The Punishment of Freshman Composition

After reading the three articles, I was instantly struck at the irony of the freshman composition debate: it was conceived as a punishment for students who failed the Harvard entrance exam and, in the next 120 years, it was regarded as a punishment by the unfortunate, overworked instructors who had to teach it year after year, semester after semester. (Crowley 72) Why, then, would I choose it to be my life-long profession? I have several answers swimming in my head for that one. I don’t see it as punishment. Hopefully, my students don’t see it as a punishment. It has the possibility of so much more than the drilling of correct usage or even instructing of persuasive organization. It can be a vehicle in which to introduce students to the responsibilities they have as the educated elite to be active, engaged citizens. I truly believe that commitment to learning and service.

I was impressed by Collin’s notetaking system, so I’ll try it here:

Robert Connors. “Overwork and Underpay: Labor and Status of Composition Teachers since 1880.” _Rhetoric Review 9.1 (1990): 108-25. Rpt in Selected Essays of Robert J. Connors. Ed. Lisa Ede and Andrea J. Lunsford. Boston: Bedford/St Martin’s, 2003.

Composition, unlike literature or really any other academic discipline, has historically required intense individual contact between students and instructors, resulting in perpetually overworked instructors, and the huge workload and low status of the job has made it an “untouchable” field staffed primarily by women and young PhDs.

Agree/Disagree

1. Co-education helped transform the study of rhetoric from the public sphere (speaking) to the private sphere (writing).

2. The number of students flocking to the universities both democraticized them and created this composition mess. It’s interesting that the problems cited in the title of this essay – overwork and underpay – are a direct consequence of opening higher education up to the middle class and, later, “the masses.”

3. Women were attracted to the field because of the close, nuturing contact with students.
1. Is the teaching of composition really that much more time consuming than other disciplines? I’d like to know what other fields say.

2. Why was the field created if nobody liked it? Was it a grassroots movement from the overworked, underpaid instructor class? Who were the compositionists and rhetoritians when everyone wanted to escape composition and teach literature?

Good Quotes

“Rhetoric has changed in a hundred years from an academic desideratum to a grim apprenticeship.” (181)

“While teachers in other fields were dealing successfully with the larger numbers in their classes by evolving techniques of discussion and lecture, composition teachers were tied to the reading of thousands of themes.” (188)

“Composition teaching and literary teaching are not comparable in their demands on a teacher. This is hard to talk about, given the way our departments function.” (195)

Top Five

Baldwin, C.S. “The Value of the Office-Hour in the Teaching of Rhetoric.” Educational Review 8 (1894): 290-93

Hill, Adam S. “An Answer to the Cry for More English.” Twenty Years of School and College English. Cambridge: Harvard UP, 1896.

Hopkins, Edwin M. “The Labor and Cost of Composition Teaching: The Present Conditions.” Proceedings of the NEA. 1912. 747-51.

Campbell, Oscar James. “The Failure of Freshman English.” English Journal 28 (1939): 177-85.

Stewart, Charles A. “Appointment and Promotion of College Instructors.” Educational Review 44 (1912): 249-66

Crowley, Sharon. “The Invention of Freshman English” (pp. 46-78) “Terms of Employment” pp. 118-131

Freshman English was constructed as a punishment for those students who failed the written entrance exam at Harvard and regarded by its instructors as a drudgery: a course that did not apply to their research and that regelated them to the underclass of their departments.

Agree/Disagree

1. The German university system prized research (the creation of knowledge) over pedagogy. This separation plagues composition today. It is why we feel like we need to legitimize ourselves, because truthfully under that model, we don’t belong at the university.

2. The roots of freshman composition in the classical college curriculum as rhetoric. It was redefined with the entrance exam requirement.

3. Most colleges do not require an exit exam – so we want them to just go through the motions of the course, be taught “skills,” but do we know what it looks like when a student masters them? And can they possibly be mastered in a semester? If not, what’s the point of the freshman course?

4. I like her claim that English departments owe their existence to freshman composition – and their funding as well.

1. I don’t think that instructors today are “squeamish” about imparting their views to students about what a proper, upstanding citizen should think and care about. Isn’t that an underlying goal of the diversity intiative at SU, in a way?

2. Crowley seems to argue that teaching a standard, correct version of English is insulting to students and against the democratic turn in the history of the university. But don’t students want to learn how to read and write in the standard format, so that they can get good, high paying jobs in society after school is over? Isn’t it still true that a man is known by the English he keeps?

3. I disagree with Crowley’s ending statement in “The Invention of Freshman English.” You can have a freshman English course that allows for students to become aware citizens who want to change the world. I believe that that is a possibility within the realm of traditional rhetoric. The course needs to be reconcieved, not thrown out. It’s an amazing opportunity – you see every entering student at the university. Imagine the possibilities with that!

