My Discourse Community

To visit sites by my colleagues relevant to the teaching of writing and rhetoric, see the following links:

J.C. Williams discusses the legitimacy of visual rhetoric in the classroom.

ROBIDA's Enlightened Discourse Regarding the Mind's Sublimity

Russell Hehn's Multimodal Presentation on the Writing Process

Tess Rooney on the Use of Weblogs in the Teaching of Writing

Natalie Couch on Technical Mediums for a Traditional Classroom

A Few Previous Experiences

My personal experience with competition in the classroom has been very different from one teacher to the next. In the context of writing classes, I can remember two specific incidents of classroom competition. One of these experiences was great for me and the other was potentially dangerous. The first that I can remember was in a high school class. It was my senior year of high school and I was less than thrilled to be involved in the class or the assigned project. I was ready to graduate and move on. My class was reading The Lord of the Flies by William Golding. While I had enjoyed the book, I was not excited about the class in general or any work that I might have to do for the class. My teacher, Mrs. Genoble, in an effort to cure the students of the class of their senioritis, assigned us a task: to build something representative of the book. She gave us very few guidelines for the project. She just wanted us to build something. She let us pick our own groups and we set to work attempting to discern exactly what she wanted us to do. She said that at the end of the time allotted, three days, we would look at all the projects and the best one would receive a prize. She never specified what the prize was, but we all knew we wanted it.
Over the next three days, several groups began building models of the island, complete with working volcanoes, model airplanes, and tropical plants. These were some of the most creative projects I had seen in my entire high school career, even with science fairs, etc. Looking back, I am rather amazed at the level of work she got from students in a writing class. Although the project was not a writing project, it did help us to think about the book critically and decide what the important elements of the book were. I suppose you could call it an exercise in visual rhetoric. My group, wanting to do something different, decided that everyone else would probably build some sort of model of the island. We didn't want to do the same thing everyone else was doing, so we decided to build a scene. We would create the atmosphere of the book (as we read it) and portray one of the climactic scenes of the book for our class. We set out to find a pig's head. After all, this would be the most important and realistic element of our scene. We got one from our local abattoir, put it on a stick, and set it up in the woods near our school. We draped a parachute over the tree next to it and spread some red jello around it. The next day, when it came time for us to present our project to the class, one member of our group, dressed as a savage boy, lead the class into the woods and into our scene. After we acted out the scene, we showed the class the video we made when we went to the abattoir. The video was mostly for fun, but we thought it was a nice touch as one of the men in the abattoir had shouted from behind the pig's head, "I am the Lord of the Flies!" Appropriate.
At the end of the three days, after everyone had presented their projects, we all eagerly awaited the revelation of who had won the contest. Mrs. Genoble stood at the front of the class and said, "Well, everyone, these were some of the best projects I have ever seen in this class. Well done." And then she dismissed us from class, or attempted to. We were none too happy with the fact that she never announced a winner. We wanted to know whose project was best. When we asked what happened, she said, "You all win because now you understand the book." We were disappointed to say the least. However, her competitive exercise demonstrates all four of Schindler's criteria for healthy competition. It was for fun. The reward was never real. It created no long-term effect, other than the fact that several of us consider The Lord of the Flies to be one of our favorite books now. And everyone in the class believed they had a great shot at winning because of the positive feedback she gave us all along the way. The exercise was a success.
In college, I took a literature class in which most of the students in the class were fairly competitive people anyway. While that class still recalls fond memories for me because it helped me come to love the writing of one of my current favorite authors, I don't know if others would feel so fondly about it. I am not even entirely sure if some students recognized that our teacher was fostering our competitive natures. When this teacher passed back our writing assignments, she passed them back in order of highest grades to lowest grades. I am almost positive that this was her practice. I cannot be entirely sure, but several of us compared grades on a regular basis anyway and from what I observed in class, papers were almost always passed back in order of highest grade to lowest. As I say, I am not sure if anyone else ever noticed that it was happening, but for me, it seemed rather wrong. I always wanted to be the first to get a paper back and when I wasn't, it was hurtful and I felt like the teacher was looking at me smugly because I hadn't done as well as someone else. While I personally was still inspired to write better and receive my paper first after the next assignment, I am not so sure that this would have been the case for everyone in the class. I can see the possibility that some of the students would have been discouraged and think that they could never be good enough for this teacher. Many of the students who didn't notice what she was doing already felt that way. She was a difficult teacher and she did a lot of good for my writing personally, but I can easily believe that she would not have had such a positive influence on everyone in the class.
I believe that the ways in which she encouraged our competitive natures were not the healthy kind of competition that needs to be implemented in the classroom. The competition in her classroom fit Schindler's criteria for unhealthy competition:

• It feels real. The winners and losers will be affected.
• The reward is “valuable/real.”
• Winners are able to use their victory as social or educational capital at a later time.
• Competition implicitly or explicitly rewards the advantaged students.
• Over time students develop an increasingly “competitive mindset.”

