I've thought of studying Rhet/comp, I don't think that I have a cool enough name for it... Not only is my last name not pronounceable, it is not a fun noun.
Anyway, I "liked" several of the things I read in Bean this week if, for no other reason, they helped me to justify my writing assignments, at least to myself. Ultimately, I want to teach students to think critically even more than I want to teach them to write. Bean explains that students should be asked "to consider multiple points of view, to confront clashing values, and to imagine, analyze, and evaluate alternative solutions to problems" (26). These were almost precisely the things I was targeting in my first paper assignment, which, incidentally, I am still struggling to write.
Partially related to this week's readings, I was reading Richard Light's book, Making the Most of College: Students Speak Their Minds, last night. Light (another great noun [/verb/adjective] surname) conducted hundreds of interviews with students over several years to draw conclusions primarily related to advising issues. He said that most of the students he interviewed about their writing said that they really needed writing instruction in their junior and senior years and that they could not understand the necessity of their composition classes as freshmen. The students said that only through needing to write better for a specific purpose were they interested in writing instruction. Explains a lot, doesn't it?
--Bri
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Perhaps a cult of the essay is in order? I can see it now: "Learn correct argumentation, my daughter, so that, after death, you can reach the holy vistas of the Western Lands." Nothing beats a cult when it comes to generating arbitrary necessities . . .
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