the polysyllabic spree

Minimalsim. I feel that anything worth saying should be able to be said with the fewest words possible. I know that most people would think that this is just plain laziness. But I believe that when you limit the number of words you use to say something you will choose how you say what you say more carefully. This can have the powerful effect of giving your message more currency.
One of my favorite authors, Ernest Hemingway, is typically classified as having a very minimalist style. Ezra Pound’s poem In a station of the Metro (the only poem by pound that I like or even understand) is the prime example of minimalism

IN A STATION OF THE METRO

The apparition of these faces in the crowd;
Petals on a wet, black bough.

What I really appreciate about Minimalism is the conversation that is implied between author and reader. What I mean by this is that there are “fill in the blanks” in minimalist writing that the reader needs to interpret. The true value if I was going to use this kind of “genre” in a classroom for reading, or writing would be the potential for discourse.
In our class discussion about the possible genres you could use in multi-genre writing projects, Professor Rozema presented the micro-story option. The three stories that we read inspired discussion that lasted for about 45 minutes. Aside from the great time eater potential when reading this “genre,” I believe that it offers real potential for student writing. If students are told that the have to tell a story using only 250 to 300 words, they will be forced to think about the most economic way to communicate a meaningful vignette.

It is becoming pretty evident to me that as a perspective secondary-educator, I will need to become more than familiar with technology in the classroom. I will need to embrace technology and run away to Vegas and elope with technology. Well, I probably won’t have to go that far, but I will need it.
The Grand Valley Technology Fair, while intended as a forum for the GVSU faculty to share ways to implement technology in the classroom was still a fruitful experience for students preparing to enter the wonderful career of education. Now, because I happen to have already obtained my B.S. in Literature I tend to think of my self as a kind of purist. Meaning, I would prefer to be alone with a text and critical journal. This kind of thinking would probably turn off a huge population of my students.
Most of the exhibits at the fair were designed by math, and science departments. I tend to feel ill when thinking about equations and numbers in general, so I shied away from those presentations. The library happened to be there, and even though they were presenting much of the information that I was already familiar with they did have information on a program that I found very exciting, ebrary. This program works kind of like the libraries database search. Some of the differences make this a much more versatile tool. The ability to create a “personal bookshelf” that saves documents that are reviewing is one of the less useful applications, but what is useful is that you can highlight passages in the text using ebrary and the highlights will be saved when you save the document. The program also allows the user to do so a word or phrase search within the document you are perusing. The coolest thing about this program is that you can copy from the document you are viewing, paste it to one that you are writing, and it will cite the source for you!! There were problems that I had using the program that really limited potential uses in a classroom. The first problem was that I wasn’t able to use all of the applications from my home computer because it wasn’t, “connected to the libraries network.” Hopefully this is just a minor or technical problem because I would really love to be able to use this service at home, and if possible for my future students to be able to do so also. The second problem that I foresee will be with the limited collection that this database provides, and the poor advanced search results I received on pretty broad topics (e.g. Thomas Hardy, Moby Dick, and Shakespeare). Most of the documents in ebrary’s humanities collection are books and few journals.
I still see real potential for a high school classroom in this program. Ebrary could help alleviate some of the anxiety students have about research papers. But I am not totally convinced that the collection provided by ebrary would be worth a high school library subscribing to. On the side though I wish I had discovered this program way sooner, as it will make research for college students’ way easier.
The other two exhibits that I found useful to my ends were very similar. Shelley Schuurman was presenting on the use of e-journals within the school-of-social-work. The other was Robert Rozema’s use of blogging in the classroom. The e-journal provides an environment for student, professor, and in-class peers to interact. In an ideal e-journal situation everyone participates in the online conversation by giving genuine responses to other students’ comments. The other aspect of the e-journal, as presented by Shelley Schuurman was the ability of the student to keep a private journal (online through blackboard) that the instructor could then comment on… privately. I believe that in the particular context that Schuurman is using the e-journal (social work classrooms) this kind of “safe” writing is probably preferable. I view this kind of bubble as being a vacuum for knowledge, no information is allowed to leave or enter the forum.
Rozema’s blogging presentation presents some of its own interesting problems. The first problem that occurs in a web publication is that the student may not take things like grammar as seriously as they would when completing a traditional writing assignment. Another problem is the exact opposite of the e-journal, anyone one can access the students writing and post comments. The likelihood of this actually happening is pretty slim, but some students may be sensitive to this, and some may take advantage of it in order to terrorize other students.
The positive applications of blogging in the classroom have not gone unnoticed by me either. Blogging enables the students to direct the reader to other websites that back up arguments by the student, or that the student disagrees with. What I think students will find appealing about blogging is the ability to customize the look and readability of their writing. If given the option to choose between e-journals, and blogging… I’d have to choose blogging.
The one determinate as to whether or not I use any technology in my classroom will be my student’s accessibility to it. While it is become more common for households to have a computer and internet access, there are still households that do not. At the same time the school I work for may end up having an excellent computer to student ratio, in which case I would be able to block time for the students to work on projects in class. I do not anticipate either access at home, or school to continue to be a problem for very long. It is likely that student’s access to technology will only increase.

I began reading Tom Romano’s Blending Genre Altering Style, and I’ll readily admit that I’m excited about its implications. Though the round about way he goes about explaining the multi-genre pedagogy can get a little tiresome, the power of this teaching method is in its simplicity. Well maybe not simplicity, but rather its lacking complexity…
Anyway, this pedagogy allows students to go beyond the expository essay, in fact it demands that students go well beyond the trappings of the expository essay and use “narrative thinking.” In doing so students are not asked to cop-out of the research, but in fact they must do quite the opposite.
Cheryl L. Johnson and Jayne A. Moneysmith, co-wrote an article based upon Romano’s idea entitled Multiple Voices, Multiple Genres Teaching Argument in Composition and Literature. In their paper, they found that the Multiple Voiced Argument (the term they use for multi-genre) “is far more engaging.”
Some of the broader applications I see through this method is that I could hypothetically teach several genres (perhaps in mini lessons) and have my students write in these several genres, but all focused on one topic (chosen by the student).
I did heed some of the cautions that Romano pointed out, the most important being that students will need to have a clear idea about which topics may not work for this method, and that students may need to work with the arrangement of the pieces in the overall collaboration.
The outline that Romano leaves as a real basic skeleton work of this method, doing so he has allowed for experimentation by the teacher with the pedagogy. I t would appear though one thing is paramount to teaching the multi-genre paper, modeling what a good multi-genre piece looks and reads like.