I think that as more of us realized what was happening, we did become more competitive people. The class damaged a few of our relationships and it took a while for us to regain the kind of comaraderie we had going into the class. While it seems as though I am stating the ways in which classroom competition has had a negative effect on me, I am still advocating its use when it is implemented in such a way that the students cannot see its effects as it happens. In Mrs. Genoble's class, we all knew we were competing, but we did not realize what we were really gaining from the exercise until it was over. In my college literature class, we all knew we were competing and we could physically see, every time a paper was passed back, the result or payoff of our work. The difference is that in Mrs. Genoble's class, we never knew the outcome. It was all a fun game. In my college literature class, we became like the boys of The Lord of the Flies, wanting to out everyone else and secure the power of that first paper passed back for ourselves. As John-Paul Sardi notes, "Competition is a healthy, friendly, normal human endeavor. Measuring ourselves against others is important to our growth as a means of orienting ourselves. The enemy is not competition as much as it is the desire to kill and overmaster. It is an error to misidentify competition as this desire." If we are to continue to grow and change as writers, we should be driven by a force. Many of our students do not have the internal motivation to want to change themselves, so competition can be a healthy way to spur them on to become better writers if we use it correctly.

While competition can be a dangerous thing, we must recognize its benefits. We must accept that it can, and often does, produce excellent results. When implemented correctly, it can prod our students in the right direction, helping them to desire better work for themselves. Ultimately, of course, their biggest competition should be themselves. I think Schindler would agree with that. When students compete with themselves, attempting to receive a better grade or produce a better piece of writing than the last, everyone wins.

Past, Present, and Future

In the recent past, certain classrooms have operated on the theory that all students should be rewarded for any effort. I have taken several classes in which I felt that every student, regardless of the actual quality of his/her work, is rewarded at the same rate. On this subject, I tend to agree with Rachael Young, who says in her article on helium.com, "Is Competition in the Classroom Really Helpful for Kids," "People will always be rewarded for the highest quality work, and if teachers reward mediocre, above average, and below average results at the same rate, they are only doing their students a disservice, because then the bar is lowered for everyone" (1). I think this is absolutely true. Competition does not always have to be harmful for students, which is the idea that I have gathered from most classes I have taken on pedagogy. Virtually every teacher of pedagogy I have encountered says that competition makes students feel inadequate and leads them to become frustrated and give up. Around 19% of the students surveyed who noticed competition being fostered by the teacher said that it was not helpful for them. About 75% of these students said that it was helpful for them. Praise for competition fostered by teachers straight from the students' mouths:

• "It pushes me to do my best and learn from my mistakes to do better."


• "It helped by making me more aware of studying and pushing me harder."


• "It promoted all teams to do their best."


• "It made me want to do better."


• "I believe it helped in motivating students to do better than normal in class."


• "It helped because it was a team competition which helped me get to know new people and it was just a friendly competition."


• "Usually it helps because I want to be rewarded by teachers."


• "It usually only helps grades."


• "Any competition that I have noticed generally helps my progress because I love competition."


• "If it were to happen, it would probably just help me."


• "I believe competition in a classroom can boost student academic potential."


• "It made me study harder."

The three students surveyed who said that competition was not good for them had this to say:

• "I think it would harm my progress because I am not competitive when it comes to grades and if someone tries to make me competitive, I may do the opposite because I am spiteful like that and don't care."


• "When work is publicly evaluated and compared by the teachers, the students tend to look at everyone else's work in comparison to themselves. [I] tended to judge myself too harshly, work myself to death, get frustrated, and give up."


• "Competition between students is harmful to self-esteems."

