Blogging Pedagogy - discussion

Because I Can't Help Myself: Using Canvas Discussion to Practice Style and Grammar

Aubrey Plourde — Wed, 12 Nov 2014 22:18:33 +0000

Author:

Aubri Plourde

Image Credit:

Ohio University Department of Linguistics

When I began teaching E316K, I was disappointed but not particularly surprised to find that by and large, my students couldn’t write well. Sure, there were a few outliers who turned in clear, dynamic prose; overall, though, I could be administered a vaccine for redundant sentences and clunky syntax. Often, I’d catch myself wondering, “Who let you get this far without teaching you how to write?”

I realize this is an unfair question. Even in the moment, I knew enough about the teaching requirements of basic writing courses to know that there is just not enough time. By the time they even get to higher education, they’ve forgotten subjects and verbs, let alone participial phrases and nominal clauses or, more ambitiously, style.

If I had world enough and time, if there were room on my syllabus, I would teach them grammar along with the skills of argument. I wish with painful naiveté to teach them how to build and rearrange syntax, instead of “just” ethos, logos, and pathos. The truth is that more often than note, I’m working triage. If I can get my students to write a solid thesis, I will consider myself successful.

And perhaps that’s okay. I spent most of September in turmoil over the wealth of things I wanted to teach them. I realize this is a very immature mentality, one isolated from the long-term realities of only being able to teach a single syllabus at a time. Still, I’m going with it, because, for now, I still care when I read redundancies.

So, although I did finally give up on teaching the basics of infinitives, I have also worked in what seems, so far, to be a reasonable compromise. First, I did provide a series of links and PowerPoints to basic grammatical concepts, and I administered a take-home pretest (ungraded) to help students diagnose themselves. So much for one weekend.

The results were predictably dismal, but not quite as depressing as I’d feared. At least now I know what must be explained (subject-verb agreement, introductory subordinate clauses, comma rules) and what is better left to English majors (verbals, sentence modifiers). Since then, I’ve found a better way to take attendance. While I’ve used “bell work” or basic activities before, I’ve had a hard time integrating them as useful concepts rather than as busywork. It took some adjusting, but I’ve got my students accustomed to the new routine. It goes like this:

Instead of heading right to the center of the classroom upon arrival, they choose their individual computers, logging into Canvas immediately. Nothing fancy—just a discussion board. At the beginning of every class, I’ve posted some kind of prompt, generally related to an overarching stylistic goal. So, for example, this week, we focused on weak construction and redundancy. (I’m pushing for clarity.) The prompt asked students to spot the redundancies in three statements and to revise a fourth for clarity and rhythm:

Label

The submarine fired at the cruiser at a distance of ten thousand meters.

He falsely misrepresented the situation.

The troops advanced forward on the outer Falklands today.

Revise

His brother, who is a student at law school, loves to bring up controversial topics that everyone has a different opinion about.

Sometimes, I simply ask the students to point out the weak construction or redundancy, such as with these statements:

“The reason is because…”

“Due to the fact that…”

“a number of”

“in regard to”

“despite the fact that”

“in the very near future”

“cancel out”

“disappear from sight”

Other times, I ask them to syntactically copy a sentence to get practice recognizing the different parts of speech and how they function.

The routine is that they sign onto Canvas, fill out the discussion post (I require them to post before they can see others’ replies), and do a tiny bit of thinking about style or cosmetics before we begin the agenda for the day. It enables me to count attendance later as I look through responses, and I think they like the feedback.

I’m still working out some knots with this practice, and yes, sometimes it takes longer than I would like it to—although I do think it helps students who get paralyzed when writing to loosen up and get something out. For now, though, I’ve set up mini bites of grammatical, syntactical, or stylistic information to introduce through exercises. Using Canvas’s discussion board is nothing revolutionary, of course, but since we don’t have automatic attendance enabled anyway, and since revising at the sentence level is something they seem not to have considered, I’ll keep doing this for a while—even just to make myself feel like we’re collectively making their writing clearer.

On Making Your Class Mad: Some Pros and Cons

Meredith Coffey — Mon, 24 Mar 2014 20:35:05 +0000

Author:

Meredith Coffey

Image Credit:

Plashing Vole

There’s nothing quite like having twenty-one angry people gathered in a small windowless room—especially when they’re all angry at you. Now I know to expect (and to look forward to!) just such a class day when I teach Jamaica Kincaid’s 1988 essay A Small Place.

