Thanks! I’m flattered to be doing better than one of your profs. :)

Oh, yeah, I’ve been through critique sessions like you describe. One of the most toxic things for a workshop class is any uncertainty about how the grading is done (or in fact, maybe it’s a feature of grading in general): it seems to contribute to a mood where cutting down something, or kissing ass, is the purpose of crit.

(And when you have people who fancy themselves hip to postmodernity and theory, the potential for time-wasted frontin’ and maxin’ with quotes and buzzwords from Derrida and Foucault and Spivak just goes up. I think, indeed, this also serves a second, hidden function: it distracts everyone from fundamentally boring and mediocre student writing samples which are sadly all too common in creative writing courses!)

I should stress, though, that I think group crit probably works somewhat differently in a classroom where everyone is (a) writing, and (b) critiquing, in a foreign language.

This simple fact can do stunning things in terms of leveling the playing field, even: a lot of students with really great spoken English write how they speak (slang included); sometimes the ones who speak less well write better than them, because they’re taking less for granted, and they’re really putting the time in on proofreading, editing, and rewriting.

I definitely agree that anytime you’re pushing students to experiment or explore, there has to be an atmosphere of safety. But I also find that there’s a bad effect when too much writing is held in private confidence: kids get to assuming that’s natural (when it isn’t) and they develop a hypersentivity about it.

Given the risk-averse tendencies of so many Korean students of English, one reinforced both by education and culture, I find this really hampers development.

(If making no mistakes if your top priority, you can’t learn by doing, because doing involves far too much risk of making mistakes. Which is why I SO wish middle school teachers would stop *punishing* kids for wrong answers on exams and so on.)

The long and the short of it is: the classroom needs to be a safe environment, where students can both explore and experiment, but also where students can be reminded of the fundamentals that their peers see clearly need to be mastered. Striking the balance is a bit like spinning multiple plates on long sticks.

(UPDATE: By the way, I just realized you’re not the Steph I thought you were at first. [Unless you are?] So if the sudden referencing of Creative Writing programs, as opposed to traditional academic comp programs, was a jolt, then I apologize!)

It really is best to keep it private and want students to experiment and explore without fear of targeted embarrassment.

Thanks! Yeah, non-credit courses are so hard! Luckily, I don’t face that.

And yeah, the template thing works well when you have students write up a text, then submit a copy to you (as teacher) and a exchange their second copies with a randomly classmate. Then have them write a contrarian response that (a) frames the original argument, and (b) points out what’s wrong with it.

(This also works for other moves like amplifying a claim, expanding on an argument, clarifying a point missed by the other author, and so on.)

Not only is the practice as summarizing or paraphrasing others’ words useful, but it also gives them a chance to practice specific argumentative postures one by one.

(The hard part being when they have to disagree with an argument with which, in real life, they utterly agree. But that’s good for them too, I think.)

My biggest struggle is getting students to actually write. I have non-credit courses, so homework is so rarely completed. I can see the above working nicely during a class session (or multiple sessions) given two papers with competing claims.

Dan

Yeah, all I can say is that even people who have gone through the same system or schooling can emerge with reading styles as disparate as yours and his.

(I come in somewhere in between, maybe, though closer to your side. I can’t shut off the subtext-analyzer at will, but it sometimes gets preempted by “Wheeeeeeeee!” And sometimes, I feel put off when I feel like an author is almost prompting me to read a book this way. (As some of the Adam Roberts books I’ve read seemed to me to be doing. I think he’s a hell of a writer, but he tugs me towards litcrit a little to much for me to stay in the “Whee!” zone.)

FWIW, as much as I know about literary studies, yours is the more common background, and Dan’s is more unusual. Most of the lit classes I took at two very different universities involved a lot of group discussion with the prof, if not first among equals, then at least as a kind of safari guide who expected us to run off and chase animals out of the bush ourselves. Even my intro English Lit class was like that. And that’s certainly how I teach Lit when I do, here.

(Of interest: one of my students in my Lit course this past semester is a Korean Lit major, and she confessed to me she’d never studied Lit this way. It was always about being told what the symbols mean, definitively, by a professor, and committing the accepted analyses to memory for exams. She said when she becomes a prof, she wants to teach Korean way along the lines of how I taught the Can Lit course. I was pretty moved by that.)

Okay, this is fascinating enough that I may have to pick up that book even though I’m not teaching. It’s also significant because it ties in to a long-running — eh, not argument exactly, but confusion, between me and Dan. We both majored in English but the ways we were taught criticism are so different that I sometimes wonder if it didn’t come from a different planet. I was taught to take apart a work, look at what was being said and implied and assumed, and then discuss it; the professor was merely first among equals in the discussion (yay, tiny liberal arts colleges.) Dan had what I suppose is a more standard background, where “criticism” meant fancy techniques to dissect a work. You were taught techniques by the professor, applied them, and then were told where you were right and where you were wrong. (The one he’s mentioned that I remember was something about taking a single word, and then looking at the words on either side of it and analyzing them, and then looking at the next words out and analyzing them… it sounded kinda retarded, frankly.)

The result is that I analyze books all the time, to the point of it being a subconcious thing, and he never does. This drives us both a little crazy, him because I insist on ripping apart silly sci-fi books that frankly weren’t meant for it, me because he doesn’t SEE what I do (there’s at least one series that he enjoys ’cause it’s fun and I can’t stand for purely subtext reasons.)

No big, I suppose, and he did come out of college with a perfectly good grasp of writing and grammar, so I suppose it wasn’t a wasted four years. It’s just that I came out of a very similar program with so much more, and without a bad attitude towards academic criticism, besides. It seems a pity.