Yeah, I know: I’ve been going on about this for a while. This is the last entry. I think I’ve said and thought enough here to be able to turn these entries into an article, and I’ll have the IRB permissions to do it. I’m happy about that. As I’ve noted before, I think this is the first large-scale project I’ve been able to implement that’s drawn together my process-oriented pedagogy and my scholarly interest in the rhetoric of technology as it plays out in composition and connect both through my work on the economics of immaterial labor and a renewed attention to the labor theory of value. In other words: everything clicked last semester, and I’m trying to figure out why and how, so I can develop this approach (which, according to our blind tests and number-crunching, is empirically and statistically successful, and I think that’s no small claim) into something that might in some small way be adaptable or generalizable to other college writing courses.

The Framework I’ve been trying to apply to what we did last semester describes eight “habits of mind essential for success in college writing” and then offers five approaches or forms of experience that “can foster these habits of mind”:

Rhetorical knowledge — the ability to analyze and act on understandings of audiences, purposes, and contexts in creating and comprehending texts. (In my class, we get pretty good at that: we write for multiple and various real-world audiences for various purposes and in various contexts, and I’ve encouraged students to send off their end-of-semester real-world documents to the audiences who they thought were both most in need of being convinced and in the best position to make a difference. In so doing, I’ve benefited from the cadets’ confidence in themselves, but I’m also one of the people who helps to build that confidence.)

Critical thinking — the ability to analyze a situation or text and make thoughtful decisions based on that analysis, through writing, reading, and research. (This is the criterion I hate for its bland, euphemistic triteness. Is anybody in academia opposed to “critical thinking”? Of course not. It has no positive opposing term. It’s a fancy way of saying, “Just be smart,” or — for many instructors — “Agree with my political opinions and endorse the ways in which I unmask for you the grim and terrible functions of hegemony.” Too often, the would-be Freirean pedagogue simply becomes a counter-Freirean, substituting one set of banking-method perspectives for another. Yes, one can critique, but if you’re going to critique, you’d better be pluralistic in doing so, even if you don’t like the answers you get. I avoid use of the phrase “critical thinking” because it’s a hackneyed term and a more-or-less empty signifier, but I do demand that students engage multiple perspectives and carefully evaluate the motivations that stand behind the sources they engage.

Writing Processes — multiple strategies to approach and undertake writing and research. (Yes, the approach we used in last semester’s pilot course did this in a huge way: we showed and worked with our students on multiple approaches and processes and then asked them to engage them in enormously flexible ways, trying out one approach after another and carefully monitoring and self-monitoring what worked and what didn’t work. The first and most important thing: we wrote, every lesson, and we wrote a lot. Students got good at composing fast; at putting together words. That’s a first and foundational skill, and perhaps more than anything else what helped them to succeed. They admitted as much, nearly unanimously, in their anonymous evalutations at the end of the semester: if you’re going to learn to write well, the first step is writing, and writing regularly. The next step was to try it out in various ways and with various approaches. That engagement with the multiple processes and approaches — the various forms of work for composition, but most of all with the down-in-it work of actually composing — is precisely what leads me to mistrust any compositionist who self-characterizes as “post-process,” as if we can simply glide over or elide that absolutely essential attention to how we do what we do. If someone self-characterizes to me as “post-process,” my first question in response will likely be: How many of your students still write their papers the night before they’re due? Uh-huh.)

Knowledge of conventions — the formal and informal guidelines that define what is considered to be correct and appropriate, or incorrect and inappropriate, in a piece of writing. (We have here our share of would-be grammar nazis — often self-identified, and often unable to adequately explain what they mean by the term “grammar” and how it might differ from punctuation, mechanics, or usage — who are mostly as ill-informed as they are at any other institution as to the proper use of the subjunctive voice, the particulars of em dashes and en dashes as opposed to hyphens, or why certain students struggle with the use of determiners. Perhaps because of that, I work hard to illustrate to my students how such conventions are always dependent on context, and work hard with junior faculty and with other departments to talk about how conventions shift according to context and audience.)

