Hello, here’s a recent cover letter and CV.
CV and Cover Letter – Andrew
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Author Archives: Andrew Zolot
Accommodating Students
After listening to the podcast, my reaction is essentially: okay! I think we’re experiencing a particularly rapid change in mass consciousness with regard to a lot of important issues in the last decade, and accessibility is one of them. I think some aspects of what are being discussed are institutional and not in my control — access ramps, the red tape around getting accommodations, etc. — but what I can control is within the classroom, on the syllabus, and in my e-mails. I’m a big rubber stamp. Whether I get requests for accommodation through official avenues or direct requests from students, I just say yes. Why not?
For one thing, I tend not to have many such requests, and the most common thing disability services ask for is extra time taking tests, which doesn’t apply to my classes. On the other hand, denying requests seems pointless. The podcast brings up the idea of “faking.” I don’t believe people fake disabilities, but on the other hand I do tend to get at least 1 or 2 11th hour requests per semester for extensions vaguely citing the student’s mental health. And my response is: okay! Take more time. Who am I to doubt such a claim? What could possibly be gained if I do? I take the “better to let 100 guilty people go free than jail 1 innocent person” approach. If someone just procrastinated and decides to lie to me, so be it. They’re only hurting themselves but I’m not interested in becoming a PI.
Part of this I think has to do with my own view on classroom competitiveness that the speakers on the podcast don’t address. Actually, Kat Macfarlane makes an observation I found interesting. She says there’s angst about accommodations because students might receive an “advantage.” Her response (if I remember correctly) is that accommodations are not really advantages, they’re a necessary corrective. But I found myself wondering: what does “advantage” mean? I just don’t see my students in competition. She teaches law so maybe there’s a different culture in law schools, and I know from experience that grad students in particular often see themselves as competing with others. And of course we know undergrads who view grades as the be-all and would be upset if they thought other students’ grades didn’t represent the same “rate of exchange” for effort as their own. But I just don’t see the end point of evaluation or the learning process in terms of grades, and so I really don’t see any problem with students wanting more time, extensions, etc. There are some accommodations which I agree with Macfarlane might be beyond “reasonable” — I’ve never encountered that situation, but if for instance somebody said I had to like make a duplicate version of all course materials in some different modality, say record myself reading my syllabus and other readings, I’d probably resist. And I think there are decent technological solutions for things like that. But otherwise: okay!
The only real backstop I put on this, and it’s one I don’t see discussed explicitly, is that the student does have to do the work. I think once, maybe twice, I’ve had a student essentially not turn in coursework, hand in a note from some healthcare provider about their mental health, and bristle at the end of the semester when I insist they can’t pass the class without making up the work. Even in the case where the student has had a difficult semester and just couldn’t do the work, and even if I let them make it up, I know that they won’t have gotten much out of the class because the process and progression of assignments is the class; the work is secondary. But I’ll pass them if they do the work. What I cannot consider is having a student sign up for a class, not do the work, claim exemption because of personal medical difficulties, and request a passing grade anyway. I do think there’s a point at which medical (whether physical, mental, or both) difficulties go beyond what can be reasonably accommodated, where the reality is in no reasonable sense should the student be in a college class at the moment. It’s rare, but obviously it does happen. Have I given out some undeserved passing grades? Yes. Have some students taken advantage of the well intentioned spirit of accommodation without probably needing it? I’d be foolish to think not. But it doesn’t seem relevant to me. Students get out of the course what they put in. My job is to motivate them to put more in, not punish them if they don’t. And certainly not to hold some imaginary line on grades or deadlines if they seem distressed.
Multimodal Composing
Well, my comments on the Perusall article probably make me sound much more passionate and angry about this than I really am. My thoughts on the matter are pretty simple. I think multimodal assignments and rhetoric can be effective for teaching composition principles. I think multimodcal composition itself should not be confused as an appropriate end for a writing class. I think multimedia composing is both not relevant to teaching composition and, if the writers of that textbook introduction really believe it’s as important as they say, they’d naturally declare that multimodal composition should have its own dedicated academic department, intro courses, advanced courses, etc.
