Blogging Pedagogy - composition

Truth Baiting

Cole Wehrle — Mon, 07 Apr 2014 20:03:34 +0000

Author:

Cole Wehrle

Image Credit:

Wikipedia

Earlier this semester I wrote a post which ruminated on the pedagogic possibilities of Google Docs. I’ve been experimenting with the platform for about a year now and have found the possibilities vast but the actual activities mostly chaotic. Of course, classrooms need a little chaos, and it’s often an environment worth courting. (For more on that first experience, you can check out my earlier post here).

A couple of weeks ago I decide to revisit that activity and think of new ways to use the tremendous energy and creativity that the last collaborative writing exercise fostered. First I thought it was important to not take that wonderful, disorderly session for granted. What had, exactly, produced that much energy? It seemed like a mistake to attribute it to the software. Google Docs can be plenty chaotic but I think it was mainly a result of two other things: a goal and a time limit.

To review: students were asked to break into groups and then produce a research summary of a short video within the space of one class period. Whatever they had at the end of the 75 minute class period would be turned in to me. I would not take late papers. Groups used a single Google Docs file to monitor each other’s progress and hammer out the final document. This public platform allowed them to correct one another and ask me questions about both style and content as they appeared. The result was nearly unmanageable chaos that was nonetheless extremely productive. Because of the finite time limit and simple goal, students focused their attention on the task at hand. The collaboration software was incidental. Indeed, I imagine the activity could have worked with pen and paper, but doing it on the computer made it easier for them to communicate with one another and allowed the activity to get closer to their writing practice.

The assignment was partly an outgrowth of my interest in reverse classrooms and the possibility of adapting the principle to writing instruction. I wondered what would happen if they were to take on a more complicated (even multi-day) assignment.

More complicated assignments presented a double threat to the two attributes that allowed the assignment to be effective in the first place. They muddied the simplicity of the assignment’s goal and also distorted the time limit. The second concern is a big one. Immediacy is a hard thing for anyone to wrap their head around. If I gave them two class sessions to do an assignment, the students would just Candy Crush away the first day and then work extra hard the second. I’d probably do the same myself. As interested as I was in solving the time issue, I decided to tackle one thing at a time and take a look at giving the students a more complicated goal.

Complicated goals are a tricky thing when designing activities because they can distract participants from learning the necessary skills and instead focus on the evaluative framework. There is a reason why the goal of most sports boils down to “get more points” or “shove this thing into that space.” The best games allow their complexity to emerge organically. This is an especially important thing to remember in teaching writing. The goal is often to develop and communicate an argument clearly. Everything else is at the service of that goal. That’s not to say that writing is a simple task, but it’s important that the objective stay simple. When players first learn chess they are told that the goal is to capture the opponent’s King. Teachers would be advised to save the conversation about exchanges, initiative, traps, board development and the importance of central positions for the next lecture.

I needed a good goal and one that would foster complications without exhausting my students in minutia. As the students were preparing to write their annotated bibliographies, I decided to build an activity around that assignment. Anyone who has had to grade a stack of annotated bibliographies knows, however, that they can be a bit dull. They seemed like a poor motivation for a classroom activity that I wanted to be brimming with energy and creativity. So, I decided to supply some stakes to the assignment. “Suppose,” I told my students, “You work for a US charity that is looking into the Ukraine and is considering giving aid to either Putin or the Ukraine government. Which do you give to?” The students then had about an hour to produce an annotated bibliography that ended with a policy recommendation. The assignment (5 sources and a recommendation) would need to be turned in by the end of class.

None of my students study geopolitics, but they have become astute readers and were certainly up to the task. Arguments broke out constantly and opinions differed, but the result was almost always a sharpening of a proposal or annotation. It also allowed them a space to ask me questions about annotations and research overviews as they encountered their problems. When a group ran into a big problem I had them share the document with me and I put it up on the projector and helped them work through the issue. It made for an exhausting class period but at the end I had a stack of interesting annotated bibliographies and the students had a sense of how their research skills could be applied to the murky realities of the real world.

