LONDON--In the predawn hours of Christmas morning, a 40-year-old shoe repairman who goes by the name Robbo squeezed his 6-foot-8-inch frame into a wet suit, tossed some spray cans into a plastic bag, and crossed Regent's Canal on a red-and-blue air mattress.

Robbo, one of the lost pioneers of London's 1980s graffiti scene, was emerging from a long retirement. He had a mission: to settle a score with the world-famous street artist Banksy, who, Robbo believes, had attacked his legacy.

Increasingly, weather is being pre-sold as a kind of public drama, one with a distinctive language and set of conventions - the military-like music, the urgent graphics, the rhetoric of promise and veiled threat. We've come to take all this for granted in a modern storm forecast. The roots of this approach though, don't lie in meteorology. They come from the hype of Hollywood and big-event television - a business in which overselling isn't a sin, as long as you draw an audience.

Of course, in the case of weather, even the best promotional campaign can't actually control the product once it arrives. The images from blizzards past and the breathless voice-overs promise lots of action, but what we get isn't exactly a Quentin Tarantino movie, or even Sunday afternoon on the Golf Channel. It's more like an especially sleepy production of "The Iceman Cometh." Performed nine times in a row.

I haven't developed an assignment around this idea yet, but I might just have to try. And if you use it for something in one of your classes, please be sure to let me know how.

What did predict success, interestingly, was a history of perseverance -- not just an attitude, but a track record. In the interview process, Teach for America now asks applicants to talk about overcoming challenges in their lives -- and ranks their perseverance based on their answers. Angela Lee Duckworth, an assistant professor of psychology at the University of Pennsylvania, and her colleagues have actually quantified the value of perseverance. In a study published in The Journal of Positive Psychology in November 2009, they evaluated 390 Teach for America instructors before and after a year of teaching. Those who initially scored high for "grit" -- defined as perseverance and a passion for long-term goals, and measured using a short multiple-choice test -- were 31 percent more likely than their less gritty peers to spur academic growth in their students. Gritty people, the theory goes, work harder and stay committed to their goals longer. (Grit also predicts retention of cadets at West Point, Duckworth has found.)

But another trait seemed to matter even more. Teachers who scored high in "life satisfaction" -- reporting that they were very content with their lives -- were 43 percent more likely to perform well in the classroom than their less satisfied colleagues. These teachers "may be more adept at engaging their pupils, and their zest and enthusiasm may spread to their students," the study suggested.

High Schools to Offer Plan to Graduate 2 Years Early
Dozens of public high schools in eight states will introduce a program next year allowing 10th graders who pass a battery of tests to get a diploma two years early and immediately enroll in community college.

Students who pass but aspire to attend a selective college may continue with college preparatory courses in their junior and senior years, organizers of the new effort said. Students who fail the 10th-grade tests, known as board exams, can try again at the end of their 11th and 12th grades. The tests would cover not only English and math but also subjects like science and history.

The new system of high school coursework with the accompanying board examinations is modeled largely on systems in high-performing nations including Denmark, England, Finland, France and Singapore.

Productive stupidity means being ignorant by choice. Focusing on important questions puts us in the awkward position of being ignorant. One of the beautiful things about science is that it allows us to bumble along, getting it wrong time after time, and feel perfectly fine as long as we learn something each time. No doubt, this can be difficult for students who are accustomed to getting the answers right. No doubt, reasonable levels of confidence and emotional resilience help, but I think scientific education might do more to ease what is a very big transition: from learning what other people once discovered to making your own discoveries. The more comfortable we become with being stupid, the deeper we will wade into the unknown and the more likely we are to make big discoveries.
~ Martin A. Schwartz

Editor's Note: After hearing about an assignment Claire Blechman uses in WR121, I asked her to write a guest post about it. If you've got an assignment you'd like to share with the rest of the FYWP community, please let me know.

The genre translation assignment wraps up everything that 121 is about into a sweet little package: genre knowledge, rhetorical situation, research, forwarding, etc. I originally got hooked on the idea of this assignment by reading an example that John Trimbur gave us in preparation for our first semester teaching 121. He would have his students at WPI take a scientific study and adapt it into a mainstream news genre.

The problem is, at Emerson, we're pretty good at Bringing Innovation to Communication and the Arts, but pretty bad at Doing Science. I for one did not want to read a bunch of papers from film students trying to come to terms with DNA sequencing and theoretical particle physics.