When I initially planned the syllabus for my course, Rhetoric of Tourism, I included Kincaid’s text for remarkably straightforward reasons: it makes an argument about tourism; it deploys a number of different rhetorical strategies to make its argument; and it influenced me tremendously when I first read it for an undergraduate class. And from the beginning, I knew that A Small Place would trigger a strong reaction from my students. The essay opens by critiquing tourists in Antigua, calling them “ugly,” “stupid,” “pastrylike-fleshed,” and so forth; it goes on to draw connections between the colonization of Antigua and the contemporary tourism industry.

In teaching A Small Place, however, I’ve been struck both by the degree of emotion it has provoked in my students, and the differences in their reactions each semester. Last fall, (most of) my students were genuinely offended by Kincaid’s argument. Substantial portions of the text use the second person voice, identifying the reader herself as the “ugly” tourist. Many students either became angry at the text’s accusations (“But I’m not like that! She can’t assume!”) or ashamed (“This makes me never want to travel again!”).

From a pedagogical point of view, there were some real benefits to these responses. We could discuss tone (would the argument have been more effective if it had been gentler on its audience?), distinguish types of appeals (they were all on board with her reasons, but the emotional appeals overwhelmed many students), delve into a nuanced ethos analysis (as an Antiguan, Kincaid is credible, but she seems to have little regard for her audience), etc. At the same time, however, their strong feelings also created obstacles. Some students did not want to finish reading the essay, for example, while others insistently attempted snarky, defensive commentary throughout the class discussion.

Following that experience, I still felt that the pros of teaching A Small Place outweighed the cons, so I included it again on my spring syllabus. To my surprise, however, my second group of students was far less upset by the essay. “She makes a lot of good points,” they said, and, “If I were in her position, I would probably feel the same way.” Despite their less hostile initial reactions, our subsequent discussion annoyed this class in a different way.

After a brief opening discussion, I asked the students to create a single sentence that summed up Kincaid’s main thesis in the essay. (I had my previous class do the same, but I had been much less intent on getting them to cut their ideas down to a single sentence.) They brainstormed as a class, and then I broke them into small groups to construct thesis statements. I gathered their proposed sentences, posted them at the front of the room, and asked them all to vote on which group’s thesis statement most effectively conveyed Kincaid’s argument. I also said that they could revise particular words or phrases within the four or five suggested candidates for “best sum-up of Kincaid’s thesis.” I imagined that this exercise would take twenty minutes at most.

Instead, it took about an hour, and the class was still far from satisfied with the “final” thesis statement. There were definitely some productive aspects of this apparently maddening exercise: students were forced to boil down a lengthy and nuanced argument into a concise sum-up, and the contrasts among the groups’ proposed sentences sparked a thoughtful sub-conversation. (The students’ debate over whether Kincaid’s argument focuses on “tourists” or “tourism,” for instance, was a high point.) That said, the exercise was deeply frustrating for many students; by the end, some were too tired of the activity to care anymore, while others could not stop tweaking the sentence by questioning word choices and orders, which led to some minor bickering.

All this is to say that I’ve used the same text to make two different classes angry in two different ways, and despite some small setbacks, I believe it’s been worth it. Sometimes students’ anger or annoyance isn’t productive, like when they are too wrapped up in their emotional reactions to follow the assigned reading, or when they snap at each other over a verb tense choice. That said, having students cope with demanding material forced them to confront emotional hurdles, difficulties with information synthesis, and other important personal and academic challenges. Moreover, these endeavors—I like to think—also helped them to grow together as a class. I suspect that intentionally making a class mad isn’t for everyone, and it certainly shouldn’t be a weekly activity. But it’s at least worth trying.

What to Do When Students Want to Talk in Class

Rachel Schneider — Mon, 25 Feb 2013 01:02:47 +0000

Author:

Rachel Schneider

Image Credit:

Marc St. Gill

I’ve been feeling very invigorated this semester as a teacher for several reasons: I’m teaching RHE 309S for the first time, incorporating more digital writing and texts into my syllabus, and the kids I’m teaching seem pretty invested in the material. In fact, they love to talk in class. Managing the class discussions, then, has presented a new challenge for me as a teacher.

Like my colleague Steven, I’m much more familiar with the problem of getting reluctant students to participate in discussion. As such, I’ve figured out how to use my particular exuberant energy to crack jokes, to present the material in a non-threatening manner, to encourage students to feel comfortable participating (and how to learn everyone’s name so you can call on them in to spread the talking around). Teaching my RHE 309S for the Liberal Arts Honors program has significantly changed the dynamic, however. Whereas in most classes you’re lucky to have about two students who talk on a regular basis, right now about ten of my twenty-one students participate in every class, and about fifteen raise their hands at least once a week. It’s the stragglers who are more noticeable at this point than the talkers.