Abilities to compose in multiple environments — from using traditional pen and paper to electronic technologies. (We totally rocked this last semester. We worked in pencil and paper, on laptops, across multiple information systems for multiple purposes. I opened lesson 1 and closed lesson 40 with the use of pen and paper and 63 sealed envelopes; in between, we worked with Microsoft Word, 750words.com, email, chat clients, Zoho.com, Blackboard, beta-testing the Eli peer review software, blogspaces, presentation software, movie editing, wikispaces, and that reminds me that I need to test out Etherpad analogues this semester. In fact, we changed environments so often that students got good — or perhaps were already good — at changing environments.)

Conclusions? The work of writing has value. Students get better at it by doing it in various ways that focus their attention on the very specific contexts in which they write. And this pedagogy — a pedagogy of writing as work, of writing as regular work — works.

I started to offer some additional detail in my last post about how the technology- and writing-intensive version of our plebe composition course that I led and co-piloted last semester supported the “habits of mind” detailed in the Framework for Success in Postsecondary Writing document developed and produced by the Council of Writing Program Administrators, the National Writing Project, and the National Council of Teachers of English.

Here’s the short version: the adaptability across multiple information systems that the pedagogy we developed in our eight sections and the regular, rigorous, and reflective practice and instruction in writing that we gave our students (1) aligns well with nationally accepted pedagogies and outcomes and (2) produced a positive and statistically significant correlation between how much students wrote and how well they performed on blind-graded end-of-semester writing assessment measures.

In other words, what we did worked. Here’s how we tried to develop the other four (out of the total of eight) habits of mind that I started to describe last time.

Persistence – the ability to sustain interest in and attention to short- and long-term projects. (As Clancy pointed out, this is the habit of mind in which our students have perhaps the most significant advantage: at the nation’s premier and highest-ranked military academy, where our students compete for Rhodes and Marshall scholarships with students at Harvard, Yale, and Princeton, we don’t lack for high-initiative self-starters. Our students are trained and temperamentally inclined to do what they’re asked. The plebes come straight out of the military basic-training rigors of “Beast Barracks” into our classrooms, and many of them have express their adherence to the maxim, “Fake it ’til you make it”: the notion that even if you can’t yet do it, keep trying and going through the motions until you can. That attitude is a remarkable asset in the classroom, especially when they’re also consistently urged to take advantage of every resource possibly available to them, including instructor advice. If I encourage them to do something, and model it convincingly, they’ll do it, and give me reports long after they’ve departed my course about how well they’ve done. I kind of love that.)

Responsibility – the ability to take ownership of one’s actions and understand the consequences of those actions for oneself and others. (Perhaps more than anything else, this is what sets Academy students apart from others. The demand for persistence and initiative, coupled to the forthrightness necessitated by the cadet-run honor system and its implementation of the Cadet Honor Code, and the command structure set up in the Corps of Cadets in which cadets take on increasing responsibility for the actions of cadets in classes below them as they advance through the ranks from plebe through yearling and cow to firstie, all lead to a system in which personal responsibility is foremost. Cadets eagerly give credit to those who have helped them out, and seek recognition for their actions. When they fail, they’re almost always the first to acknowledge it, and typically follow up that acknowledgement with a request for advice on how to improve. They own their actions, and they give full credit — good and bad — to the actions of others, as well.)

Flexibility – the ability to adapt to situations, expectations, or demands. (This is another advantage I’d argue Academy students tend to possess over others. Before they get to our FYC classroom, they’ve gone through Beast Barracks. The Army’s developed plenty of ways to help them learn to “Improvise, adapt, and overcome.” And their instructors run the range from cuddly civilian nice-guys to officers cycling into West Point fresh out of command of a Ranger or Special Forces unit. We demand that cadets excel in all three domains — athletic, military, and academic — rather than just one. And their strengths in the athletic or military domains can contribute to their performance in the academic classroom in surprising ways. They tend to understand the idiosyncrasies of the rhetorical situation in ways that some instructors at more conventional institutions might not anticipate.)