Spatial Praxes: Theories of Space, Place, and Pedagogy, a 2012 summer special issue of Kairos
Guest Editors: Dr. Amy Kimme Hea, Ashley J. Holmes, and Jennifer Haley-Brown

Many in our field have brought spatial rhetoric to the forefront of their research. Most notably, Nedra Reynolds' Geographies of Writing: Inhabiting Places and Encountering Difference (2003) reminds composition and rhetoric scholars of the ways in which spatial relations are always rhetorical relations, imbricated in visual, literate, and technological cultures. Our need, as compositionists and rhetoricians, is to understand the broad impact of these spatial interrelationships on our research and teaching.

The University of Connecticut's Freshman English Program is calling for presentation/panel/roundtable proposals from instructors of writing (in all disciplines and programs) for the Fifth Annual Conference on the Teaching of Writing. While the theme for this year's conference invites reflection on local knowledge and the role of archives in composition instruction, we encourage presenters to interpret "local knowledge" and "archives" broadly. We also invite proposals on other related topics. Suggested categories and topics include:

Over the summer, I read Rehearsing New Roles: How College Students Develop as Writers by Lee Ann Carroll, a teacher of writing at Pepperdine University and Chair of the State Advisory Board of the California Writing Project.

As a consequence, my first-day-of-class speech this semester sounded like this: "Your freshman composition courses have value, because you become more fluent as writers and the skills you bring from high school continue to develop. But as you go forward in college, you will see that freshman comp is just a point along the way. You will continue to grow and develop as a reader and a writer from year to year throughout college."

As a reviewer, what higher compliment could I pay Carroll than to claim her research and writing informed and altered my practice?

Though this is only the second year that I have taught 101 and 121, I have come to think of workshopping student writing as an essential component of class work.  It makes good pedagogical sense to workshop, and it also seems to be a natural outgrowth of many of our experiences as MFA students.  Though I suspect that a fair number of FYWP instructors feel the same, there seems to be little discussion of in the circles I float in of various methods and approaches that instructors have developed towards workshopping.  In this post I will explain why I think workshop is a good idea.  In the next, I will describe my approach. 

Whether it is intellectual writing, the research paper, graphic novel, memoir, or any other number of possible genres, workshop is an important means of occasionally refocusing the class on student writing and a good supplement to the work done in peer review groups and individual student conferences.  There are many other reasons that I like the idea of workshopping in first-year writing courses, but here are some of the more important ones.

1. It gives the class a chance to engage with student writing as creative writing, which frequently seems to come as a surprise to students who think of intellectual and research writing as dry and monotonous.
2. It allows the class to engage with the vocabulary of rhetoric and composition (e.g. "audience," "rhetorical situation, Harris-speak or terms like "substantiation," "logos," etc.) in more organic and empirical terms and, of course, as these concepts relate to their own work.
3. It allows each student to confront the fact/potential of writing as a public act at least once during the semester and to thereby confront the complex emotional response to having their writing "exposed."
4. It gives the class a chance to address frequently asked questions, frequently recurring issues, and to talk about their own writing practices and habits.
5. Having students read at least a portion of their work out loud almost always shows them that it is a good idea to make this a part of their revision practice as a way to spot errors, clunky sentences, faulty logic, poor transitions, etc.

Teachers cannot ignore this communication shift. A Kindle is more than a paperless book: it changes how we read, how we define reading, and how we perceive intellectual ownership. As society continues down a path toward ever-increasing mobile communication, our conceptions of how we persuade will also change. I think few Rhetoric instructors would argue with the idea that students should be able to not only consume information, something they've been doing their entire lives, but also to produce it. But as it stands now, most rhetoric courses focus strictly on writing, and they limit assignments to the classroom environment - practices that devalue other rhetorical mediums, and the purpose of rhetoric itself. It is with this spirit in mind that I designed my special topics Fall 2009 freshman rhetoric course at the University of Texas at Dallas. I wanted to transform the traditional rhetoric class with its standard textbook into a more relevant, new-media oriented course that focused not only on writing and speaking, but one that also looked at rhetoric in film, photography and music.

But the idea that genre is a tool, not a prophecy goes beyond combating genre snobbery, I think -- it's actually helpful for writers to think about when crafting their next novel. Just because there's this marvelous tool for helping readers to understand your story, doesn't mean your story has to be crafted around the tool. Novelists are not Ikea, and your swashbuckling space epic is not a chunky sofa with a Scandinavian boy's name. Food for thought, anyway.