While this might seem like an embarrassment of riches or a straight #humblebrag, I’ve had some surprisingly challenging moments: for example, at one point during a discussion of stasis theory not only was I fielding some pretty challenging questions, I had two students arguing during a stasis analysis of the same-sex marriage debate about whether or not law should be determined by religious morality. The conversation got so tense that I had to raise my voice and shout “HEY!” to end the debate, and one of the other students approached me after the class to talk about how uncomfortable the tension made her feel. This kind of rough-and-ready exchange provides both some nice intellectual charge and an uncomfortable dynamic: how do you monitor classroom discussion when everybody wants to have a say? Does that mean that you have to let everyone talk equally? How do you encourage silent students to participate when others are eager to speak, or is that even advisable? What is the balance between leading the discussion and letting the discussion be student-centered? And how far do you try to balance the contributors?

The nice thing about this situation was that it led me to consult with experienced instructors to hear their reflections and advice. One professor recommended turning this argument into a teachable moment that could connect back to the previous lesson—what makes rhetoric and stasis so important is how it provides the means to have productive debate on important issues. Another suggested I connect the situation to a discussion about where rhetoric takes place: it rarely happens in polite, controlled circumstances and people don’t always adhere to the rules. Others recommended that I talk about appropriate classroom behavior or even gamify it. I was even told that to handle honors students, I should alternate between catering to their sense of themselves “special snowflakes” and attempting to “melt” it. I loved that each response helped attend to a different aspect of the problem: accommodating the egos in play, creating the rules of interaction for classroom discussion, and connecting the rhetorical material to the ways in which discuss rhetoric.

Since then, I’ve adopted several different strategies to help lead successful discussion among students. I ended up following the advice about addressing it as a teachable moment, and tried to make my questions explicit to the students in order to invite them to help provide the answers. I’ve also since tried to intervene to frame the goals for discussion and to keep them on topic by asking them to cite examples from the text. To organize the conversations, I occasionally clarify what I see emerging from the discussion as a way to help redirect at various points. Like Steven, I’ve tried to provide opportunities for students to do short writing exercises at the beginning of class to allow the other students to come up with contributions, deliberately framing them in this way, as well as just calling on students occasionally when a rare silent moment presents itself. I’m cautious in some ways too in how gender dynamics are playing out—it seems like while of these ten most talkative students seven of them are women, the three male students tend to talk back and forth to each other for extended periods. I try to recognize and affirm positive contributions and try to intervene more directly to keep the conversations related to the day’s topic. While I hope I show my students that I value their interests and directions, I also try to find ways to encourage a variety of students to respond to make the conversations not only more lively but also more inclusive. I can only hope that my students will help teach me how to make the class discussion productive for them all.

The Shock Factor: Using Heavy Content in Class

Jenny Howell — Tue, 30 Oct 2012 02:24:55 +0000

Author:

Jenny Howell

Image Credit:

Alicakes*

This semester I’m teaching The Rhetoric of Documentary Films, and I have a very engaged group of students who have various levels of familiarity with the course topic. In fact, one of my challenges in this course is devising class activities that are enlightening for both the person who has seen only one documentary (usually one of Michael Moore’s films) and the person who has seen dozens. One of the ways I have approached this challenge is by showing clips from a wide variety of films: I figure that I will be opening some minds to the diversity of the documentary genre and hopefully introducing others to films that they haven’t yet seen. But there’s one kind of clip that I hesitate to use as a basis for class discussion: the heavy clip, by which I mean a section of a film with a particularly serious, shocking, or uncomfortable subject matter.

