REFLECTIVE WRITING CHALLENGE 7X7X25 The Professional Development Committee invited faculty and staff to create blogs with a total of 7 pieces of writing, over the span of 7 weeks with 25 sentences or more. These blog postings are about teaching, learning, and student success. The short term goal of the challenge is to give staff, administrators, and faculty a playful space to share and learn and to see what colleagues are doing in classes and on campus. The long term goal of the 7 x 7 x 25 Challenge is to push teachers, staff and administrators to be reflective practitioners in the field of education and share their reflections with colleagues. While the seven weeks of writing may be a start, we hope that some of the participants will continue to write and share their thoughts about the educational landscape. Credits: The writing challenge was originally conceived by Todd Conway at Yavapai College and curated for Foothill by Carolyn Holcroft. List of Participants Benjamin Armerding Oudia Mathis Ashley Bowden Richard Morasci Falk Cammin Patrick Morriss Patti Chan Rachel Mudge Maureen Chenoweth Jennifer Mullin Amy Edwards Teresa Ong Karen Erickson Kathy Perino Valerie Fong Jennifer Sinclair Katie Ha Mary Thomas Allison Herman Stephanie Tran Carolyn Holcroft Nick Tuttle Kate Jordahl Charles Witschorik Eric Kuehnl Bill Ziegenhorn Scott Lankford Teresa Zwack Benjamin Armerding Language Arts: English Week 1: January 2, 2015 WORDS There’s this story about Wittgenstein in the trench warfare of WWI. Supposedly, he sat down in the middle of no man’s land, bullets flying over his head, and started scribbling in a notebook. His platoon was flummoxed. When they later demanded an explanation he said he realized he was having, in that moment, the most important thoughts of his life and had to write them down so he wouldn’t forget. I don’t know if that story is true, but what he was writing came to be known as Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus, regarded not only as some of his most important thoughts, but also one of the most important contributions to the discipline of philosophy. There is one idea from its preface that I almost always share with my students: the outermost edge of language is the outermost edge of expressible thought; whatever falls on the other side of that edge is nonsense. In class, this is supposed to turn into an interesting debate about the imprecision of language or linguistic determinism, but where it often ends with my students is at a question of their own vocabularies. They wonder if the outermost edge of their own language, is also the outermost edge of their own thoughts. If their own expression and articulation of ideas is governed by the words that they know. Are there thoughts they cannot easily express (or even access at all) if they don’t have the words for those thoughts? Across the college, many of our disciplines are networks of key terms; so, as students learn our vocabularies, they also learn our ways of knowing. They start to say things like “social contract” and “eigenvalue” and “identity,” and these words, if they are not only jargon, uncover an entire world of ideas – they push that outermost edge by another inch. I’m remembering my first year at Las Positas College. At some point, in one of my critical thinking courses, the instructor was using the word “presupposition.” I’m sure I had heard the word, and read it, but I very clearly recall the first moment I used the word for myself, and understood its meaning, and meant its meaning. And it wasn’t simply that I had added a new entry to my lexicon; the word actually gave me a new way of looking at debates, and the ways people dismiss one another before they even begin to speak. In arguments, many of us presuppose we are already right, and presuppose the other is already wrong. We do this even to the extent that if someone says something compelling we will already presuppose there is a sufficient response that we just haven’t heard yet. So the word itself, in its very existence, taught me this critical move – taught me to understand my interlocutor’s presuppositions and to especially recognize my own. Only then could we really begin the work of persuading each other. So, what words are we teaching to our students? And do we teach those words in such a way that they open up whole new worlds of thoughts, new vistas from which students might see previously unseen ideas? Week 2: January 18, 2015 FEAR A few years ago I got an email from a student that made the hair on my neck stand on edge. Sometimes lessons lead to odd conversations, so while I hadn’t quite planned it, students were asking about the ethics of torture. It had been in the news that week. I wasn’t too surprised, didn’t think much of it, until I opened my email that afternoon and read through a veteran student’s harrowing experience in Iraq. He said the small group discussion from that morning had made him nauseous, made him shut up, made him feel like he wasn’t allowed to speak. His fellow students were insistent that torture, in all cases, was reprehensible, yet he, a war veteran sitting among them, had participated in some of the very behaviors they condemned as immoral. He emailed me later, saying that none of his classmates could possibly know what it was like to watch a close friend die in front of their eyes from an IED. None of them could actually know what they might do if the bomb builder was then in their hands… in a secluded room of a base. But there he was, sitting in the classroom, in our ivory tower, listening to us all debate abstractions that were for him realities, that were his own memories, and he felt he couldn’t speak. In so doing, he would have subjected himself to the moral judgements of his peers. In another class, a student told me about the effects of her PTSD. It was her first day of college so, being diligent, she sat in the front. As the rows filled in behind her, she panicked. Too many people were at her back. Once I called roll she immediately left and from that day forward always sat in the far corner, “near the exits.” Another student told me he didn’t know why, but when we were talking about thesis statements, he started having flashbacks from the war. That was why he had left early. And these hidden fears are not exclusively experienced by our veterans. Not too long ago, an athlete student confided in me that she almost never admitted to her teachers that she was an athlete as this information might elicit their prejudice – maybe she’s a cheater? There was that article about athletes cheating in an ethics course at Dartmouth not too long ago. I bring up these stories because they remind us that we frequently don’t know the range of life experiences that are brought through the door by those fifty people in the classroom. And while I don’t think this should prevent us from including challenging materials in our curricula, I am curious to learn ways that we might give our students opportunities to process their fears. Perhaps our coursework can allow for reflection, catharsis, and recovery, and ultimately allow our students to effect change through their own voice. Week 3: January 24, 2015 DIFFICULTY Students avoid it. We all do, even as teachers. What is difficult is not attractive. And yet, if we admit it, difficulty is often there in our favorite memories, in the challenges, the surmounted tasks, the laughter after tragedies. I remember being a student (who am I kidding, I do this now, did this earlier today), when I would “skim” through difficult passages in the readings my teachers assigned. I would dodge such moments even though these difficult places were often the exact locations where I could perform the most learning. They were gaps. So why not try filling them in? This is why I am interested in the Difficulty Paper. The concept of the assignment comes from Salvatori and Donahue’s “The Elements (and Pleasures) of Difficulty” and, as I understand it, is built in a series of core steps: 1. What is most difficult about this text/problem? Why is this difficult? 2. How will you attempt to resolve this difficulty? Why will this plan work? 3. Attempt to resolve your difficulty. 4. What did you learn? Obviously, any teacher should add and subtract from these steps in whatever way is appropriate, but really, I’m curious to know how this particular assignment would translate into other disciplines outside of the Literature classroom in which is was invented. For me it is without a doubt my favorite student work to read. I enjoy it so much I almost can’t even grade the prose. So if you start doing it in your math classes, your biology classes, your physics classes, please send along some your students’ work. I’d love to see it. In my own class a student reflected on his Difficulty Paper, writing, As class goes further, the prompts become more self-guided and open-ended, which poses a challenge by itself. This prompt was specifically hard since it flows unnaturally and against intuition: usually we try to avoid difficulties, but in this case it was necessary to face it directly.