“Do We Teach to Life or to College?”

In “Box-logic,” Geoffrey Sirc proposes a new media pedagogy that values annotation and collection as a means of composing multimedia texts. Like other scholars, such as Wysocki and Selfe who are interested in using new technologies in the composition classroom, Sirc voices his “pedagogical dilemma:” “just what do I do in the classroom, what do I teach (111)?” As he moves away from the essayistic genre that carries with it the legacy of linear thinking, he considers the "formal and material concerns [that] guide a newly-mediated pedagogical practice" (114)—a pedagogy that values association, “desire and lack,” metonymy, aesthetics, “personal symbologies(cool term, but huh?),” juxtaposition, and design (117). For Sirc, the student writer is a "dissatisfied collector, one impatiently seeking pleasure" (117).

  

“The Arcades Project” Activity is 

a very informative yet entertaining

genre/ activity. I like how Sirc allows students

to break away from “doing old-fashioned note cards

for the term paper,” and adopt a much more interesting format.

I find Sirc’s theory and pedagogy of box logic interesting and inspiring, but I’m not sure how much writing (actual writing, how much of the 20-page requirement) do students write in the freshman comp course based on this pedagogy. If the focus on this pedagogy is collection and annotation then what students actually learn is researching, summarizing, and responding to entries (quotes, images, sound, songs, etc.), what happens after that? I mean, what happens when we ask students to write an essay? Do they know how to do so?  I agree with Sirc when he writes that there is "something increasingly untenable about the integrated coherence of college essayist prose" (123) in the 21^st century, but shouldn’t writing teachers focus on the basics (mastering the “traditional” essay) first and then, when students master that, we can take them to another level? Perhaps his pedagogy can be more useful with juniors since there is an underlying assumption that they know how to write “homogenous” essays. 

Sirc claims that the composition essay hides behind an "easy falseness of a unified resolution" (123). Do we really believe that? I know that many of us think of our students’ “final” drafts as first drafts and that we highly value the process of wallowing in the complexity of the topic. I think that Sirc here oversimplified what a comp essay entails. Also, I find it problematic that Sirc doesn’t take into consideration that students need to learn how to write a 10-page well-argued essay in order to survive and pass other classes that rely on comp teachers to teach students how to write a well-argued essay. 

 If each teacher works individually without considering the consequences of their adopted pedagogies/models, then, we are jeopardizing the students’ success in her academic life/college life so we could teach her something about life. This is not to deny the importance of Sirc’s model, as I said, I find the box model for the early stages of writing essays and researching, what Sirc calls "search strategies and annotating material" (122), particularly useful. And I’m a strong believer in empowering students in finding their own voices in writing, but if we want to translate Sirc’s model into a more realistic one that correspondences to the requirements of our comps classes, we should work on a comprehensive vision that values experimentation and nonlinear thinking and redefines essayistic prose not only on the college level, but also on the university level so students would not be at a disadvantage. Unfortunately, on the university level, the "genre" of note-taking/collaging/archiving, etc. is not as prominent as the genre of the argumentative essay. I think that the university is far from adopting the box-logic model as a primary model for its freshmen level comp classes.