I’ll provide some illustrative examples of heavy clips I have considered using: I thought about showing two scenes from Shoah, a 10-hour 1985 film by Claude Lanzmann that consists of interviews that detail some of the Holocaust’s most horrifying incidents. In one scene, Lanzmann speaks with an SS officer who repeatedly asks him not to record the interview or use his name, and Lanzmann agrees, all the while filming with a hidden camera. In another scene, the director interviews Abraham Bomba, a barber who survived the Treblinka death camp by cutting women’s hair before they entered the gas chambers. When the director hits a nerve during their interview, Bomba begs him to stop asking questions: “I can’t. It’s too horrible.” But Lanzmann won’t let him end the interview: “You have to do it,” he tells the barber as the man wipes away tears. These scenes, in my thinking, would provide useful fodder for a discussion of ethos: does it establish or undermine his credibility that Lanzmann lies to one of his subjects and grows hostile with a sympathetic interviewee? Another clip that may prove valuable in class is from Deliver Us from Evil, a 2006 film by Amy Berg that tells the story of Father Oliver O’Grady, who raped and molested 25 children over a period of 15 years. Near the beginning of the film, as O’Grady is being interviewed, the camera refuses to capture his face; instead, it focuses in close-up on his hands. I would use this clip in my final unit of study, when my students turn to making their own film, to teach camera angles. The decision to obscure O’Grady’s face initially and focus in on his hands is a rhetorical choice that my students could usefully analyze and discuss as they determine what kinds of shots and angles they will include in their own films and the effect of these determinations.

Even describing these films in that last paragraph, though, felt a little . . . icky. And that’s really the problem: my fear is that showing any of these clips will be distracting. My students could be repulsed or (worse?) morbidly fascinated by the content, and their usual rigorous analysis will suffer. So why use these clips? Why not show a scene from An Inconvenient Truth or Fahrenheit 9/11 that may communicate the concepts just as well?

I can see a few possible reasons. First, at a very practical level, some of these clips simply represent the best, most thought-provoking examples—that I can think of, at least—of the concepts I want to teach. The scene from Shoah, for instance, is so powerful for teaching ethos precisely because it is shocking and serious. Discussing the decision to berate a Holocaust survivor (surely there has never been a more sympathetic subject) could lead to incredibly provocative questions about Lanzmann’s credibility, the purposes of the film, and the rhetorical effects and effectiveness of ethical appeals.

Second, to shock students with heavy clips is also to engage students. These scenes will certainly demand attention and provoke response. The danger, I suppose, is that the discussion may never advance beyond that immediate reaction into analytical thinking. However, if I can manage the conversation so that the foundation is set for critical engagement, then real moments of insight can be had. And, if they are had, the shocking nature of the clips may make this insight all the more poignant and deeply rooted.

Finally, using heavy content provides an occasion to help students move beyond seeing that content into analyzing rhetorical choices and argumentative structure. After all, isn’t teaching rhetoric about developing in our students the skills of seeing through an argument in order to figure out how it’s working and what its intended effect is? This task is all the more difficult when the content of an argument is distractingly uncomfortable, but the pursuit remains a worthy and important one: if they can learn to objectively analyze a scene featuring a Holocaust survivor, imagine what they could do with the heated political rhetoric with which they are bombarded daily. With the correct framing, I think, heavy clips have their place in the rhetoric classroom, and they may even provide a uniquely productive opportunity for analysis and discussion.

Mitigating Silence

Steven LeMieux — Mon, 29 Oct 2012 14:01:20 +0000

Author:

Steven J. LeMieux

Image Credit:

Steven J. LeMieux

I’ve never been able to hold a silence in class. There’s lots of talk about how long you can let a question hang in the air--there’s a swagger in these discussions, a sort of teacherly way of one-upping one another. And I’ve heard boasts about a minute or two and stories about those rare masters that can hold the three, four, five minute silence (we can, in this regard, look toward John Cage as having raised the long silence to an artform). As I’ve met it, this chatter about silence carries with it the tacit assumption that there’s a fundamental good behind the slight squirm caused by a long silence, that it’s worth waiting out our students, letting them know that they’re still on the hook. More than that, though, there’s a belief in the emergent powers of discussion--that we learn by talking things out, asking questions, raising issues, testing out ideas aloud.

It’s hard to disagree with some of these assumptions. We want students to engage the material, to raise issues and questions and begin a conversation, a real thinking through the issue at hand. Plus, there’s an excitement when you’re teaching and real talk breaks out. It feels like your students are learning, that work is being done, and it’s good. But it’s hard to get that conversation going if students won’t offer their opinions, so we ask a question and then wait.

Anyone who has taught the same class multiple times (or even more so multiple sections of the same course) can tell you that the general talkativeness of a given class varies wildly from one group of students to the next. Some classes seem to reach the critical mass necessary for robust discussion--there are those 5 or 6 students that you can rely upon to fill silences, to respond to texts and coax out other responses from quieter students. In other classes, though, it’s like pulling teeth. Every bit of back and forth is a struggle.