I have to say that I have trouble accepting one of these opinions because the student says that he doesn't care. At any rate, the last two in this group tend to agree with what I have heard from several teachers of pedagogy and classroom management. Many of these teachers want their students to feel good about their work, which is definitely not a bad thing to want, but my concern is that this feel-good attitude will come at the cost of better quality work. In his article "Using Competition in the Classroom," John Schindler outlines some of the ways in which competition can be bad for students. He says that it may make them feel threatened or anxious. He also says that it can promote "a tendency to take on a mentality defined by 'fear of failure.'” I have to agree that these are possibilities, but aren't students just as affected by a fear of success? Marano, in "The Fear of Success," from Psychology Today, says that most people will at some point be affected by a fear of achieving the things they want. The logic that some teachers use to defend their attitudes about not wanting their students to fail seems as though it must also prevent them from wanting their students to succeed, if that is what their students are afraid of. My point here is not that we should wish our students failure, but that we should look into what makes them succeed and if the overwhelming majority of them are saying that competition is part of what helps them, why can't we utilize it for their advantage? Most students will need, at some point, the kind of external motivation that can be provided by friendly competition, but I do agree with Schindler when he lists the four criteria for successful competition in the classroom:

• It’s for fun.
• The Reward is not “valuable/real.”
• There is no long-term effect from the episode.
• All individuals or groups see a reasonable change of winning.

With these concepts in mind, students can compete in such a way that helps them to accomplish a goal while at the same time learning their own strengths and the ways in which they can utilize the strengths of their classmates. Group workshopping is helpful in these kinds of circumstances as well. When students can see the strengths of others, they not only see their own weaknesses more clearly, but they get a better sense of how to improve those weaknesses. With a sense of what healthy competition can provide, the students will be more equipped to go into the fields of their choosing, realizing that the world is a fairly competitive place, but dealing with the competition in a productive way. Our job is to prepare our students and one of the best ways we can do this is to help them see the benefits of the situations they will encounter later on.

Works Cited

Marano, Hara Estroff. "The Fear of Success." Psychology Today 17 December 2002: 1-2. 1 Dec. 2007. <http://psychologytoday.com/articles/pto-20031224-000001.xml>.

Schindler, John. "Using Competition in the Classroom" from Transformative Classroom Management. 29 Nov. 2007. <http://www.calstatela.edu/faculty/jschindl/cm/competition.htm>.

Young, Rachael. "Is Competition in the Classroom Helpful for Kids?" 29 Nov. 2007. .

