The Teacher in the Attic,
(and the Attic is Wired)
The Life and Times of an Electronic Educator:
A Terribly Uninteresting
Autobiography
by Fred Kemp
I make no claims
that my life is any more or less interesting than anyone
else's life, but these are my home pages and I take a rather assertive stance
in regard to home WWW pages. It's my personal niche on the World Wide Web and
I'll cry if I want to, or if I want, I'll write my life story, boring as it may
be. Most people who read books want to write an autobiography -- it is a
prerogative of the reader/writer's ego -- and the web is giving us all that opportunity. If what you find
here drags a bit or seems self-serving, it undoubtedly does and is. But you,
dear reader, have the Power of the Mouse and can drag the GO menu down to BACK
with no loss in money and little loss in time.
I was born in
I received a full
tuition scholarship to
Slightly ahead of
the typically understood romantic revolution of the 1960's, but undoubtedly
responding to the winds of student intellectual change, I left Northwestern in
order to experience life as directly as Hemingway presumably did and spent
periods of time in
Having relinquished my scholarship to Northwestern, I was unable to return
there when I felt it was time to re-enter college and entered instead the University of Texas at Austin.
Within a year, because of my erratic undergraduate record, I lost my 2S student
deferment and was drafted. This at the height of the
In
My fellow GI's and I were designated as military linguists (982GL), arguably
the military occupational speciality (MOS) requiring the most intelligent and
educated soldier, so we were hardly the typical off-duty lout one sees roaming
the streets around major military installations, but more than anything we
wanted to be officers, because officers got dates. We were all qualified to go
to OCS (
In the military in
1969, I was assigned to a small island off the Korean coast, Kang-Hwa Do, with
forty other Army military intelligence personnel. With little to do for
entertainment, as a translator/interpretor, I accepted the invitation of Father
Mike, a local Maryknoll priest who had been in that place for so long he lived
off one part rice and two parts Johnny Walker Red, and began teaching English
pronunciation to large groups of middle school students at night.
It was an intense experience and changed my oft-stated opinion that I would
never, NEVER become a teacher. Koreans, especially Koreans in that isolated
place, respected teachers in a way I've never seen since. (One addresses
everyday people respectfully as "Kemp Shi," or "Mr. Kemp,"
but one gives extraordinary respect to an acknowledged superior by saying
"Kemp Son Sang Nim," or "Teacher Kemp," even when the
person so addressed is not vocationally a teacher. This parallels the word
"master" in English, in the biblical sense of "teacher,"
which arose from the Latin "magister," "teacher," and
eventually devolved to "mister," but the roots of the term in
On the coldest
evenings I have ever suffered in my life, I would drive four miles (about 35
minutes in an open Jeep) into Kang Hwa, a little town of about 20,000, and
teach English pronunciation to about forty or fifty 10-year-olds in a room the
size of a bus terminal "heated" (if that is the word) by a single
kerosene stove that you couldn't tell was on unless you touched it. The kids
attended these night classes voluntarily and were bundled in jackets and pants
quilted so thick they looked like a room of multi-colored Pilsbury doughboys,
and when they repeated the "So nice to meet you, Mrs. Johnson" in
unison, the vapor from their mouths drifted to the ceiling like a cannon salvo.
At the end of each class, the entire forty or fifty students would stand and
clap politely. I became hooked on what I've since come to call the
"proscenium classroom," the classroom as a stage.
At the time I thought that's what teaching was, influencing student motivation
by projecting personality, the "guru effect" that procreates learning
among the acolytes or at least clones oneself through sheer stage presence.
It's the principal dynamic that makes teaching so attractive,
the centering of affection and -- mustn't forget -- the control. When I was
good, and when I was funny, and when I made mistakes (sometimes on purpose for
effect) in my stilted, stupidly formal Korean, my students would indeed be
"mine," and they would "appreciate" me to such a degree
that I came to need the "buzz" that most good teachers crave and
often can substitute for salary and society's respect. The "Mr. Chips
Addiction" I've since come to call it, and in another place, the "'To
Sir' Syndrome." It's the "leadership principle" or "messiah
effect" of school teaching that dominates the sentimental public
imagination, as revealed even in these skeptical times in current films such as
Mr. Holland's Opus and Dangerous Minds, great and good people
sacrificing themselves, even annihilating themselves
by sucking in love and dominating the once wayward intellects of their charges.
Returning to the
My students referred
to me as "That Man," obviously in a mood of light derision but also
as an indication of neutrality, as a kind of implicit declaration that I was
always to be the cultural "other." The clarity of a "'To Sir'
Syndrome," for me, took major hits in east
Fights
every day, guns confiscated, threats, an attempt to burn down the school, seventh-graders
proudly showing off their new-born babies, and the ever-present mental torpor.
I discovered there
the careless attitude American education presents to the whole problem of
educating those who have lost interest in learning (mainly because the
education establishment has worked hard to bury such an interest in all but the
most compliant). The schools and the teachers, for whatever their basic
decency, have no imagination when it comes to approaching learning from the
students' side. We have been so steeped in 19th century principles of
coercive instruction that we, more or less, present a "take it or leave
it" proposition to the students, in effect weeding, gratefully, out those
who tell us to take our power trip and shove it. I have become convinced
that we can present learning in such a way as to make it not only palatable but
compelling to those who will not accept our efforts under terms of overt
coercion.