I can’t help but feel sympathy for those silent classes. While I’ve never been able to hold a silence as a teacher, as a student I used to last entire semesters without saying word one. Thinking back to my quiet undergrad days there often wasn’t anything in particular that had me holding my tongue so tightly. I did the readings, always came to class, did well on my assignments, etc. etc., but I just didn’t talk. I just wasn’t feeling it. It took me some time, after I had begun teaching, to remember how that felt--to have things to say without really wanting to say them. So rather than developing my silence-holding-skills I’ve instead moved toward mitigating the silence in those quiet classes.

Part of this has been incorporating different modes of expression within the class. In my current course, The Rhetoric of Technology, I have them write fairly regular blog posts about their reading (I also have them comment on each other’s posts). The blogs are nice because not only can I get a general sense for how everyone is encountering the texts but I can be sure to bring up issues that they’ve raised in their posts but are silent on in class. I break the silence with their already articulated questions and comments.

Also, following a method used in a seminar I was recently in, I’ve begun beginning class discussion by asking them to briefly discuss the readings with their peers. The basic idea (as I’ve understood it both as a student and teacher) behind these discussions is that it gives students a relaxed, low-risk environment to talk about the reading, to gesture toward interesting or difficult portions of the text. They can test things out before trying them before the whole class. I wrap up these sessions by asking my students to simply share what they discussed with their group. I’ve grown to love these short (5-10 minute) break out sessions. They tend to scaffold nicely into larger class discussions, but even when they don’t I hear my students, like with the blogs, engaging the material and pushing one another toward new understandings.

Alongside these practices, though, I have been working on my own frame of mind. Part of mitigating the silence is resituating my relationship with it. It’s pretty easy to feel lousy when discussion dies down or when my students are feeling reticent. But rather than blame myself (or my students) I have been thinking more about what they want from me, about how we can situate ourselves and the interaction between teacher and student together. This doesn’t mean that I want to walk into class a blank slate, hostage to my students’ whims. More than anything it’s about recognizing how we’re going to share the load, how we can meet the silence in the middle.

Getting Students to Disagree

Axel Bohmann — Mon, 22 Oct 2012 21:52:20 +0000

Author:

Axel Bohmann

Image Credit:

The Chalkboard Manifesto by Shawn R. McDonald

I am teaching 306 for the first time this semester. Apart from the typical anxieties and uncertainties of teaching a new format (and a lot of content that had thus far been foreign to me) things are going pretty well. More important, they seem to be going better every week. Of course there are still many things I struggle with. One of the most important ones to me is getting a decent group discussion going.

Now, my students grasp concepts relatively quickly, they ask sensible questions, make valuable contributions when explicitly asked to do so. They have things to say. So why are they so reticent when it comes to speaking their mind in discussions? One explanation may be that they are not used to articulating their own thoughts in the classroom, let alone defend them against other positions. Conversely, I feel like many of my students equate challenging their peers' comments with being rude, even backstabbing. And I feel a lot of this has to do with the way classroom discourse is channeled through me as a teacher. With so many assignments and deadlines and the emphasis so heavily on grades, I fear the primary way my students see me is as a distributor of letters from A to F. Hence the attempt to elicit direct teacher validation for any given comment and to see that validation as normative. If it is given, no need to explore or challenge further. All too often, this results in a sequence of instructor question → one or two answers → 20 heads nodding → silence.

So recently I've tried around with methods to take myself as a teacher out of the conversation more. In general it mostly works, although of course not always at a hundred percent. One resource I found very helpful to capitalize on was students' sense of competitiveness. For instance, last week I had the entire class get up out of their seats to watch the second presidential debate with them. At this point in the course, we are talking about ethos, pathos, and logos. So I told the students whoever could point out an appeal to either of these three and explain precisely how Romney or Obama made them could sit down. And we would not finish until everybody was seated. I expected this to take little more than 10 minutes, but it ended up taking up a good deal of the lecture. Because students talked. They contradicted each others' interpretations, elaborated what they understood about the three concepts much clearly and vividly than before and actually challenged some of my positions, which I loved.

I am not generally a big fan of foregrounding competition, and I would not do this exercise the same way. Although I stopped it before everyone was seated I felt a little bad afterwards for the students who were still standing towards the end. And I was not completely satisfied with the fact that I was still ultimately the one to make the call whether a case a student made was “good enough” for them to sit down. But I could imagine developing this further into a team activity with teams of three where two teams are challenging each other and the third has to decide who is making the better case. That way students will not only be doing rhetorical analysis, but actually have to construct rhetorically effective arguments on the spot. And they will not be able to turn to the instructor for validation.

