Blogging Pedagogy - pedagogy

"Don't Feel So Down": When Your Students Don't Understand Your References

Jeffrey Boruszak — Fri, 10 Apr 2015 18:30:56 +0000

Author:

Jeffrey Boruszak

Image Credit:

Flickr, wumpiewoo, 2010

I recently had a teaching experience I could only compare to being on a sinking ship—like the band on the Titanic, I played my song dutifully as I sunk into the murky waters. With every word I spoke, attempting to explain the material I prepared, I could sense the students’ disinterest, disengagement, and utter confusion. This wasn’t the first time I experienced this sinking feeling of a total misfire while teaching, nor do I expect it to be the last time. And do you know whose fault it was? Julian Casablancas.

Well, let me clarify—it was not Julian Casablancas himself that sunk my lesson, but rather the expectation that my students would know that in the early 2000’s there was a popular band called The Strokes. You see, I was in my introduction to rhetoric and writing class, and the topic of the day was identifying different kinds of evidence and relating them to the main argument. The centerpiece of my lesson was a group exercise involving an op-ed in The New York Times earlier that week. In “Brunch is for Jerks,” David Shaftel argues that Manhattan’s indulgent brunch atmosphere has hit a critical mass, and that the meal’s ubiquity is evidence of widespread gentrification and the failure of the ultra-hip millennial lifestyle. Or, in the words I figured wanted my students to get—“People may think brunch is still cool, but really it’s just two-thousand and late.”

The key to Shaftel’s argument about the hip-ness of brunch is his use of a Julian Casablancas quote at the beginning of his article: “I don’t know how many, like, white people having brunch I can deal with on a Saturday afternoon.” Shaftel comes back to Casablancas two more times in the piece, representing him as an arbiter of what is cool. “Perfect!” I thought, while preparing the lesson. “This example is straight out of the textbook’s chapter on evidence, and between talking about brunch and referencing a hit rock band, I can keep a fairly dry topic upbeat and engaging.”

WRONG. Once we were in the actual class, my students didn’t seem to really be getting to the “cool” part of Shaftel’s argument. I slowly tried maneuvering them to the paragraphs where Casablancas is mentioned. Still nothing. Finally, a student brings up brunch’s cool factor based on another paragraph. Here is my moment—I ask them to find evidence for the article’s argument on brunch’s coolness, but they can’t find it. As the search gets more and more drawn out, I eventually write Julian Casablanca’s name on the board. Crickets. They’ve never heard of this name before. “He’s the lead singer of The Strokes,” I tell them. Then came the moment I hadn’t been prepared for—my students had never heard of The Strokes.

I had been told this would eventually happen. Another professor told me that his students no longer understand his references to The Matrix, and that one day I would struggle after making what I thought of as a still-contemporary pop culture reference to something my students had no idea about.

And so there I was, caught entirely off-guard by a reference that my students just didn’t understand. And in this critical moment, I fumbled the ball. How do you explain what “cool” is, especially when your reference to what is cool is a rock star whose hit songs you suddenly realize came out over a decade before? Now my students seemed more lost than ever. I wanted to just move on—what I had prepared as the crown jewel of my lesson was a total wash. But there was nothing to move on to—I had to deal with “cool” on my students’ terms, not my own.

And so they left the class with bewildered looks on their faces. It didn’t help that my other examples besides Shaftel’s article also failed to hit their mark (one of these exercises was staging a debate over which Austin burger is better—Whataburger or P. Terry’s…except none of my students had been to nor heard of P. Terry’s). The next class I picked up the shattered dregs of my dignity, and gave them a boring Powerpoint reviewing kinds of evidence to reverse the effects of a disastrous lesson.

And so I am left with numerous questions: What do we as teachers do when we fail to connect with our students, especially when it comes to pop culture? It is something that will only get worse as time passes. But more importantly, what do we do when our references fail? How do we recover? For me the answer is now contingency plans—from this point forward, if I use a pop culture reference as a focal point in a lesson, I need to prepare options so that I don’t leave my class confused and bewildered.

