Definitely One of the Top Five Pirate Supply Stores/Tutoring Centers I've Been to Recently

I've been inspired by 826Valencia in San Francisco for a long, long time now. They are the tutoring cog in the dynamic literary machine that is McSweeney's + The Believer. They are also a pirate supply store, selling eye patches, peglegs, and lard, amongst other piratey things.

Here is the story about how a Pirate Supply Store/Tutoring Center came to exist, told by Dave Eggers, author and founder of McSweeney's and 826Valencia, in his TED Prize One Wish speech:

Quoted Quotables

The footnote to this entry from July indicates that I wanted to do something with the widsom and insight of students that I run across as a person involved in education. Here is that something in its current incarnation as bookmarks. Luis' words can be found along with four other quotes that I wrote down after reading over student journals or papers or message postings over the last few semesters.

In our consumer culture, we are accustomed to buying/receiving/taking from those we are told we should buy/receive/take from. They are smart or beautiful or popular and we listen to them because they are known as smart or beautiful or popular. It's easy to ignore what we have not been told to pay attention to, and that includes the vast amount of intellectual work being done in educational institutions all over the place. It's a tragedy that so many words are printed simply for the sake of fulfilling class assignments or school projects, as opposed to these assignments asking students for words worth printing in the bigger picture of things--observing, examining, hoping, you know, the work that professional writers do.

Matt and I found some student words worth printing because they were poignant. We put them on bookmarks. Stop by if you want one (or if you want to know what they say). Each quote is on each color.

This is a project that is an example of why I believe in education. The world is full of capable, brilliant people who simply need unlocking or guidance or a push in the right direction.

Expert Testimony: Everybody's Got Their Something

I always visit several Student Success classes each school year to tell them about -gasp- plagiarism*. I tell them about the consequences, about how it happens unintentionally most of the time, about how I've really not seen it or heard about it from other teachers because most of the people who choose to come here are honest, hard-working folks who know they are here for a very good reason.

This time around, I thought I would add an element to my short presentation: I brought notecards and asked them to write a) their name and b) something, anything, they consider themselves an expert in. In the big scheme of things, the biggest benefit most of those brand-new college students in those classes receive from hearing from me is the fact that they begin to build a relationship** with someone in The Learning Center. I thought asking them about their expertise would help that along a bit, as well as show them that I do, in fact care about what they care about.

Here are the results of my little survey (in no particular order):

Tennis (2)
A Role Model {because of his older brothers being his role model}
Kids
Cooking (2)
Being a Student
Computers (3) {this often related to teaching parents what to do}
Math
Sports (3)
Writing {I asked her what she wrote: stories}
Giving Advice {but she doesn't take her own, she said...hmmm}
Shopping {she immediately began to defend herself}
Eating {written as she was ingesting a bagel}
Softball
Basketball (4)
Volleyball (2)
Being on Time for Appointments
Riding Quads
Texting (4) {one even spelled it "txting" because we just don't need that e}
Being Serious {intriguing, really}
Organizing
Driving {yes, he had tickets}
Doing Laundry
Reading
Video Games
Drawing
Digital Cameras/Accessories {a Best Buy employee, not a photographer}
Sleeping

I enjoyed going around and talking to them about their expertise. They were honest, and I think it helped them understand that the people they would be using as sources in their papers were experts in a similar way. It brought them a little closer to the position of the writer of articles in newspapers and magazines and scholarly journals.

*from the Latin plagiarus, or kidnapping

**Oh, did it work. This time, two wonderful students--sisters, even--brought me a small bag of homemade, delicious oatmeal raisin cookies with a handwritten thank you note. Fantastic.

Making Research Relevant: The Shoes on Your Feet, The Words in Your Mouth, The Borders They Crossed

I love research. To be perfectly clear, I love the idea of research. I love that there are people who dig, dig, dig for answers to questions. I love that they are passionate about finding those answers and truthful in the the relation of those findings.

Yesterday, I wrote down three questions that, in my notebook, I labeled "Research Questions Worth the Time and Intellectual Effort of American High School Students." I would amend that to include college students as well. They are:

Who made your shoes?
Why do most Americans speak English?
How many Americans come from immigrant families?

They are simple and they are wide-open--and they are direct in their indirection. In the first one, I'm not asking them to research human rights, sweatshops, corporations, outsourcing of jobs, or any other hot button issue with direct language. Instead, I'm skipping the technical terms that experts use on television or in published articles and simply asking them to look down at their feet and start thinking that somewhere somebody had to construct the shoes they see. That can lead them to a lot of places, including human rights, sweatshops, corporations, outsourcing of jobs, and many other hot button issues. It's a back door approach. Really, it's a student-discovery-centered approach, and it's connected to their lives, not some abstract idea.

