1. Jeremy S Grace
Philosophy of Teaching and Learning
When I enter a new classroom one of the first activities I do, other than mispronouncing a few students’
names, is ask for everyone to pull out his or her cell phone and read a text message. Having just heard my zero
tolerance policy towards such devices, the students look at me with suspicion. “It’s not a trap,” I say. “Go ahead.” Sure
enough their pockets empty, and twenty miniature screens burst with color. Because this is the first day after all,
because everyone is still the teacher’s pet at this point, a row of hands sprout and someone offers a generic text
message: K, should I meet you 4 lunch?
Banal, mundane, maybe, but it gets the job done. It allows me to show them that what we do in this class is
neither restricted to a thousand word essay nor an hour-and-a-half meeting. Writing is everywhere; it is the graphic
novels they read and the rap reverberating out their dorms; it is the cover letters and resumes they’ll bring into
interviews; it is the Facebook comments they post and the tweets they hashtag nightly; it is the films they watch every
weekend with their significant others, and it is within the speech memorized, recited while proposing to that same
special someone. Essentially, the world is a text and everything from K, should I meet you 4 lunch to Anna Karenina was
made with the same purpose: to connect with a reader, a listener, another person. For even in a simple text, a student
embraces the rhetoric roles of writer, reader, and topic.
Through the sheer act of putting pen to paper, or fingers to keyboard, the student, rather obviously, fulfills the
role of writer. Choosing the abbreviated “K” to stand in for “okay,” the numerical “4” over the prepositional “for,” are
colloquial choices, conscious choices the writer has made as his or her own reader. They are options designed to gear
this message to a friend, a sister, someone close rather than an acquaintance or superior. And even if a million students
asked a million friends to lunch, we’d still get a million and one different text messages because the individual contexts
and backgrounds, biases and ideals influencing their syntax and thoughts are distinct, singular, unique to them and
them alone. They inhabit their topic in a way no one else can. Showing such rhetorical machinations behind a simple,
seven-word invite is quite a paradigm shift for my students. When that phone chirrups, they will never look at a text
the same way again. In fact, when they are done with this class, I hope they will view many mediums of connection
differently. To insure that, I pick from an eclectic catalogue of resources. For proofreading practice and grammar,
students search out the usual comma splices and pronoun-antecedent disagreements, but within Craigslist personal ads.
Revising drafts sometimes involves a Twitter exercise, where students reduce each of their paragraphs to 140
characters (the length of a tweet), then 140 words; it teaches them how to rid papers of the superfluous, while keeping
the essential. As an example of compare and contrast analysis as well as the dumbing-down of mass media, I juxtapose
their discussion of George Saunders’ “The Braindead Megaphone” with YouTube clips of John Stewart’s The Daily
Show. Students are then asked to take a quote from each for comparison.
That is not to say the traditional essay does not have its place; each of these exercises comes with a companion
from our trusty anthology. Yet what it demonstrates is that rhetoric is not limited to the pages of that anthology either.
This work in venues other than print prepares them to approach more traditional rhetorical situations as well as
enhancing their critical literacy of advertisements and information they take for granted. As a result, after completing
an introspective, personal narrative, an analytical paper, and an argumentative essay with research, their final project in
my course is something titled “Adding to a Culture.” In this assignment, they must take the skills they’ve harnessed,
and direct them towards some facet of pop culture. That facet can be a book, a piece of music, a film. Whatever
program or album chosen, they must use the rhetorical roles discussed to better analyze how that art form operates and
persuades an audience. This has yielded brave, even insightful work, including a dialogue of the hit television show
Breaking Bad as a reaction to the housing market crash of 2007 and a study of romantic comedies setting unrealistic
expectations for real relationships. Thanks to such a prompt, students must go beyond the usual, more or less
unoriginal paper topics of legalizing marijuana or lowering the drinking age.
Therefore, in making young adults mindful of the roles behind all communication, I hope to bring lone writers
into discussion with greater society, not just one text. Awareness and assessment of any writer’s intention in any
medium—this is the big picture I give my class. By the end of our first day, they are aware. By the end of the semester,
they have assessed, studied, and hopefully view their environment a little more critically. Because what could be a
better gift than sharpening critical thinking? In a celebrity-obsessed, Instagram-induced culture where eyes bounce
from hyperlink to hyperlink, the necessity for long concentration and contemplation on the written word has never
been higher. It is what I hope to give to students, so that when they are reintroduced to this world, they look at it with
a pensive, more perceptive eye.