A couple of posts ago, I wrote about the pre-test I gave students in my English 101 class the first week of the semester. Two days ago I gave them the same survey and compared the results. As with the results I reported last time, I'm only recording a response for the open-ended questions if two or more students wrote it. Twenty-five students took the survey the first week, and 22 took it on November 16.

Apparently a couple of people decided a good argument doesn't need evidence? -- this was the joke when I presented these results in class today, anyway. I like that there were increases in "addresses opposing views" and "uses personal experience." I have been encouraging them to write about topics they are well qualified to write about, to use their personal authority. We've been talking about claims and reasons this semester, and we've done an evaluation argument (using criteria) and are working on a definition argument, which will also use criteria.

I'm not surprised to see the sameness here. The question lends itself to matters of technique, as does the next one.

I'm glad to see that they've relaxed about the "no new information" rule, which has always struck me as especially arbitrary.

Again, I'm liking that some of them are showing confidence in their own experience as a source of knowledge.

I wish more of them had written "talk to the teacher," but oh well. We've done some Toulmin schemas, which accounts for its appearance here.

I'm happy to see the increase in "show it to the teacher." I've commented on (required) rough drafts all semester, and they seem to find it helpful. I'm glad also to see the Writing Center listed.

As I've said, this was just an experiment. It's hard to say how many of the correct responses (for the pre- and the post-) were lucky guesses, but here are the results anyway. I'll be using some of the remaining class time this semester to reinforce ethos and logos, that's for sure.

Most people who are paying attention to the field of rhetoric and writing are aware that knowledge transfer is a highly fashionable research area right now and has been for a while. See this work by Kathleen Blake Yancey and colleagues and this work by Mary Jo Reiff and Jenn Fishman, for starters.

It's certainly an important topic; the consensus according to various universities' assessments and lore is that students do not take what we teach them in one class and apply it in the next class. I know that in my own interactions with students, when I've encouraged them to write a paper for my class about something they're doing in another class, they've balked immediately, as though it were out of the question, preposterous. It was as if they thought that was something only an overzealous nerd would do; doing that kind of integration and cross-boundary transfer would constitute an engagement that was too close, and the (socially, culturally?) appropriate thing to do is to keep one's mind at a tasteful distance from one's coursework. Or maybe they've thought it was cheating, somehow, to cross the boundaries. At any rate, there has always been strong resistance on students' part to that kind of encouragement from me. I see all this as a problem of a cultural cynicism of higher education and of anti-intellectualism, not a fault of students themselves.

So, transfer. I want them to do the transferring. I'm still tooling my assignments and course materials to try to get there, but one thing I'm trying this semester is a really simple "What I Hope Will Transfer" handout that I'll be giving them sometime between now and the last day of classes. Completely weak? Probably, but I will give it a shot and see how they respond.

On the first or second day of the semester, I gave my English 101 students a pre-test, or opening survey. I'm going to be giving them the same survey in about a week to see if their responses are any different. I plan to give them a summary of what they said (my compilation of their responses) for both surveys, but I reserve the right to change my mind. This is really for my personal use in developing my pedagogy.

What follows is the list of questions and my compilation of their answers. Twenty-five students took the survey, and I'm not writing down all the replies here, only the ones I saw in two or more of the surveys. The (sighs) are directed toward the obviously still heavily dominant 5PE formula in high school English classes, from the attention-grabber to the clincher.

1. What are some qualities of a good argument? List at least four.

17 said it has to be supported with evidence
12 said it addresses opposing views (this was a pleasant surprise)
8 said it has a strong position on the topic
5 said it uses personal experience
3 said it is well-researched
3 said "confidence" (spoken arguments, maybe?)
3 said it has a good introduction and conclusion
2 said it has a good tone

2. What do you know about writing an introduction for an essay?

17 said it must include a thesis statement (sigh)
11 said it has to say what the paper will be about
6 said it has to have an attention-grabber, or hook (sigh)
6 said it has to have topic sentences (for body paragraphs) (sigh)
4 said it has to have an overview or background on the topic
2 said it must be brief

3. What do you know about writing a conclusion of an essay?

23 said it should restate the thesis and main points of the essay (sigh)
5 said it should have a "clincher sentence" at the end (sigh)
3 said it must not bring up any new information or points (sigh)

