Friday, December 11, 2009

It's Not Me, It's You

One of the teachers here at Desert Vista assigns a persuasive letter as her third essay in Writing 100 every semester. This semester's crop of essay topics has been the best I've seen. Instead of students trying to get the State of Arizona to completely overhaul their education system or convincing the government to change laws, these students picked accomplishable goals: Dad, stop smoking; downstairs neighbors, stop filing all those complaints; suitor, look elsewhere for romantic involvement; teacher, amend your assignments; etc.

These are manageable requests, and working with these students has generally centered on two ideas:

1. Me, Me, Me
The students know what they want. Knowing what they want is the first hurdle they overcome. And the first obstacle they face. It's what the student wants, so their rhetoric focuses on how this change will meet their needs. They pretty much stop right there. They don't realize that while the request they make originates in a need they have, the action will take place on the other side of the fence, so they need to go over there and see it from that person's perspective.

2. You, You, You
What they need to do is think about who they are persuading and what their idea involves for that person.

Instead of presenting tons of medical information to get your father to stop smoking, think about why your father smokes in the first place. What if he doesn't care so much about his health, but cares more about appearing manly because he started smoking on a ranch as a preteen because his father let him? Data about lung cancer may not hit the bullseye.

Instead of asking your neighbors one floor down to "put yourselves in my shoes," you need to slip into theirs. They complain about the noise your two-year-old makes at ten o'clock at night because they want to go to bed. If you want them to stop filing complaints, explain your situation (why is that kid up at 10:00pm?), explain what you'll do to try and be quieter, and maybe go so far as to invite them up for a meal so they will think about how wonderful you and your family are instead of curse you and call the apartment office the next time they hear stomp stomp stomp when they are trying to fall sleep.

Instead of pointing out how much of an idiot he is, lay out the differences between what you want and what the guy who keeps asking you out wants in a relationship. Be objective. Sure, he wants to be a drug dealer and you think basing your life on illegal crime is a bad idea, but he's not going to change if you tell him he's stupid. Take the emotion away for a bit and present your case rationally. You want security. Comfort. Not men with guns. Maybe he'll see that getting a real job isn't so bad, especially if he wants to date a girl.

Instead of asking your teacher to rework her entire semester's worth of assignments to exclude personal details, think about why she set it up that way (hint: you already know yourself and don't have to do research in a non-research class) and how much work would be involved in crafting an entirely new class. Then think beyond your desire to not talk about your bad memories and examine why focusing on other things might help more people learn to write. Oh, and give her some ideas about what you would be willing to write about. You don't want to appear "like [you] don't want to participate." Help her out and think about what she's trying to accomplish: getting you to write essays without sinking you into deep research.


These are interesting conversations. The students don't realize they are focusing solely on their own needs. Or they don't realize they are using broad arguments that don't necessarily apply to their audience. Bringing it up changes their papers from a general repetition of their basic premise to specific thoughts aimed at actually getting something done.

Wednesday, December 2, 2009

Keep Calm and Carry On


It's the time of year when people start freaking out because big projects and final papers are due. I shared this image with a particularly stressed student today. She's a non-traditional student of the sort who combines go-getter-ness with I'm-gonna-make-something-of-my-life-ocity, so everything must must must be perfect.

In reality, perfect doesn't happen all the time. Deadlines come, things are handed in, the semester marches on, and so should she.

Tuesday, December 1, 2009

Evolution as It Pertains to Introductions

I've noticed myself repeatedly saying something new about introductions lately. It's the natural evolution of my usual advice.

My usual advice on intros: Wait.Work on the body paragraphs. Know what you have to say first. It's okay to work on the middle before the beginning.

See, people jump in and write their intro first because it's the first part of their paper. They jump in without knowing what they have to say. They just know that they need to get this paper done, so logically start at the beginning and try to work from there.

The problem, as I said, is that they don't know what they have to say. Thus, the evolution.

The evolution in my advice on intros: Your intro should introduce your paper, not the general topic you're working with.

Student writers sit down with a blank Word document and they start generally writing about whatever it is that they are supposed to be writing about. They make broad statements that include all people everywhere or every time anyone has done a certain thing or been a particular place. They are doing the wrong work. They are trying to go from general to specific before they know the specifics. They are not introducing their paper. They are trying to introduce a subject, an assignment, a big idea, but they are not introducing what they will cover in their essay.

