Wednesday, August 25, 2010
It made me think about my assignment...
As I was reading "Made Not Only in Words," I was considering Yancey's point about how technology seems to be infiltrating (in a good or bad way, I haven't come to the conclusion yet) our composition classrooms. That is her most basic argument, but it made me consider the assignment I will be handing to my students in approximately 2.5 weeks. I revised it over the summer and now I think it perfectly applies to this article.
The assignment is an argument paper on whether or not texting is affecting students' writing ability. And by ability, I mean the way of writing a traditional academic paper. I actually text quite a bit myself, but when a student pulls out a phone in my class, for some reason I want to throw it against a wall. Yet I have to agree with Yancey's point that those thousands of texts add up. Not unlike the stupid Facebook profile write-ups and "25 things about me" surveys, they (they, being students) are writing...
It is safe to say, that because they aren't being forced to write, that students don't even realize the sheer number of words they put down (on screen or in print) a day. It's astonishing. Thus, despite my abhorrence of people texting when they should be writing their essay for my class, I can't help but think that as long as students communicate on a regular basis through words, then it can't be anything but good.
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I'll be really curious to hear how your assignment goes as the semester progresses (the texting/writing one)--very cool idea. I'm curious, will students be writing a paper on this? making a video? giving a speech? composing a multimedia argument? Why this medium for this content?
ReplyDeleteI said this to a lot of folks already, and you're going to get it too :) -- make sure in future blog posts to really engage w/ the reading by summarizing a bit more some of the key points and offering a few quotes that help support your ideas. It's only so that 1) I can see how ya'll are engaging w/ the text, and 2) so that ya'll end up w/ reading notes you can go back to in week 12 and say "oh yeah, that's what Yancey said."
I agree w/ you (and yancey) that our students are certainly writing a lot, but I do wonder how, if we associate the type of writing we do in 101 w/ critical thinking, the writing they're doing in their public lives helps them w/ critical thinking. Does it? Should it? Is reporting on events the same as writing an analysis paper? Food for thought.
Thanks for your thoughts.