Metacognition – the ability to reflect on one’s own thinking as well as on the individual and cultural processes used to structure knowledge. (I’ve tried to actively promote reflection-as-metacognition in the service of knowledge transfer since I arrived at West Point, but I worry that I’ve been largely unsuccessful, in part because the Army’s institutional structures and discourses have to a degree co-opted research on reflection and metacognition: it’s become an often contentless buzzword here. The Army does After-Action Reviews and thinks of it as metacognition, rather than paying attention to the constraints and processes that led to a given outcome, and that leads in turn to the ways many of my students don’t want to think about constraints and processes, but only about actions and outcomes. Method and motivation seem sometimes not to matter, even as we pay them lip service in the interest of reflection. The best thing I might do, I think, would be to keep a dual-column index of my end-of-paper comments and their end-of-paper reflections for all their assignments, and maybe even to make it a triple-entry notebook, with their reactions to the intersections between the first two columns in the third column.)

So: the pedagogy in the pilot course I’ve led has promoted, I think, significant advantage on the part of students here in many of the habits of mind that lead to success in postsecondary writing, and I’ve got a ways to go in some other areas. I’ll talk next time about how I work in terms of the five approaches the Framework recommends in order to promote those habits of mind.

I’m going to continue here my response to Clancy’s recent comment that I started in my last post. The new semester is underway, and with it not quite as much freedom as I had last semester — I’m teaching EN302, our Advanced Composition course for cows (juniors), rather than EN101, our Composition course for plebes (first-year students), and the course leadership is different and the course structure is more regimented. Still, I’m engaging in most of the same writing-intensive practices (I’m requiring students to write in 750words.com every lesson day, where I’m currently composing this blog entry, and requiring them to write 30,000 words to earn a C) and some of the same technology-intensive practices (we’re using the Eli peer review application again this semester, for which I’m very happy; as I’ve said before, if you’re a writing teacher and you haven’t yet tried it, you really should: it’s that good) that I piloted last semester. Here’s the basic point I’m trying to make: my approach both last semester and this semester brought together my process-based pedagogy, my interests in digital technologies, and my scholarship on the political economy of writing instruction in a remarkably integrated way. It all fit together, and I’ve got the numbers that show that it worked, and I’m very happy about that.

One way into talking about why I think it worked is for me to respond to Bradley’s question about how I “addressed whatever writing of essays they did outside of the in-class writing.” To put it in crude economic terms, I valued both the labor and the product: out of a 1000-point syllabus, 450 points went to the the final products of the four homework essay assignments, and 160 points went to their 750words.com daily writing assignments. I gave them a minimum of 20 minutes in class every lesson to work on their daily writing assignments, for which I often gave them prompts designed to help them build their homework essays, and I encouraged them to recycle their daily writing into their homework essays. I’m still somewhat surprised at what a success the simple act of giving students at least 20 minutes in class every day to write was, but it really shouldn’t be surprising: butts in seats is what gets writing done, much more so than talking about writing. My thinking here is that the immaterial labor of producing and organizing information is much more responsive to the labor theory of value, especially given that immaterial capital — the product of immaterial labor — is an experience good.

That takes me to the “habits of mind” that Clancy asked about. Clancy’s referring to the Framework for Success in Postsecondary Writing document jointly developed and produced by the Council of Writing Program Administrators, the National Writing Project, and the National Council of Teachers of English. That document (which merits attention if you’re not already familiar with it and reading this blog) outlines eight “habits of mind essential for success in college writing”:

Curiosity — the desire to know more about the world. (In most conventional composition classes, class discussion is what tends to drive and foster curiosity. Because we did more writing than talking in class, and because I didn’t do a very good job of promoting the use of the class weblog for out-of-class discussion, I think this habit may have suffered somewhat. The fact that plebes were coming to EN101 straight out of “Beast Barracks,” West Point’s version of the Army’s basic training, where curiosity and a spirit of inquiry were the absolute last things to be fostered, didn’t help matters.)