It’s worth noting that they earnestly believed that there was one answer to the problem. I encouraged them to think in this way because it made them work all the harder to get to the bottom of things. Of course this isn’t the case, but it’s an important illusion to maintain when one is researching. The goals should stay simple, even if the reality complicates things.

To Poll or Not to Poll

Jeremy Smyczek — Tue, 11 Mar 2014 16:12:00 +0000

Author:

Jeremy Smyczek

Image Credit:

Screenshot via SurveyMonkey

*The final unit of my RHE 309K: Rhetoric of Animal Rights course features an oral presentation based around a multimedia advocacy project that each student must design. As the major part of the evaluation, I create and use online polls (using tools such as SurveyMonkey and Qualtrics) that the students complete in real time after every presentation. Each poll asks four trait-centered questions, followed by a holistic evaluation, allowing for a variety of data combinations to see how students respond to each other’s work. Polls can be more elaborate than this, naturally, but the point here is to capture initial impressions while the memory is still fresh.

Students are familiar with polls, of course, as they not only complete a course survey evaluating their instructors and teaching assistants, but also are asked to fill out an exit poll for a wide array of campus services. Using polls in the classroom no doubt predates computer-assisted instruction, and could certainly still be done without it, but computers provide a number of services that pencil-and-paper methods would not, such as multiple permutations and combinations of the data. They also allow for total anonymity of response, generally a good thing for any democratic evaluation.

Technological convenience aside, however, using polls in determining grades seems a subset of a larger pedagogical problem: the ethics of peer evaluation. It’s easy to anticipate a response both from students and other educators something like, “well, you’re the one getting paid here; farming out evaluation is at best lazy and at worst negligent.”

But I disagree with this, for three overlapping reasons. First, one of the central problems that we face as rhetorical educators is getting past the single-audience problem. By this, I mean the idea that the only purpose of college writing is to crack the teacher’s code, to figure out what she wants to hear, and to write it. When I tell students that the persuasive appeal of the final oral presentation is aimed at the rest of the class, online polling shows that I mean it.

Second, as Peter Elbow tells us, teachers are not the typical readers that most writing in the world encounters. Fellow students provide a diversity of perspectives and concerns that are far more representative of a typical public discourse’s audience than the one I offer. If activism is more than an academic exercise, then other voices ought to count.

Finally, students are more discerning than I would have initially thought. Sure, they grade each other a bit more kindly than I do, but ultimately the ordinal rankings that they produce in terms of best and worst performances end up looking very similar to mine. They can tell when someone hasn’t done his homework. Hearing that from a peer is, ultimately, probably a bigger stick than hearing from the teacher.

*As many of my blogging ideas do, the idea of crowd-sourced grading grew in part from a conversation with DWRL Assistant Director Beck Wise.

A Course of Ice and Fire: on Literary-Critical Pairings

Aaron Mercier — Mon, 25 Nov 2013 17:42:49 +0000

Author:

Aaron Mercier

Image Credit:

Aubrey Beardsley

When I was getting my B.A. at the University of British Columbia in the early 2000's, the English professors there assigned primary text readings almost exclusively. There are things to recommend this approach, but one result was that students were left to discover and master literary criticism, theory, and history (or not) on their own. Professors used their expertise to fill in the blanks and keep class discussions focused and productive, but a lot of my papers were kind of unfocused and wandering. When I got to grad school, I quickly came to understand that tendency to wander as a lack of critical framework and self-consciousnesses of methodology.

So, when I finally got to teach literature, I was really interested in getting my students invested in the idea of using secondary materials to create critical frameworks that would allow them to see things in the primary text that they would otherwise have missed. As it turned out, I was dogged and lucky enough to secure myself a teaching assignment that raised a lot of eyebrows. I was to teach an introductory lit course entitled simply "A Game of Thrones." I mentioned to the powers that be that since I'd actually be teaching both the novel A Game of Thrones and its sequel A Clash of Kings, and would not be referring at all to the HBO series Game of Thrones, that the course title should be A Song of Ice and Fire, but the powers that be didn't really care.