Asking them why Americans speak English is the same approach to get them to think about a) the cultures and languages that enter(ed) America, b) what happens to cultures and languages in America, and c) how language is liquid and always changing. Asking them about immigrant families brings the present and the past together and highlights the nature of the formation of the current United States.

Discussions of terms and theories and abstract ideas can be tacked on to these concrete questions. Some people are more apt to think in terms and theories and abstract ideas than others; everybody can look down at their shoes and ask who made them.

This is How We Do It

Writing Process is an interesting term. It implies steps, an institutional kind of order even, a 1-2-3-done kind of thinking--but it also allows for creativity and variety for individuals to invent their own way to bring a piece of writing to completion (and to continue to reinvent that process as needed).

I'm interested in Writing Process in all its incarnations: the overall how-to's that are passed along from writing teachers to writing students, the innovative ways that writers (both students and professionals) think of to help them build an idea into an essay or a story, and the unthought-of, unnoticed little steps that people who are engaged in the act of writing go through that are definitely part of the process, yet outside of what those in the field of writing would discuss when asked to discuss Writing Process.

Here is an example of what I mean about the last of those three. It comes from Robert, a student in my Writing 100 class from this past Spring semester:

"When I'm trying to complete a writing assignment, I sweat a lot, then go into contortions, and then start swearing."

Good Guys Wear Hoodies

Here's the text from an ad for hoodies made by Howies, a Welsh clothing company (font and bold as printed):

If we're going to ban items of clothing, shouldn't we start with the business suit?

While we don't condone shoplifting, terrorising old ladies or generally making other people's lives a misery, the tabloids seem to be picking on the wrong people. Casual research suggests serious fraud, insider trading or acts of corporate man-slaughter are unlikely to be carried out by people wearing hooded sweatshirts. Photographs of senior executives of British manufacturers of land mines, anti-personnel grenades and cluster bombs have shown no evidence of hoodie-wearers. Businessmen offering large amounts of cash in return for peerages, and the politicians who accept the cash, tend towards less casual items of clothing. When the decision was made to invade Iraq, no-one wore a hoodie. And the men who think Guantanamo Bay is still a good idea do not wear hoods themselves, though they have been known to offer them to guests. Sure, there's the odd villain who wants to conceal his face. But there's bigger villains around who have no such shame.

Jon Matthews

I love that they are making an argument against the opposite style of clothing they are selling. I love that it is so focused on one particular item of clothing. I also love that they use specific, tangible references to get their point across. Why is that effective? I originally read this little blurb in a magazine over a month ago; I have not forgotten it since.

And the Award Goes To...

Best Tutoring Session of the Summer:

Her name is Josie and she was analyzing the poem "My Papa's Waltz." My first goal each and every time I work with a student writer is to find out if they* know what they are saying in their paper. Josie knew: she was comparing the waltz itself to a roller-coaster. I was astounded a) with the certainty with which she announced her premise and b) the truth in her comparison. I saw it immediately: safety + danger, familiarity + fear, risk + excitement.

We went to work. Her paper announced her purpose as clearly as she did, but it did not hold tightly, only mentioning the roller-coaster two times in the following paragraphs. She wandered through memories and experiences of her own dances with her own father, through defences of the drunk father as a good man, and tossed in a mention of carnival rides in a couple of places. We discussed focus. She wanted to make sure her readers knew that this man was not a bad man. I told her that his character was not as important in this paper as making the connection between the experience in the poem and the experience of riding a roller-coaster: What is a roller-coaster like? + How does this dance exhibit those qualities despite having no gears or hills or that clicking sound that you hear while you go upupup to careen downward that first time? That is all you care about, I told her. That is all.

I told her that I loved her premise. I told her that I will never read that poem in quite the same way because of her insight. I said that as a reader, not a tutor or teacher--as an experiencer of literature and poetry and all that words can do to bring other people's lives into my own.

She worked and left and then worked some more on her own. She returned later that semester to say she got an A.

*I'm using this as a neutral pronoun because I honestly believe this will become a convention at some point in the future. English lacks a neutral pronoun, but English speakers have increasingly begun to use forms of they to refer to persons with unspecified genders. I'm cool with that. Some word needs to do that job.