Y'all are the best!

I once again count myself fortunate to learn with such talented and creative teachers. I appreciate all the seeds you've planted-- my classes next year will benefit.

Have a terrific summer and school year. We'll hopefully see you all next year.

Onward!

Yeah, but can you put it on a Scantron?

Moreover, I propose that we draw on our familiarity with rhetorical tropes--and specifically with the tropes of metaphor and metonymy--to provide us with a language with which to talk to our students about the effectiveness of their work. (Madeleine Sorapure)

I found Sorapure's thoughts on assessment to be interesting and original: I would have never thought of utilizing metaphor and metonymy as tools of assessment. Although I'm still wrapping my head around it, I like the creation of a brand-new language of assessment to address brand-new media types.

Following in Sorapure's footsteps, I will now play in this newly discovered assessment space by "grading" the digital collage Elissa and I created. Scot, feel free to use this in the tabulation of my final grade (Elissa might disagree with this idea, however).

by Elissa and Jeff

This image works by employing a central metaphor (and a play on words): composition as composting (as in reusing and re-employing organic material), or decomposition (again making a metaphoric connection between organic decay/rebirth and writing). This is a strong, unique metaphor (and, to give credit where credit is due, a metaphor that was Elissa's brainchild). As strong metaphors do, this relates two unlikely conceptual elements. By making composting/decomposition as the vehicle for illuminating the writing process, this metaphor allows the audience to consider the organic implications of writing. That this piece was composed using digital technology only highlights the connections and disconnections between the organic act of creation and the technologies required to foster this creation.

There are some metonymic connections made, mostly relating to the central metaphor. The writing being produced by the image in the digital collage is a garden. A beautiful, ordered garden is metonymically related to the finished piece of writing. Likewise, images depicting the process of composting are metonymically related to the manner in which a writer makes use of all his or her experiences and influences.

The metonymic connections in this piece, however, are fairly limited in scope, and are all directly related to the central metaphor. Metonymy, here, is used to reinforce and not re-imagine. A bolder, more visionary use of metonymy may have provided this piece with more depth.

An area of assessment which Sorapure for the most part neglects in her article is aesthetics. Visual images prompt an aesthetic response: this is part of the experience of viewing art. I think this digital collage would score relatively high on this scale-- it is thoughtfully composed and the contrast between color and black and white works well. However, the execution is sloppy at points, as highlighted by the chucks missing from the writer's body and the somewhat boring use of repetition in the "garden" being created by the writer.

Final grade: B+

Death of the author

Reading Howard's postmodern deconstruction of plagiarism was an interesting experience. I'm not sure I've ever heard plagiarism, that scourge of high school English classrooms, discussed in anything but negative terms. The debate about plagiarism rages on: the high school where I teach is currently in the middle of a district-wide initiative to educate about and reduce instance of plagiarism, and the district spends a good deal of money for a subscription to turnitin.com, an anti-plagiarism suite of software.

A line that caught my attention was on page 24, where Howard asserts that the "values" that are threatened in modernist views of plagiarism "surely include individuality." She states that modern society cherishes the concept of a the "true author." This strikes me as true: ours has long been a culture that has elevated the sanctity of the individual.

But maybe this is starting to change. Howard's book was published in 1999, prior to "Web 2.0." Her talk of students purchasing term papers seems almost quaint in this era of the internet's free-for-all of recycled essays, file-sharing sites, and, of course, Wikipedia (another scourge of high school classrooms). I wonder if, amidst all this unfettered access to information, the concepts of true authorship and the attendant values of individuality and autonomy are starting to wane. Writing, at least outside of the classroom, is becoming increasingly more collaborative, as we saw in Jenkins's chapter "Why Heater Can Write." In a Times article about digital literacy, Motoko Rich describes how on-line fan fiction, wildly popular, in particular among teenage girls, differs from modernist views of true authorship. Rich writes about Nadia, an enthusiastic on-line author:

Nadia said she preferred reading stories online because “you could add your own character and twist it the way you want it to be. So like in the book somebody could die but you could make it so that person doesn’t die or make it so like somebody else dies who you don’t like.”

Clearly, in this paradigm, writing and reading are collaborative efforts and authorship a shared phenomenon. The individual writer doesn't matter so much as the shared text. If Nadia tweaks the ending to a story, rescuing one character while dooming another, does the story become hers? Is she a "true author," or is she plagiarizing the work of the first writer to post the story? And if the whole story is based on Harry Potter or Twilight or a manga series, who is the author in the first place?

It's confusing and resistant to easy classification and definition, which seems to be a major point Howard is trying to make. But one thing seems clear to me: increasingly, the students entering our classrooms are going to have a different understanding of authorship, autonomy, and individualism than we as teachers do.