It didn't matter, either. As my class filled out, I filled out my reading list, and decided that I wanted to introduce a basic notion of the aesthetic and thematic rules of thumb for the books. The idea was that if my students had that common ground to work from, the class discussions and, by extension, their written work, would have a kind of critical framework that would productively direct attention to significant moments in the text. In class, the next step would be to unpack those moments with the analytical tactics of close reading. In papers, students could use those habits of mind to direct their own research and interpretive synthesis.

So I'm a medievalist, and 14th-century English romances figure prominently in my dissertation. As a result, I've come to view the five currently extant volumes of A Song of Ice and Fire not so much as a series, but as a cycle, in the manner of Malory's great compendiums of Arthuriana. This observation, which was long a source of private, nerdy enjoyment for me, led me as a teacher to Eugene Vinaver's two groundbreaking essays on medieval literary aesthetics, "The Poetry of Interlace" and "Analogy as the Dominant Form." Without going into too much detail, Vinaver argues that romance cycles have these two features as the operative center of their aesthetics. So in romance, enjoyment is created and thematic meaning is established on the one hand by the analogy of disparate persons and events, which reflect and distort each other in meaningful ways; and on the other by entrelacement, the interweaving of seperate but related adventures or narratives, whose course spans the whole cycle, whose whole unfolding we do not see because as one narrative strand is foregrounded, the others are backgrounded, in a continuous interweaving pattern. The novel's "plot arc" is an irrelevancy in romance: one is better off imagining something more like a celtic knot design.

If you've read ASoIaF, this aesthetics should sound familiar, which is weird since it was published in the '50's and meant to describe literature published in the 1490's. Nevertheless, I assigned these two essays in the first three weeks of class and have been stunned by how often, in class and in writing, my students have referred to Vinaver's arguments, and the essays I've been grading have been startling in their evidentiary scope and incisiveness of argument.

The conclusion: assigning criticism is good, in moderation. Even if you're setting out to teach close reading practices, pick the one or two essays that best suit or describe or speak to a text, and encourage your students to apply criticism ... well, critically. It's just like food and wine. When you have the right pairing, the experience becomes more than the sum of its parts.

Benefits of Paper Workshops

Stephanie Odom — Tue, 02 Apr 2013 20:13:10 +0000

Author:

Stephanie Odom

Image Credit:

DigiDreamGrafix.com

This spring I’ve been teaching RHE 310: Intermediate Expository Prose for the second time. The first time I taught it was two years ago, so I had plenty of time in between to think of ways to improve upon my first effort. I love teaching this class. I’m not sure I’ll get to teach a class like it in my new job, but I will definitely try to work in the practice of in-class paper workshops in future classes. Workshops are a cornerstone of RHE 310, and in this post, I’d like to describe how I run workshops, what I think works well, and what I will change in the future.

First, a little context about the class is in order. RHE 310 is a class about style. Instructors (usually graduate students) teach the class in many different ways, but practicing the prose style and genre conventions of a number of types of writing is usually the norm. When I was first planning how I would teach the course, I wanted the students to be able to select the type of writing they wanted to master. I didn’t feel entirely comfortable selecting styles for the whole class since I didn’t want to make pronouncements about what style/s of writing were superior to others and didn’t want to spend time on genres and styles that were uninteresting or unimportant to students. (I have since come around to re-thinking that stance and would feel more comfortable teaching a range of pre-selected styles now.) So, in my class, each student selects a prose model that they admire and the assignments give them opportunities to analyze and imitate that model. The range of models students have chosen has been incredible, as have their creative imitations.

As I said, workshopping is a key part of this course. The first time I taught it, the requirement was that everyone submit writing--any writing--for the class to comment on. Many students submitted imitations of their prose model. These models included magazine writing, sports reporting, technical guides, academic philosophy and film articles, and many more. But in that first attempt, I didn’t require students to provide an example or of describe the writing style they were going for, and that made our workshops ineffective at times. Students would offer advice based on what their general understanding of “good style” was, and the writer being workshopped would reply that their choices were justified based on the type of writing they were practicing. The students would shrug and trust that the writer was correct.