Class Discussion and Writing Due Dates

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

Author:

Jay Voss

Image Credit:

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.

Learning to Let Go: My Friday Non-interference Pact with my Students

Ptacek — Tue, 14 Aug 2012 02:42:51 +0000

Author:

Jake Ptacek

Image Credit:

The Internet

I think virtually every newcomer to collegiate teaching realizes early on, with varying degrees of dismay, that “teaching” and “parenting” are closely related functions. I find my students often find it hard to think outside of a kind of parental relationship: they are legitimately shocked when I tell them, for example, that I don’t care why they missed class, or that their C (or B, or A-, even) is neither a reflection of my personal feelings about them nor assigned punitively but rather my best assessment of their performance on an assignment ruled against some form of index. But the thing is, I find myself at least as often somewhat neurotically embodying a “parental” role. I reward my students for good behavior (“We’ll have cookies next class to celebrate your revised papers!”), scold them for bad (“Why did no one show up for cookie day?”), feel a general anxiety about how they perform in front of strangers or in statistical comparison (“Please let them behave well on evaluation day!”), and worry about their health, happiness, class attendance, and a million other small things.

So part of my goal this semester has been to try to let go of some of this parental anxiety, as well as to cede some pedagogical control over my class to the students. I teach a 314L course on Banned Books, which means it’s a relatively small class (I have 22 students) that is required for English majors and encouraged for most humanities students (through interdepartmental flagging). The goal of the course is to introduce students to reading critically at a collegiate level and the fundamental goals of literary research; so a good deal of the class is devoted to teaching how to close read (and, more challengingly, teaching students the rationale behind choosing a passage to read closely), how to use theoretical models when making an argument, and resources for developing those arguments. Though my students are finding the texts we’re reading (texts like Lolita and Beloved) by turns bewildering, challenging, exciting, and ultimately rewarding, I often have that “new instructor” / “parental” anxiety: are they getting this? Are they taking away from the text the right stuff? I have so much to say, and teaching literature is so genuinely exciting, that I feel that all too often, in my anxiety over their progress, I’m steamrolling what they have to say, forcing them to talk only about what I’m interested in.

So to my solution: beginning now, with the second half of the semester, every Friday is given over to my students. We don’t have any readings assigned by me, and I don’t plan any material for the class. Instead, small groups of 3-5 students are responsible for determining the day’s content and executing that. Against all better judgment, I haven’t given the groups much more definition than this: you need to plan some sort of activity that will last at least 30 minutes; it must engage the whole class; and it must relate in an immediate way to the text we are currently reading. Otherwise, you are free to plan what you want, and I won’t interfere.

This was initially—and remains—somewhat anxiety-producing to my students. The initial response was universally, “Part of my grade depends on this and you won’t tell me what to do?” After the anxiety wears off, though, my students often seem to engage with the activity remarkably well. It encourages ownership of the material, it provokes them to think in depth about a week’s worth of reading, and the discussion that have come out of it (so far) have turned out to be really enlightening.

This was—and remains—anxiety –producing for me as an instructor, as well. It’s hard to give up directing the conversation, steering students towards thinking about thematic meanings or linguistic questions that resonate—but of course, I still do that Mondays and Wednesdays. And what I discovered is that this group of students, at least, generally comes around to the right questions and interpretive moments, anyways. Today one of the group members asked about tree symbolism in Beloved. “Perhaps it’s coincidental,” one student said—and this is the moment where I’d normally jump in with a long-winded talk about the painstaking construction of the novel, or about the often futile hunt for symbolic meanings. “Well,” another student answered, “it’s hard to imagine that it would be coincidental—think of all the planning that went into the novel.” And from there they were off, debating the symbolism and even debating the value of reading for symbolism, thinking about intentionality and narrative structure and a whole host of interesting ideas that I almost cut off with a well-meaning interjection. Though their arguments often lacked an advanced theoretical vocabulary, my students were really thinking at high levels with great rigor.

The pedagogical point of all this, if I have one, is not that everyone should take one weekday off from teaching. Every class is different, and what works for your 10:00 class may differ wildly from what works for your 11:00 class that same day. But it is that there is a real value in letting go of control of the classroom for a while. Let your students make mistakes, and see if they can sort them out on their own. Let your students talk about what they’re invested in, what they find compelling about the topic at hand, what they don’t care about, and why. Let go of being a classroom “parent” and let your students take responsibility for themselves.