4. How do you know if the evidence supporting an argument is valid or not?

6 said if the evidence is cited (not sure if "cited" here means simply that, or "it's cited, which enables you to evaluate the credibility and bias of the source)
5 gave answers suggesting that they use their own judgment
4 said if you research the topic
4 said if the sources are reliable and credible

5. What do you do if you're having a hard time getting started writing a paper for a class?

11 said brainstorm
8 said prewrite (some variation in phrasing but generally this activity)
4 said write an outline
4 said create a chart or concept map
3 said talk to the teacher
2 said read/research the topic
2 said listen to music
2 said have a conversation with someone about the topic

6. What do you do if you've written a paper for a class but aren't sure if it's good or not?

14 said get "someone" (unspecified) to read it and give feedback
6 said show it to the teacher
6 said take a break and then re-read it
4 said look at the rubric

Then I listed five rhetorical terms that I planned to talk about over the course of the semester and put a list of definitions beside them. I asked students to draw a line connecting the term to its definition.

Kairos: 8 right, 18 wrong

Pathos: 7 right, 18 wrong

Ethos: 4 right, 21 wrong

Enthymeme: 4 right, 21 wrong

Logos: 3 right, 22 wrong

Henry has a few cans of Play-Doh, but I haven't gotten it out for him to play with yet. The idea of "play dough" makes me nostalgic for a past that probably never was -- a mom baking bread and kneading dough, a child who wants to imitate her and to help, which Henry does, and it's painfully sweet, and so the mom tears off a piece of dough, real dough, for the child to play with. And now it comes in these plastic cans, and is brightly colored, and can be processed in plastic toy Play-Doh factories.

Ugh. What is wrong with me? Perhaps I need to take up bread-making.

This post is going to be something like my official position statement on the use of "I" in academic writing -- or more specifically, a critique of the arguments against using "I" in academic writing, most of which I find utterly baseless. My opinions have been informed by conversations with many teachers over the course of my eleven(?) years teaching college writing, and I'm not singling anyone out. If you've said anything like the following statements to me, you can be sure that it's about the dozenth time I've heard it.

But also, I recently taught Kate McKinney Maddalena's wonderfully sensible "I Need You to Say 'I': Why First Person Is Important in College Writing, so my thoughts are informed by her essay too. Here goes:

Arguments against using "I"

"Students have to follow the rules in writing before they should be allowed to break them."

But "don't use first person" is not a rule. Do these people read academic writing, I want to ask. From the July 2010 issue of College English:

In this essay, I suggest that blogging is better understood as a technology that enables an expansion of the private sphere for the Orthodox Jewish women who write them...My analysis is based on research conducted between March 2006 and January 2008. In the earliest phase of research (March-November 2006), I began by following the blogging activity of three writers featured in the mainstream Jewish press: AidelMaidel, Nice Jewish Girl (NJG), and Chayyei Sarah.

That's from Andrea Lieber, "A Virtual Veibershul: Blogging and the Blurring of Public and Private among Orthodox Jewish Women," and "I" is used many more times in the article.

From the August 2010 issue of New Media & Society:

By addressing the historical role of telecommunications in the city, I attempt to contextualize the use of mobile social networks not as entirely radical and new, but as a next step in the intricate interdependency between communication technology and urban living. I next outline the mobile social network case study, Dodgeball, and discuss the data collection and analysis procedures. Then I introduce the concept of parochialization as a means of capturing the sense of commonality that emerges among participating co-inhabitants of the social space. I explain how Dodgeball informants used the service to socially coordinate and congregate with others in urban public spaces. I conclude by arguing that spatial factors are very relevant in mediated communication and suggest how this research might be extended to other social media.

That's from Lee Humphreys, "Mobile Social Networks and Urban Public Space."

From the Fall 2010 issue of Pedagogy:

[L]iterature is no different from any other art: how to quantify, for example, the precise amount of value contributed by provenance, condition, artist's stature, workmanship, and medium that go into the valuation of a work of visual art, not even considering the question of its perceived beauty? Confusion is abetted by the plethora of categorizations that have arisen to describe aspects of works of literature and their reception history. To allow for subtle distinctions, and to uncover similarities obscured by competing terms, I will break down these determinants into basic factorial elements, recognizing that any exhaustive classification system will have some ares of overlap.

You just read some of "Constructing Our Pedagogical Canons" by Joan L. Brown.