A Survey of Students

In a recent survey I conducted, I asked some first-year writing students how they felt about competition in their classes. Many said that the competition they noticed in their classes was instigated mostly by other students. The teachers had little to do with aiding or beginning competitive activities. Many of these students felt that they were about average or above average in comparison with their classmates, although a few of them would not admit that they compared themselves to other students. Of the 49 students surveyed, 36 of them said that they do compare their writing and/or grades with other students. Only 12 said they did not compare either. Of the 12 who did not compare, one student said, "I believe the real competition is myself. If I had the same classes and teachers as my classmates, then I probably would." Several students commented on how their other classes (like science or math) were highly competitive, but their writing classes were not. Perhaps this is because writing is considered a very subjective skill to evaluate. If a student in a math class receives an A or an F, the student can generally feel good about knowing that they did not receive the A or the F because the teacher likes or dislikes them. In writing classes, students often have trouble identifying the process which leads up to the final grade.
Part of the problem here is that students do not understand the process by which writing is evaluated. In his book Fragments of Rationality: Postmodernity and the Subject of Composition, Lester Faigley points out a few of these problems. If we ask our students to write about themselves, which is the nature of the ENG 103 course at Clemson, we must remember that their writing will reflect their personal history and experience. Yet, as Faigley points out, "Joseph Harris says the problem with defining good writing as honest writing 'is that it reduces writing to a simple test of integrity'" (127). Later, Faigley says, "The freedom students are given in some classes to choose and adapt autobiographical assignments hides the fact that these same students will be judged by the teachers' unstated assumptions about subjectivity and that every act of writing they perform occurs within complex relations of power" (128). My issue with Faigley's point is what he points out about Harris. There is a problem with the way in which we define "good writing." The problem for the students is that it must be defined by every individual teacher. How can students be expected to know how they compare or to successfully compete with each other when the evaluation of their writing seems so subjective according to whichever teacher for whom they may be writing. Alas, there is no way to completely set a standard for "good writing" because all writing should be some sort of expression. With that said, we move on, accepting the notion that the standard is not applicable, to discuss ways in which we can still help our students to improve themselves as writers and as students in general.
Of the students participating in the survey who said they do compare themselves, 28 said that they do not notice their teachers fostering competitive activity in class. Only 8 said that their teachers were aiding classroom competition. One student said, "Some teachers reward the top students... Usually [this kind of competition fostered by teachers] helps because I want to be rewarded by those teachers." Of the 8 who said that they do see teachers encouraging competition, 7 said that this kind of competition helps them get better grades. One student said that competition "helped in motivating students to do better than normal in class." I believe that this is the most important aspect of classroom competition. If our goal is to get good results from our students and the ones who are participating in teacher-fostered competition are all saying that it helps their grades, why would we not look into this kind of pedagogy?
In many other groups in society, competition is used for team-building and motivation. In virtually any kind of sales-based business, the salesmen/women will have competitions amongst themselves to see who can get the best results. In one of the offices in which I worked, the winner of the annual sales contest won a week-long trip to Rio de Janeiro. In the food service industry, managers will often encourage servers with sales contests in which the server who sells the most wine or appetizers will be rewarded with less work at the end of the night, a bottle of wine, a free meal at the restaurant, etc. This kind of motivation not only helps the company by selling more product, it also creates a common goal for the servers, bonding them together. Sports are also a huge part of our society. Competition in the sports arena is obvious. Anytime we can bring people together for a common goal, the result will be better. In team sports, players must depend on one another to improve individual performance. This kind of team-building can be used in writing courses to help students as well. Group workshops allow students to compare their writing. This kind of comparison helps students because comparison with a stronger writer enables the students to recognize the weaknesses in their own writing. It also allows them to see the strengths they possess that other writers may not have. Workshopping may not seem to the students like competition, but it is a great tool for motivating them.
One student who participated in the survey said that while she did not notice any competition fostered by teachers in her classes, she said that the competition she has noticed fostered by students "generally helps [her] progress." Every student is inevitably different from every other student, but if the overwhelming majority of students who notice competition being fostered by teachers in their classes are saying that it helps them become better students, why are teachers so afraid to utilize this kind of strategy?

Works Cited

Faigley, Lester. Fragments of Rationality: Ideologies of the Self in Writing Evaluation. Pittsburgh: University of Pittsburgh Press, 1992. 111-131.

An Introduction to the Project

This blog is an attempt to discover what actually happens when students compete, or do not compete, whichever the case may be. I am attempting to prove that competition is not only natural for students but also productive for their purpose in becoming better writers who wish to achieve more in their studies. There are several different ways in which students compete. Often, they will compare grades to see how far they need to go to catch up with the most advanced student in the class. Other times, they will actually be directed by the teacher to go up against each other in projects that will help display their learning. These are the two ways in which I believe the majority of classroom competition occurs.
Competition, when carried out only by the students, can be dangerous, but its benefits, I believe, outweigh its drawbacks. It serves a purpose in giving students some motivation to progress in their work. Without some sort of external motivation, I would venture to guess that few first-year writing students would care very much at all about their progress. There are, of course, a few students who are self-motivated and prefer to do work for their own reasons and not because they will receive a grade or win a prize, if you will. However, the number of students who lack this kind of drive outweighs those who possess it.
In this project, I will attempt to further explore the various modes of classroom competition and expound on theories about what makes students compete and succeed. I will also discuss the ways in which competitive pedagogy can influence students and prepare them for future work in the fields of business or academia. Most of our students will presumably be going into these areas and I would like to think that our job as teachers is to prepare them for these kinds of work environments. I would also like to discuss some of the ways in which competition in the classroom goes horribly wrong. If competition is not done correctly in a classroom, it can lend itself to an environment of resentment and/or bitterness not only with the teacher but also with the other students and even with the individual students themselves. In closing, I will compare some of my personal experiences with competition in classes and discuss what made those experiences productive and valuable for me personally.
My point is not to say that competition is necessary, but to suggest that it is a natural and healthy part of the learning process. In the end, the goal of the teacher should be to teach the students that competition with themselves is the most important. If a writer wishes to become great, he/she should always be working to outdo his/herself with every draft or project. When we strive to consistently make a better effort than the last, we learn that pushing ourselves creates better work.