Many small things

Continuing my aphoristic tradition of advice that will fit in a fortune cookie:

• what if you DO want them to 'write good essays' by the end of the course? (and it's by no means clear to me that this is a good main goal in 2012--we can discuss PowerPoint decks later)

• you KNOW that if you just 'assign essays' several really bad things will happen:

1. the skilled will flourish, as they always do--because of what they brought in the room on the first day.  The unskilled will fail, as they know they will, and as they always do--reifying patterns of class and power.

2. they 'won't read the instructions'--or so it will seem, because as the Manoa folks found, we all revert to what worked before.  So you won't get your assignment; you'll get an aggregate of a lot of bad high-school experiences.

3. you will be unhappy, because the wonderful engagements with (whatever) will not happen.  And you will not get chili peppers.

• A way out.  A road not taken. A different path.  Another drummer.  [insert relevant cliche here]:

--many small and different experiences, all of which--taken together--add up to the composite literacy abilities that constitute 'academic literacy,' and a good deal more.

--key idea: literacies, are built by lots of disparate experiences, some of which don't appear, at first, to go directly to literacy:  sorting data, solving problems, telling stories, drawing diagrams, acting parts / taking roles, writing audience 'profiles,' making playlists, parody, immitatio, reading visual rhetoric, free association--hardly matters what, as long as there's LOTS and it's DIFFERENT and it's SMALL.  Low stakes.  Variation (so different Gardener-ish 'multiple intelligences' can come to bear).  Sequenced and articulated.

--minimal advice: segment big projects (like sustained essays) into small, constituent parts, each of which gets some sort of feedback--from you, or better: from them, in collaborative projects.

This is the idea behind our 'List' on the Archive.  Small, fun, focused things to do in and out of class.