Re: tagmemics -Reply

["Dr. Deborah Martinson" <dmartin@oxy.edu>]

Jon,
        I think one reason many faculty do not feel comfortable using the
real issues at hand to illustrate heuristics is, as an historian said at the
writing institute this last summer: "we shouldn't have to spoon feed them."
I think we sometimes don't trust students' understanding. We fear they will
"copy" our ideas wholesale, or we don't trust them to make the shift to
their own ideas. I don't mean, of course, you & me and WCenter "we." I think
that WAC faculty fear revealing too much, too simply about writing.  And
yet, that is exactly what most students need early on. Sometimes when using
a heuristic (and I think they are terrific to get students to understand
basic conventions), I have the class do one together--on a stupid topic (I
just did a thesis heuristic on cats--not that cats are in any way stupid),
then together we did one on Chompsky's thesis about language acquisition.
They made the transition smoothly. 
        We don't want them to think writing is filling in blanks; we don't
want them to get the idea that it doesn't have conventions; we don't want to
have them reduce their own creativity. So we end up half revealing and half
hiding--a kind of quarter-back sneak (I'd rather use the Gypsy Rose Lee
Metaphor, but Jon's leary of that kind of imagery!)
Debby
        




At 04:20 PM 1/20/97 -0600, you wrote:
>>>> Gail Tubbs <Gail.Tubbs@washcoll.edu>  1/20/97, 08:41am >>>
>Thanks to all who replied so generously to my question about the
>tagmemic heuristic. Now if our students will only ask us what it
>is...
>------
>Gail, you bring up an issue about which I've been thinking during
>this thread:  why don't students use heuristics more?  And maybe
>there's a related question, one I asked myself one term after I'd
>made for my first-year comp class what I thought was a splendid
>multi-page handout illustrating a bunch of nifty heuristics (the
>tagmemic grid, 5W&H, the pentad, morphological forced connections,
>and some others I've now forgotten), but nobody cared:  why do we
>teachers always seem to illustrate these heuristics with artificial
>examples rather than the real issues about which students actually
>write?  (I think of how Ira Shor uses "generative" words such as
>*hamburger* and *chair* to illustrate a strategy of liberation
>pedagogy.)
>
>Jo, I'll pick on you:  why do you use computers to illustrate
>tagmemics and not the presidential issue about which your students
>actually wrote?  When you mentioned the presidential discussion and
>how nicely tagmemics fit into it, why did you stop short of using it
>for your example?  Why is it so hard for us to use real-writing
>examples?  (I guess I'm assuming you don't ask your students to write
>about computers and Chloe doesn't ask her students to write about
>debutantes, and that may be a false assumption for me to make.)  
>
>The answer I come up with is that none of us, neither teachers nor
>students, actually use these devices the way we ideally present them.
>I'd be curious to know how many of you actually take the time to plot
>out the tagmemic grid and address all the ratios when you write.  
>
>Perhaps we need to illustrate the inventional devices with clear,
>artificial-but-complete examples so that writers can understand them
>well enough to use them in bits and pieces when they actually need
>inventional help as they write. What do you think? --Jon,
>olsonj@cla.orst.edu
>
>
>