My students liked
me, I think, but resented my efforts to remake them. I learned much more
at Martin Junior High about teaching than I ever did in
As I was finishing up
my course work for the often set-aside BA in 1971, I took a course from Dr. Jim
Ayers called, cryptically enough, "Shakespeare in Performance," which
turned out to be the second offering of what came to be his
famous Shakespeare at Winedale (the
program recently celebrated its silver anniversary).
Not only did I learn some Shakespeare from the inside out, but I also met the
woman who was to become my wife, Jan Heminghaus. It would be hard to imagine a
more fitting start to a life-time relationship for an English major than to
meet the woman he was to love in a Shakespeare class, especially one so
"dramatic." Jan wasn't an English major but rather a "Plan II" major, which was (and is) a
prestigious honors program at the
We read Sylvia Plath together; she because she loved the
poetry, me because she loved the poetry. We entered into a conspiracy of
aestheticism that rejected materialism and its despised icons, color television
and a two-car garage. (We would have rejected air conditioning too, but jeeze, this was
In 1976 Jan received her Master of Library Science from the University of
Texas and took a position at the library at East
Texas State University, located about 70 miles northeast of Dallas
in Commerce, Texas. I entered the masters program in the ETSU Literature and
Languages department and was given a position teaching, among other courses,
developmental writing, English as a second language, first-year composition,
and worked extensively in both the reading and writing laboratories. At ETSU I
had the incredible good fortune to work with a talented group of graduate
students including Jeannette Harris, Joyce Kincaid, Lil Brannen, Jim Skelton,
and a notable group of professors including Richard Fulkerson, Glen Irvin, and
Richard Tuerk.
From 1981 to 1985, I
taught at
The student body was
divided, by the students' description, into four types: the regs, the
kickers, the brothers, and the punks. The regs dressed in shirts with
collars and slacks, populated the National Honor Society, and listened in
class. Most of them went on to good colleges out of state. The kickers
were mostly polite, sat in the back of the class, spit snuff when you weren't
looking, seemed proud that they didn't read much, and were mean fighters.
The brothers played jam boxes too loud in the hallways at lunch, joked
constantly in class, failed everything, and showed a constant, irritating,
vocal, and mesmerizing appreciation of the black girls.
The punks, who
really weren't "punk" in the media sense, were the poets, dungeons
and dragons players, pot smokers, and readers. They were the interesting
ones, the theory mongers, the misfit intellectuals. They'd come to me
during lunchtime (I ate my sandwiches in my classroom and told the hall
monitors to let students through). We talked about existentialism,
"popularity" as a sickness, rock stars who
died young, and if there was any hope at all for smart geeks in a world that
seemed clutched in the grip of superficiality.
The problem with
being an outsider is that in order to be one, you have to be 'outside,' and
that means to some extent despised. I've
always considered myself in outsider and, therefore, despised, but for some
reason that hasn't disabled my working closely with others. I'm a closet "despised
person." I suspect there are many
others out there who would consider themselves likewise. There is a freedom in realizing, early on,
that one has no hope of being attractive, intelligent, successful, or respected in the
usual sense. I think such people
populate English departments.
I completed my
Masters in 1985. My thesis was a collection of original short stories dealing
with the frustrations of teaching. Want to read
one of them?
Having become
discouraged with teaching high school, I returned to Austin and the University
of Texas to earn a Ph.D. in literature, with my wife Jan and two small
children, Meg and Ted.
While teaching in Commerce I had been strongly influenced by Dr. Glen Irvin at
Kinneavy, quite simply, had knocked my socks off with his version of the
communications triangle and the complex patterning of the domain of English
scholarship in his A Theory of Discourse.
I was determined to take at least one class from him at
One evening in a bathroom during a break in a class, I heard the director of
first-year composition, John Ruszkiewicz
comment to another graduate student (Greg Lyons) that the department had
received a number of new IBM XT computers as part of a grant, but the person
who had initiated the grant had left campus and no one seemed willing to take
responsibility for using the machines.
I had been working
on a Radio Shack TRS 80 Model IV through the summer, preparing for the daunting
chore of writing a dissertation and knowing I must do it on a word processor, and had gained some familiarity
with working on computers, at least on that
computer. So I volunteered for doing something with the new computers, and thus
launched myself in a totally different career direction from anything I had
ever imagined.
Jan had been
prodding me to spend less time on my TRS 80 Model IV and more time reviewing my
Latin, for one of the gloomy aspects of returning to school had been the
necessity of renewing my proficiency in Latin. But instead of going over
declensions and conjugations, I was instead constantly tinkering in BASIC,
programming such astonishing capabilities as software that would ask the user,
"Hello, who are you?" When the user typed in a name, such as
"Fred," the program would say, "Hi, Fred. What's
happening?"
Earthshaking, eh? But at that time, with my
technological naivete, it was compelling. Here I was, just a few months after
absolutely hating computers with all
the usual intellectually elite ferver of the literature major, and now I was
writing software that could "recognize" a person! (Well, of course,
not really, but I was still amazed that I could so quickly exert a kind of
control over what was supposed to be such a complex machine.)
