On Laptops in Classrooms

Here's an interesting article I read recently on the use of laptops in law classrooms.  Obviously this is a different setting than in undergrad classrooms, but still pertinent in thinking about the issue.

Wahutu, via Robin

its been an interesting week since we talked about essay writing. I still feel that essay writing is important for students as it helps them to learn how to sustain an argument and make a point by coming with authoritative support for their arguments. A student in my class threw a conniption last Thursday upon receiving an essay prompt in our American Race Relations class. The student was mad since according to him we "hadn't discussed race and race relations since all we had talked about was Whiteness for the past three weeks."  As evident from this he views 'White' as not being a racial group. Upon scheduling an appointment with him i asked to make his case in his essay and come up with a convincing one. In his opinion, asking him to  do this in an essay didn't not make sense. The irony is that on our facebook group, he has been talking about dealing with White priviledge and the idea of whiteness and what it means to be white. Yet last week, talking about Whiteness did not constitute talking about race relations in America. While I do not say this to highlight my bias for essays, I'm baffled at why his argument would be different on Facebook and why he can't write an essay as to why whiteness is not a topic to write about in an essay. perhaps most frustrating, he emailed the grad instructor saying she was not 'qualified' to be teaching the class and i wasn't 'qualified' to be the TA for this class. Since the former is interested in intersectionality of race class gender on the GLBT community and I'm interested in ethnicity and race and how conflicts in Africa are talked about in the West.

Reflections on the Essay

I've been thinking about this a lot since Robin asked us to write on "the essay." I read some articles (this one in the NYtimes is relevant and worth a read), used another "new medium," Facebook, to try to crowd-source a discussion on the utility of the essay among my Facebook friends (more on that later), and sought out the syllabi of individuals whose writing I adore (see this one by David Foster Wallace).

But before I get to all that, I'd like to begin with a discussion of...definitions. This feels at once nerdy and ironically appropriate for the stereotyped 5 paragraph essay form. As in, "What do I think about free speech? Well, the Greeks defined free speech as..." But indulge me. Here are the definitions of "essay" from "thefreedictionary.com", which seem representative:

1. (s)

a. A short literary composition on a single subject, usually presenting the personal view of the author.

b. Something resembling such a composition: a photojournalistic essay.

2. A testing or trial of the value or nature of a thing: an essay of the students' capabilities.

3. An initial attempt or endeavor, especially a tentative attempt.

With definition 1, we get the stereotypical version of our 5 paragraph essay. I think we can all agree that not all, probably not even most college writing falls into this category, but some of it does. Here's what some of my friends had to say about this (quoted here anonymously because I did not obtain permissions to take this "off Facebook"). My post asked: "Tell me, facebookverse, what do you think of "the essay" as an assignment in a college course? What has your experience been with writing them or assigning them? Was it a useful exercise? What would you change?":

"As a grad student, useless, I write them while watching tv. At this point in my educational career, I am able to figure out what the prof wants to read, and write it. As a teacher, I think writing assignments should have authentic audiences...." 

"I hate "reflective" or "responsive" essays with a passion as it seems to be all I write these days. This far along in my degree, I'm not feeling like there is much use for them except to have some sort of grade in the grade book."

"From personal experience, I had many great humanities teachers from middle school to college that stressed the importance of structured writing and argumentation through the traditional essay, and I think their doing so helped me succeed through various stages of education."

What to draw from these diverse responses? To use the popular internetspeak of the day, I don't think we say FAIL essay, I think we say FAIL assignment instructions or guidelines. I tend to agree with Robin; it is all in the prompt.

David Foster Wallace identifies this learned behavior in his syllabus (linked above) and presumably attempted (RIP) to counter this tendency in his classrooms, to help students relearn to write (as others have noted):

Let's move on now to definitions 2 and 3 of "essay": a "test or trial," an "initial attempt or endeavor." I find these definitions more thought provoking. What do we want students to get out of "the essay," or, to expand things a bit, any piece of college writing?

I think it is important to have "essays" in this sense -- initial attempts at tackling big ideas. But I think it is also important to give students opportunities to refine these "initial attempts" or "test trials." I think that those of us who have given students rewriting assignments, where they rework a paper they have already submitted, realize that this is a task many students are unfamiliar with because they are rarely asked to perform it -- a "return to the scene of the crime" for some students. How do we clean this up? Make it better?