Openness — the willingness to consider new ways of being and thinking in the world. (Again, more discussion would have likely promoted this more, but I also think that the course readings we select should promote openness. To me, that’s one of the few shortcomings of Downs and Wardle’s “writing about writing” approach: it focuses on only one aspect of the world. On the other hand, the way we used Eli for carefully crafted anonymous peer review work did some good work promoting openness.)

Engagement — a sense of investment and involvement in learning. (I think this is one of the hardest things for any curriculum to promote. West Point’s mission, in part, is to “educate, train, and inspire” future Army officers, and that requirement to inspire is fundamentally rhetorical, and what creates engagement. It means being involved in cadets’ lives and activities, as well as persuading them of the importance of the connections between their classroom pursuits and what happens beyond the classroom.)

Creativity — the ability to use novel approaches for generating, investigating, and representing ideas. (Recently, I’ve tried to promote this habit more and more by requiring cadets to compose and deliver multi-modal, multi-media presentations involving graphics, music, video, speech, and text, and directing them away from the familiar, comfortable, and terrible Army PowerPoint standard. Initially, they’re lousy risk-takers, but once they figure out that being risk-averse is actually a hindrance and a danger for future military officers, and once they realize that I’m requiring to try out new methods, they’re pretty amazing.)

That’s the first four, and I think that’s enough for tonight. I’ll talk tomorrow night about how I’ve tried to promote persistence, responsibility, flexibility, and metacognition.

Clancy responds to my last post by noting that she “completely agree[d] with [me] that it never would have worked without a group of strong students,” and writes that she could “imagine that at a lot of places, upper administration might shut down a project like this if faced with complaints from students and/or parents.” As I prepare to depart this place at the end of this academic year, I’m feeling a little conflicted about the assumptions she makes about my students. Do I think that West Point cadets are that much better than students I might encounter elsewhere? Perhaps in some ways yes: every student I teach is nominated for excellence by a member of Congress, and that’s part of what makes this place magic, and part of what makes it so intensely rewarding to teach here.

But the answer’s more complicated than that, too. Clancy’s comment makes me feel a little awkward, because I don’t think I ever actually said that our pilot course “never would have worked without a group of strong students.” And I want to believe that the approach I’ve developed, with its deep theoretical and pedagogical investment with the notion of the value of work, could work elsewhere.

At the start of the semester, I sold our approach to the cadets with every bit of persuasive enthusiasm I could muster, because I knew they’d be suspicious. Writing every day in class? Writing 750 words every lesson day, just to earn a C?

A funny thing happened. They figured out that writing 750 words is easy. They figured out that they can do it on demand. And the most important thing that has happened — and it only happened recently, for some of them — is that they figured out they can write. For me, that’s huge. That’s the battle I’ve been fighting since I first started teaching composition. Every semester, I had the students who were sure they couldn’t write, and so they didn’t. They didn’t write until it came down to crunch time and they had to write their essays the night before the final drafts of those essays were due, and they did. Until this semester, I got those essays all the time. You know what they look like, because you’ve seen them. They’re essays produced at the last minute by students who are certain that doing so is the only and best way of writing. Those essays are why they hate writing.