So I've started to talk about that specifically with people whose intros are painted with broad strokes. It seems to be helping because it removes the stress of getting the paper off to an interesting/humorous/engaging/thoughtful/never-before-seen/amazing start and subtly plants the seed that they do in fact have something specific to say with this paper.

Tuesday, November 17, 2009

Why We Do What We Do

Part I.
Yesterday in the Writing Lab, a conversation about my 22-month- and five-week-old daughters turned toward the H1N1 Flu shot:

Ania: Did you give your daughter the swine flu shot?
Me: Yes, we did.
Joe: You did?
Me: Yes
Joe: I wouldn't do that.
Me: Why?
Joe: I know lots of people who aren't doing that.
Me: I know lots of people who don't save money, but that's not a reason to not save money.
Joe: Well, yeah, but it sure is controversial.
Me: Yes, but that's not a reason not to give her the shot, either.

After that, Ania and I had a lengthy conversation about support, arguments, opposition, and credible sources. Too bad Joe left.

Part II.
Today, Brooks, a writing tutor, came back from a trip to Alabama with a Bear Bryant hat. A student came in, pointed to the hat and to me...

Joe B: That hat on him would look just like Crocodile Dundee.
Me: Crocodile Dundee's hat was leather.
Joe B: Details, details. As long as it's a hat.

Friday, November 13, 2009

The Best Worksheet I've Seen In Awhile, Perhaps Ever

Today, a student came in with a worksheet. I'm not a huge fan of worksheets because they usually focus on technical aspects of grammar that are not inherently bad things to know (people would do well to know them) but are generally less than useful in terms of their applied function for writing students.

This worksheet, however, is possibly one of the most useful I've ever seen. It was simple. It took some sentences the student composed for a prior worksheet and had them replace general terms with specific nouns. Students need to know how to do that. They need that practice.

The example was corny (it replaced "elderly man" with "Old Jimmy Two-Teeth"), but the worksheet gave this student a chance to work on a writing skill that I see people struggle with everyday: being specific. I'm all for this and will probably add a similar activity to any classroom work I do in the future.

Monday, November 2, 2009

They Follow Rules That Do Not Exist

I just had someone ask me about whether or not they needed a particular comma in a particular sentence. I asked why they thought it shouldn't be there.

"Because that's too many commas."

How many is too many?

"Um..."

I hear versions of that all the time. They either have to do with commas, as in this example, or with the length of sentences. Students tell me that their sentence is wrong because it is too long or too short.

Sometimes when they say it's too long, I bust out a sentence written by Virginia Woolf in an essay called "On Being Ill" that appears in Reading Like a Writer by Francine Prose. It's 181 words long and takes up most of the printed page in the book. They are shocked to learn that such things are possible.

I'm not sure where people pick up such rules. I suppose a teacher in some class told them a sentence was too long, but didn't define the measurements for a proper sentence. Thus, they were left with a vague notion that sentences could be too long, but that the border between proper and too long was a thing undetectable except by experts.

When they say a sentence is too short, there is usually an undertone of Short Sentence = Unintelligent Writer. They don't want to present a two-, three-, or four-word sentence to their teacher, and they usually seem a bit embarrassed to even let a tutor know that they were only able to come up with those few words.

The saddest thing about those moments is that the short sentences usually serve the purpose of a short sentence. Students just don't know there is such a purpose. They don't know the value of rhythm, of mixing up long, medium, and short sentences for legibility and effect. They don't know that choosing, at times, to write a short, pointed sentence shows intelligence. They just know that it's shorter than their other sentences and they think there is something sad about that.

Too long. Too short. Too many commas*. I don't know where these arbitrary rules come from. It's strange because they aren't definable and aren't teachable like their real counterparts--subjects + verbs = clauses of different sorts, connecting clauses and phrases, listing, separating, connecting again.

*Oh, and also: Place a comma wherever you take a breath. This notion of a rule might work for speakers of proper English, but it proves disastrous for those who do not already know the rhythms of the language. Commas pop up it the strangest places because the reader paused ever so slightly to breathe.