A few final thoughts in disjointed form:

• I think form or forum matters less than the assignment guidelines, or how we set it up.
• Blogs probably have the potentially to be just as disciplinary (if not more so) as essays. One point that was brought up in my crowd-sourced discussion was the new trend of "forcing" individuals on the academic job market to have blogs for the sake of "professionalization."
• A lot of the criticisms of the essay seem to stem from an over-reliance on "personalized" narratives and opinions that some either find tiresome, pointless, or performed. I think that here we should take Jackie's narrative speech as a great example of how to include personal experiences and opinions in the classroom in a structured and productive manner. I think her assignment avoids a lot of these traps.
• It's not revolutionary, but worth saying: the best classrooms are probably multi-modal, allowing students different ways of participating and expressing their ideas. When I've used blogs as an instructor, I've used them less as an analog for essays and more as a supplement to in-class participation. Not all students are comfortable with vocal expression of more controversial ideas, and that's just fine with me.
• Critical thinking. How to get more of it back into the essay? My personal experience has suggested that rhetorical criticism assignments force students to create new arguments that they have ownership over.

There you have it: rhetorical criticism saves the essay the world. The End.

Just kidding...sort of.

Using Essays and Other Forms of Writing

I believe that being able to write well in an academic setting is important, and I would absolutely assign my students essays if it suited the goals of whatever course I was teaching.  I think students (and instructors) should be able to work within many different forms of expression, and for people in academia, that obviously includes essays.  As long as students are at school (at least for the foreseeable future), they will be asked to write essays, so additional opportunities to practice those skills and get feedback from others are necessary.  And, as some of my fellow students have noted, being able to make a clear, sustained argument in writing is a skill developed by the essay and applicable to other forms of writing and speaking.  On the other hand, I can imagine courses where writing a formal essay wouldn't (necessarily) be helpful for achieving course goals, but writing, say, lab reports or lesson plans would be.  It would still be important for students to think through why they're writing those things and why they're writing them the way they are, and to be able to express those reflective thoughts to others, but that might be accomplished through informal journaling, one-on-one conferences, or regular in-class small group discussion.

The one university-level course that I've had experience teaching addressed the foundations of education (history, philosophy, sociology, anthropology, and politics), and we did assign our students a final essay in which they would analyze a school using the course concepts, attempting to synthesize everything.  This activity was pretty successful, and became more so once I started building time into class for students to talk to each other and me about their paper ideas and early drafts.  The students appreciated the in-class work time, as they found that sometimes a question wouldn't come up for them until they'd started working, and then when they had a question, they could immediately ask me or another student.  They were definitely more comfortable about writing the essay the semester I instituted this practice.  In the future I'd like to find more ways to get more of them thinking more deeply about their analyses, rather than staying at a surface or maybe mid-range level.  I think that taking additional time to directly model that type of analytical thinking and behavior in class would help, walking them through my thought process as I did a sample analysis, so they'd know exactly what I'm looking for.  I could even record myself doing that and put it up on Moodle for students who missed class or wanted to review the process.

The Essay as "Deliberate Conflict"

I like Noolifar's post a lot--especially the benefits of the "opportunity of obligation" that being forced to learn (and conform) to a certain technical form can have. When I started grad school (in Rhetoric) I surrounded myself with articles by rhetorical critics I admired-Mike Leff, Karlyn Kohrs Campbell, Brad Vivian, Dave Kaufer-and copied what they did. That is, when they inserted history in their article, I inserted history in my article. When they worked in their lit review, I'd work in my lit review. By copying the form of an academic article (in Rhetoric) I learned how to write one. Eventually, I became confident enough that I was freed from the form, able to produce work without looking at the work of others for comparison. I like assigning essays to my students for this very reason. I also like assigning them other sorts of forms depending on the class. In my Freshman Comp class, I might assign essays, but also other forms that my students might find useful--short arguments, blog posts, even some work on how to do basic coding schemes for language.