All that right up there is from published articles in academic journals, so I'd say it's academic writing. I can grab any other issue of any other journal I subscribe to and find first person used in similar ways. It's done ALL THE TIME, especially in the kind of argument-based writing we teach in first-year writing. All those authors who are using "I" in every article and book: are they breaking a rule? At some point, you have to realize that there is no meaningful rule against using "I," and that convention overwhelmingly favors using "I."

"It's better not to say 'I think' because it's the writer's paper; it's understood that everything in the paper is the writer's opinion."

Not so. Maddalena does a fine job debunking this dowdy idea. Not everything in the paper is the writer's opinion; most likely, much of what's in the paper consists of paraphrases of other writers' opinions, and my audience can become very confused if I don't set up contrast relationships properly -- if I don't make it clear when my summary of someone else's argument ends and mine begins. In fact, there's a pretty excellent book about just this!

"Yeah, yeah. OK. I know it isn't really a rule that you can't say 'I' in academic writing. But it still bugs me when students do it; I'm not sure why."

I see several assumptive possibilities here, which all involve an underlying generalized mistrust of or hostility toward students:

• Students haven't earned the right to say 'I.'
• It's presumptuous, arrogant, audacious, or otherwise off-putting for a student to say 'I.'
• The urge to invalidate students' claims of authority and expertise: you don't get to have a boldly stated opinion, underling. You may only whisper it as echoes of a phalanx of experts in cited sources.

Even this article from Neural Development uses first person. And this article in Cerebrospinal Fluid Research.

Does every sentence that makes a claim have to be prefaced by "I argue," "I think that," "My position is," "I contend that," "I posit that," "I claim that," "My claim is," etc.? Of course not. But first person is rhetorically useful and appropriate for a wide variety of reasons, reasons more plentiful and far more sound than any I can think of to prohibit it.

There's been a lot of buzz lately about the GRAD Act in Louisiana. Its goal is to increase graduation rates in state universities, and that has had me thinking about what might be a good goal to set for graduation rates in regional public universities like mine.

There will always be students who simply decide that college is not their thing, regardless of the particular institution, and students who relocate for reasons having nothing to do with any failure of the institution. Also, as Sara pointed out last night, there are always students who have life issues that put them outside the six-year graduation timetable. In other words, they finish, but they might have to take semesters off, and it might take them seven and a half years.

The goal this legislation sets for my university is 60%. This source, which may be false and/or outdated, puts our transfer rate at 40%. Even if this number is somewhat exaggerated, that's a pretty big chunk of the student population. I wonder how transfer students are counted in the graduation rate. I don't want to be put into a "graduate everyone that's left" situation. I guess what I'm saying is that I see a few categories of students in the "aren't graduating" cohort:

• Those who simply decide that they don't like college, period (nothing personal!)
• Those who take longer than six years due to life issues
• Those who transfer elsewhere (if those students are counted in the graduation rates)
• Those who are so underprepared that they don't manage to meet the requirements and outcomes despite the best efforts of academic support services -- or who just need more than six years to reach them (have to repeat some courses, for example)
• Those who are well prepared but not mature or focused, so they crash and burn, but they might return sometime in their late twenties or early thirties
• And of course, there are those who are pretty well prepared, but they don't manage to make it out in six years due to some actual institutional problems, like required courses that are only offered every two years, etc.
• And those who are not that well prepared but are motivated, but could have been helped by academic support services that are underfunded, nonexistent, or otherwise inadequate

I wonder if 60% is a realistic goal. It sounds like it -- after all, you're still conceding that 40% won't graduate, and the GRAD Act is only ruling that Louisiana must rise to the rates of other southern states -- but I'm curious to find out the whole story about the compilation of graduation rates. I know dual enrollment students are not counted; they could take a year's worth of credit in high school, but the graduation clock starts only when they get OUT of high school and set foot on our campus. Gaming the system...

I think I'm more or less to my goal weight. My ob/gyn told me just yesterday that he thinks I'm where I should be and would do fine to maintain my current weight. And he seems to be a stickler for weight; I get weighed for every appointment whether pregnant or not. Obviously weighing during pregnancy is a gauge for measuring potential complications, but is it really necessary to weigh a woman when the point of the visit is to do a routine test for cervical cancer? I'm not complaining, but I know a lot of people, such as those in the Health at Every Size movement, have criticized doctors who give lectures about weight when the patient went there for an ear infection, for example. My doctor is great, but he's the type who might do something like that. He recommends a twenty-pound gain during pregnancy rather than the 25-35 pound recommendation from the field of obstetrics.