When I include a multimodal assignment it’s generally a requirement of the school I’m teaching at. I would not do it naturally, in the sense that I would not ask students to create videos, social media posts, websites, podcasts, unless it was part of the pedagogical approach of the department. I think we should be honest: the best thing from a teaching perspective about multimodal assignments is that they’re easy for us. Admit it. They’re easy to assign and describe because this isn’t our area of expertise, we aren’t beholden to (or usually even understand) the state of the art, and probably most important they’re easy to grade. They are much easier to engage with than an essay. Much easier to watch a video, scroll through a website, read some Tweets with images, than sift through an entire essay. Most departments I’ve worked at are explicit about this: you have the research paper and then “a bit of an easier time” at the end of the semester when you do the multimodal stuff. This isn’t even really my opinion, I’m just agreeing with what departments say about their own syllabi. I would reiterate something I brought up in my Perusall comments, that the ease of multimodal texts, both creating them and understanding them, is the exact reason they are so ubiquitous, and I think their ubiquity is the only reason they are imbued with all this meaning and importance by the kind of people who wrote that textbook intro. We should not confuse ubiquity with profundity. And, again, our students have so much more experience with these texts than we are going to give them by integrating it into our assignments. They intrinsically understand the conventions of websites, social media, YouTube, etc., from practice and experience. Having them create that stuff seems to me a lot like doing breathing instruction.
On the other hand, this does provide a good opportunity for teaching composition. For example, when we teach rhetoric, we are in search of texts that are alive to students and whose conventions they probably understand but cannot yet name. Multimodal texts are great for this. Movies, commercials, social media posts, etc., are the perfect object for composition exercises because they show that writing is the practice of exploring and expressing what you might know or feel on a gut level but have not yet verbalized. And contrary to an assignment like “create a website,” exploring how a commercial or movie works requires a lot more intellectual engagement and effort, and has good outcomes. So my view on multimodal pedagogy is that it’s good to use the texts students are familiar with and analyze them from a rhetorical perspective. But the end goal is writing a series of paragraphs that clearly expresses their insights, not to create examples of those texts themselves. If, once they’ve accopmplished that, we give them a chance to make a video about it, I don’t have a problem with it. Shrug emoji.
Thoughts on Grammar
How do you teach grammar? How do you deal with sentence-level issues in essays? Or any other thoughts on the readings.
Earlier in my teaching career, I would sometimes find college freshman had poor grasp of what I considered the absolute basics of grammar, and I would stop my syllabus midstream and conduct a grammar crash course. We’d literally start with parts of speech, then build up to clauses, independent vs. dependent, etc. It was extremely boring for me and for the students, but I reasoned that, somewhere along the line, they’d encountered a series of delinquent English teachers and now I was cleaning up the mess.
My views are different now, and align roughly with the views of Pattanayak and Dunn.
I think teaching grammar is both futile and besides the point. I frame grammar, or the idea of “standard English,” in terms of the students’ own linguistic powers. I explain that, by virtue of being humans, they are linguistic geniuses. The capacity for language develops unaided, undirected, in their brains as they grow. They can no more help learning to use language than they can help learning to walk or see. The human linguistic capacity allows them to wield all sorts of languages of varying similarities. Among these languages is the language they speak with their friends. Also among these potential languages is what’s known as “standard English.” I confirm what they already suspect: that standard English is largely artificial but, for simple pragmatic reasons, important to know. It’s part of contextualizing their education. I show them a video of linguist Noam Chomsky explaining that, among other things, most “grammar rules” are pure fabrications, often traceable to one particular teacher some centuries ago. Chomsky goes on to explain that what’s taught as standard English is, at root, a class- (and, therefore, race-) dictated set of conventions derived from the power possessed by ruling classes. His punchline is that, if roles in the United States were reversed, and African Americans owned the corporations and institutions, then African American English would be considered the language of science and business, and White English would be considered “a degenerate dialect that you had to get people out of so they’d be able to think.” Students tend to understand this once they have it pointed out.
As for sentence-level issues, I tend to ignore them. I used to put an x over every missed punctuation. Now I’ll just generally give a comment at the top of an draft along the lines of “a lot of incorrect commas” or “verb agreement issues.” I just find no practical purpose to correcting particular aspects of grammar. For one thing, students almost never go out and try to correct them. For another, grammar issues like these are relatively unimportant to improving student writing as compared with structural issues. A perfectly punctuated, perfectly conjugated paragraph that is structurally chaotic will make no sense to a reader, whereas a perefctly structuerd parargraph in whicch literaly evry woord wihth thrree or moer leters is mispeled can aktchually be quwite efective. Of course, if a student has extreme issues, like if their paragraphs are all single run-on sentences, etc., I’ll try to impress upon them that learning those standard English grammar conventions is going to greatly improve their prospects in certain types of jobs. Otherwise, I don’t know of any way to make a 19-year-old student with truly, disqualifyingly poor grammar go out of their way to teach themselves the accepted conventions — which is what such a case would require.
