Troy Croom
English 895
Prof. Jennifer Trainor
7 May 2015
Two
Years at State
Composing a reflection paper that
covers about twelve very intense Composition courses, the nuts and
bolts of FYC pedagogy, and the drama of the GTA, I suppose the phrase
that comes to mind is my “growing acceptance of ambiguity.” I
blush to admit it but, prior to this program, I'd never heard the
term, even if I understood it implicitly. In the SFSU Comp MA, of
course, I would come to learn it on a much deeper level. I've
learned it from reading dozens of texts about the importance of
problematizing an issue; I've learned it through the many hours of
small-group and whole-class discussion, prying open my mind to
competing viewpoints; I've learned it from facing GTA rejection and
learning to move on.
In the Comp MA we talk a lot
about the need to embrace ambiguity when we discuss ways to encourage
our students to fully engage with critical thinking, to reach beyond
the simple, knee-jerk response and to examine the multiple layers of
truth of an issue. I used to assume this concept was restricted to
students learning to confront an opposing perspective so they could
produce a strong counter-point in an argumentative essay – which
just about capsulizes my narrow understanding of Composition overall
at that time. Of course, we do want to develop students into
able writers of the argument, but embracing ambiguity, I've found has
more profound implications than product alone. In fact, Composition
prefers to turn the spotlight away from product in favor of a focus
on process because in order to develop as readers and writers, and,
yes, in order to create meaningful product, we have to expand
ourselves as thinkers. To do so calls for us to open ourselves up
with some kind of empathy to the “other,” and to seeing the
confines of our own situated biases.
Looking back on two years at
State, I feel privileged to have been taught by professionals for
whom I feel the highest esteem, all in all. They have taken on the
incredible burden of training new teachers for what amounts to the
largest and most ambitious task in the university: not satisfied to
merely help students acquire more control of their writing, we compel
them to think harder, to be expand themselves intellectually and
empathically. My instructors, then, are in the business of raising
the bar for us and the whole field, much as we're raising the bar for
our own students, or as we hope to.
When I think about the Comp MA
encouraging us to raise the bar, to challenge ourselves and our peers
to be the best teachers we can be, I think of the untiring efforts of
teachers like Nelson Graff. Motivated and motivating, Graff is
often impossible to satisfy – in a good way – when it
comes to helping a student extract the deeper implications of a
thought while discussing a topic or writing a paper. When it comes
to making grad students care about a subject, I think of the passion
that Mark Roberge brings to even something as ostensibly bland as
grammar error correction – the delicate approach he brings to it,
and the importance he places on reading one of our students' texts
with compassion and confidence, with patience and tact.
I cherish certain lessons from
this program that have made me the person I am today, and the
educator that I'm determined to be. Key to my thinking and to the
classroom I want to develop is what McCormick calls the
“transactional triad” – the text, the writer and the reader,
how they all interact in the reading experience, and how there is no
single “correct” reading. It's important to me to stay cognizant
of students' rich schema that they bring to their readings and
writings, and to encourage them, as Freire says, to use reading as an
empowering act, to read beyond the text: to “read the world.” A
prime directive for my teaching is to strive to develop Freire's
democratic classroom, where teacher and students are co-researchers,
rather than a teacher filling “empty” bank accounts. Moreover, I
want to urge my classes to question the ideologies underpinning the
institutions most people take for granted, including questioning
their own presumptions toward building a better world than they were
born into.
Regarding
classroom application, it’s crucial to integrate speaking, reading
and writing to capitalize on the synergy that one lends to the other.
For example, students read to gain understanding. This is followed
by discussion, which further embeds understanding, which, bolstered
by a sense of community, allows one’s own opinions and confidence
to flourish. Ideally, this leads very naturally to the writing
process, where students further develop stance, aware that their
writing will be read by the instructor, in peer review, or
workshopped before the whole class. In this “proving ground,”
students learn what works and what needs developing as far as point,
purpose, audience and voice.
In
th FYC classroom reading is an opportunity to discover ways of
thinking and ways of making meaning. Students need to evaluate
readings, and their own writing, from a meta-cognitive point of view,
developing an awareness of the process of writing that they can
transfer to future applications. In addition to focusing on academic
discourse as a ticket to membership in the academy, it's equally
important to give students the chance to write "low stakes"
pieces, such as free writing and non-graded journals. These are
vital means to help students develop their own points of view as
readers, and their own sense of voice as writers.