What’s happened this semester, though, is that writing has become almost like athletic performance: it’s a matter of getting it done, putting in the practice, and pretty soon, practice translates into improvement. There’s value in the work of doing. In August, I asserted my primary reservations about most university-level writing instruction: that it’s “too easy to allow the classroom work associated with composition courses to focus on activities other than writing,” and that

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This semester I’ve co-developed and run a course pilot of eight sections, two instructors and roughly one hundred and thirty students total, through the use of at least eight different information systems: Blackboard, because it’s institutionally mandated and a place to store course documents and post announcements; Wikispaces, which we’ve used mostly to post editable sign-up sheets for conferences (though I think there’s more potential there); Zoho.com, an online productivity and document-sharing suite that we fell back on because our institution blocks the Google docs productivity and document-sharing suite; 750words.com, to serve as a space for daily writing; four separate WordPress installs at rhetcomp.net, to serve as a discussion space; and the ELI peer review post-beta, to implement early-stage peer review; and of course email, Web browsing and Microsoft Word.

It’s gone mostly well, though I’ll admit the successes have been varied.

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Hal Varian is the chief economist for Google and retired professor emeritus at UC Berkeley, where he founded the School of Information and held positions with the Haas School of Business and the Department of Economics. In The Economics of Information Technology, he and Joseph Farrell and Carl Shapiro outline a market-based philosophy of the relationships between economic factors and for-profit information technology companies. They note that in technological industries, constant and substantial fixed costs are coupled with low or nonexistent marginal costs for each additional incremental unit (3). This is of particular interest when coupled to the careful distinctions they draw between “Information technology,” which “is used to manipulate information,” of which a portion “may be intellectual property” (4). We know these are not separate categories. Often, in the economic cycle of production, distribution, use, and re-production, one becomes the other. When that happens, we should understand it as an instance of the transformation problem and the aggregation problem. Varian is a lot smarter and a lot more well-educated about economic phenomena than am I, but I’ll point out that this illustrates a difference in emphasis and perspective: mainstream neoclassical economics is synchronic in its analysis, while I’m concerned via that economic cycle I’ve outlined with what takes place over time. Varian wants to categorize economic inputs and transactions and look at their intersections in the moment. I’m looking at processes over time and how time is always and inevitably the factor in the three problems (transformation, aggregation, substitution) that I see as being characteristic of the way we teach composition. We aggregate the labor of production into the commodification of both the grade and the skill, but the process itself attends to the phenomenology of writing in ways that blur value together rather than separate value into distinct domains.

What would happen, then, if we worked to closely examine the ways in which value is appropriated into different domains and by different parties at different stages in the economic process? Varian discusses the phenomenon of “price discrimination” enabled by “high-tech industries” in the ways that “price will often exceed marginal cost” and “a seller can offer prices and goods that are differentiated by individual behavior and/or characteristics” (12). This phenomenon, exemplified in wishlists and egocasting and the splintering of the supply of goods — Zuboff and Maxmin’s so-called “support economy” — would seem to be a strong counter to the rhetorically idealized massed economic forces of depersonalized corporations and ideologies of mass consumption. Chomsky’s critique of “Weapons of Mass Distraction” refers to advertising, and homogenizes capitalist entities in order to criticize them homogenously, as an undifferentiated group, while simultaneously surrendering to them as the overpowering metonymic avatars of an irresistible global capitalism. For critiques such as Chomsky’s, which are all too common to the discourse of composition, the game is already lost and it is always already the end of the world and the only things we can do is shake our heads and say, “If only they had listened to us, but they didn’t, so there’s nothing to be done except decry the fact that they didn’t listen to us and so reinforce our nobly subaltern position”: we have met the enemy, and he is us. On the other hand, if we were to attend to the diverse economic landscape and extend the metaphor of price discrimination to non-market activities, we would recognize ourselves and the work we do with information as an experience good.