Jan was worried that I was having too much fun, that I
wasn't pushing aside the nonessential stuff in favor of what was undoubtedly
going to be a major problem for me, passing that Latin test. And she seemed
absolutely right. In my more self-disciplined moments (yes, I have them from
time to time), I berated myself for not putting in time with Latin (and I
actually do enjoy working in Latin) and instead tinkering for hour upon hour
learning how to do silly little things on a computer screen. I put in hundreds
of hours programming crude BASIC code that, from any rational point of view,
would never be put to any possible use. I kept saying to myself, "You
fool. Do you honestly think you will ever use any of this 'stuff' that you're
spending so much time at? Are you such a spineless worm that you can't
discipline your efforts to reject so obviously irrelevant and inconsequential
tasks in favor of something that is an absolute requirement printed in black
and white and looming ugly on the horizon?"
Uh...no. It was too compelling, writing out those
strange little sentences that made that computer screen print this and that,
manipulate words and input in unusual ways, and even make crude
"if....then" decisions. It seemed to me that I was programming a kind
of intelligence! I was completely absorbed in a process that seemed blatantly
irrelevant to my professional life.
Well, ya just never know. It wasn't irrelevant, it turned out, because my
capability (and suddenly discovered fascination) with computers led me to
working with them in the English department at UT, developing some role in the
computers and writing national community, starting a small but interesting
company, getting a tenure-track job, getting tenure, and making possible a
career in which tinkering with computers was indeed relevant, and with nary a
reduction in fun.
And I was eventually able to use my programming capability in BASIC and Pascal
to satisfy my language requirement in the doctoral program. Ironically, as things turned out, a renewed proficiency in Latin
would have been a stupendous waste of time and effort in my subsequent career. I
have since grown quite fond of instructional theories that resist the apparent
inevitability of coercion in formal
learning in favor of theories that privilege personally constructive and
compelling learning tasks. I don't like instruction that presumes a sort of
"no pain, no gain" core to teaching and learning, that insists that
learning is necessarily a hard and wearisome business, and that successful
learners must work from a grinding self-discipline that, in the most successful
of them, completely suppresses natural inclinations and pleasurable inquiry.
In the early 1980s
IBM finally decided to follow the groundbreaking work of Texas Instruments,
Apple, Commodore, and Digital Equipment Corporation and develop a personal
computer. With its (up to then) usual arrogance, IBM
has assumed its entry into the PC market would quickly sweep the field. So it
overbuilt. The resulting glut of unsold IBM Pcs encouraged a newly discovered
altruism, and IBM began seeding the PC in colleges and universities across the
country under the so-called "Excel" grants (re: tax write offs).
At the University of the
A Digression about Pure Speculation
Nobody knew in 1984, or indeed, nobody ever knows, how exactly the new
technology -- any new technology -- is going to be applied to formal learning
situations. Naysayers hear me admitting that and say, "Aha! You
technophiliacs never move into technology use with a plan, a purpose, clearly defined goals. You just love the technology for
technology's sake! (Yow. What a horrible thing to say.) You're 'machine people'
and not 'people people.'"
Nooo. The point is that new technologies need to be
understood before being included in plans and implemented in instruction, and
they cannot be understood if they are rejected a priori. Pure speculation is an absolutely necessary element in
any change whatsoever, and with technology pure speculation has to generate a
little blind faith. McMurray had that faith, and his speculation may have been
completely off the mark, in terms of how the computers have come best to be
used, but what he did was generically visionary and somewhat risky. Hail, hail,
pure speculation. The purer the better.
By the time I arrived on the scene McMurray was no longer directing the
When on that fateful evening I heard John Ruszkiewicz discussing the fact with
Greg Lyons that he had no one to manage the computers -- I remember the phrase,
"no one will touch the damn things" -- I felt my pulse quicken. I
would definitely touch the damn things. Why? I didn't know then and still
really don't know.
I had been quite surprised the previous summer to discover that personal
computers stirred some strange and compelling sense of adventure in me. A sense
of adventure, a sense of risk, and yet a sense of control, all in a
complicated, troubling mixture. To make a machine address me by name, albeit in
a stupid, machine-like way, seemed a kind of alchemy to me. So much of teaching
had escaped me. I had tried so hard to have students both like me and learn
from me, and yet I had come to realize that sheer force of personality couldn't
do it. Not with the batting average my ego demanded. I was looking for magic.
Programming the machine engaged me, took me to that illo tempore that Mircea Eliade had described so well as the quest
of primitive man separated from unity with the cosmos by a
positivist knowledge of time and space. We can all get "lost"
to time and space by doing something involving, but programming sucked me out
of time and space more thoroughly than even reading and writing, my presumed
principal areas of endeavor. The inanely simple programming that I was doing on
those PCs presented me with the possibility of both control and magic in a combination
I had never imagined. My prior understanding of technology had been couched in
the usual humanist, fearful, reductive terms, as a Fritz Lang movie of human
beings-reduced-to-machine behaviors. Now, at a rather late age, I was beginning
to see an entirely different perspective on what compels non-humanists.
I think I was moving from one area of geekdom to another.
That fateful evening
I asked Ruszkiewicz if I could help out with the computers, and he suggested I
show up at a meeting the very next day. At the meeting were Ruszkiewicz, the
director of the
It was decided by a kind of responsibility abnegation that if I really wanted
to mess around with the twelve computers already delivered to the
Fine by me. I couldn't wait to get my hands on them.
They were, at the time (spring of 1995), sleek and powerful, 512 Kilobytes of
RAM, and came with, glory of glories, EGA color monitors. My lord the color was
bright! Those computers seemed, and were!, a
generation past my TRS 80 Model IV. And I had 12 of them to play with.
Barlow had taken six of the machines out of their boxes and set them up on
utility tables in the Writing Lab in the lowest floor of Parlin Hall. The
director of the Writing Lab was a woman named Light German, who was a
self-professed "people person" with a deep, humanist antipathy to
computers. It seemed, after several conversations with her, that her major
problem was with the cables, the view
of the cables that plugged into the back of the computers. In order to avoid a
view of these cables, and of the computers themselves, she dragged several
massive books shelves away from the walls into the center area of the room to
act as screens, in effect partially blocking the view of about one-third of the
room from the other two-thirds. This action, I concluded, mildly amused, was to
protect the humanities sensibilities of our tutors and students from the ugly
aspect of the computers.
Working in my little technology alcove, I began merrily learning about IBMs.
DOS seemed similar to (and more sensible than) the TRSDOS I had worked briefly
with using the TRS-80 IV, and the color of the EGA monitors was, to me at
least, stunning. I learned to program pictures and even some minor animation,
and sound. I built upon a program that Barlow has started that played "The
Eyes of Texas" and showed a slowly forming UT Tower. Wow. I also
programmed various grammar and usage diagnostic quizzes. My highest art,
however, was in programming a complex (for me and BASIC) sign-in program for
the Writing Lab. It managed student records and tutor comments in a sensible
and labor-saving way.
Valerie Balester shared management of the Writing Lab that summer (1985) with
Greg Lyons and she, with permission from John Ruszkiewicz, decided to implement
my lab records-keeping software. She placed a computer at a desk near the
doorway. The twelve or so graduate students who were staffing the lab at that
time asked for a meeting and declared, in fairly certain terms,
that it was either keep all the computers out-of-sight behind the
protective bookshelves or they would boycott.
Man, what a shock. I had never in my wildest dreams imagined so strong a
resistence to computers, especially from younger people. I began at that time
to formulate my own version of "literary essentialism" and a theory
of why literature majors (I was naive at the time and thought anti-technology
bias was a creature mostly of literaturist sensibilities) were so emotionally
against computing. It was more than the Big Brother effect. There was something
deeply disturbing about what computers could do, or seemed to be able to do, that ate away at the intellectual
equinimity of our literature faculty and students.
I am as convinced now as ever that there was (maybe still is) such a hard nut
of hatred for technology in literary academic types and that it stemmed from
anti-technology and anti-utilitarian prejudices created and fed during the
Romantic period and coalescing most famously in Matthew Arnold's Culture and Anarchy in mid-century. To a
large extent, English departments are literature departments, and literature is
Romantic to the core -- at least in the naive view of literature that almost
all English majors bring to graduate school. The Frankenstein fable (generously supported by Brave New World and 1984)
permeates the self-consciously book-loving culture of English majors and is
amazingly resistent to argument. But Time, in the end, wins out. The increasing
ubiquity of computing and especially networking and the Internet is wearing
down the edge on anti-technology hatreds and will eventually wear it away
completely, just as we have learned to live with the railroad (so hated by
Thoreau) and the telephone and airplane.
Professor Jerome
Bump assumed executive authority over the Project
Quest computers and put me in charge as manager of them.
Realizing the political difficulty that had surfaced in regard to the
computers, Jerry sought to move them from the
I shared an office
with seven or eight of the lecturers; I left my office in the basement of the
Undergraduate Library (UGL) on a Friday with the place filled junkily with all
that academics usually collect, and returned on a Monday to find a room with
bare desks, empty bookshelves, and a unfamiliar echo.
How these folks were evicted so quickly I've never inquired into, perhaps haunted by so personally experiencing raw
power.
I realized a truth
then that I've never forgotten, even in the face of many idealistic opposing
views. People will be hard with each other if they can get away with it. The
point to justice is not reforming every individual's sense of fairness, but to
set up conditions so that the bastards can't get away with it. Whether the
firing of the English department lecturers at the
Bump protected me.
He said, and continues to say, that he did it simply so that he could get
access to neat computers. His engagement in computer-based writing at UT was
simply a means of allowing him to take home and use state-of-the-art computers.
Maybe he believed that himself, but I know Jerry Bump well enough to conclude
that he wanted something more than personal use of computers when he stepped
forward to assume an administrative role in the use of computers in the English
department in 1986. Later he wrote an article about how use of computer
networks spread access to classroom authority to groups that would normally not
receive that access.
I romantically
conclude that in spite of himself, or because of himself, Jerry Bump knew that
his engagement in computer-based pedagogies was opening up a traditionally
fixed classroom dynamic to something that could benefit a wider group.
In the summer of
1986 Bump gained approval to move the computers from the
Bummer
ethos.