Certain Comp classes have
influenced my teaching philosophy more than others. I learned the
power of small group work and blogging in Mark Roberge's 704 and 709.
To my mind, blogging and small-group work give students a forum to
share ideas and challenge peers' thinking. I got invaluable exposure
to curriculum design in Jennifer Trainor's 710. Paul Morris' 717
gave me additional practice in course development, particularly in
imagining and planning specific lessons, both for Composition and
Literature classes. Despite my initial resistance, I came to
appreciate the benefits of research – how this sort of
intensive/extensive work forces the writer into an intimate
relationship with key concepts. While those experiences – day and
night, with muscles aching before a computer – were strenuous,
exhausting and at times frustrating, I now look back fondly on
writing papers and doubt I could have come to the understanding I
have for ambiguity if I hadn't had to wrestle with writing like a
desperate soldier, one-on-one with “the enemy” (my paper) down in
a dirty foxhole for days on end; only in this way could I plunge in
and ask the hard questions that tend to slip away without tenacious
effort.
One of the greatest lessons I've
had while in this program came inadvertently, providing me with a
profound comprehension for benefits of the conversations of the
academy. I was writing a paper for Kory Ching's 795 class (this
morphed into a revised version for 800 and another for 895). This
necessitated interviewing a handful of community college teachers. A
particular teacher presented herself candidly as bored with her job
and stuck in a dead-end routine. So far as commenting on student
papers, she'd opted out of all written feedback, limiting her
response to optional conferences in office hours. Cut off from
decades of Composition research, she seemed uninformed about
practical insights in the field which could otherwise have benefited
her career, I think. To me, this teacher was emblematic of the
instructor I think we're all determined never to be. After
interviewing this teacher, I realized how fortunate I've been to have
the time and resources and the great teachers in the Comp MA to
challenge me to cultivate my thinking and my teaching so I can make a
difference wherever I might teach. And then, maybe embracing
ambiguity sometimes means looking at the enormous scope Comp teachers
are charged responsibility for, and how few are really trained in
Composition specifically, and trying to live with the the truth that
our real world schools might not fully resemble Paolo Freire's
democratic classroom. Still, it's a worthy target to aim for.
Embracing
ambiguity, I've found, occasionally means taking the bitter with the
sweet. It means learning to benefit from the enlightening points of
my Comp experience along with the darker times. For me, the darkest
moments came in the wake of my rejection from the GTA. Nothing in
the program had prepared me for the devastating blow that came when I
learned I was “not fit for a SF State classroom,” never mind that
I had over twenty years of classroom experience. In fact, for a full
year, I'd heard repeatedly that getting into the GTA was “no
problem,” that everything depended on designing a logically
sequenced curriculum, and that department politics bore no impact
whatsoever. Sadly, I found the opposite to be the case: it was
not my curriculum design that damned me, but my personality
or...something else? To be sure, at first, I was told my
curriculum “wasn't well thought through,” even though I recall my
710 instructor being enthusiastic about it. When it came to
defending the committee's decision, I was told that, in my course
materials, I'd listed three books:
“Shouldn't have more than two,” the instructor said. It
stands to reason, I suppose. But to offer this as a cause for GTA
exclusion – it seemed so surreal, the Kafka effect was hard to
deny.
She then admitted that the
primary marks against me were not from my curriculum design, but from
how some teachers perceived my behavior in my core Comp classes.
This committee representative, said she'd heard that I ask
questions that are too far afield, leading the committee to fear
that I would confuse my students, should I ever be allowed to teach a
GTA class. It seemed to come down to a question of shielding SFSU
students from my volatile personality, not to mention by inferior
thinking: she said that “more than one teacher” on the committee
said I “just wasn't getting it” – apparently suggesting
that I was a substandard student.
This was especially confusing since my GPA was nearly 4.0 and I'd
never heard the faintest indication from instructors of my
problematic scholarship. The GTA, I'd hoped, would give me
confidence for a new career, but losing it, for a long time, gutted
my confidence.
Embracing ambiguity, for me,
means acknowledging the lessons and the losses, and knowing when
not to call them lost causes. In confronting the
defeat of the GTA, I understand the committee were limited by certain
criteria and made their decision based on what they deemed best for
SFSU students. By some measurement, I failed. By some measurement,
I'm not cut out for this profession. Ultimately, living with
ambiguity means weighing this experience against my love for Comp, my
desire to serve, my years of teaching already, and my teacher
friends' confirming my conviction that I will prevail.
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