Fran Magazine: Issue #93

Notes on teaching

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A note on socials

I’ve stopped plugging Twitter at the start of Fran Magazine, as “increasing my audience” doesn’t make much sense to me now that I have stopped posting on the site. My account will stay up and if there’s, like, some crazy news about something that I feel I need “announce” then I guess that can happen there, but for the time being, I no longer feel the need to use that main account to do anything but occasionally scroll through for news. I am sick of its janky and failing UX, and I am sick of how much evil¹ I am exposed to on a regular basis. You can always quit anything, and as I wrote last year, when it’s time to go, I’ll know it then and no sooner! In the meantime, I’ve unlocked my Instagram on the hope that everyone decides to behave themselves on there. Assume that if I write anything of note, you’ll hear about it here or there.

And another note on that

Fran Magazine has also quit watching True Detective: Night Country. I know we all like Sunday night HBO programming and we’re all happy for “this era” of Jodie Foster, but this is just stupid, cruel programming. The posts about it aren’t even that good!

Two second Maestro moment

The Maestro promotion has crossed the pond, and here is Bradley Cooper explaining his obsession with taking women to the hospital on Graham Norton. I have no great affection for Poor Things, but if you are looking for other great clips from this year’s Oscar hopefuls on Graham Norton, please enjoy Emma Stone explaining how to say “bottle.”

Back to school

When I solicited writing topics back in the fall,

wig-wag inc.

sent me the following:

would love to read anything you have to say about teaching, and balancing teaching and writing — as a teacher myself, i'm always looking for different voices on this struggle/challenge/fun little thing we decided to do :)

I enrolled in an ESL teaching course through my university, because the longer I teach there, the more tuition waiver credits I get, and I want to put those to use in the same way I think everyone should put their maximum PTO to use. It’s your labor — you might as well take what you want for free. I can thankfully be certified in ESL teaching for the cost of $0 so long as I continued to be part-time faculty, which is a nice boon. Since I started teaching back in 2019, every single one of my classes has had a majority of students who know English as their second (or even third or fourth) language. There’s a real variety of ability and fluency; I have students who learned English as children and speak with native speaker fluency and I have students who are still actively translating what I’m saying as I say it in the classroom, who funnel questions through a smartphone translator so we can communicate effectively.

I’ve spent the last couple of years committed to meeting those students halfway when it comes to discussions and writing, which is to say that I conform my understanding of what I believe they’re saying to me rather than make them work harder to make themselves comprehensible. I don’t think this is the wrong thing to do — it’s just that I find myself lacking in the language to begin to explain what might be wrong about what’s being articulated, and it feels as though it would be frustrating for both of us to try to muscle through that rather than make what we have work as best we can.

I was surprised, in turn, that my first class in the ESL program — which is less of a pedagogical “teaching methods” class and more on the phonetic structure of English — was mostly about that sense of frustration, that learning another language is a frequently infuriating thing to do, and how to avoid that anger and resistance that can come from teaching something that feels unnatural. We broke down syllable emphasis and their associated rules (e.g. CONduct [noun] vs. conDUCT [verb], or FIFty vs. fifTEEN) — which is considered an easier way to start teaching English than going over consonant and vowel sounds. If you can pat out the rhythms or words and phrases, hopefully you can plug in the sounds. We explored this through really basic motions and vocalizations — clapping, going LA la LA or la LA la — when one of my peers asked why were weren’t just teaching the definition of “syllable” to the imaginary students.

I don’t really know what I am doing when I am doing it, only when I am on the other side of it. Though I’ve been teaching for about five years now, I always feel like I am learning to do it for the first time with the start of each subsequent semester. It’s only when I’m a student alongside being a teacher that I start to understand the value in some aspects of teaching — the pacing of a class, building of trust between peers and peers and peers and faculty, how to make sure that everyone is on the same page. At the end of last semester, my students asked that my co-teacher² and I delve into our teaching strategies and our general “artist’s mentality” — kind of hefty thing to consider, let alone present aloud.

I didn’t always like being a student, but I really liked being a student in undergrad because I went to one of those hippie liberal arts colleges that didn’t have any general education classes³ so I got to take what I wanted when I wanted, with the only barrier to entry being class size.⁴ Because the general philosophy pushed students towards pursuing interests and curiosity, I never felt like we were inundated with busywork. Everything felt cumulative, and outside of foreign language classes were there is a lot of worksheet-based homework, most of my assignments were long-form, written work⁵ that was intended to build onto itself. There was always a lot of nonsense about the joy of learning and the passion of discovery and an emphasis on curiosity. These were all well and good, and they were informed by the work that we were doing.

