I knew I would have to write about this article as soon as I saw the words “Collecting Money Toilet” in the text. Let me just say that there are a LOT of pictures of Americans posing beside pay toilets in foreign countries out there on the internet…second only to posing next to the Leaning Tower of Pisa as if holding it up is the American clutching his/her crotch beside a public pay toilet in a foreign land.
It seems to me that essentially, Lu’s argument in the article “An Essay on the Work of Composition: Composing English against the Order of Fast Capitalism” boils down to understanding. I really enjoyed this article, and am very much looking forward to our discussion in class on Monday.
Attention to the interplay between and across one’s language expertise, affiliation, and inheritance, along with attention to individual writers’ understandings of different aspects of their selves and lives, can help us interpret and depict one another’s discursive resources (and by extension, language needs) in terms of not only the “actual” (lived experiences) but also the “possible” (possibilities and prospects) and the “imagined” (desire, hope aspiration), so that we may represent one another’s actions as grounded in the realities of our lives but never predetermined by them. (36)
While the tools at my disposal here at TCU as a graduate instructor are greater than I have encountered in other places, I am frustrated that in my dealings with international students, I seem to have only two: the mallet and the hoop. The mallet is what I am expected to use in banging “how to write correctly” into the heads of my students and the hoop is what I hold and expect the students to jump through to get out of my class. It seems that so many of my international students see Intro to Comp as a hoop (flaming or otherwise) they have to jump through in order to get through school – and I’m sure that non-international students see it that way as well. My exposure to how to successfully teach international students how to write has been limited to my discussions with Gabby (and I feel damn lucky to have those, because really, where in Gabby’s job description does it say, “Educate Laura on how to teach folks not from around here”??). As awesome as her help has been, I still feel that this is an area of my teaching that is woefully lacking.
Thus, I have no idea about what my international students’ “actual,” “possible,” or “imagined” discursive resources are – and I really don’t know how to go about finding out. This bothers me – a LOT.
We have been trained to demarcate the world into Developed, Developing, Underdeveloped, Undeveloped pockets, cultures, and peoples and to see jiaos between Us and Them strictly in terms of the Aid We grant to the Development (of Knowledge, Technology, the Market Economy, Democracy) of others rather than also how Our Aid helps stunt Their life opportunities in the name of Development. (46)
This really strikes a chord for me – and she goes on to write about how we as a culture want the “quick fixes” for problems, another problem that drives me nuts. So many of my students want to know “what do I do to this paper to make it an A paper?” and I want to just shake them and say, “What about the excitement of discovery through writing? What about the paper that helps you see the world in a different way as you write it? What about the paper that simply cannot, no matter what, become an A paper?” This response, however, would likely get me trotted off campus very rapidly, and my SPOTS would be horrible, I’m quite sure.
Sometimes it feels as if I am supposed to fold my students up to fit into a particular envelope, or to become a specific piece of origami artwork (perhaps an origami of a McDonald’s sign). Whether the student is international or not, I sometimes feel that they (students, parents of the students, public in general) expect me as Composition Teacher to provide students with a set formula for How To Do This Writing Thing Right. But what’s right? And who is the final arbiter of Right?
Interconnectedness is something that is massively important to the world today, and through Lu’s article, I’m now thinking about interconnectedness as it relates to language…which is a new idea for me.
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*Wondering why I’m addled, and why the picture of Rocky and Bullwinkle? It’s because I discovered one of the two characters in the picture above in my bathroom last night as I got ready to retire. Discovering an outdoor animal in one’s indoor space is a bit discombobulating, and I fear my work has suffered for it today. Fortunately, the critter paddling about in my toilet wasn’t armed and dangerous like these guys:
