Textbook Review

Textbook Review: The St. Martin’s Guide to Writing
After reviewing, The St. Martin’s Guide to the Writing by Rise Axelrod and Charles Cooper: Ninth Edition, I would strongly recommend this textbook to new instructors teaching first year writing at Texas Wesleyan University. In this review, I will summarize what the textbook is about, identify pedagogical influences I have seen in the textbook’s content, and weigh the various features of the text that makes this textbook stand out.
The St. Martin’s Guide to Writing is designed to be a flexible composition textbook for instructors and a helpful guide for students. Axelrod and Cooper provide a step-by-step guide to writing specific kinds of essays in this textbook. The text helps build on the actual writing processes of students and does even more to prepare them for writing they will do in other college courses. As a rhetoric and reader, The St. Martin’s Guide can serve as a comprehensive introduction to discursive practice. It comprises several parts:
• Part I, Writing Activities, presents nine different essay assignments, all reflecting actual writing situations that students may encounter in and out of college, kinds of discourse that they should learn to read critically and to write intelligently. Among the types of essays included are autobiography, explanation, position paper, proposal and literary interpretation.
• Part II, Critical Thinking Strategies, collects in two separate chapters, practical guides for invention and reading. The catalog of the invention stratagies includes annotating, summarizing, exploring the significance of figurative language, and evaluating the logic of an argument.
• Part III, Writing Strategies, looks at a wide range of essential writers’ strategies: paragraphing and coherence, logic and reasoning, and the familiar modes of presenting information, such as, marration, defining and classifying.
• Part IV, Research Strategies, discusses field as well as library and Internet research and includes thorough guidelines for using and documenting sources, with detailed examples of MLA and APA documentation styles.
• Part V, Writing for Assignment, covers essay examinations, showing students how to analyze different kinds of exam questions and offering strategies for writing solutions.
• The Handbook, is a complete reference guide covering grammar, word choice, punctuation, mechanics, ESL problems, sentence structure and usage. Provides student examples throughout so that students will see errors similar to the ones in their own essays.
Axelrod and Cooper took on a classical tradition of teaching writing not only as a method of composing rhetorically effective composition but also as a powerful guide for thinking creatively and critically. The textbook adds elements of critical and collaborative pedagogy that can make possible social and personal empowerment and transformation. Each chapter promotes critical thinking. In Part I, it concludes with three metacognitive activities to help students to become aware of what they have learned about the process of writing, about the influence of reading and writing, and about the social and political dimensions of the genres they have learned to write. According to Ann George, in Critical Pedagogy: Dreaming of Democracy, she states that “critical pedagogy reinvents the roles of teachers and students in the classroom and the kind of activities they engage in” (George 93). Axelrod and Cooper emphasize this idealogy in their textbook by believing that writing is both a social act and a way of knowing. The textbook also has activites to stimulate collaboration. At the start of each of the writing chapters, there is a collaborative activity that invites students to try out some of the thinking and planning they will be doing for the kind of writing covered in that chapter. Then, following each reading comes connecting to Culture and Experience, designed to provoke thoughtful responses about the social and political dimensions of the reading. According to Rebecca Moore Howard, “when teachers are no longer dispensing knowledge in lectures but are guiding students in the collaborative process of discovering and constructing knowledge, students are empowered” (Howard 57). This textbook empowers the students.
There are many features that make this textbook stand out. The text’s cover is a cheerful, soothing, cool green that invites the student to use it. The textbook is well organized and easy to use by both the instructor and student. There is a lot of visual rhetoric throughout the text with designs that highlight collaborative activities, lists of basic features, guidelines for peer review, etc. I believe this is an effective textbook for first year writing due to the content having practical guides to writing, the systematic integration of reading and writing, activities to promote group discussion and inquiry, and activites that encourage students to reflect on what they have learned.
The St. Martin’s Guide to Writing would be a superb textbook for a new instructor teaching first year writing at Texas Wesleyan University. The textbook will help students learn to write critically and effectively. Also, the text is very easy to follow, combining reading instruction with writing instruction. Overall, the textbook would be beneficial to the student as well as the instructor.

