PS01: SWOT Analysis
Collective feedback on strengths and weaknesses.
A quick, prefatory note on threshold mechanics: Instead of losing or gaining points because of minutiae, threshold mechanics allow us to look for holistic effectiveness and discrete benchmarks. As in grade abatement, the starting position should be a 7 — a score indicating completion and a certain level of quality. Self-assessments above a 7 reflect increased insight, diligence, collegiality, and so on. A 6 or 5+ is due if the trait or skill is incomplete, erroneous, or otherwise flawed. Scores of 5- or lower are reserved for increasing levels of weakness or deficiency.
The following table uses two scales to illustrate this: a 10-point shorthand and the usual, toxic, 100-point conversion. The descriptions on the left are the key to understanding how to self-assess. Note the phrasing; this scale can be used to self-assess anything from collaboration to an element of effective writing.
SWOT Analysis: Strengths and Weaknesses
It’s been a while since you did this assignment, but SWOT work is constant — opportunities arise, threats loom, and strengths and weaknesses change. Here is the version of SWOT work that makes the most sense to me:
We are talking about internal and external elements, which also correspond to what we can and can’t control. You can highlight your strengths, especially those that will help the group, and you can seize opportunities when they arise, even if you can’t always control when that happens.
Control and engagement are the keys. In a class built on collaboration and collective, interconnected learning — especially proxy teaching and interstitial discussion — those keys start a really weird-looking car.
Strengths and Weaknesses: Composition
The following radar graph is a visual approximation of my observations of the strengths and weaknesses you’ve exhibited since September. This is where you are now. It is also a collective assessment designed to help you with collaborative metacognition and reflection. It’s important that you grapple with why, as a class, you seem to meet the criteria of one score over another.
I’ve given some general commentary for particular elements. Not every score is addressed; too much information becomes white noise, and we can’t afford that. Use this to help me engineer lessons that will help us address your collective needs. Note that this general commentary utilizes the language of the DAMAGES rubric matrix — the 8x9 grid of feedback archived here.
Arrangement
I’m devoting another post to arrangement, or at least one aspect of it. Overall, you lack control — the ability to make meaningful choices in arrangement that boost the effectiveness of the response. Some of you take risks, which is good, but those risks don’t always pay off. Others create space through almost arbitrary paragraphing.
The only way to get better at arranging an essay is to experiment, and the only way to experiment is to emulate published writers. Which is to say: Read more. I’ll begin tweeting (oh, how that verb vexes me) articles that are worth a spare 16 minutes or so for ETA work. If all you do is note these tweeted (now it’s an adjective?) texts’ arrangement, that will be 16 minutes well spent.
Grammar
You haven’t learned grammar. Actually, what I should say is that you haven’t learned SWE grammar. Most of the SWE rules that you know have been picked up piecemeal, and some of you have learned the wrong rules entirely.
Teaching grammar feels pedantic to me. I feel like a grammaticaster, which is a mean verbal pedant — what less careful users of figurative language would call a grammar Nazi. David Foster Wallace calls it being a SNOOT in an essay called “Tense Present.” He also makes probably the best case for you all learning SWE, or Standard Written English. It’s long, but you need practice with longer and more difficult reading (as the SWOT feedback on close reading further down indicates).
David Foster Wallace on Standard Written English:
I’m not suggesting here that an effective SWE pedagogy would require teachers to wear sunglasses and call students “Dude.” What I am suggesting is that the rhetorical situation of an English class — a class composed wholly of young people whose Group identity is rooted in defiance of Adult-Establishment values, plus also composed partly of minorities whose primary dialects are different from SWE — requires the teacher to come up with overt, honest, compelling arguments for why SWE is a dialect worth learning.
These arguments are hard to make — not intellectually but emotionally, politically. Because they are baldly elitist. The real truth, of course, is that SWE is the dialect of the American elite. That it was invented, codified, and promulgated by Privileged WASP Males and is perpetuated as “Standard” by same. That it is the shibboleth of the Establishment and an instrument of political power and class division and racial discrimination and all manner of social inequity. These are shall we say rather delicate subjects to bring up in an English class, especially in the service of a pro-SWE argument, and extra-especially if you yourself are both a Privileged WASP Male and the Teacher and thus pretty much a walking symbol of the Adult Establishment. This reviewer’s opinion, though, is that both students and SWE are better served if the teacher makes his premises explicit, licit and his argument overt, presenting himself as an advocate of SWE’s utility rather than as a prophet of its innate superiority.
