Bad at English dot tumblr dot com

A CCCC 2014 blog by Franny Howes

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As a coda...

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While this project originally focused on the "bad at English" theme, over the course of collecting photos and stories for the blog I realized how important a critical consciousness on being a millennial educator has been to my professional development and career.

I'm not sure if my baby-boomer and Generation X colleagues realize that when they complain about millennial entitlement and overabundance of self-esteem, they are millennials in the room.  We are turning 30 every year!  We are getting hired by your departments.

It is important to me to speak back to these conversations, but also to draw on my generational background in social media and popular culture to challenge the norms of what it means to be a professional and a teacher.

I obviously have a lot more thinking to do about what this all means, but this project has been an important start.

[Image: Franny Howes, a white woman with glasses, poses for a selfie in a hotel bathroom mirror.  She is wearing a pink flower crown and a bright green blazer.  Colorful bags of toiletries and a white sink are visible in the foreground.]

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Flower Crowns

Flower Crowns are headbands or other hair accessories created by stringing a number of flowers together. On Tumblr, these floral accessories have become an exploitable photoshop meme by adding them to photos of males who would not normally wear them.

Everybody at the conference really liked my flower crown and I got a lot of compliments, even from strangers.  (I think it looked especially good with my suit.  I wore it for my panel and everything.)  But I also got a lot of questions about whyyyyy I was wearing one and what it meant.

Flower crowns are a meme; they got picked up especially hard by fans of the tv show Hannibal, but putting them (via photoshop or sometimes in person) on masculine actors and characters is a very millennial way of queering and appropriating media.  I think.

For me, wearing a flower crown around an academic conference, and inviting other people to wear my extra one with me, had a few purposes:

feminist critique of the discourses of respectability

playing with my identity and visibility as a queer millennial educator in a venue that skews a lot older

it looked awesome on me and my tumblr friends egged me on to do it

I was hesitant at first, but I have no regrets about the choice and considering how much we literally talked about tumblr and queer rhetorics at my panel (thanks queryingthequeer) it was an excellent choice.

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I went to the Eiteljorg Museum while I was in Indianapolis for the conference: Pearson held a party there one evening so I got in for free!  I took some blurry and unhelpful pictures of the totem pole they have on display in the atrium: here is some information about its history. Narrative things like this pole harken back to my previous post about not turning things into texts!

It's really hard to describe an image that is itself a complicated story.  I hope the link I have provided will tell you more about the pole than any description I could type here.

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I hung out for a bit with Malea Powell, my MA advisor, current PhD committee member, and past chair of CCCC one morning at the conference.  She was delighted to pose with a flower crown and I regret not getting these pictures up sooner.

I asked Malea her thoughts about being "bad at English" and she told me that colonialism assigns value to a very narrow set of skills (linear alphabetic texts) and devalues the same material rhetorics and practices she is most concerned with (making, crafting).

Which reminds me of her call in the Octalog 3 panel put on at CCCC to stop turning things into texts.  A thing demands a different kind of interaction than a "text"--our default mode of interaction is "reading" but material rhetorics ask us for a deeper engagement with all the facets of a meaning-laden object.

[Image: a close-up shot of two women with glasses wearing flower crowns.  The first woman, Malea Powell, wears a daisy crown.  The second woman, Franny Howes, wears a pink flower crown.]

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[birdrhetorics]

my life, my choices, part two: childhood in the early 1990’s. 

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Okay, so another thing that happened at the CCCC conference was that I met the guy (one of the guys) who wrote the textbook I use (Sid Dobrin) in person, finally.  His reaction was, "You're not just a comic book character, you're a real person!"  So, flattering to know he is a fan of my comics.  Also, as it turns out, he's a big Jubilee fan.  He's watching the 90's X-Men show with his kids because it's on Netflix, and I told him to make sure to watch the Christmas special where Wolverine saves Christmas for the Morlocks.

[grammarchist]

Love it!

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Stephanie and Ayde are awesome!  Don't know the other people.

[Image: photo of the CCCC program showing the description of session D.29, "Writing the Zombie Apocalypse."]

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I talked to Victor del Hierro, a PhD student at Michigan State, after his panel and we posed in front of my webcam.  He gave an awesome talk beginning to theorize a hip hop rhetorics framework for digital humanities.

I asked him what he thought about being "bad at English"--he said, "I used to be really worried about it...but then I stopped caring.  Is that ok?"  It's totally ok.

[Image description: two webcam pictures of Franny, a white woman with glasses wearing a crown of pink flowers, and Victor, a Chicano dude with glasses wearing a white button-down shirt.  We are inside a Marriott conference room in Indianapolis.]

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My notes from the Committee on the Status of Graduate Students, of which I am a member.  We met today.  There were no outlets in the room so I had to do my note-taking old school.

[Image: Franny, a white woman with glasses and an eyebrow barbell, holds up three pages of handwritten notes.  The pages read "Newcomers.  Let's talk to CCCCs the day.  More connections.  Contingent and adjunct faculty.  Organizational transparency.  dis cdicc.  reconstitution."  There are also a lot of scribbly doodles.}

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Up and at em with the flower crown this morning, attending Victor del Hierro and Marcos del Hierro's session (A.37).  I decided to skip Angela Davis.

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I did get a new baby sparklepony this year (though I actually think I completed one of the quests the same way I did in Vegas last year…)  Two quests down, many to go.

[Image description: A laptop webcam picture of me, Franny Howes, a white woman with glasses an an eyebrow barbell, posing with a tiny purple and green pony pin, inside the JW Marriott in Indianapolis.]

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I stopped by the C's the Day table to talk to Mary Karcher.  Turns out, she lives in my hometown and we had never realized it before.  We talked about how teachers can make students think they are bad at english by making "english" seem like an arbitrary series of rules about what words you are allowed and not allowed to use.

The more I talk to people about this, the more I wonder what I even mean by English, anyway.

I feel like spending part of your academic conference playing an game might by some definitions count as being "bad", but that's what gamification is trying to change--games are good!  Games can be part of being good at english.

[Image description: two white women with glasses pose, grinning, with the grand sparklepony, a blue sparkly pony doll that is the prize for winning C's the Day.  We are inside the JW Marriott in Indianapolis.]

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Doug Walls and Franny Howes agree: being a bad speller can make you think you are bad at english, but thankfully there's more to it than that.

[Image description: two extreme close-up selfies of me, a white chick with glasses and an eyebrow barbell, and my friend Doug, a white white and Latino dude with a goatee and glasses and a cool hat.  We are posing outdoors in Indianapolis and are both grinning cheerfully.]

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[Image: the login page for the con hotel wifi.  "High Speed Internet Access... Please click here to login to the internet"]

Really, the whole internet?

[birdrhetorics]

oop tweeted about the flower crown and ended up on the front page of the conference website

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[Image: a screenshot of the CCCC conference website that captured a tweet I (Tesseractive on twitter) made saying "It's done--I bought my flower crown for #4c14.  We're doing this.  We're making this happen."]

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[Image: Me, a white woman with glasses and a large gold earring, staring into my webcam with my CCCC nametag, reading "Franny Howes Virginia Tech".]

I'm hanging out in the JW Marriott lobby drinking the complimentary (complementary? Which one means free?) for now because I'm at the conference early but didn't sign up to do anything on Wednesday.  Except finish drawing the image that go with my presentation on Friday.  Oops.

[badatenglish]

Are rhetoricians and compositionists overachievers?  Were we?  Were we geeks in high school English class, or did we sit in the back of the room making fun of Charles Dickens?  What literacy histories do we bring with us to our teaching, research, and mentorship?  How do our past experiences with being “bad at English” affect our relationships to our students at present? What does it mean to be a Millennial professional, carrying a professional history fraught with uncertainty and starkly different from the lives of the professionals who currently dominate the field?

This blog, a documentation of my experiences at CCCC 2014, though a variety of media.  I am going to talk to my colleagues about what it means times they have felt "bad at English" as well as blog my own experiences here.  Sometimes I feel like just by being of my generation I'm seen as fundamentally "bad at English" because of my orientation to technology and my love of the singular they.  So there's that.