It’s Black Friday, the day after Thanksgiving. And like Wednesday and Thanksgiving Day, it is another exciting day of grading ahead. And another. And another. Then it’s Monday, leading to the last paper and final reflection.
I earned the MFA in Film and Digital Technology to teach anything but composition. I admire composition instructors because I’m not equipped for the workload and disagree with many of the practices I see day after day.
I love teaching, a lot, but I don’t love the compromises I’m making to manage large classes. I’ve tried games. I’ve tried group presentations. Each experiment reminds me that students don’t want to be in the class… no matter how much energy I invest in trying to make the content engaging.
The students bluntly tell me they hate writing. I understand because high school writing courses are often bad experiences. Now, their college papers are exercises in following rules.
My own views of academic writing surely don’t help. The peer-review process faced by professors is about as much fun for us as our grading and feedback are for students. How can we complain about feedback traditions when we model those same processes within our fields?
In the end, I have tried bribery and penalties to motivate students. Neither works for me.
You can love rhetoric, but making teaching about rhetoric as a career has proven to be a poor choice for me. I love the rhetoric of design. I am passionate about the rhetoric of economics. It’s interesting to study narrative as a persuasive technique.
I’m not suited for teaching composition to this student population. I’m probably not suited to teaching composition. It isn’t my specialty, no matter what one of my graduate degree programs was called.
Composition teachers deserve a lot of credit for being passionate about academic writing and wanting to teach others the secret code to academia. I’m not one of them.
This is a gatekeeper course. A filter for the unprepared and unmotivated. The A students from week two are the A students in week 14. Cut class sizes in half and we could discuss things and explore ideas. Might even help a few struggling students.
Unemployment stinks. In my 50s, it will stink more. I’m torn because I love many things. I also know what I do not love. I’m not re-applying for this teaching post for next school year. This job was meant for someone else.
In high school and college I would set up the computers for the school publications. I love the tech of writing. I wanted to study how technology shapes writing.
I completed the MA because I wanted to teach and the high school path hadn’t worked out as planned. But, there were no jobs teaching that creative writing + technology stuff.
The Ph.D. was because I hoped to shift clearly to the technology of writing. No jobs in that narrow specialty, either. As with the MA, the jobs were back in composition…
Then, I added the MFA in Film and Digital Technology. Surely with that degree my specialty interest was clear. I do the tech stuff, right? Nope. The jobs were still in composition.
Rhetoric and composition matter. We should teach them across the curriculum and in ways that better connect to students. Instead, we cram class sections to their limits, hire adjuncts and temps (like me) to teach the courses, and then wonder why critical thinking and writing skills don’t emerge.
I knew the problems were bad. Now, I wonder if we don’t need to scrap composition as taught at many places and rethink our course requirements.
As for me?
Forget it. I give up. I have been reading all about composition. I’ve been seeking out research and trying to teach college writing as best I can. But, I realize I’m not succeeding for the majority of my students.
My colleagues seem slightly more confident than I am.
I recognize the problem is that I don’t know how to make a general education requirement work for the students. That failure is troubling me.
I AM A TECH PERSON. Technology and data. I would scream at 20-something me: STEM. Computing. Economics. Data-based field of study. No humanities except for self-curiosity. I’ll be unemployed again after this school year.
I wanted to teach media production, visual rhetoric, and the economics of media. Instead, I’m flailing about, hoping to do no harm as a teacher.
I’m not a composition person and regret that I ever completed degrees that imply I am a composition instructor.
What’s sad is that I would enjoy doing a dozen other things, and I’m not doing any of those.