I think the most jarring thing about teaching when I first started out was that I couldn’t just apply liberal arts mentality to any and every classroom. Sometimes that’s just not practical. It took me longer than it should to come to realizes the level of privilege I had in my education — that it was relatively okay for me to study something not immediately profitable, that I was not required to support my family with my education, that I had the flexibility to pursue intellectual passions for the sake of it and not because there was something really at stake in my higher education. My students often don’t have that privilege; many of my undergrads came from working class backgrounds, living at home and doing school part-time so they could work. My masters students vary a little more — some of them are doing art for art’s sake, but many of them are trying to make deliberate jumps and shifts in their technical work so they can pivot in their careers or sell a device/app/program. They are in school to do something; they are not in school to be in school.

For a while I caved to a type of pedagogical regiment that I don’t really like: reading checks, pop quizzes⁶, cold-calling in class. No one was learning that way either, and I suddenly had twice as much grading work to do. It took time to develop the philosophy I use now: regular assignments, graded all but the final for completion, with open doorways for feedback and improvement. Students are encouraged to pursue individualized interests — easier at a masters level, where everyone is doing their own thing, than undergrad, but with those students, I would create projects that required them to choose a topic/book/story of individualized study — and present them in a way that encourages comprehensibility.

In language learning, we talk about the differences between intelligibility (straight up understanding) and comprehensibility (ease of understanding), and while the former often takes precedence on paper, it’s the latter that makes the most sense in order to move through the world. The reason we don’t outright teach the definition of “syllable” to new English speakers is that it’s not really relevant for them to understanding what a syllable is so long as they understand what it feels like. Learning is always frustrating, but the goal is not to over-complicate for sake of “rightness” or box ticking.

When I talked to my students about my “artistic process,” I talked about how the number one thing I do not want to ever be doing is wasting my time, and the number one thing I do not want them to be doing on behalf of me is wasting their time. I don’t want to take a low-paying, unrewarding assignment. I don’t want to be grading needless homework. In turn, I want their work to feel cumulative and responsive, not punitive or otherwise obligatory. My students need to be doing routine documentation in order to build evidence for their process — this can take the form of a number of things: response paper, process diary, Instagram photodump (with details). What wastes time is boundless frustration, emphasizing a tedious and rigid correctness, rather than seeking out the most interesting and doable parts of learning. In my experience, both as a student and as a teacher, the rest of this stuff often fills itself — curiosity gets the better of the learner, you seek context, clarification, detail.

To answer the question above — I get almost no generative writing done during the semester that isn’t immediately for pay, which is frustrating, obviously, because I love to do generative writing for no pay, but I do often get a lot of editing and rewriting done for my own personal work. I find that hearing myself explain things in the classroom, putting emphasis on comprehension and curiosity and humor, makes it easier for me to look at something I’ve said in the past and think about how to say it better: not smarter, not more “interestingly,” but with increased clarity of thought and compassionate intention, and in a way that makes a reader want to keep going.

1. I don’t know why but the video of Mayim Bialik laughing at the unfunny comedian doing a tight five on genocide tipped something over the edge, though I’d long stopped tweeting prior to that. I think there has been a significant shift in bearing witness to active evil into bearing witness to gloating about evil that feels algorithmically encouraged. That’s not really a new phenomenon, but it does feel unforgivably craven in a way where that becomes what I have to look away from when I look away.

2. I teach writing in a non-writing, design and technology program, and so I am usually paired with a faculty member who has a background in studio art and/or computer science.

3. This is a lie: we had to fulfill PE requirements (!) and foreign language requirements, as these were deemed more universally applicable than, say, math or biology or English or history for those not in those programs. I’m biased, but this does feel like a better alternative to the traditional gen ed route.

4. English classes were so popular in my undergrad that I wasn’t really able to start on my major until halfway through my sophomore year, which is how I managed to double major in History (as well as fulfill a lot of music history and theater classes).

5. A visiting professor my sophomore year assigned a multiple choice exam for which the class average was a C-… Probably the most damning indicator of being told “everything is arguable” at an academic level.

6. My brother, also a teacher for a while, called me a cop for doing this.