning paper. And who am I to blame them for this shortsightedness? Romney’s attack wasn’t working here not because they remembered enough of the past to see its fallacies, but rather because they were thinking critically about their environment. I passed around Krugman’s Op-Ed and they saw that collectively they’d reached his conclusions. Now asked again what they learned over the course of the semester, the answer was obvious and apparent.