Never fails: I get to the end of a semester, and I want to (presumptuously, arrogantly) Redesign First Year Composition From the Ground Up for All Programs in the US!
The difference I see now in my first year students is that they are naive relativists rather than naive dualists; they are naively savvy about marketing and various televisionary fakeries; they are instinctive multicultural consumers (if not really culturally fluent); they are far less other-phobic than they were even ten years ago.
But, they still hate Comp textbooks -- no matter how hip those textbooks try to be.
And I have figured out why.
They're insulting.
They are basically hippified versions of "current events" and "current debates" that place the students in a "context" of competing voices of varying degrees of expertise and rhetorical cleverness.
And they expect the student to develop a cogent (if inexpert) essay on a controversial subject from this fractured and fragmented reading. OF COURSE, they're going to be tempted to A) retreat to received wisdom, or B) disengage via the "everyone's got an opinion" fade.
Because they're insulted. They're asked by their teachers to become rhetorically aware (if not savvy) cogent arguers in a context of floating bits of opinion. That is an insult.
I have two ways that I want to teach First Year Composition (and the rhetoric, research and argumentation classes, for that matter).
First, for a composition class in which we are working on modes of organization and their skillful combination, and mature style and rhetorical savviness: Teach the Personal or Creative Non-Fiction Essay. Use Lopate's poetics of the essay to get a sense of the rules of the genre, read good essays, analyze them for modes, style, voice, audience. Then write. -- I've used this one, and I know that for this level of writer, it works like a CHARM.
Second: Teach Comp I and II like a graduate class or an upper division class -- but simplified. Present some Seriously Readable Theory, create a real frame both philosophically and historically. Ground them somewhere. Then read arguments, even about the frame. But start them someplace other than Received Knowledge (no matter how tolerant and hip that reception may be). Analyze positions in relation to the frame, and for style, voice, cogency, audience. Then write.
High school writing does precious little, STILL, but ask students to return the Received Knowledge in a well organized and grammatically interpretable manner. It does not ask them to look beyond themselves.
This method would let them look because they would have a frame. Frames assist looking, after all.
In short: get rid of composition textbooks -- or make smarter composition textbooks.
Of course, we can't do this because so much comp is taught by grad students and adjuncts who are in no position to choose books or make their own due to inexperience or shortness of notice before employment. So, you know, ignore me.
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Which is exactly why I've never used a textbook for comp. Even when they gave them to me to use. Found ways around it. But intervening years have brought "standardization" to what was once the creative teaching endeavor, & the use of adjuncts and grad students has led committes to feel they must track "output" and so, for fuck's sake. Somethin gots to change.
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