In Apposition of English

In my ENG 621 class the other day, we (the graduate students) were presented with some of the exercises that ENG 100 students are sometimes made to do, just so, I suppose, we can get a feel not only for what kind of exericises work for the basic writing student, but to also put us in their shoes. During one of the exercises where we were to construct a paragraph using popsicle sticks instead of words, we were told to include such things as introductory phrases, complete sentences, exclamatory phrases, prepositions, commas, periods, and a couple of appositives. That last one brought about what could only be described as a cloud of confusion for some of the graduate students. Listening closely, one could hear many murmuring voices asking each other, back and forth, "What's an appositive?" Myself included.

This brought up an issue for me. How can we expect a basic writing student to understand and point out such things as an appositive in a sentence when it would seem some (or maybe most) graduate students could not do the same thing?

Yet, for myself as least, once I was able to get home and look up the definition for the word, I found out that, yes, I did know what an appositive was, I had just never heard of it being called an appositive before. In fact, I had never heard any technical word for it before.

Here's what www.dictionary.com has listed for "apposition" (since appositive only means the use of an apposition) - "a syntactic relation between expressions, usually consecutive, that have the same function and the same relation to other elements in the sentence, the second expression identifying or supplementing the first. In Washington, our first president, the phrase our first president is in apposition with Washington."

Since that class period, I've been wondering about the use of technical jargon that we sometimes feel we have to use to talk about these conecepts of grammar and language. Or, more precisely, should we be using this technical jargon at all? I can only imagine the frustration that a basic writer must feel when being told to find an appositive (or any other fancy technical mumbo-jumbo) in a sentence, when some graduate English students have trouble finding it too. But what can be done? Should we start teaching this technical grammatical jargon in early childhood so first graders can go home spouting about the proper use of a prepostional phrase or active versus passive voice in the book See Spot Run? Or should we be more apt as teachers to spell out what these words mean, to give the student a graphic representation of what these words stand for so that they can make the connection themselves between these fancy words and their real-life applications to the their writing?

Catering to the Interests of the Students...

I had a really good class period today. Well, maybe I should re-phrase that: I had what felt like a good class period today, whether it was or not. For some reason, whether it be this strange bout of flu that is taking over the campus or just sheer laziness, only a little over half of my class showed up today, the day before their first drafts of the Critical Analysis is due. And I know that the Critical Analysis (along with the articles from The Presence of Others that they are supposed to be analyzing) is the least favorite of all papers they are doing this semester, but come on. So, as kind of a reward to the students that did show up (and to myself), I gave these students the option of writing a different kind of Critical Analysis: they could analyze a movie instead. Any movie would be fine as long as they actually analyzed it and didn't write a paper that just told me why they like this movie so much. The students really seemed to come alive (which I've found to be VERY rare for an 8:00 am class), and had all kinds of questions about how they could tackle this, as well as suggestions on how to approach watching their movie without bias so they could get an accurate analysis of it. It felt great to not have to give direction to the class, but to rather take a position more akin to a springboard for their ideas. And their excitement about doing this project also excited me for them (if that makes sense). I really enjoyed the class and felt like I might get some papers with a little more personality in them now.

Presence of ..... What?

I initially thought I would post on here about being ambivalent to whether we kept The Presence of Others book for next semester or not. After all, the few stories that I have used out of that book I have made extensive notes on and feel like I wouldn't have to worry too much about making a new lesson plan or spending hours preparing for class because I already have done all the leg-work necessary on those stories and feel comfortable using them. But, really, I only use TPOO book for the Critical Analysis paper. I didn't find it too useful for any of the other papers, so I basically just made copies of stories, articles or essays that I found to be more conducive to the way I teach. Last semester I relied on TPOO book for the Memoir, but I have definitely found the Composing Ourselves book to be way more suited for the way I want to teach the Memoir, by letting them experience REAL student Memoirs.

Of course, like any person who hasn't done their homework before they post, I have no suggestions about using a different text for this coming Fall, but I would love to see more of what options there are out there.

Is it too much to ask that, finally, someone would publish a Freshman Composition text that would actually deal specifically with the types of writing we are asking these students to do for us, and also do a little entertaining as well??? There are plenty of articles/essays that might actually work for multiple purposes in TPOO, but they fail to keep my attention at even the most basic level, so why would I expect my students to have some real, in-depth, commentary on said articles/essays???