I and several other
helpers hauled the twelve computers from the
Once in the UGL 109
we set up the computers. We had lots of computers, 50 of them. In boxes stacked
along side the walls. Brad and I opened up the boxes and stacked the computers
-- most were IBM XTs, 8088 processors with 8 megahertz clocks -- on top of each
other and the monitors on utility tables. A couple of the computers we plugged
in and fired up. The EGA monitors (Enhanced Graphics Adaptors monitors) had a
crisp color that was exciting in and of themselves,
and we enjoyed running some of the commercial software we had that could
display color.
Other than that we
sat and marvelled that we were sitting in the midst of so many computers. Sigh.
The marvel of the modern world, stacked like so many grey things around us. My my. What to do. What to do.
I have this drive in
life, a curse really, that makes me want to do things better. What things?
Well, I don't really know. Just things. I'm not a particularly hard worker in
the sense of working conscientiously to complete tasks I'm not thrilled about.
In fact, I'm bad in that way. I gravitate toward things I want to do and shamelessly
ignore sometimes very serious things that I should be doing. I'm a
procrastinator in terms of those things that a proper schedule of activities
informs me I must do, but I engage somewhat obsessively in those things I
intuit are important in some way.
Maybe everyone is
like that. Maybe we're all fanatic in one little corner of activity, but my
corner of activity is learning and teaching. The curse draws me again and again
to the question of how people learn and why
people learn. In those freezing classrooms in Korea I wondered mightily how
those tiny kids in overstuffed clothing could give up their evenings and come
to hear a GI with some Korean rice wine on his breath rattle off "Good
morning Mrs. Smith" over and over, and do it like they were spending an
afternoon at Disney World. Huge grins. Huge excitement. Over me, because I was American but more than
that, because I was an American teacher.
And on American
soil, as a teacher, no more grins, no more excitement. Just grind. After
twenty-seven years in the classroom I know that the great majority of time is
spent as a grind, a dragging oneself in front of the sullen faces. Trying to
crank up the thrill of "changing lives," the old aphrodesiac of
teachers everywhere. But as hundreds of students go by every year and only a
few respond with even recognition of you as teacher...god it's gets tough to
get up in the morning.
But as Paul and Brad
and I played around with the computers, I began feel the old electricity of
possibility. It snuck up on me, a slight tingle now and then, but increasingly
exciting. I was a smart guy and had concluded that there wasn't a hell of a lot
that could be done with American students. The best would go on to fame and
fortune, and the rest -- a huge number of the rest -- would bounce off American
education like they had encounted an invisible shield. Nobody knows what that
shield is constructed of, but vast numbers of young people cannot get through
it.
Now, in the midst of
all those stacked computers and working off two or three every day, screwing
around programming a little BASIC here and there and plugging in this or that
idea, I more and more became convinced that here in these grey boxes lay the
secret to a revitalization of American education. Nobody was going to
revitalize American education by crying out for more compassion, more sympathy,
more rigor, more rules,
more standards, more humanity, less humanity, more tradition, less tradition.
Nobody was going to revitalize American education by crying out for an attitude shift, which was what they were
all crying for. The touchy-feelies were going to remain touchie-feelie and the
tough guys were going to get tougher.
What was going to
change education was only one thing: a complete change in how education was conducted.
I have since called this a shift in a learning
ecology, in the mix of the complex interactive elements that blend and
compete to form the learning encounter
our young people (and, increasingly, all parts of the population) experience as
a part of the civilizing process in our society. The computers weren't going to
patch up here and tack on there: they were going to shake the foundation to its
very roots.
Jerry Bump got me a
two-course load reduction, perhaps not realizing where my thinking was going,
and I sat there day after day in the midst of those computers in front of three
enhanced graphics screens and slouched down into a deep think. I stared into
those stacks of computer boxes. I programmed tons and tons of garbage code and
watched thousands of screens of idiot representation. I spent lots of time
alone, which I had always been, but I was in a kind of Willie Wonka Chocolate
Factory for ideas, and they came and they came.
I was the night
watch, the slacker who'd stepped off the presumed path of career advancement,
staring at stacks of grey computers, understanding nothing and thinking about
everything.
And that is where I
learned what learning is.
And if you read long
enough, you'll find out what that is.
But I needed help. I
went to a birthday party for Jim Kinneavy at Jim Berlin's house, which was also
attended by Victor Vitanza (who had spoken earlier that day to the faculty and
grad students at UT to a mixed reaction -- his application of Derridan playful
humor had not come across as all that playful and actually quite lacking
humor). Graduate students were walking around wearing tee-shirts that said
"I got lost in the Kinneavy Triangle." Locke Carter was in the
kitchen drinking beer, as I was. I had had five or six keys made to the
Computer Lab and was determined that I would get somebody besides Paul Taylor
to at least use the computers. Even then, as now, I thoroughly rejected the
idea that computers are like bars of gold that perform some kind of function
just sitting there. Paul had seen a typically hyped up presentation I had made
to a number of writing center people when the computers had been located in the
writing center that summer and Valerie Balester had been in charge, and he had
come on board to help Brad and me move the computers.