Consider the concept of versioning as it takes place in the non-market context of revision in the composition classroom or in scholarly discourse. Varian describes “versioning” as “a way to price discriminate between collectors and casual viewers, and between buyers and renters,” and notes that “the price differences between the two version is much greater than the difference in marginal cost” (17). We know as scholars, and we teach our students, that once you educate yourself enough about a particular subject, you can shift your arguments about that subject to pitch some to experts and some to non-experts, who will take away slightly different messages and be inclined to react in different ways to your rhetorical pitch, despite how little you needed to adjust your fundamental message. We do versioning, too, in the ways we compose and ask students to compose for different audiences, and in the ways we return to habitual concerns. We embody versioning, in fact, in our variations on particular topics and our returns to the same concerns in conference presentations and scholarly articles. But it’s not price we’re interested in; it’s value, and how it circulates, and we hope that others take up our concerns and differentiate theirs from ours in new and unique ways.

That act of versioning, however, can only offer value in a context where enough people possess the motivation and the ability — the will and the skill — to make that discrimination. Varian talks about “network effects” and how those effects “are endemic in high-tech products,” pointing out that “the demand for the [technological] infrastructure depends on the availability of applications, and vice versa” (33). The condition of literacy is infrastructure. These are “demand-side economies of scale” (33): how valuable a skill is depends on how many people have it. As Varian notes, “average revenue (demand) increases with scale” (34). Increasing the number of people who know how to use computers increases the value of knowing how to use computers. The same phenomenon occurs with literacy. There is a hump, a tipping point, that one has to get over, and to a large degree we’ve done so in the U.S., and so we’ve hidden from ourselves that obstacle. That obstacle is wholly present in Afghanistan, even if we don’t know quite where it is: we only know that we have to get over it. That’s what the counterinsurgency battle is about, and that’s why we should be thinking about Plato and the Phaedrus when we’re engaging the Afghans. There are plenty of things that are going to influence them, and enjoyment of literature might be one, and familiarity with Western culture might be another (even as I cringe at the ugly inherent colonialism of such a statement). The coupled abilities of post-print literacy and computer literacy will be of enormous benefit to the Afghans if they can get enough people practiced in those abilities. Right now, they don’t have it, but we know that network effects are hugely influential, and we know that once that positive-value tipping point is passed, improvement in multiliteracies and economic gain (both market and nonmarket) can become mutually self-sustaining. In observing such a self-sustaining relationship, however, we should not confuse ourselves that marked effects are in some way equivalent to network effects, as we so often do.

In fact, as smart as Varian and Farrell and Shapiro are, they are in their attention to markets missing the broader and much more important picture: it’s not about money; it’s about value. Varian problematically asserts that “copyrighted computer software, such as Microsoft Windows, can have far greater economic significance than any single book, musical composition, or movie” (34), apparently ignoring the Bible, The Communist Manifesto, Chairman Mao’s Little Red Book, The Internationale, Triumph of the Will, and The Battle Hymn of the Republic. As market economists, they see only market effects. They are once more engaging in the reductive “ceci tuera cela” argument familiar from Victor Hugo’s Hunchback of Notre Dame: this will kill that. The book will kill the cathedral. Postmodernism will kill the author. The screen will kill the page. In fact, I would argue that the market-based economic arguments of Varian, Farrell, and Shapiro all carry within them their own unseaming and show how success with market-based interpretations of the functioning of information technology actually show and illustrate how the market is circumscribed, bound, and supplemented by a broader nonmarket economy. Not that this will kill that, but that this will coexist with that, and many more things besides, and necessarily so.

What makes writing good?

I’m not talking about the object — the product of writing-as-activity — but about the doing itself. The gerund. The activity. The habit.

