Wednesday, November 26, 2008

Mustachioed!

This guy came in today in all black, including his backpack, his long hair, and his mustache. It got me wondering (as things often do) about mustaches. This guy is one of many guys, my father included, who sports a mustache, but it is not exclusive to a particular style (I have never once seen my father in all black, and his hair is not long like a Seattle grunge rocker but trimmed short and neat).

Here is where this is going: Why the mustache?

I would love to give that option to students to investigate. What is the history of the male decision to grow the hair above the lip, yet shave the hair below and around? When? Why? What does it mean? How has that meaning changed? Where did the word "mustache" come from?

Does it sound goofy? Yes. Would it lead them to all kinds of places? Yes: history, culture, social behavior, fashion, trends, etc. It would also be more fun to read than yet another paper about abortion/global warming/lowering the drinking age/legalizing pot.

Wednesday, November 19, 2008

Now You See, Me Now You Don't v. Up, Up, and Away

If I were in a classroom environment where I was charged with teaching people how to argue, I would start here, I think.

Invisibility v. Flight
You get one of these superpowers. Pick one. Quick, pick one, no thinking. Now, write down the reasons you picked this one.
This is the gut reaction part. We would use this part to talk about how people often have opinions before they think through their reasons, but there are reasons buried in the heads of those people. This is the part where I get the students to realize that opinions and even guesses don't come out of nowhere, and that they can be unearthed with a little work. (Then we do a little work to unearth our reasons for our gut decisions, our choice of invisibility v. flight.)
Let's listen to some other people make this decision: This American Life's "Superpowers" Episode.
Act One of this epidsode is thirteen minutes of people choosing invisibility or flight. This is the part where we listen to how other people think through choices. Students would write down all the reasons they hear and make note of reasons they did not think of and any reasons they would choose for themselves after hearing them on the show.
Now, think of reasons why someone would pick the other superpower. Not the one you picked. The other one.
This is the part where we think of The Other Side, where we learn to think through the opinions of others, even if we don't agree with them. Students have to come up with reasons for the other power (at this point, some could be waffling on their original choice, but I would simply have them examine the one they didn't go to on their gut instincts).
Taking all of this into account, now you get to make a new choice. Invisibility or flight? You also get to come up with intelligent reasons for your choice. That will turn into a fun-yet-intelligent essay.
This is the part where they work on producing a piece of writing based on all this thinking. We'd probably work on outlining and revising and proofreading, but the basic idea of all this is that Invisibility v. Flight is not a supercomplex issue for them to deal with, but a simple choice that turns into a more complex and mature thought process.

We could also:
-have a class debate
-look at the benefits of both superpowers in actual comic books (in the lives of "real" superheros) -imagine the drawbacks of each power in everyday life (outside the lives of superheros)
-imagine the benefits of each power to a regular, non-hero-type person
-establish rules for each power (what would and would not turn invisible with you, how fast and high you could fly, etc.)
-move on to discussing something a little weightier like the agreeing or disagreeing with the claim that begins F. Scott Fitzgerald's essay "The Crack-Up": "Of course all life is a process of breaking down..."

Tuesday, November 18, 2008

Meaning is Everywhere, Even in Honey Jars or Cartoon Savannas

Here are two thesis ideas for essays I overheard in the Writing Lab today:

1. All the major characters from Winnie the Pooh are different aspects of Christopher Robin's personality. The person who said this went through an exhaustive list of each character and which part of Christopher Robin's personality they correspond to. It was really quite impressive.

2. The Lion King is Shakespeare's Hamlet in Africa. And Disney-fied. No, Simba doesn't feign insanity, or put on a play-within-a-play/movie, and he doesn't die in the end, and Scar doesn't marry Simba's mother, but there are enough similarities between the two stories there for that argument to stand (there is a father's ghost in each, which is important for any comparison including Hamlet).

Friday, November 14, 2008

Collaborate + Imitate: Two Ideas for Possibilities in Teaching Writing

{Collaborate}
Two Writing 100 classes each write their first paragraphs, say, on how they got an important/prominent/significant scar (an actual assignment in Andrea Graham's classes). They discuss the assignment, generate some ideas (the one on my leg from the bike wreck, or the one over my left eye from saving that stray dog in the alley?), and bang out a draft.

Then, they trade. Class A gets Class B's paragraphs, while Class B sends their paragraphs to Class A. Both classes dissect from first sentence to last. Both groups ask what is there and what is not there, what is done well and what questions still hang in the blank white space between the black ink marks. Class A's writers get to mentally pick apart, to explore, to venture questions, without the worry of knowing their paragraph is somewhere in the room, lurking incomplete and imperfect. Class B's writers learn how to dissect--really, is there a more perfect verb for this action?--what others have put on a page but are not present to elaborate on or defend: what is on the page is all they have as readers, and thus they (hopefully) see that is all they give as writers, so they should take care to put on the page what they want others to pick off the page. Both classes learn to ask specific questions, to look for the pieces that should be there, to encourage and applaud what is truly good with better phrases than "That's good!"

The student-dissectors return the paragraphs and then revise. So much of writing is learned in revision. Most, I would venture. Everything before is just experiment and hope.