But we needed more
people. Locke, who had been in a 20th Century Rhetoric class with me -- taught
by Jim Berlin -- had had computer programming experience and seemed as
intrigued with the in-depth possibilities of digitalization as Paul and I were,
but he was unsure if the Computer Lab was the route to take. "I don't
know," he said, shaking his head. "I'm not sure I want to get stuck
with computers."
Just use them, I
said. Here. Take a key. Come in an use them. No
obligation. State of the art equipment. Just use them.
I was so very sure
that people of talent and intelligence and who weren't nailed into some
particular history would respond almost instinctively to the liberating feel of computers, if nothing else.
An event occurred in
March of 1986 that had a profound influence on the development of the Computer
Research Lab, the development of Daedalus, and my subsequent career in
computers and writing. Jerry Bump had
asked me to read his paper at the CCCC conference (Conference on College
Composition and Communication) to be held in March in
Jan and I drove to
Especially because I
had been told the evening before that Lt. Colonel Hugh Burns would probably be
coming, since the Invent series of programs arose out of his dissertation. Upon hearing of this, I was suddenly clutched
with the fear that this Major Name would be angry at what I was going to
say. Most of my interpretation of
Project Invention Heuristics dealt with my reprogramming of Burns’ software
from mainframe BASIC to PC BASIC and the elimination of many of Burns’
phrase-capture mechanisms intended to provide an “Eliza”-type pseudo-human
interaction with students. I suddenly
realized, at
I went through
numerous mental rewrites of my paper that evening, disturbing Jan to no end
with my pacing and reading aloud and complaining about the state of the
universe. They had told me that Burns
was very tall (six foot four) and would be wearing an
Air Force uniform, not a usual sight at an academic conference. I pictured the guy as a sort of blue-suited
Patten, storming down the aisle half-way through my presentation, screaming
threats of legal action.
The next morning the
room filled, Jan was in the third row, and sure enough, there was the tall guy
in the Air Force uniform. He didn’t seem
too vicious, but who could tell. I
stumbled through my presentation (Jan later said I didn’t seem nervous at all –
I must have been on auto-pilot), and the dreaded Colonel Burns did not
interrupt with accusations of plagiarism
or intellectual property assault or anything like that. After the presentation, I was talking to
various people who approached the speaker’s platform to ask questions or
compliment me, and there, suddenly, he was.
A very nice-looking fellow, quite pleasant demeanor, who asked to talk
to me more in the hallway. There, I was sure, he was going to unload.
No such thing. We talked for an hour in the hallway. He was quite pleased that Jerry and I were
picking up on his dissertation, although he said he was too young to be called
a “pioneer” in any sense. I was
surprised by his generosity and willingness to talk to me as if I had some
importance in the field. At one point,
Michael Spitzer walked by (chair of English at New York Institute of Technology and a
major participant in Trent Batson’s ENFI project) and Hugh told Michael I
should be signed up on the ENFI chat system (a long-distance modem-based
precursor to Interned listservs).
Spitzer did so, and there I met online such notables as Cindy Selfe,
Helen Schwartz, Trent Batson, Geof Sirc, and Terry Collins. When the ENFI Exxon grant expired, I was
motivated to continue the conversation through the Internet and therefore
established
In the hallway, Hugh
also suggested that he join my dissertation committee. He was a good friend of Jerry Bump, Jim
Kinneavy, and George Culp, and felt he could contribute. Could he!
I was gratified, flattered, excited, and terribly motivated. Jan said I talked all the way down I-10 from
Burns’ association
with us through my dissertation committee, through his informal association
with the CRL, and by the fall of 1987 as an adjunct professor in the English
department (he was stationed at Brooks Air Force Base just down the road in
We worked throughout
the rest of 1986 trying to carry out the original Project Quest mission of
developing new means of instruction through computers. The major breakthrough occurred that summer
when we got from George Culp (who was the manager of Project Quest at UT) a
token ring local-area network (LAN) and set up our own network. The invention heuristics work, building on
Burns’ TOPOI and the Invent series, had never captured my imagination, although
I could certainly see its utility. But
once Paul and Locke and I had set up a network, spanning both rooms 110 (our
lab) and 109 (what we were calling a “classroom,” although no classes were held
there on a full-time basis), I began to really see the value of computers. It was the network that made all the
difference.
The three principal
innovative efforts in using computers in English departments at the time were
invention heuristics (Helen Schwartz, Hugh Burns, William Wresch), hypertext
(Michael Joyce, Stuart Moulthrop, Nancy Kaplan), and then, slowly,
networks. I say “slowly” networks because
at the time (summer of 1986)
the local-area networking was clumsy, very fragile, and extremely
irritating. The various types of peer
and star configurations just didn’t work very well, and the servers (we were
using an IBM AT, 286 processor) and storage (10
megabyte harddisks as big as a hard-cover dictionary) were slow and
inadequate. But we persevered.
I persevered because
I had tried to use collaborative pedagogy when I was teaching high school and
had found that it didn’t work – NOT because it didn’t tap into something
natural in the learning process, but because it was logistically too difficult
to carry off. Xeroxing was new and
expensive and the reams of papers cumbersome, reading aloud was time-consuming
and the students mostly slept, and other forms of sharing student work simply
got fouled up in the management.
Computer networks, however, provided what seemed like a perfect way to
distribute student writing among students.