I have some ideas, largely rooted in process-based pedagogy, which I know may be problematic for the composition scholars who identify themselves as post-process. In “Professional Writing Expertise,” in The Cambridge Handbook of Expertise and Expert Performance (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2006, 389-402), Ronald Kellogg points out that “[s]erious writing is at once a thinking task, a language task, and a memory task” that involves “hold[ing] multiple representations in mind while adeptly juggling the basic processes of planning ideas, generating sentences, and reviewing how well the process is going” (389). I’d say that’s a pretty good picture of what we teach our students to do, whether we characterize ourselves as process or post-process. Teaching that array of skills is a complex endeavor, and I can understand why plenty of composition specialists and theorists and pedagogues — you, my friends and colleagues — would want to resist reducing it to the lock-step single-sequence method that a sequence of lessons or a syllabus can sometimes make it look like. But that’s unfair: we all know, always and already, how rich and complex and challenging teaching writing can be, and we know it’s not a lock-step method. If we argue in good faith, I think, it’s hard to not see the post-process objections as ways of setting up a straw man that we’d like to beat with a stick.

We understand that post-process theories of writing assert that they take the understanding of writing-as-process as given; as an understanding so obvious that we no longer need to think or argue about it. In other words, the process understanding of writing is so basic as to no longer be able to generate interesting questions. I disagree: while process pedagogy in many places is largely taken for granted, it’s also still clearly generating argument and disagreement. When post-process pedagogues declare process pedagogy to be foundational and monolithic, I want to say: yes, of course, but not so fast.

In 1987, I was a freshman at Carnegie Mellon University. In the general psychology 100 course that all freshmen were required to take — Cognitive Processes Theory and Practice, led and lectured by John Hayes — we were required to participate in empirically-based psychology experiments for course credit.

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Most of the plagiarized essays available at the online term paper mills are terrible. The free ones I’ve seen are largely incoherent or semi-coherent patches of writing recycled for high school writing assignments so obvious they’re kind of embarrassing. I haven’t seen all that many of the for-hire ones, but the excerpted samples available at some of the sites and the experiments I’ve seen from some of those investigating online plagiarism mostly point toward a consensus that the canned essays students sometimes pay for with a credit card aren’t much better than the free ones. What’s left are the custom for-pay papers, and the prices for those are pretty high. I would imagine the quality is better than that of the canned papers, and I’m sure the for-hire term paper artists are pretty good, but I have to wonder if the trade-off in cash versus time is really worth it: for a custom paper, the going rate seems to start at around $20 per page and go up steeply. So a three-page paper will put you out at least sixty bucks.

Most students don’t make more than $10 an hour, if they work. Is a three-page paper worth six hours of your time? It depends on the student, I’m pretty sure. I don’t think working students are the ones paying $60 for a three-page paper: if they’re working and going to college, there’s a sort of value equation there that would lead most of them, I would think, to sit in front of the keyboard and do whatever one can to get the work of writing done. That work might be lackadaisical or slapdash, but from what I’ve seen, they mostly do it. (It should be clear at this point that I’m not talking about cadets, who are not permitted to hold paid employment, and who are so overscheduled as to be completely incapable of doing so. They’ve got other pressing concerns.) So if you see a good paper from a student, and it’s a plagiarized paper exchanged in a market transaction, I’d bet there’s a good chance that student isn’t a working student.

There’s a reason for that, and it has to do with how markets work differently for different people. In “The Subject and Object of Commodification,” the Introduction to the Ertman and Williams collection Rethinking Commodification (NYU Press, 2005), Margaret Jane Rabin and Madhavi Sunder call into question

the economic neutrality of markets. Markets affect the rich and poor differently. The poor are more likely to be the sellers, and the rich, the buyers, of questionable commodities such as sexual services or body parts. Unequal distributions of wealth make the poorest in society, with little to offer in the marketplace, more likely to commodify themselves. (11)

The immaterial labor of education, and of writing, is self-work, and written products are often close to the self, even if they aren’t the gushing public exposure of self that compositionists too often misrepresent as what we call expressive writing. Writing is work, and it’s hard, and that work that we and our students do carries portions of our selves. (Poststructuralist objections and pointed remarks about the illusory nature of the unified subject noted, and I’m mostly in agreement. Randall Freisinger’s perspective in the Peter Elbow Landmark Essays volume on voice stands as required reading for those who raise such objections.) In higher education, students who are sufficiently privileged not to have to exchange their labor for a wage enjoy the relative privilege of being able to at least partially appropriate the value of their own self-work: they get to write their own papers, and in writing their own papers, they are turning that labor of writing into the capital of skill at writing, as well as exchanging their papers-as-commodities in return for the good grade that will presumably contribute to the furthering of their careers.

