Topic: Malcliches

Question: What is a “malcliché” and what are its intentions?

Answer: Traditional cliché: “The love of money is the root of all evil.”

Malcliché: “The love of money is the route of all evil.”

Summary: An unintended variation on a cliché that leads to some interesting thoughts about what it means.

Comment: This article is an example of an idea that is fun to think about. There are few such articles in today’s professional journals. Articles for this purpose used to appear in College Composition and Communication under the heading “Eu d’esprit.” They often poked fun at those educators who were deadly serious about issues in English teaching. And they were fun to read. In this article about “malclichés, the author follows through with reflections on what these unintended uses of clichés by wide-eyed, innocent, naïve freshman comp students (and others) might have really meant by substituting one word for another. RayS.

Title: “The Malcliche: An Argument for an Unlikely Episteme.” Cathryn Molloy. College English (November 2010), 138-155.

Topic: Evaluating Poems

Question: How do we evaluate poetry? What are our criteria for judging whether a poem should be published?

Answer: I admit it. This article became a little too complex and technical for me Yet its method of trying to identify the criteria that people use to evaluate poetry is intriguing. What do you value in this poem? Why do you judge that this poem should be included for publication? The article has insights into some of the criteria used by “a group of seven poets, critics, editors and teachers” in a one-day discussion “judging some contemporary U.S. verse.”

Quote: “Although evaluation is at the core of many of the practices associated with poetry—including teaching, editing, selecting, judging, and even writing—and although there have been involved discussions of the assessment of verse… there has been no empirical investigation of the specific values which, one supposes, lie at the heart of such judgments in contemporary American poetry. This study examines how one group of poets valued twelve poems.”

An example of one criterion:

Quote: “Though striking moments tend to promote a willingness to stick with a poem in order to investigate it more—as Dennis states of Hawkey’s poem, ‘there are enough moments in it for me that made it something that I wanted to continue to experience’—the mere presence of these, no matter how powerful, is rarely enough for the discussion participants to value the poem as a whole.”

Comment: I recommend as part of discussions of poems, the question be addressed, “What do you value in the poem you have just read?” Of course contemporary poems, such as those in The New Yorker would be best to use. “Would you publish this poem? Why?” Reading the full article will provide essential background on some of the criteria used by these seven professionals concerned with poetry. RayS.

Title: “How We Value Contemporary Poetry: an Empirical Inquiry.” B Broad and M Theune. College English (November 2010), 113-137.

Topic: Indoctrination in Teaching English

10-second review: Book review of Stanley Fish’s Save the World on Your Own Time. New York: Oxford University Press, 2008, 208 pp. Teach skills, don’t indoctrinate with your personal activism.

Quote: “In his latest publication, Save the World on Your Own Time, Stanley Fish asserts that we instructors should have only one goal in the classroom: intellectual inquiry. We should not think of ourselves as agents of social change. According to Fish, our job is not to indoctrinate our students with any moral thinking or even to provoke sympathy and compassion. If we stick to, as he calls it, ‘academicizing,’ then we only ‘introduce students to the disciplinary materials and equip them with the necessary analytic skills’ (153). In the case of first-year writing, this focus would be on language, not readings or outside ideas of any sort (especially those that are politically charged).”

Quote: “…Fish bluntly accuses those of us who do not have a grammar-focused classroom as irresponsible activist who place our ideologies before our actual jobs as writing instructors.”

Comment: I couldn’t agree more. Students are captive audiences. I have read articles in professional journals in which instructors have said that students either agree with the teachers’ activist positions on such themes as sex-fairness or they will suffer penalties like close reading to find mistakes. That is wrong, wrong, wrong! Students sign up for writing courses to learn how to write. That’s the teacher’s job. Injecting activist positions with which agreement is mandatory is miles out of line and should be forbidden by a code of ethics, which, in the teaching of English, I understand, does not exist. RayS.

Reviewed by DR Shank. Teaching English in the Two-Year College (September 2010). Pp. 85-87.

Topic: Purpose of Education Today

10-second review: Book review of Against Schooling: For an Education That Matters. Stanley Aronowitz. Boulder, CO: Paradigm, 2008, 195 pp. The purpose of education Today? Job readiness.

Comment: Finally, someone has come out and said what everyone knows. The purpose of an education today is to get a job. Aronowitz’s suggestion? Teachers should teach their students to analyze and interpret. I think “What is the purpose of education?” might be a good question for an interview. The answer is not that simple. RayS.

Reviewed by K Kroll. Teaching English in the Two-Year College (September 2010), 83-85.

Topic: Holding Class Outdoors

10-second review: The whole world is your classroom. When the author realized that he did much of his writing while jogging, mental writing, that is, especially invention and organizing, he began to see the value of changing from the computer-screen-centered classroom to the great outdoors.

Summary: For beginning writers, he gives an assignment before the students walk, observe and write, then for the second half of the class, they gather to share what they have written.

Comment: Addresses a reality about writing. Some writers write while they shave. Some while they complete the routine chores of housework. I think we need to emphasize that writing does not take place only in front of a computer screen. Thinking about writing can take place anywhere. RayS.

Title: “Can We Have Class Outside?” PW Moe. Teaching English in the Two-year College (September 2010), 81-82.