Free copies and free transfer.
A major problem was
that students, in order to move their papers over the network, had to write
their papers on the computer (or at least copy their papers onto the
network). The word processing programs
at the time (WordStar, Volkswriter, SuperScripsit)
were expensive, extremely clumsy, and very hard to learn. Students then (unlike now) were totally
unfamiliar with computers and word processing, and many of them resented having
to use them in English classes. The idea
that the computer was a “writing machine” seemed completely beyond the pale at
the time. We were still seeing articles
in our scholarly journals that “proved” that word processing actually
inhibited good writing.
Jerry Bump tried to
get around this by adopting for classes that met occasionally in the lab (UGL
109) McGraw-Hill’s
version of WordPerfect, called “the College Edition.” What a ripoff. The so-called “college edition” was supposed
to be simpler than the full-blown version, but it was a buggy, botchy mess that
angered students and seemed to us to spell the doom of ever using the network
to move student papers.
I suggested that we
write our own editor in the early fall of 1986, and I distinctly remember Paul
Taylor saying we couldn’t do that, certainly not in BASIC. BASIC just didn’t have the tools to do
that. So I went and wrote an editor in
BASIC and, buggy as it was, it was extremely simple to use and engaged little frustration
on the part of students. That was the
code that eventually became “QuickStart,” the first real Daedalus product. We incorporated QuickStart into our invention
and revision heuristic programs, called originally “Invent” and “Descant.”
The working
conditions in the CRL in those days (1986-1987) were extraordinary, especially
for graduate students in an English program.
Paul, Locke, and I were given release time (full release time for me)
mostly to baby-sit 50 computers and (wink wink, nudge nudge) come up with
innovative uses for computers in English studies. But we ignored the wink wink, nudge nudge,
and took our mission seriously. I didn’t
care whether the department got to keep the computers after two years or not,
but I did feel a tremendous opportunity to explore new ways of managing the
student-teacher encounter through these digital devices. None of us really had any plan or filled-in
vision for the future, but we had a strange confidence that things would work
out. I coined catch-phrases like “innovation
through implementation” (in other words, “try it, dammit!”), “blowing out the walls,” and “leap
before you look.” When people complained
that “leap before you look” was too irrational, I always replied, “if we actually looked, our feet would never get off the
ground.”
In the spring of
1987 I went to the CCCC in
I decided to attend
a vendor suite later that evening to see the software up close (it was called
“CompuTeach” at the time, and had been developed through the ENFI project but
was being sold commercially). In the
elevator going up to the room I began talking with someone I recognized as
Tommy Barker, because I had attended his session at the New Orleans
CCCC’s. He had established a reputation
in Computers and Writing for working very hard, personally, to develop the
“English Microlab Registry” in 1984-1987, a directory for people establishing
computer labs in English departments.
Tommy was a friendly
guy, easy to talk to, and said he was going to the CompuTeach vender suite
too. We entered the suite together. The guys running the suite were dressed in
tuxedoes (bad) and had set up two networked computers in one of the rooms that
were allowing synchronous chat (good).
There was plenty of beer and wine.
Even champaigne.
At one point, Tommy
and I got onto the two computers and began “chatting.” It was very cool. My mind was racing with the
possibilities. A graduate student
sitting on a nearby bed also thought it was cool. He introduced himself as Geof Sirc.
When I returned to
Paul Taylor, the one
we respected most for his technical knowledge and his down-to-earth
practicality, said it couldn’t be done on a simple file-sharing network like
Novell. At the time a group came by Room
110 from Corpus Christie and wanted a tour of the CRL and a description of what
we were doing, so I broke away from my colleagues and spent 20 minutes showing
people our facilities. By the time I got
back, Paul was drawing diagrams of how we could set up synchronous chat on a
file-sharing network. Two days later he
walked into the CRL with a prototype, and we all got on computers and conducted
a chat in much the same way I had seen it done in
Something equally
momentous had occurred a week early that March.
My old friend from
At that same
conference, a few other
When we got to
But as Wayne and Val
and Kay got going, I began to realize that here was the missing link, the
reason to exist for the technology we had been pursuing! They talked about
student-to-student interaction, the dynamics of the negotiation of knowledge,
the creation of discourse communities, and the entire time I was thinking,
getting hotter and hotter, that OUR NETWORKS could do exactly what they wanted
done, could establish the peer interactivity and document management in ways
that simply couldn't be done, logistically, with paper and xerox machines.
I kept whispering to
Paul, "This is it! These guys have exactly what we need to validate our
technology!" Later I found out that
But when the session
was over I walked up to
Boy did we have to
talk.
We all had dinner
that night, the graduate students from UT, at a seafood restaurant, and
This was an act of
pedagogical courage that I wasn't used to seeing at any level of
education. For some reason, the very
people one would assume to be professionally flexible and risk-taking, those
who work with youth, are far more likely to be inflexible, defensive, and so
risk-aversive as to be dangerous to the minds of young people.
