Defrag This Blog

Grading process…

In a conversation with Andy and Lisa, I find myself writing:

This is the thing that keeps me working: the technology keeps making it possible/(necessary?) for me to change the way I do things.
I’m working with students on their papers at Google Documents; it allows me to go in to their draft and give them feedback and they can work again in the same draft and then I can compare revisions with a couple of clicks.
But it’s making me now need to respond to papers as I receive them rather than waiting to grade them all as a set.  The good news: I can grade the papers in shorter bursts of time.  The bad news: if I’m not careful, I’m giving them too many opportunities to revise in small ways that waste my time.

Or is that what teaching writing is all about?  helping them understand a real process of planning and revision?  Should I really be assigning fewer papers that they are working more on?

should every student have to write the same number of papers or should they each work on what they individually need?
Google Documents allows me to grade a process in ways that I’ve never been able to grade before; what if some students get two great papers done and other students get five, but they all are working on their writing?

Is the old-school emphasis on product really the way to go?  I mean, I know that we say that we teach process, but if we’re really grading 5 papers, are we really teaching process?  Or are we still grading 5 products?

The changing technology is allowing us to re-think our practices in some very important ways.

What if students have a possible 10 points that they can earn every week based on the writing that they do that week?  If they revise in the substantial ways that we suggest, they earn all 10 points, but it doesn’t mean that the product is “finished” — they may still have other things to revise the following week.

Hmmmm….  Why does it sound so feasible?

Kopelson (1): Stuck on paragraph 4

Mueller has suggested Karen Kopelson’s “Sp(l)itting Images; or, Back to the Future of (Rhetoric and?) Composition” (CCC 59.4) for blog discussion next week, so I started kinda sorta reading the article yesterday and got stuck in paragraph 4.

I need to go back and read Pat Bizzaro’s ”What I Learned in Grad School” (CCC 50.4 June 1999) to get beyond this. I remember Pat telling me about a book that wrote the beginning narrative of Comp as coming out of Creative Writing (something about an elephant?), but obviously I don’t remember the name of it*.

My main observation at this point is that these narratives seem to trace the theory-practice split TO THE BEGINNING of big-C Comp: Creative Writers were already “professional teachers of writing”; it seems only to be that these guys were NOT already writers that made them think they’d had a “eureka” moment. If that’s true, then from its beginnings, Comp was about how to teach writing as a response to a school assignment and then how to theorize that teaching in quantitative ways. Both of those ideas give me an “ick” and a double “ick.”

Of course, I come out of Creative Writing and then Rhetoric (and Classical Language Studies), so Comp for me has always been split, just never from Literature.

Clancy has already posted about her personal history in response, so maybe I’ll do that soon. Maybe I’ll just try to get to paragraph 5.

Back to dissertating today tho.

If anyone wants to read the article in a collaborative comment fashion, email me or comment below and I’ll send you the link and password to where I have the article in a protected CommentPress format WP blog where I personally am thinking through it.