Because this argument is both most delicate and (I believe) most important with respect to students of color, here is one version of a spiel I’ve given in private conference with certain black students who were (a) bright and inquisitive and (b) deficient in what U.S. higher education considers written English facility:
I don’t know whether anybody’s told you this or not, but when you’re in a college English class you’re basically studying a foreign dialect. This dialect is called ‘Standard Written English. … From talking with you and readingyour essays, I’ve concluded that your own primary dialect is [one of three variants of SBE common to our region]. Now, let me spell something out in my official Teacher-voice: The SBE you’re fluent in is different from SWE in all kinds of important ways. Some of these differences are grammatical — for example, double negatives are OK in Standard Black English but not in SWE, and SBE and SWE conjugate certain verbs in totally different ways. Other differences have more to do with style — for instance, Standard Written English tends to use a lot more subordinate clauses in the early parts of sentences, and it sets off most of these early subordinates with commas, and, under SWE rules, writing that doesn’t do this is “choppy.” There are tons of differences like that. How much of this stuff do you already know?
[STANDARD RESPONSE: some variation on “I know from the grades and comments on my papers that English profs don’t think I’m a good writer.”]
Well, I’ve got good news and bad news. There are some otherwise smart English profs who aren’t very aware that there are real dialects of English other than SWE, so when they’re reading your papers they’ll put, like, “Incorrect conjugation” or “Comma needed” instead of “SWE conjugates this verb differently” or “SWE calls for a comma here.” That’s the good news — it’s not that you’re a bad writer, it’s that you haven’t learned the special rules of the dialect they want you to write in. Maybe that’s not such good news, that they were grading you down for mistakes in a foreign language you didn’t even know was a foreign language. That they won’t let you write in SBE. Maybe it seems unfair. If it does, you’re not going to like this news: I’m not going to let you write in SBE either. In my class, you have to learn and write in SWE. If you want to study your own dialect and its rules and history and how it’s different from SWE, fine — there are some great books by scholars of Black English, and I’ll help you find some and talk about them with you if you want. But that will be outside class. In class — in my English class — you will have to master and write in Standard Written English, which we might just as well call “Standard White English,” because it was developed by white people and is used by white people, especially educated, powerful white people.
[RESPONSES by this point vary too widely to standardize.]
I’m respecting you enough here to give you what I believe is the straight truth. In this country, SWE is perceived as the dialect of education and intelligence and power and prestige, and anybody of any race, ethnicity, religion, or gender who wants to succeed in American culture has got to be able to use SWE. This is How It Is. You can be glad about it or sad about it or deeply pissed off. You can believe it’s racist and unjust and decide right here and now to spend every waking minute of your adult life arguing against it, and maybe you should, but I’ll tell you something: If you ever want those arguments to get listened to and taken seriously, you’re going to have to communicate them in SWE, because SWE is the dialect our country uses to talk to itself. African-Americans who’ve become successful and important in U.S. culture know this; that’s why King’s and X’s and Jackson’s speeches are in SWE, and why Morrison’s and Angelou’s and Baldwin’s and Wideman’s and West’s books are full of totally ass-kicking SWE, and why black judges and politicians and journalists and doctors and teachers communicate professionally in SWE. Some of these people grew up in homes and communities where SWE was the native dialect, and these black people had it much easier in school, but the ones who didn’t grow up with SWE realized at some point that they had to learn it and become able to write in it, and so they did. And [INSERT NAME HERE], you’re going to learn to use it, too, because I am going to make you.
I should note here that a couple of the students I’ve said this stuff to were offended — one lodged an Official Complaint — and that I have had more than one colleague profess to find my spiel “racially insensitive.” Perhaps you do, too. My own humble opinion is that some of the cultural and political realities of American life are themselves racially insensitive and elitist and offensive and unfair, and that pussyfooting around these realities with euphemistic doublespeak is not only hypocritical but toxic to the project of ever actually changing them.