In doing this write-and-switch between classes, the process of looking closely at incomplete and imperfect work is taught, is focused on and addressed thoroughly. Student writers need that from their experienced mentor-writers and -scholars.

{Imitate}
People learn by observing and repeating. Only the truly brave or brash or innovative enjoy striking out on their own. Most of us are intimidated or simply expect the coming failure.

So: Controlled Imitation. I often wonder about the use of non-textbook texts in Writing classes (because those books and magazines and Internet columns are written by people who want to write for some specific purpose), and that wondering has honed in on the idea of letting a class loose with a teacher-chosen set of magazines, books, and even Internet columns, asking them to read and make note of articles that catch their attention (and their attention is caught), and then asking them to choose one to imitate.

They can observe and learn from a specific text. They can get inside it, figure out why it works, and then try to build the same type of rhetorical machine. I think I would start by having them type parts of, or maybe even the entire text*. That way, they could feel what writing these kind of polished sentences and specific details is like. Then, we could look at the ideas contained in that piece and the students could learn to think along the lines that writers who want to write (and get paid to write) use to sniff out stories, construct arguments, and string readers along through their entire piece. In addition to ideas (but after after after), we could get to technical stuff: organization, paragraph development, sentences, intro+conclusion. Then, they would be off to write a similar piece from their own slant or about their own subject.

It's a launching pad, really. Also an apprenticeship in a way.

I think there is space for this in the learning process.

*Watch Finding Forrester.

Logo!


My friend Andrew is a graphic designer. A few months ago, I asked him if he would design a seal-like logo for the Writing Center. Here is result of our discussion.
Some thoughts on our logo:
1. The griffin was Andrew's doing, but I'm all in favor of griffins. They are my favorite mythological creature (I'm not making that up), and what could be better than a griffin holding a pencil. Write, griffin, write!
2. I wanted to make sure the year of establishment was on there because a) it's kind of what you do on a seal, and b) I am grateful to the people who came before me and decided that a Writing Center with a Writing Lab Specialist would be a good idea.
3. Tucson is on there not only because we do what we do in the Old Pueblo, but because we want people to be proud of doing what they do in the Old Pueblo.
4. "Escribimos Amigos" isn't any kind of official motto, but it is fun to say. Say it. Go ahead. Say it under your breath if you have to (maybe you are at work and or in the library and you want to remain quiet out of respect for others). It means, "We write, friends" in EspaƱol. Also: it rhymes (sort of, depending on how loose you are with your definition of rhyming--I have a friend who adamantly denies the rhyming nature of "alligator" and "calculator").
5. We hope to eventually put this on shirts. A former student of mine has a screen-printing business, so it may pop up soon on someone's clothes.

Thursday, November 13, 2008

Ask the Photographer

A student came in yesterday with the assignment to come up with a list of questions for the person who took a photograph (she didn't have the picture, but said it was of galaxies).

I see many, many people who say, "I don't know" and see it as a stopping point. They give up instead of inquire further. I like this assignment because it was a low-pressure chance to practice being curious. Students need to be inquisitive explorers to be successful, and this was a dry-run at questioning, a way to stretch the students' brains powers of exploration. This is an especially important skill for students who write research papers, have to choose their own topics, or write about issues they don't know about (which is kind of, pretty much, all students).

I also like this because it is repeatable to the nth degree (with n equalling the number of photographs available to the instructor).

Thursday, November 6, 2008

On the Kind of Attention That Needs to Be Paid

Here is what I tell students who are somewhere in the area of proofreading their work (which they sometimes want us to help with, but more often assume we just do for them):

1. Read Out Loud
It makes your brain process the words again. You need to make your brain do that because your brain is smart and it knows what you want to say. Now, though, you are interested in what you actually did say, not what you wanted to say. When you read out loud, your brain sends the words to your mouth instead of keeping them up in your head.

A high percentage of students tell me that they don't like to read out loud. I tell them that it doesn't really matter if they like it. It's an important step to take to owning the little black marks you printed on a page. Oh, and after I make them start reading, when they see the first few mistakes, they forget about liking or not liking and simply read.

2. Read Slowly
The goal is not to read through your paper so you can say you read through your paper. The goal is to catch little mistakes, and to do that, you need to set your brain to a different mode of reading than when you cruise through a magazine article, brush over an email, or scan an assigned chapter about mitosis for Biology class. To do that, you need to read slowly. You need to make yourself read slowly. At some point, you will speed up. I guarantee it. A paragraph or two into your paper, you'll gain speed like a cyclist riding down a mountain. Hit the brakes. Slow down. If you don't, you'll miss things you are perfectly capable of fixing.

3. Expect Little Mistakes
Finding a mistake is not finding a failure. Finding a mistake is simply finding a spot where you hit the wrong key or forgot a word, or forgot to delete a word, or make a word plural, or etc., etc. When you proofread, you are looking for the missing "s" at the end of a word or the accidental "-ed" that makes the right verb into the wrong tense. You're trying to make sure you put periods where periods should go, that commas are in the right places, and the words that need to be capitalized are capitalized (and the ones that don't need it are not).

These are small, small things. Look closely. Look very closely. They are there. You can find them and fix them.