Research as a Conversation
To me, research means identifying, evaluating, and joining the voices in a conversation. Students should learn what is meant by “discourse,” why a discourse is important, how it functions, and the specific avenues through which a given discipline’s discourse is conducted. This includes not only scholarly journals and research databases but the discourse as represented in lay journals and newspapers, colloquially on college campuses and in the non-academic world, in their own lives, and surrounding the real-world events that scholarly discourse attempts to analyze and interpret.
To this end, I try to empower my students to two specific ends. First, to understand that they get to decide which voices are relevant to them and, second, that by doing so they augment their own abilities to be part of a conversation and be heard. We don’t simply converse with authoritative voices in our work because it makes people more likely to believe our writing is worthwhile; we do it because engaging in the conversation makes us more authoritative, qualified, and interesting thinkers and writers.
Getting students to want to be part of a conversation is difficult, and I think the common thread in the two readings today is that it’s important to show students that there is a discourse surrounding whatever they are most interested in. I try to emphasize that research is simply a purpose-driven process of trying to learn more about what you naturally want to know more about anyway. Allowing students to find the greater import or value of things they’ve been conditioned to see as unimportant is a path toward greater investment in the research process. Guiding students past what they might consider frivolous to the deeper human meaning of recreational activites, artistic communities, etc., can be rewarding for them and show them that academic work is best seen as an extension of who they are, not some alien imposition from insular academics who want to transform them into professors. I find that the most direct way to do this is something along the lines of the “finding your beat” exercise questions in the 1121 syllabus. I’ve had a lot of success asking students what they naturally think about, care about, Google when they’re bored, and so on.
Teaching Philosophy – Andrew Zolot
I was teaching first year writing at Florida International University in the fall of 2017 when I noticed many of my students having trouble with concision. Their prose was bloated with redundant phrases and awkward, practically satirically academic diction. One day in class I was demonstrating how this language could be deflated and simplified by showing an anonymous example, extracting the underlying meaning, and rewording it to be as direct as possible. At the end of the demonstration a student raised her hand and said, âMy teacher in high school told us to add more words to make our writing sound smarter.â
I was shocked. I had to take a step back and change my approach. I told them that concision is a prime virtue in expository writing, that when choosing between ways to express an idea, you should almost always choose the most direct and concise method.
But in the back of my mind, something else was going on. I hadnât been teaching for very long then and it hadnât yet occurred to me that beyond teaching good writing habits and skills, it was also my job to dispel harmful writing notions. It took me a few years outside my lucky â privileged â education to really understand how routinely the educational system fails students in the United States. One aspect of this failure Iâve found is consistently poor writing education.
I find that students reach the university level with either no effective writing education or some strange mixture of negative associations and bad advice. The bad advice can be as direct as âuse more words so you sound smarterâ or âan essay should have five paragraphs regardless of length,â but the negative associations are more abstract and seem socially, rather than institutionally, enforced. The general sense my students seem to have is that academic writing is esoteric, boring, highly formal, and almost bureaucratically rules-driven â not to mention utterly divorced from their, or anyoneâs, real lives. The truth, of course, is precisely the opposite.
My goal in teaching is to emphasize to students that all people, by virtue of being able to speak a language, are inherently expert communicators. Their particular methods of communication may be particular to their familial, sociopolitical, and geographic context, but the language they possess is just as valid and viable for writing effectively as any other. I try to deconstruct and eliminate the so-called writing rules typical of traditional academic gatekeeping and return written expression to its human, ground level. What kinds of things are the students interested in saying? How do they normally say those things?
From there I think itâs possible to illustrate the power of writing not as a formalized process for fitting experience into the âcorrectâ box, but learning what you already know, identifying what you donât, and realizing an ideal or close to ideal structure for expressing what you want to say. I start with basic principles of written clarity â precise diction, paragraph structure â and expand on these ideas with project-relevant assignments so students can use these tools to explore issues relevant to their lives.
Want to talk about your grandfatherâs role in enabling your familyâs immigration? Tell me specific city names, describe the specific smells of his cooking, help me follow a story chronologically. Want to argue who the best basketball player of all time is? Make sure you clearly state your criteria, handle each one in its own paragraph.
By starting with student interest and their natural methods of expression, then showing them how they can refine their own thoughts through the power of draft-based writing, I hope to sidestep the restrictive confusions theyâve been taught or simply absorbed, and show students that whatever they want to express, and wherever they hope to express it, writing is powerful a tool for refining and structuring thought.