You can replace all of the references to minorities and students of color with you — the elite students of a small public high school. Where Wallace is dealing with a minority that learned SBE, we are dealing with a majority that learned something very different — Standard Internet English, maybe, or Standard Microcommunicative English. We can call it whatever we want, but it’s a radically different dialect from SWE, and it is practiced by most Internet users to some extent. You might compartmentalize your languages — it’s a fascinating kind of code-switching — but there is bleeding between them. And you fit the symptoms: “bright and inquisitive [but] deficient in what U.S. higher education considers written English facility.”
Anyway, I am cribbing Wallace’s feedback (and the way he writes; the first time I read him, it was like running into a much, much smarter doppelganger) and giving it to you: You are going to learn the rules of grammar because you can’t not learn them in here. As for how we do that? I’m open to ideas, and I expect you to work cleverly and collaboratively to come up with some.
In the meantime, I’m making a note for myself as much as for you: Maybe we should study grammar next, with articles like this one (which I just discovered and currently love) giving way to pointed discussion of Orwell, Wallace, and others.
Strengths and Weaknesses: Grade Abatement
The following radar graph is a visual approximation of my observations of the strengths and weaknesses you’ve exhibited since September. This is where you are now. It is also a collective assessment designed to help you with collaborative metacognition and reflection. It’s important that you grapple with why, as a class, you seem to meet the criteria of one score over another.
I’ve given some general commentary for particular elements. Not every score is addressed; too much information becomes white noise, and we can’t afford that. Use this to help me engineer lessons that will help us address your collective needs. Note that this general commentary utilizes the language of the grade abatement guides and rubrics.
Assiduousness
This would be higher, but you struggle with distraction during class. Usually that distraction is smart enough — you get caught up in discussions that are worth having, at least. But there’s a lot to be said for being able to grind out 39 minutes on one task, especially when you know it’s part of a much bigger sequence. You just don’t have the time outside of the room to waste any of what you’re given inside of it.
Amenability
I think this 8 is deserved. Most of you are highly amenable to feedback, even when it is critical. It’s impressive and really, really encouraging. Maybe I’m comparing you to last year too much — we were plagued by a group of incorrigible students, really steeped in Dunning-Kruger delusions and disrespect in equal measure. They were rough.
You on the other hand, are a remarkable group. Keep that attitude, please, as we get into harder tasks and harsher feedback.
Collegiality
Use the interstitial tools more. The same voices dominate online; you need to find your entrance into those conversations and seize it. If you’re one of those dominant voices, you have a bigger responsibility: Involve others.
Autodidacticism
I think your struggles here are a function of your schedules. Most of you are stretched so thin that self-generated teaching is more difficult than it would normally be. The silver lining: If you figure out how to budget your time now, you will never lose that skill. Unless you make the terrible decision to become a public school teacher, your life will never again be dominated by bizarre chunks of repetitive chaos like this.
I’m going to give you something that I’d like you to try. It’s optional, and it’s not easy; I’m learning it now, though, so you have a capable partner in figuring it out. It’s called a Chronodex:
Let’s see if that helps.
Metacognition
I think this score is fair, although it makes even me cringe to see something that low. This is your newest skill, and it’s your weakest; it also requires the most time, and time is your lowest resource. There’s no judgment in a 4 here. The “basic standards of quality” that the threshold rubric mentions aren’t being met — you need to be metacognitive about most of your work, and it needs to be in writing. You’re looking for the kind of probing, uncomfortable analysis that makes you better. Few of you are in that habit, and that is the biggest hurdle to improving everything else.
Close Reading
Your course runs on writing from your teacher. This feedback is an example: If you read this carefully and closely, you walk away with a tremendous amount of help of all kinds. You walk away with interesting readings and tools to try. But it takes careful, close reading — the kind that you are not used to doing, especially in bursts.
That’s the paradox here: In order to meet you where your schedules leave you (i.e., in an exhausted heap), this is an interestitial course. The lessons and assignments and discussions are blended, happening in class and online — in those moments when you’re free. But you still need to read deeply and meaningful, to write slowly and effectively, to think collaboratively and divergently… all things that are hard to do interstitially.
You need to evolve. You can’t let your schedules turn you into zombies — desultory, monomaniacal creatures that shuffle about and lose the occasional limb.