The three first-year
composition courses that were team-taught during the summer of 1987 by Val,
Nancy, and Kay, constituted the first full-fledged effort, as far as I am
aware, employing a peer-interactivity computer-network pedagogy in a
computer-based classroom. The software
used employed routines we in the Computer Research Lab had written ourselves in
BASIC and mostly supported file-sharing and real-time (synchronous) discussion. These routines were later to be rewritten and
incorporated into DIWE, the "Daedalus Integrated Writing
Environment," writing instruction software that has enjoyed moderate
success over the last fourteen years.
The problems that
occurred during the summer were both discouraging and encouraging. The teachers were regularly assaulted with
software and network crashes, student resistence, problems in adjusting
traditional practices to the high interactivity of the network, and just the
weirdness of it all. Several times
throughout the summer the teachers vowed to bail out of the effort, take the
students back into the traditional classroom, forget
the computer effort entirely.
But as the summer
progressed, Paul and Locke and I stood in the doorway to the computer-based
classroom (the students' backs were to us and we could see their monitors) and
observed how the students were using the compters and software.
And here I
discovered a profound concept in my teaching and pedagogically supported
software development: "if the kids
can't dance to it, bombsville."
This was a line from
a Stan Freberg comic record from the 1950s that, for whatever reason, has stuck
in my memory all these years. The
meaning more appropriately described in the particular context of "Teacher
in the Attic" can be summed up in the term, "useability."
Watching those kids that summer try to use the stuff that Paul, Locke, and I
programmed became a revelation to me. I
saw the frustrations in the positioning of the shoulder blades, the occasional
clinching of the fist, the tilt of the head (sometimes simply dropping forward
in a gesture of complete compitulation to the idiocy of the computer interface.
I had been teaching
for a number of years prior to my working in the Computer Research Lab and had
always predicated my "ideas" for lesson plans and student tasking on
my projection of what would "work" and what wouldn't. I hadn't been a stupid teacher, but I had
assumed, as most teachers do, that I could simply apply my own experience and
rationality to 'anticipating' what students need and want.
What I saw the
summer of "Val, Kay, and Nancy" (summer of 1987) was a new process of
understanding what students do when they encounter a pedagogy. For all my years in teaching, I had never
really observed, in a regular way and from some other place than the front of
the classroom, how students respond to classroom tasks. I had observed students from the front of the
classroom, and I prided myself on being intelligently able to interpret student
behavior even as I was addressing a room of students. I thought I was good at that.
But what I was
observing that summer was something else, a group of students from the rear,
and ironically, as I came to realize, I could tell much more about how they
were responding to the requirements presented by a teacher by observing them
from the rear than by observing them from the front. I'm not sure why. I suppose that from the front I had too much
personal stake in a favorable outcome.
The agonies
experienced by the teachers in trying something new became, for me at least, an
introduction into an entirely new way to look at what teachers and students
do. The computers and the computer-based
classroom had opened up an instructional process, or an instructional paradigm,
to a new view of what teaching is supposed to accomplish. Although my transformation is far too
complicated to present in these pages, I can describe it in simple terms.
I came to
understanding that what a teacher is teaching is miniscule in terms of what a
student is learning. What a teacher
teaches, how a teacher blocks out a particular domain of instruction, what the
'frame' of presentation engages, is WORTHLESS unless confirmed by what the
student learns. As teachers, we have
been over the years far too
interested in how a subject can be mapped, or how a day can be
broken up into modules, and far, far too UNinterested in what our students are
learning. That summer, as I watched
shoulder blades and neck muscles and head tilts and body language of all sorts,
I came to a different understanding of what teaching is from what I had thought
of it previously.
I recognized that my
job was not to shape a knowledge domain, but to encourage, engage, and enthuse a student. If
the kids can't dance to it, bombsville.
Val, Kay, and Nancy
survived the summer, and during the second summer session Locke, Wyane, and
Greg Lyons taught composition in the computer-based classroom. They had many fewer problems, but that would
be expected since the software and our instructional techniques benefited from
the experience of the previous summer session.
The software
worked! about
as well as the Wright Brothers' plane on the first few flights, but that was
enough. The students could use it,
teachers (imaginative teachers) could use it, and the frustration level,
although occasionally approaching crash level, was contained. An entirely new instruction was born and
employed by several different teachers, showing the portability of the processes. Over the years innovative instruction has
been developed and implemented by individual teachers who, within the bounds of
their own classrooms, have been able to make computer-supported processes
work. But the real test is whether
computer-supported processes can be employed successfully by different
teachers. The CRL at the
Of course the field
of writing instruction was rampant with anti-technology feeling (and still
is). The nineteenth-century distinction
between art and technology still influenced most English majors, who staunchly
defended their "hunamist" roots against all suppositions of
technology, technocracy, computerization, and the inevitably referred to 'Big
Brother.' The understanding of what
'Big Brother' was and is obviously not NOW is woefully lacking among humanist
academics. There is a pleasure in people
who pride themselves on their non-empiricist intellectual puffery in attacking
anything that has to do with machinery (except, of course, their cars and air
conditioning and that sort of machinery).
The experiences of
the summer of 1987 had shown that there was a value in using local-area
networks in writing instruction. The
ENFI project had more or less established this, but they had not brought to the
table the instructional theories of Bruffee and Gere and Bizzell, and as a
result – from our point of view – were providing too much of an instrumentalist
pedagogy. We wanted to validate
instructional theory through our computer networks, because
[to
be continued]