This time around, I changed the workshop submission template to give students a space to describe and/or provide an example of their prose model, which could be the main one they were working with that semester or anything else. Having the opportunity for students to read high quality examples of that type of writing has made our workshops more effective. During the workshop, when someone has a question about whether the writer’s choices are appropriate, it’s easy to turn to the target prose and analyze it to see whether the more experienced author made that choice. For example, we’ve talked a lot about pronoun usage and what that means in terms of rhetorical distance. If the student writer makes I-statements and someone asks if that is an appropriate choice (sometimes invoking the “I heard you should never use ‘I’ in papers” rule), we revisit the target prose and see if that author used the first person pronoun. This is one of several analysis and imitation techniques I’m able to model during workshops.

Other such techniques that I hope they internalize and take with them include reading prose out loud, making a reverse outline of their or another writer’s text, getting a thought down in rough form and playing with the style later, and just generally getting others’ input about clarity and style. I’m lucky that the students in this semester’s class are respectful and forthright, so I don’t need to do a lot of delicate balancing of egos or communication styles. Especially in the early part of the semester, students were nervous about getting their writing critiqued, but that feeling has subsided after seeing how their peers are not dismissive, rude, or totally off-base in their comments.

In this class, I love how these workshops expose students to a wide range of writing styles, some of which they will themselves write someday but others that they won’t. The range gives us the chance to see how writing varies and how what’s “wrong” in one rhetorical situation is “right” in another one. For example, one student wrote a reflective essay about a baseball game that he wanted to publish as a sports column. His style is casual and blunt, two qualities that you often see in sports writing. We talked about how in his case, it was acceptable to use slang words and even profanity in story telling, and how he created dramatic interest by using a series of short simple sentences, whereas in other workshops, we had worked with the writers to combine simple sentences into more complex ones to lend a more sophisticated tone. We’ve seen how in science writing, the passive voice is standard and appropriate, but in personal statements, we want to see more first-person pronouns. It’s also been helpful for writers to get feedback about where their readers want to see more evidence, what they think the argument was, and how they personally responded to the piece.

In the interest of space, I’ll briefly list here other practices that I’ve found facilitate productive discussion and some that I’ll change in the future.

What is working:

Having writers upload their papers to our class wiki 24 hours before their workshop (by 9:30 a.m. on Monday for a Tuesday class) to give classmates time to comment.
Asking everyone to post at least one positive and one constructive comment on the wiki before class to prime them for participating.
Distributing printed copies of the paper even though we can all read it on the projector. This is not necessarily for the writer’s benefit since receiving 18 marked-up copies of their writing can be overwhelming, but it’s been great for keeping everyone else more engaged with the writing.
Speaking with each student about their participation during our midterm conference and letting them know if I want them to participate more or give others a chance to speak, and what I think their strengths as a participant are.

What I will likely change:

Spending 20 minutes instead of 30 minutes on each student to give us more time to analyze and imitate at least one additional type of writing as a class.
Requiring everyone to revise their writing based on our feedback so that the stakes are higher and they practice weighing conflicting comments against each other.
Practicing close line editing techniques, though this is a maybe. Some students are doing this anyway and I’d like to be more involved in what they are suggesting, but I would rather they practice minimal marking and ask questions for clarification instead of making changes to the papers. Depending on the goals of the course I’m teaching, I may or may not encourage line editing.

Learning how to run a writing workshop is a valuable skill for anyone who will be teaching composition, and it requires practice and being open to change. It focuses the class on student writing instead of polished professional writing, it opens up the writing process for discussion, it teaches students that getting feedback on their writing is not going to kill them, and it lets them see how different readers react in different ways and that that’s ok. I will definitely be using this pedagogical tool in future classes and I hope my description of it here gives others some ideas about how to use it in their classes, too.

The Chicken In the Egg: Theme and Comp in the Truthy Classroom, Revisted

Aaron Mercier — Fri, 22 Feb 2013 20:17:26 +0000

Author:

Aaron Mercier

Image Credit:

uggoy

I want to revisit my post from last semester today, because it dealt with the lessons of grading the first major assignment in my first advanced composition course, and this week I found myself doing the last class meetings before this semester’s first major assignment deadline.