4. I like teaching. I like that being part of my identity. I would hate to be a researcher and a researcher only. That’s why I got into composition – for the love of the teaching and the opportunities I saw through that.

Good Quotes

“But the teachers of other subjects did not need to justify their fields of study at the university level, and so they had no need to establish entrance exams that could be failed by the bulk of would-be matriculants. The entrance examination in English repeatedly and continually created appropriate subjects for the study of English – subjects who were visibly, graphically, unable to meet Harvard’s standards.” (71)
“The point of the required course is not to acquire some level of skill or knowledge that can be measured upon exit; it is instead to subject students to discipline, to force them to recognize the power of the institution to insist on conformity with its standards.” (74)
“Universities apparently value introductory composition so much that they insist it be universally required, and yet they make inadequate provision for its teaching.” (118)

“First-year composition has always been staffed by people identified as teachers rather than scholars.” (121)

Situating Myself in Rhetoric and Composition

What has attracted you to the field of composition and rhetoric? What questions do you wish to pursue?

 

I taught my first course in freshman composition in the spring of 2005, and, as luck would have it, I enrolled in my first graduate course in composition that semester as well. I had just switched my focus in my master’s degree work at the University of New Hampshire from creative non-fiction writing to teaching English. The requirements for the MST degree were very open – I just needed to take eight courses that had something to do with writing, teaching, or a combination of the two. I was substitute teaching during the day to make some extra money, and Paul Matsuda’s Tuesday night transactional writing course fit my schedule well. Not knowing anything about composition – or what “transactional” could possibly mean – I enrolled.

I was the only master’s student in that class, and I knew I was instantly over my head, surrounded by eager PhD students who spat out names, titles, and multisyllabic words I had never heard before with an ease I envied. Even though I was intimidated coming home from that first class, I was determined to succeed. I would stay in that class. I would read everything. I would throw myself into their discussions. I would get an A. And, hopefully, I would understand what “transactional writing” meant.

That class introduced me composition as a discipline, a field previously unknown to me. That course, along with the section of first-year composition that I taught that semester, sold me on the field. I was struck about how composition and rhetoric focuses on the choice of the rhetor/writer: their conscious (or unconscious?) choice of diction, form, or subject directly affects how their words and ideas are received by their audience and, in no small way, their specific words affect what their message says. I have always been interested in choice; when driving down Erie Boulevard, I find myself thinking, “I wonder why the Air-Flo sign is teal,” or “I wonder how Brueggers’ chose that font for their logo.” It’s a continuation of something I did as a child – I took books of speeches down to my basement and read them out loud, marveling about how one word or phrase changed the entire feeling of a piece. Language was invigorating. Making that correct, crucial choice amazed me.

The field of composition also addresses another, more concrete area of interest for me. I am interested in how technology has affected both communities and communication. I see technology in a broad sense, from how the Industrial Revolution transformed the farm into a business enterprise, kicking the men and then the women off the homestead and forever changing family and societal dynamics and power structures, to how cell phones, instant messaging, and emailing have simultaneously drawn the distant corners of the world close together and alienated neighbors. Are we as scholars looking at the consequences of technology as well as its benefits? And are those consequences acceptable to us as human beings?

I am also very interested in the pedagogical aspect of the field. I think it is important that we view our students as writers and as emerging members of society. We have a responsibility to them to provide them with an education that will inspire them to change their communities for the better, and we must give them the tools in order to do that. In first-year composition, I believe it is important to teach students to critically engage with the texts that surround them, both traditional print texts and other, non-traditional rhetorical forms. I want to teach my students that everything around them is a rhetorical choice, influenced by history, culture, and technology. I think that if they can see their world through this kind of rhetorical lens, they won’t take the status quo for granted, instead challenging reality and insisting on a better way to live. At Syracuse, I want to investigate ways that this pedagogy can be put into action in both my individual classes and, on a broader level, how this concept can be incorporated into a writing program as a whole. I am interested in how writing program administration functions, especially the institutional politics that influence and shape it. I would like to run a writing program someday, and because I don’t know much about it at all, I think I’d like to pursue writing program administration for my independent reading project.

I feel like I have a wide variety of interests coming into the CCR PhD, and I’m not quite sure as of yet how they fit into the discipline of rhetoric and composition. I am at once both sure that I fit into this field and nervous because so many aspects of the discipline don’t seem to coincide with my particular interests. It is such a varied field, as Louise Phelps explained in her entry on composition studies in the Encyclopedia of Rhetoric and Composition, unlike other academic disciplines like biology or history that have cores of shared ideologies and methodologies. I’m looking forward to my work in CCR 601 because I believe it will help me begin to carve out my niche in composition.