But like I said before—despite my best intentions, this will not be the last time I have a lesson that falls apart in front of me. Maybe it won’t be from pop culture references next time. I’m sure that any teachers reading this have had their share of misfires in the past, and the fear of a bad lesson plan is a constant source of anxiety. So maybe the only option is to take a deep breath, and know that no matter how bad any individual lesson goes, there is always room to recover. Just remember to listen to Julian Casablancas: “Oh baby, don’t feel so down…gonna be alright.”

Optional Collaboration and "Winging It"

Megan Eatman — Wed, 13 Aug 2014 22:21:21 +0000

Author:

Megan Eatman

Image Credit:

Screenshot from an in-class composition

I’m a big fan of "winging it" in the classroom, a practice my colleague Scott Nelson addressed in a 2012 Blogging Pedagogy post. Typically, my improvisation is restricted to my lesson plans, which I leave informal and loose so that there is room to shift gears depending on the class's needs, interests, and concerns. This semester, though, my “winging it” extended to the broader arc of the course. Once I got to know my Critical Reading and Persuasive Writing class, I rewrote their final paper assignment to include collaborative and multimodal options. The resulting projects were exciting, but that shift also led me to consider how flexibility affects student perceptions of the instructor’s ethos.

My section of Critical Reading and Persuasive Writing, a lower-division class aimed at students who already have credit for our introductory Rhetoric and Writing course, had four units. In the first two, students wrote analytic papers that discussed features of an online public of their choice; in the second two, students wrote arguments for or about issues important to that public. The third unit required students to construct a multimodal composition, and the fourth unit originally required a traditional textual composition. Normally, I would reverse those assignments so that students would have to flesh out an argument in text before writing on the same issue in other media, but I wanted their projects to be “born digital” rather than translations of existing papers. The results were good. Students turned in assignments in which it was clear that medium wasn’t an afterthought.

I had a feeling that I wanted to rewrite the Unit IV project before I saw the results of Unit III, and I had warned students (both in class and with a note on the assignment page) that the assignment was undergoing revision. But, while I wanted to offer students the option to continue their exploration of multimodal composition and produce larger, more complicated projects than they could achieve individually, I also didn’t want to disappoint students who were counting on writing a traditional, individual paper. Ultimately, I created an assignment with two options. Students could either remix their Unit III argument for a different audience and in a different medium, or they could produce a multimodal collaborative project on a topic of their choice. Since all the Unit III arguments were multimodal, an individual, traditional paper was still an option, but I also tried to facilitate collaboration. Early in the unit, I asked students shared their project ideas in small groups, and several of the groups became collaborative work groups after those meetings. Of my 17 students, nine ended up working on collaborative projects, and the other eight worked individually. Of those eight, four turned in text-based arguments.

While I was happy with this change and the resulting projects, having a collaborative option, as well as the option to do a multimodal or traditional argument, made teaching the last unit somewhat more difficult. I had to ask students to decide on a project plan very early in the unit so that I had an idea of their needs, and most classroom activities had to be tailored to have value for a wide variety of projects. For the most part, we focused on broader issues of argument construction: for example, finding appeals to suit specific audiences and anticipating and addressing counterarguments. If I were doing this sort of project again, I would have asked students to focus more on identifying the conventions of different kinds of arguments in different media and publications, because some students seemed to master some of those conventions more readily than others. Since we had already done a unit on multimodal composition, I think those activities would have been especially helpful for the students who chose to do traditional textual arguments. Spending more time discerning how an article in Slate is different than a college essay in structure, not just appeals, may not have had immediate utility for the multimodal groups, but could have still reinforced a method for understanding different rhetorical situations.

Finally, I wondered about how my flexibility in the classroom affected my students’ perceptions of me as an instructor. For me, “winging it” is the result of confidence and experience. This is a class I’ve taught before, a student population with which I’m familiar, and I feel comfortable enough as a teacher that I don’t worry about a sudden mutiny. For students, however, improvisation may make me look less prepared or less experienced because the prior experience that allows me to reconstruct assignments on the fly is obscured. That concern would not stop me from adapting lesson plans and assignments to suit the class’s needs, of course, but it has inspired me to reflect on how improvisation affects my ethos and, importantly, how it might play differently for me, a relatively young woman, than it does for some of my colleagues.