The ultra-privileged students who don’t need to work and who have the resources to pay for custom-written papers are also exempted from the need to turn any labor into capital, because any shortcomings they might have in human capital (the ability to write well, for example) are compensated for by the advantage their financial capital will give them after college. Who remains, then? The poor. And as Rabin and Sunder note, the poor are more likely to commodify themselves, and are also more likely to have experienced the educational advantages familiar to those with more wealth. In other words, the reason that so many canned for-hire term papers — and even some of the products of the custom term paper services — are so lousy is that they’re an instance of how market economies treat different classes of people in different ways. Poor people, who are more likely to have had poor experiences in the educational system, are more likely to be the ones who try to commodify their educational experiences by selling their term papers.

I boasted yesterday that I “work the hell out of the clock.” It’s true: I do. But I’m having second thoughts about that boast. Is it a good thing to “work the hell out of the clock,” either in class or out of class?

I think it’s important, certainly, to respect classroom time and student time, and to do so by planning well, which means planning at once precisely and flexibly. My first-year composition course has an arc marked by graded events, and sequences of lessons that lead up to those graded events, and I plan those sequences themselves both at the small scale and the grand scale while at the same time allowing enough space for things to shift right or left on the calendar as they need to. I’m one of those teachers who always overplans his classes, always having ready to go more than we’ll have time to do. At the same time, I’m also one of those teachers who always cuts himself short, insisting that students have their minimum of 20 minutes each class to write what I ask them to write. Respect the time.

That’s something that not enough people here say, or maybe that not enough people here do, cadets and faculty alike. We abuse time on either side, teachers assigning cadets too much to do, cadets at all levels giving themselves too much to do, to the point where the plebes (who are still earnest, still eager to succeed at everything) in class nod like those mechanical water-sipping birds, because they’ve tried to complete all the tasks set upon them, rather than realizing (as upperclassmen do) that there are some tasks at which they will fail.

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Here’s one way to start a rumination on the uses of classroom time in teaching writing: at West Point, classes are 55 minutes long, and I work the hell out of the clock. The section marcher renders the report at the :00 second mark, and we go until I dismiss students, usually no earlier than about 54 minutes and 50 seconds after that :00 second mark, and certainly no later than the 55:00. Our class time is precious and I plan it well, including incorporating at least 20 unbroken minutes (and often more) for students to write during every lesson. Students’ time outside of class is equally precious: West Point cadets are overscheduled, and one of the essential things I can do for a plebe is to respect the time he or she spends beyond my classroom. I do so scrupulously.

Here’s another way to start a rumination about time: I’m turning 42 in a little over two months, and while I’m thinking about time and economy, it seems appropriate to note that in 1748, a 42-year-old Benjamin Franklin wrote in “Advice to a Young Tradesman” that his “friend, A. B.” should “[r]emember, that time is money.” I never liked that saying. Taken as a component of the broader argument of the “Advice” piece, the statement makes sense, but I don’t like the way it categorically commodifies the dimension across and within which we all live our lives. Time is money? Well, yes, it can be. Time is theft? Sure, if you do it right and avoid your workplace internet filters. Time is a gift? Certainly, if you’ve lost a loved one to an illness.

Time is context. In 1748, Franklin was writing in the context of what was still a largely mercantile and manual-labor economy. Adam Smith published The Wealth of Nations in 1776. Raymond Williams argues that the broad cultural changes associated with the industrial revolution started around 1780. Jacques-Pierre Brissot de Warville was executed in 1793, but his treatise The Commerce of America with Europe (translated and published in English in 1795) declared that

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