I put last term’s lessons into practice this time around by revamping the content and sequence of my readings, favoring media criticism and reportage over theoretical material, putting a few more blog assignments in before the first major assignments, and revising the prompts so that they more clearly integrated class conversation and blog work. Last class was devoted mostly to discussion of a recent article by Alexander Zaitchik on Salon.com, about the Shuar tribe’s struggles against international mining interests and the Ecuadorean government.

Also new this semester, for the first time in my 4 ½ years of teaching composition, is the challenge of a truly combative student. Unchecked, this student will casually dismiss the ideas of others, monopolize conversations, and pull hard to chase down every tangent he sees. After the second class meeting in January, I was sweating bullets over this kid. I didn't know how to keep him in hand without outright suppressing his voice, or getting seriously disruptive pushback from him. As it turns out, however, his approach to the material, and to classroom conversation, has become quite a blessing for me in terms of finding ways to teach rhetoric from strongly thematically-oriented readings. For one thing, he will occassionally make some factual claim that just sounds wrong to me, and as a result, without singling this one student out, I've been much more diligent about making sure students are keeping track of what specific claims are made in discussion, and fact-checking in real time. This use of the networked classroom to habituate "research" as the knee-jerk response to controversy is a good deal less disruptive than it sounds, and has provided tons of opportunities to talk about the differences, and the interrelationships, between information and argument as a class. That set of interrelationships, I think, is at the center of my preoccupying anxiety, the anxiety over balancing strong, interesting, valuable thematic readings (and the energetic class discussions that they provoke) and effective, engaging instruction in the principles of rhetoric and academic composition.

On Tuesday, my combative student argued that the premise of the assigned reading for the day was ludicrous. The reading was a recent article by Alexander Zaitchik on Salon.com, about the Shuar tribe’s ongoing struggles against international mining interests and the Ecuadorean government.It's a provocative piece, full of loaded quotations from protestors, scientists, and mining industry reps, evocative descriptions of history, character, and scenery, and engrossing photography. From the title to the last line, it is a well-crafted bit of activist investigative journalism, published with a big budget. My combative student had a problem with a recurring pop-culture reference that helped structure one of the article's lines of argument about international engagement.

In the opening paragraphs, Zaitchik compares the resistance of the Shuar to the rebellion of the N’avi in Avatar, and he repeatedly circles back to develop and interrogate the comparison throughout the piece. My combative student suggested that the likeliest plotline for Avatar 2 is the humans returning to nuke the planet from orbit. The article, he went on, was irresponsible rabble-rousing for a lost cause, that the Shuar could never resist the march of industrial development, and to suggest otherwise actually contributed to their danger by giving them false hope, and making them less likely to compromise somehow. It was little better than incitement to violence.

Well.

I couldn’t have asked for more class participation at that moment. A forest of hands shot up, and I moderated the conversation as nimbly as I could for a couple of minutes while several students debated his point. Things started pretty calmly, and as the passions were escalating, I chose a breathless pause to intervene. I allowed as how there were some interesting and relevant points about the article being made, but said that at the source of the disagreement is a rejection of an argument that Zaitchik isn’t actually making.

While it’s true that the Avatar reference is strange and problematic in a lot of respects, it plays a complex rhetorical role in the article’s subtle account of the situation. The argument my students were having started with one of them taking a passage out of context. You can’t ask for a more teachable moment.

Recently on this blog, my colleague Laura Thain posted an interesting reflection on the controversy model we use to structure lower-division comp courses here at UT, where she talked about the ways in which discussions of popular culture can powerfully engage students and frame effective teachable moments about the relaitonships of the descriptive, analytical, and evaluative modes of reading. Her post struck a chord with me because it offers another way of approaching the concerns I voiced in my last cotribution to BP, and also of thinking about the Avatarargument as well as another recent class discussion.