Unless it is absolutely un-ignorable, I generally do not grade grammatical errors; instead, I correct them and point out to the student that he/she might work on them. My grade focuses on the issues they raise and they style with which they raise them. This philosophy stems from Joseph Williams' essay, "The Phenomenology of Error," where he proved that "people read student writing with a different screen from the one they use for published writing." We read for error when we read student writing but for ideas when we read professional academic writing.

Finally, a word on discussions: in response to Robin's point (in his email "An essai on essays") that essays/discourse are performed, I wholeheartedly agree. Just like with speeches in my Public Speaking class, I like to discuss my student's essays with them in class. I never give them public criticism (I feel it can be too damaging if it goes poorly); instead, we engage the issues that their speeches/essays brought up. I feel like pushing back against them. This is tough sometimes, perhaps because, as Patricia Roberts-Miller points out, "hostility to argument often comes from experience with unproductive forms of conflict" (Deliberate Conflict: Argument, Political Theory, and Composition Classes, p. 185). Still, I believe that, if I can make it through the first wave of built-up resistance to talking about their essays, I end up having very productive discussions with my students. The effectiveness of the essay, to me, lies in what you do after they've turned the assignment in. Without that discussion, that group engagement with the issues they write about, I'm not sure how effective I might find it.

David

Niloofar's post

I’m sorry I missed last week’s discussion regarding assignments, I’m sure I could benefit a lot form your viewpoints in formulating my own, here. However, I thinkI would vote for “assigning essays”. And I can mainly justify my opinion by going back to my own experience: I was never asked to write an essay till very late; my first year in graduate school! I know… it is quite odd! But this is how the educational system works in Iran, at least at undergraduate level. Although I had some experiences in writing for journals or magazines before my first official essay assignment, those were hugely different in the sense that they were voluntary and optional. As I think back I see that what made essay writing an exceptional and sometimes an ecstatic experience for me was actually the very “obligation”. I very much valued this opportunity or rather this “obligation” of presenting my thought, working on it and expanding it, knowing that someone will read it thoroughly to evaluate it. If I’m obliged to write then it means that someone is obliged to read.

However, I do not mean to generalize my own feeling about essay writing. I strongly agree with Robin when he says “we all hated doing them (well, maybe not us....)”, i.e., his hint about the possible differencesbetween us and them in our attitude towards essay writing. But what I think I can say without extrapolating my opinion is this: everyone should be given this opportunity of ‘obligation’, and not once or twice but more. Being asked to sit in front of a blank paper, per se, I think, is quite potential in bringingforth an ecstatic experience and thus everyone should give it a shot.

I sound pretty traditional in the last few lines and I think I will sound even more tradition here, so I keep it short! I think a couple of quizzes are also necessary to smooth the path for essay writing- just to make sure that students know what the key concepts are and how to use them as their thinking tools. So, I should confess I’m not saying anything original here!! I’m only trying to think why the traditional '2 essays and 2 tests' model has been used for so long now and why it still make sense to me.

On the essay

I am not the most gifted when it comes to being conversant with technology. Hence, I have a certain hesitation when it comes to moodle and the like. Not because they are not suited for the purpose, but because my technological dyslexia prevents me from venturing that way. I vote in favor of the essay as my preferred tool for an intellectual/academic exercise. I am aware that part of this nepotism has to do with my old-fashioned quasi-British education. Even then, cultural baggage and the ghost of the empire past notwithstanding, I do think that the essay as a form is the most malleable and hence, best suited for our purpose. The essay could be anything, and here I go back, once again, to my literary studies roots. It could be the personal essays of Charles Lamb, the stuffy armchair essays of Montaigne, the pulpit essays of Bacon and so on. It is a form that lends itself to the most profane and to the most arcane of subjects with remarkable ease. It is the best tailored for creating the skill of making sustained arguments. I am aware that most students will not go on to write essays in their workplaces, but it is not merely an attempt at good writing, but more importantly, it is an exercise is thinking in a streamlined, organized fashion. That skill I am sure will be useful in whatever profession they might enter. It is the mode of thought that I endorse more than its execution on paper. There is a certain logicality in the essay that short responses to prompts do not always generate. It is in trying to tap on this analytical tendency that the essay generates that makes me latch onto it more than any other format of academic exercise.