Anyway, point is, my ob/gyn and I are OK with my weight. But I want to stay mindful of what I eat and how much. I was catching up with my old grad school friend Greg the other day via his blog, and I ran across this post which recommended, in the strongest terms, Good Calories, Bad Calories by Gary Taubes. I read some of the reviews about it, and I ordered it from interlibrary loan.

The book seems to address the science regarding the consumption of protein, fat, and carbohydrates (refined and complex). In reading the Amazon reviews and Greg's thoughts, I came to a greater understanding about food (can't wait to actually read the book).

OK, so everyone knows the conventional wisdom that if you eat something sweet, you'll have some energy, but shortly after that you'll have a "crash," and so it's better to eat something with protein and complex carbs. I had always understood the "crash" to mean that you get tired and want to go to sleep. This does not happen to me.

BUT, Taubes is demonstrating that eating a bowl of white rice, a doughnut, or the like will cause your blood sugar to spike (of course. I haven't been living under a rock.). So your body responds with a surge of insulin to metabolize the sugar. The insulin is still surging once the sugar has been dealt with, and then you have the "crash." Again, somewhat nebulous but still more or less common knowledge.

The breakthrough for me came when I was reading about how he shows that sugar and refined carbs are addictive. You're hungry, you eat those foods, and they MAKE you hungry for more (edited to add, I guess that's why alcoholic beverages are supposedly an appetite stimulant? I don't drink, but it makes sense). THAT made me reflect a bit, and then I realized what the "crash" means for me.

Sometimes when I haven't eaten for a while, I get very weak and shaky. I'm not tired, but I definitely feel like crap in those moments. I understand now that when I eat some cake, I'm much more likely to get "the weak trembles," as my dad used to call them, shortly after that than when I eat some oatmeal. Now I really get the crash/addiction cycle that is going on with the sugary foods.

Another small but significant realization I made was from watching Thintervention on Bravo. One of the participants in the weight loss reality show was not losing any weight from week to week. Toward the end of the season, she confessed that she'd starve herself for most of the day and then eat a ton of food. Jackie Warner and the therapist on the show explained to her that she'd wrecked her metabolism. Of course all the sensible diet books say NEVER to skip meals, but their explanation really resonated; I'd also heard that starvation diets make the body go into starvation mode and hang onto fat/calories. But I'd always thought that someone had to go days without eating for that to happen. Apparently not...the body can think it's starving pretty quickly.

So now I'm going from "five small meals with protein per day and I don't quite understand why but I'm going through the motions anyhow" to "five small meals with protein per day and I really GET how to recognize and interpret the feedback my body gives me."

As I was preparing for my class meeting about informal fallacies (specifically the appendix about informal fallacies in Writing Arguments), I realized that I've heard almost every one of these in the course of my duties as an administrator, specifically in the form of a grade appeal argument.

1. Student gets an F for missing fifteen class meetings. “I got an F, and I know I missed a lot of class, but I had car trouble, and then I got mono, and then I had a family emergency, and then I got a stomach virus, and then I got a sinus infection, and then I got arrested, and then I got called for jury duty.”
2. Student gets a D; got Cs/Ds/Fs on papers. “But I showed my papers to my tenth grade English teacher who's a friend of the family, and my roommate, and my sister, and my cousin, and they all think I should get an A or a B.”
3. Student gets an F. “But Mr. X is a terrible teacher! He wore the same holey black t-shirt every day and has an annoying high-pitched voice.”
4. Student gets a D. “But I got an A as my interim grade and a B on the first paper.”
5. Student gets a D. “But I came to class every day.”
6. Student gets a C. “But my dad is a professor at this school.”
7. Student: “Hello, I need to talk to you. I got an F in my 101 class, and my teacher is the worst teacher I've ever had in my life...”
8. Student gets a C. “But I should have gotten an A because I did outstanding work in the class.”
9. Student gets a C. “But I always got As on my papers in high school.”
10. Student gets an F. “But I'll lose my TOPS!”

Obviously there are legitimate arguments to be made in grade appeal cases, but these are not among them. Their next assignment is a definition argument, so I think it might be interesting to tie these two activities together. A successful grade appeal argument would persuade the administration that the teacher engaged in "arbitrary and capricious grading" and would argue that according to the program standards and outcomes and course policies, the student deserves a different grade. And, of course, any time a teacher gives a grade to a student's work, that is a definition argument (placing the work in a category according to the criteria of that category).