A couple of weeks ago, you will recall that Applebee’s had a bit of a "social media meltdown" in the aftermath of Pastor Alois Bell’s theological confrontation with the institution of tipping in American foodservice. When that happened, I acted with the hard-hitting, decisive responsiveness that a course on Truthiness allows—nay, demands!—and assigned them a blog post by R.L. Stollar, an Oregonian journalist who stayed up late the night of that "meltdown," taking screen caps of Applebee’s social media feeds. The reporter offered a fairly trenchant analysis of the rhetorical mistakes Applebee’s social media people made, accounting for their content as well as the fundamentally inept negotiation of Facebook and Twitter, both as communications platforms and as communities. He used the screen caps of the feeds as block quotations, and did it like someone who paid attention in his comp courses. Anyway, that was all the stuff that made me interested in the article. The day that reading was due, I actually had to interrupt the class conversation to start class, and had to do so in a raised voice to be heard. Of course, they were arguing about the substance of the issue: the rights and wrongs of Alois Bells’ notes, of the firing of Chelsey Welch, of Applebee’s PR explosion.

In both these cases, I was able to steer the conversation rhetorically simply by asking a student followup questions about their remarks. With the Stollar article, I had to ask two questions: how are the screen caps like block quotations in a lit paper? How does Stollar use them to stack the argument in his favor? After that, they were off and running. In the case of Zaitchik's article, it took quite a few rounds of Q&A, but I started off asking my combative student exactly what part of the article he was objecting to. When he couldn’t point out a specific passage, I asked him how we could investigate the question of the article’s overarching message, and then opened it up to the class. One person suggested looking for a thesis in the introduction. No such luck: the article begins anecdotally and develops as an overlapping series of historical vignettes, editorial asides, narratives and interviews. Another person suggested we look at the conclusion. The last paragraph was baffling. Someone else said maybe the conclsusion came before the last paragraph, and I suggested that perhaps the conclusion spread across two or more paragraphs.

How had the author structured the article, I asked? Silence. Did anyone make a reverse outline, the way we’d practiced in class? No. Fine, that’s why we have whiteboards and projectors and visualization software, right?

So the rest of the class was spent producing, as a class, just such a reverse outline. We didn’t find anything we were all willing to call the thesis of the article until close to the bell, and not in the first or last two paragraphs. More and more notes got taken as the conversation wore on, and I saw quite a few a-ha moments when we’d take a particularly complicated bit of the text and I’d apply some rhetorical or composition principle to it. The abstract, theoretical language of rhetoric instruction was actually making sense out in the wilds of the reportorial jungle.

Still, though. I remembered seeing those sorts of frownsmile-nods before I got the first crop of major assignments last term, and I remember how many hours of feedback-giving on the subject of rhetorical analysis and what it means, and methodologies suited to its execution ensued. I mean, I expect that’s what every first round of feedback in lower-division comp classes always looks like, but I was trying to limit the number of times I’ll need to repeat myself on the basics this time. So I assigned no reading for Thursday’s class. Instead I gave the whole class over a small-group exercise geared towards building on some visual rhetoric practice exercises and getting them to teach each other discovery and outline tactics. I’ll post that plan on the lesson plans archive soon, but for now, a couple of remarks about how it fits.

With the long articles on Appebee’s and Ecuadorian politics, the students encountered levels of complexity and contingency they didn’t expect to find by lingering in the descriptive mode. Conversations that started off with the evaluative mode holding sway quickly bogged down, getting louder instead of moving forward. They couldn’t help but notice this, and when I showed them that the way out of such dead ends was back through the texts at hand, they followed willingly enough, but we only really had the time to cover the basics. What I did with the following class was present more condensed texts (images), and required the students to generate multiple, and if possible opposed, readings of the same text that incorporated local elements that nuanced a global understanding of the image.

So we teach popular culture, as Laura said, not because of any of the inherent merits or problems in its content, but simply because it’s popular. Popular texts are designed to be accessible, to engage readers, assertively develop audience investment and to communicate their contents clearly and efficiently. As such, they quite deliberately invite, and even cultivate an evaluative mode of engagement from a casual reader, but this is more blessing than curse for the rhetoric teacher, because it means you have plenty of opportunities to defamiliarize your students from a lifetime of over-passive reading habits. When that happens, the student, like the scholars Laura talked about, discovers what we did: that defamiliarization and demystification go hand in hand, that analysis is a productive rather than a destructive activity, and that a critical awareness doesn’t have to mean the death of jouissance.

The End-of-Semester Talk

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

Author:

Jay Voss

Image Credit:

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.