Live Blogging General Conference, September 2014 General Women's Meeting

Yes, it's that season once again, and I'm live blogging General Conference, starting with the General Women's Meeting this weekend and continuing on Saturday and Sunday next weekend. I'm going to try to do less summary and more reflecting this time around. I'll update it periodically throughout the conference--typically at the end of each speaker's message.

I loved the Korean primary choir singing "I Love to See the Temple!" I loved seeing members of the worldwide General Young Women's board sitting on the stand, and the combined multi-generational choir from the Salt Lake area. In so many ways, I see women in the church leading the way by example, reflecting and teaching the values and needs of our worldwide sisterhood.

Linda K. Burton, Relief Society General President
President Burton spoke on wise preparation for service and blessings. She quoted Bonnie Oscarson's insightful reversal of a well-known scripture: "Where much is required, much more will be given." This is an answer to a concern that has been weighing on my mind for many days.

Jean A. Stevens, Primary General Presidency
Sister Stevens' recollections of the faith of her mother and other faithful women, and the priority they placed on making and keeping gospel covenants reminded me of my own mother, grandmothers, and other family members.

Video Presentation: Worldwide Sisters Testify of the Temple
For the past eight months, I have served each week in the temple. I testify that what these sisters have said about the blessings of the temple--the peace and power of that place--is true. I am so grateful for the expansive program of temple building that the church has carried out in the past few decades, to bring temples to so many more people throughout the world.

Neill F. Marriott, Young Women General Presidency
Temples bring light and hope to the world--and so do we. Each of the many roles women take on carry moral influence, in our families, communities, and workplaces. It is not only through great acts, but through small acts of love and service that this moral influence is felt. The Savior's call to discipleship is not only to learn of him but to do his works--to heal broken hearts, give gospel light to the spiritually blind, and redeem the dead through temple service.

Dieter F. Uchtdorf, 2nd Counselor in the First Presidency of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints
OK. So President Uchtdorf just called this women's meeting the opening of another general conference. Not an auxiliary or supplement to it. This is the opening meeting of general conference. Is this news to you? It's news to me. Very welcome news! The question is, will these talks now be published in the conference issue of the Ensign? I hope so because this meeting has been filled with spiritual treasure. [Edit: they have been printed in the past, at the back of the conference issue. My memory was faulty.]

"It is good to remember that you are always a child of God.... however, it is also important to remember that being a daughter of heavenly parents is not a distinction that you have earned or that you can ever lose...[but it also] does not guarantee you a divine inheritance...it takes more than a spiritual birth certificate to qualify for [celestial] blessings." It is by walking the path of discipleship and obedience to God's commandments that we qualify to inherit all that God has. Sometimes it's unclear why we have to keep certain commandments. "I think God knows something we don't." God doesn't have blessings locked in a cloud, demanding that we keep his commandments before he will unlock them. Rather, God is constantly raining blessings down upon us, and our disobedience is like an umbrella blocking us from receiving this living water.

You can't see it, but I'm grinning right now because at the end of my temple shift today, I had to scurry through torrential rain, without any umbrella, to get to my car at the far end of the parking lot! I arrived soaking wet, but laughing--as perhaps only residents of arid Arizona can fully appreciate. Little did I know that as I drove home from the temple soaking wet, I was drenched in blessings.

Image: "Rain" by Navaneeth Ashok. CC BY-NC-ND 2.0

Observe, Think, Write, Reflect, Repeat. Not Necessarily in That Order.

I finished my first round of conferences with my ENG 215 students this week. Their first project is what we might call a "demi discourse analysis" of a scholarly and a popular source on the same topic. It's time-consuming but I like giving feedback in conferences a lot more than I like just collecting drafts, writing feedback all over them, and handing them back. It was an especially fascinating, exciting, and exhausting three days for me, as it's the first time I've taught this project and I was both nervous and eager to see, in my students' drafts, what they'd learned in the past few weeks about discourse analysis and, though their analyses, about the discourses of the fields they're majoring in. As usual, when I talk with my students about what they're writing and why, I learn a lot not only about my own teaching, but about their prior writing experiences.

Here's one thing I noticed:

A lot of my students focused at least in part on "credibility markers" as a significant discourse feature. Most of them reduced "credibility markers" to "citations" and many proceeded to not only describe the type and frequency of citations, but to make evaluative claims about the trustworthiness of the sources based solely on that. What I inferred from this: we tout peer reviewed sources as the "gold standard" for academic writing in FYC, and our students have bought into it heavily, and mostly uncritically. This is a problem.

I am pleased to say, however, that some of my students did hesitantly, haltingly, apologetically push back against their own parroting of this narrow FYC-induced view of credibility, which opened up a neat learning space for us to think and talk about how we construct credibility in a more nuanced way. In the future when I assign some version of this project, I'll be sure to spend class time exploring this before drafts are due.

Another (related) thing I noticed:

It's genuinely hard for my students to describe discourse features without also passing judgment on them--regardless of how often I've pushed back against the idea that any particular discourse feature or convention is objectively, universally better or worse than another. I'm not sure if this is because of prior academic writing instruction (I suspect so, at least in part, but I think it might also be a cognitive development thing; as Andrea Lunsford said at an IHR seminar I attended last week, composition studies needs to pay more attention to neuroscience) but it seems to me that in teaching "critical thinking" we might be putting a little too much emphasis on the "critical" and not enough on the "thinking"--and definitely not enough on observing--an essential part of the process that is totally elided by the term itself. I'm reminded of Samuel Scudder's classic essay, "Learning to See." Are we so concerned with teaching our students how to write arguments (that is, to make claims and support them with reasons and data) that we're neglecting to teach them to really, really look at the data, and to think about it deeply, before deciding what to say about it?

These problems are, of course, partly the result of the absurd impossibility of having to teach "college-level writing" to a couple of dozen students in sixteen weeks or less. No curriculum is going to be able to do it all, and even if we could strike a perfect balance in a given semester, we can't necessarily control what skills and concepts and notions about writing our students carry with them once they leave us behind.

OK, two more things, really quick:

Thesis statements often have to be revised, sometimes significantly, after a draft is written. This surprises and troubles my students, until I tell them it always works that way for me, too. We don't just write to report what we think. We write to learn what we think.

Writing a conclusion is hard. Really, really hard. And no formula or procedure I've ever heard or ever given has ever actually worked at all consistently. There are as many ways to write a conclusion as there are papers. Possibly more. If you think I'm wrong--if you have a foolproof method for writing conclusions, please, please share it. I will thank you and so will my students. And so will our readers.

Image Source: ASU Writing Programs. Tag, you're it!