Blog Archives

Asking Questions the Smart Way (in tech)

I am currently co-teaching (with Dr. Kristin Arola) ENGL/DTC 356: Electronic Research and the Rhetoric of Information. We are asking our students to do things with technology they aren’t used to doing, and thus (and appropriately) we are often answering tech support types of questions. I am happy to answer questions because, well, it’s what I do, but mostly I like answering questions because it shows that the students care at least a little bit about what they are doing or being asked to do. I think we all know that “caring” is not often the case in some classrooms.

Questions, for the most part, have been good ones—either specific enough that we could answer them quickly, or honest enough (as in “I have no idea what I’m doing, or the terminology to use, so can I just show you?”) that spending the time doesn’t feel like wasted time. Being the long-time geek that I am, I immediately thought of assigning Eric Raymond’s “How to Ask Questions the Smart Way”—although the earliest date on this is 2001, I swear a version of this has been around longer, like from the days of USENET and a world connected through majordomo-controlled mailing lists. But that’s neither here nor there—I’m just showing my age.

Because we’re gearing up for a fairly technical final project in that class, I thought I would point out some of the finer points of this piece. I also encourage all the students to read it in its entirety, especially if they plan to go on in a related field.

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On Staying Politically Neutral in the Classroom

When I started teaching college students, nigh on two and a half years ago, I didn’t really know what I was doing (not that I especially know now). I wasn’t a particularly great college student as an undergrad, and that was 1989-1992 anyway (meaning: little recollection of specifics), so pedagogical examples to draw upon were limited to those profs in my MA program. Luckily, I had quickly learned just who I wanted to emulate and who I very specifically did not. Those in the “do not emulate” list were those who were hell-bent on pushing their own scholarly agenda to the detriment of our own scholarly development, or who wanted to lead us toward “the right answer” with little regard for students gaining or practicing the skills to determine “the right answer” or to realize that there isn’t really a “right answer” anyway. Not a big fan of that.

Although at SJSU I was only teaching the first semester of a two-semester Freshman composition sequence, in which students wrote eight essays in various rhetorical modes (narrative, descriptive, compare-and-contrast, etc.), I still didn’t want to be That Instructor—the one who “made” students write on certain topics or in a certain style or with a certain point of view (unless that was the assignment, like “argue the side of X, then argue the side of Y”). For each essay, students had two or three prompts to choose from and could argue for one of their own if they so chose. I didn’t feel the need to bring hot-button issues into the classroom just for the sake of doing so. What would have been the point of discussing, say, gay marriage during the unit on description? This is not to say that if conversation strayed toward controversial issues I stopped it—I didn’t—but we didn’t really stray into that territory. Everyone was focused on mastering pesky things like thesis statements and commas.

I started teaching around the same time that Michael Bérubé’s What’s Liberal About the Liberal Arts?: Classroom Politics and “Bias” in Higher Education was published, and I snapped that up immediately because a) it sounded good and useful, b) I’ve always liked Bérubé’s blog and c) he’s Michael Bérubé. I mean, come on. We should all know a little bit about “Dangeral Studies,” shouldn’t we? Anyway, between the profs I trusted, and examples of classroom interaction seen throughout Bérubé’s book, I felt confident that my gut instinct wasn’t a wrong one—if I was to be a decent teacher, I had to be as politically noncommittal in the classroom as possible, and it would be possible because what exactly do my personal politics have to do with thesis statements and essay organization? Nothing.

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FYE, FYC, and why I was really busy in Fall ’08

NOTE: I use the first person plural throughout this post. I am not schizophrenic. Instead, I am referring to myself and my teaching partner, T. Best. teaching. partner. ever.

At WSU, approximately half of the English 101 (Introductory Writing) sections in the Fall semester are designated as “Freshmen Focus” sections. In the Freshman Focus (FF) program, approximately 80% (or more…I am not sure of the exact number, but I recall hearing it was a very high number) of the incoming freshmen were placed into living-learning communities in which they shared at least two classes with other students in their dorm. The individual clusters themselves were typically like ours: four sections of English 101 (26 students each) matched up with two sections of World Civ (60+ students each). Specifically, my two sections of English 101 made up one section of World Civ, and T’s two sections of English 101 made up another section of World Civ (both World Civ sections also had students not in the FF program).

After we learned that our four sections of English 101 were to be part of a FF cluster, we set out to design a course that would integrate everything we possibly could and to produce for our students the sort of living-learning experience that we both had during our undergraduate years at small liberal arts colleges. As successful products of that sort of environment, we seized the opportunity to create a similar environment within the large research institution that is WSU. To that end, from the outset we wanted to coordinate and collaborate not only with each other but with our World Civ, Residence Life, and Library partners. Additionally, we planned to integrate the Common Reading and Common Reading Lecture Series and related programming into our course, and in the end did just that.

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