Michelle Payne

I really enjoyed reading Michelle Payne’s,Rendering Women’s Authority in the Writing Classroom.I found it to be very fascinating, mainly because at one point in every educator’s career, they will have a “Kyle” in one of their classrooms. So, my big question is, what do we do as teachers to effectively handle a disruptive, disrespectful student? In trying to find the answer, I re-read Payne’s essay, and asked a dear friend who teaches at Meacham Middle School in FWISD. So, here are a few suggestions by a teacher who has more than a handful of “problem students” in her classes. Her advice was: Remember that these problems can be more common for instructors with status inconsistency (women, minorities, international, young, TAs…). Also, remember if you can figure out why the student(s) is being disruptive, it can help you decide what to do. This takes good observation skills and conversations with colleagues and students. Just as Payne, she has found that being a woman educator offers more challenges when dealing with mainly male students that challenge her authority. She also gave these tips: Note who the disruptive students are and speak to them after class or ask them to come to your office hours. Explain why/how you find them disruptive, find out why they are acting that way, ask them what they would be comfortable doing. Tell them what you want to do.Discuss the disruptive behavior in private outside of class with some of the concerned and nondisruptive students. Ask for their assistance in maintaining a positive classroom environment.On a given day when this behavior occurs change what you are doing. Break students in to groups for some work. Call on these and other students to come forward and lead discussion.Consider changing the structure of the whole class. Is it all lecture and/or do students need to be more active and involved? Rethink if/how what you do fits the students and the course. Use more diverse techniques to reach the disruptive students. She also believes that a teacher needs to document any and everything, so she will be “covered” when the time comes to bring in higher authority.
Like Payne, she, “created this course to be designed by students so that everyone could find a space to get what they wanted out of it,” (398). Having a student that is difficult would take away time and energy from the class as a whole. I really believe as Payne does, that “the whole premise of this course is that students need to participate in their own learning” (398). Though, just as Payne feels, “the perpesctive of a woman who was socilaized to have what post-strucuralists call a “split subjectivity,” who already commands from most students less authority and power than a man, yet who has embraced pedagogies and post structuralist theories that decenter authority and who also sees the value of “apprenticing” students into the academy, asking students to question my authority was overwhelming at best, debilitating at worst” (402). I believe that this issue will never be resolved, and it can be discussed until the cows come home! I do think that as a woman eduactor gaining respect from mainly male students will always be a challenge, at best a headache!!

"Teaching to Transgress"

In schools, children discover that they must use their brains mostly for memorizing rather than exploring their interests, expressing their ideas, or solving problems. Even worse, much of what they are asked to memorize is irrelevant to their world. Often, their reaction to this is either social withdrawal or destructive anger. When teachers force students to memorize certain facts, and they replicate those facts on a test, teachers are satisfied that they have successfully controlled them. Just as Bell Hooks notes in "Teaching to Transgress", “The vast majority of our professors lacked basic communication skills, they were not self-actualized, and they often used the classroom to enact rituals of control that were about domination and the unjust exercise of power” (5). Most children are not capable of understanding what is happening to them in our present educational system. They are berated by a constant dialogue of blame and fault. They accept the system as the way things must be; realizing that one either must play the game, or accept the consequences of defying the norm. Many advocate the creation of more options and a greater freedom of choice, though, mainly fail with this idea from school districts. Students require action, movement, and the freedom to explore their own interests. Good education involves far more than test scores. It is at the very heart of character formation. Those who design our educational programs today lack an understanding of the elements that contribute to healthy mindfulness. Educators should not be attempting to change a person’s predisposition. This would be like trying to change someone from being left-handed to right-handed. People remember only what they find interesting and useful. Children want to learn things that will help them make sense out of this often-confusing world. They want to make a valuable contribution to society. We do not need coercive force in order for them to accomplish this. Rather than stress memorization and blind obedience, we must stress self-discovery and exploration.
Hooks explains, “Excitement in higher education was viewed as potentially disruptive of the atmosphere of seriousness assumed to be essential to the learning process. To enter classroom settings in colleges and universities with the will to share the desire to encourage excitement was to trangress” (7). Excitement is vital in the classroom. Without excitement, students will not engage in the learning process, let alone think independently without the teacher telling them what to do and think. Personally, I know that I have retained knowledge/curriculum by pedagogical techniques rather than from the professor lecturing. I completley agree with Hooks opinion that, “It is rare that any professor, no matter how eloquent a lecturer, can generate through his or her actions enough excitement to create an axciting classroom. Excitement is generated through collective effort” (8). I strongly feel that educators need to rethink their traditional teaching practices, and facilitate each and every student’s individualism.