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ENGL567A: Short Paper #4: Not So Simple Sequences
by Edmond Chang
Written for |
Elizabeth Rankin in “From Simple to Complex” ends her argument with the telling line: “To put it simply, an assignment sequence is a necessary fiction” (134). Her conclusion flies in the face of the search for the holy grail of composition pedagogy (one of many holy grails) that teachers, and perhaps their students, look for to make the tenuous time and space of the classroom ordered, intelligible, and productive. In other words, teachers and students (myself included) hope a class, a syllabus, an assignment sequence will culminate in an epiphany, an “a-ha” moment where all of the pieces, theories, ideas, and words fall into place. However, as Ranking says, “Ultimately, we cannot allow our rage for order—in our classrooms, in our profession, in our lives—to seduce us into thinking that any order is sacrosanct” (134). Even English 131 assignment sequences, which pride themselves on a cumulative, rhetorical, often thematic, and “improvement counts” strategy, are not foolproof, even geniusproof. The best laid plans of mice and compositionists are often subject to interruption, rolling revision, and the scrap yard. At heart, my writing classroom, my teaching philosophy, and my writing assignments are about teaching students to read, think, and write about the world around them (and not necessarily just formally or academically), to take on responsibility and authority for the ideas and work they produce, and to make connections between texts, classes, peoples, cultures, and imaginaries. English 131 is a gateway class for most of these students, a class to set the stage and the standard for their intellectual, philosophical, political, and personal lives here at the university and beyond. I hope my course outline and assignments work toward that emphasis. I agree with Bruce W. Speck, who says in “Constructing Writing Assignments” that the purpose of an assignment cannot be about the grading, the administrative, the requirement goals of a class; the primary purpose “is to provide students with the opportunity to practice their writing skills” (11). This very spirit is what I tell my students about their own writing; I tell them that if their only exigence for producing a paper is that “it is due” or “my teacher told me so” or “I have to get a grade,” then their paper will inevitably be a chore (to write and read) and effect lackluster tone, style, and argument. I strive to instill in my class and in my students the sense of self-advocacy that encourages them to find their own exigence for their work, their time. If they can underpin the composition class with the idea that they can transfer learned skills or that they can find pleasure in an English class or that they can hone their talents and abilities, then they are not hung up on punctuation, due dates, and grades. For myself, my exigence is that I am not just teaching a writing class, just teaching grammar and usage, just chunking freshmen through the machine of the university’s composition requirement. It is out of this purpose and relevance that my assignments do their best work. And in order to encourage the engagement with and practice of writing, I always try to include as many opportunities to write as possible. My first 131 sequence is based on Lister & Wells’s essay “Seeing Beyond Belief.” I hoped to capitalize on students’ incoming, albeit unpolished abilities to read and critique images and popular culture. My second 131 sequence uses Pratt’s “The Arts of the Contact Zone.” For each sequence, I include five short papers, ranging from 1- to 3-pages, and one major paper with an idea that each short assignment culminates in the long paper. Because of the shape and limitation of the quarter system, I purposefully designed the assignments to coincide with work done in-class, to draw on students’ own lives and knowledges, and to push revision. For example, in sequence one, the first assignment, an autobiography based on a personal photo, is revisited in the third assignment where students must revise their original photo autobiography for a new audience. However, as Rankin would argue, sequences are always under threat of snafu, of misapprehension, and of train wrecks. Already, in my second sequence, I have realized that less is sometimes better and will be “demoting” one of the short assignments to an in-class freewrite in order to save time. Furthermore, the tension Rankin points out in the assumptions of what is “simple” and what is “complex” force me to budget more time and effort for an assignment or to rewrite it entirely. But Rankin does not push hard enough on these assumptions. What might be considered simple, such as summarizing or close reading, may turn out to be very difficult for students, particularly if it is outside of their ken. What might be complex, such as a literature review or a research paper, may be easier, more intuitive, or be familiar to students. For example, early in my sequences is a short paper where students must close read and distill the arguments of an assigned reading. Even in the second sequence, my students are still having trouble with the reading, which is the basis of all of the later assignments. The very fact that reading is assumed as simpler than writing already points up a flaw in any kind of hierarchizing of tasks. The focus on “simple” and “complex” and “sequence” shifts too much attention away from the students to the assignment, from the contexts and “contact zones” of the classroom to the pen and paper. My cumulative, pseudo-epistemic sequences try to be semi-recursive, to “recapitulate and anticipate” (as qtd. in Rankin 130) the whole of the class. The close reading assignment is followed by a non-traditional one, where students apply the concepts they have (hopefully) grasped to produce a multivocal, autoethnographic text. A later assignment asks them to apply the rhetorical and cultural critiques they have (hopefully) learned to a video shown in class. Finally, the major paper picks up threads posed by class discussion and the short assignments to re-ask, revisit, and to revise their prior productions (hopefully) into a longer, formal, researched paper. However, as I am learning even after all these years, the order of teaching is more of a dance rather than a forced march. Rankin’s caution that an “assignment sequence that ‘works’ (whatever that means) works not because of some inherent logic” (133) but one that is conscientiously constructed, presented, deconstructed, and revised. Like Rankin, I do not “believe in a ‘true’ and ‘natural’ sequence” (133), but I do believe there is a certain amount of organic-ness to assignments. As much as our students resist or refuse or simply “don’t get” what is put before them, they also demonstrate a surprising capacity for detail, critique, and intuition in the classroom. It is my hope that I can shed a little light, provide a little music, and trace a little map for my students’ work and my students’ journey. I realize that “simple” and “complex” are probably not the words that I would use, but I am not certain what their replacements would be. Whatever I would choose would still play into the idea that the “notion of sequence...is itself a social construct” (Rankin 134), a most webby and troubling yet necessary fiction.
Works Cited
Rankin, Elizabeth. "From Simple to Complex: Ideas of Order for Assignment Sequences."
Journal of Advanced Composition 10.1 (January-February 1990): 126-135.
Speck, Bruce W. "Constructing Writing Assignments." Grading Students' Classroom
Writing: Issues and Strategies. Washington, DC: Graduate School of Education
and Human Development, The George Washington University, 2000. 11-26.
Stygall, Gail. Reading Contexts. Boston: Thomson Wadsworth, 2005.
© 2005 EYC.
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