Monday, October 26, 2009

Quote of the Century

After Brooks and I talked with a student for less than five minutes, he said this:

"Writing is so much easier than people make it out to be."

We told him not to spend all his energy thinking about how hard his class is. We told him to focus on his point. We told him to ask questions to start thinking and to answer those questions in his writing. That's pretty much it.

When I told him that the students who sat at the computer thinking about how much they hate writing should just spend that energy writing, he said I should put that on the wall. When he said that writing is easier than people make it out, I told him I would put that on the wall. I got his name. It's going up later.

Thursday, October 8, 2009

My Job is Awesome

The past two hours have been the best two hours of my week at work. Maybe of my month. Scratch that. Of the semester.

1. I got to bust out the claims sheet that I made to help people write papers analyzing songs. They have trouble with that (they can talk about the song or tell the story in the song, but they don't actually analyze it). The writer who needed it wasn't writing about a song, but was analyzing an ad. She understood the ad and the assignment. She just needed to see how to do the work.

2. I helped a girl with a draft of a narrative essay. The first two paragraphs were boring stuff about working at Jack-in-the-Box. Then it got good. See, the story she was telling was about a lady who removed the meat from her burger and claimed that it had no meat. She wanted a new burger. She wanted her money back. She screamed vulgarities. The writer told me that this happens every now and then. I love learning this stuff. Who knew that there was a whole culture of people who order burgers, remove the meat (leaving little black spots that the burger makers recognize as meat evidence), claim there was no meat, and request new meat. They go to a lot of effort for another patty. If that girl does the work, that essay will be awesome.

3. I helped a lady write about owning a dog. Not that exciting in itself, but I got to use one of my favorite strategies: the bowling alley. Often, people have good things to say. Too many, in fact. Their paragraphs bulge or wander (or both) because they have so so so many things to say. They need boundaries. I asked this writer a bunch of questions about her dog and figured out that everything she had to say came down to dog + work. Those were her boundaries. I drew two parallel vertical lines and said, "It's like a bowling alley. These are your boundaries. You can't go outside them." All she cares about it what is between dog and work. If it relates to dog but not work, it's out. She asked about the brand of dog food. Should she include that? On the surface, it relates only to dog. She only gets to include it if it takes a lot of work to get that particular brand of dog food, but only if that's the case.

4. I got to help a guy who was writing about his first day of school in America after immigrating from Saudi Arabia: September 11, 2001. Talk about a unique perspective. He didn't even know English yet. Just Arabic. The funny thing about working with him was that it was right before class. I asked him what he planned to do because he had to turn in the essay. After he assured me that the essay he was handing it wasn't a final, he did want to work on it, and he would take my comments into account, we had a great conversation about his paper, that day, and the kind of details he could include to really help us understand what it was like. I'm excited to see his next draft. I told him that I wanted to see it not as a part of my job, but as a person who likes writing.

I can't believe all that happened over the time I was supposed to be at lunch on a Thursday. That made my week. Sometimes this job is hard. Sometimes it's unbelievably rewarding. I felt like I was inside an episode of This American Life with the burger and 9/11 stories, and two of my favorite strategies paid off for the other two students.

FAQ: You know

I like to talk with the writers that come in. I like to see if how well they know what they wrote about before we look at the works they put on the page. That gives me a idea of the handle they have on their ideas, or if they have one at all.

Inevitably, I get students to tell me about their subject. They start talking and they do this thing that many people do when they talk: they insert "you know" into their discourse.

Sometimes I let one, two, three slide by, and then I stop them. Other times, I just jump right in when they sneak the first "you know" in. I point out the tic, which they rarely notice, and make sure they pause for a second to realize that they just said "you know."

After that, I tell them that I do not in fact know. I don't know anything about their family Christmas gatherings or the time they got a scar while trying to stop a liquor store robbery. I don't know anything about the layout of their room or their choice of study space. I don't know their mothers, friends, teachers, or the other significant people who pop up as the subjects of their essays.

I wasn't there. I haven't spent time with those people. I do not know.

I realize that these students are not consciously referring to my knowledge, but they are subconsciously hoping that I will nod my head, say "uh-huh, I do know," and let them stay on the surface of their subject. I want them to be consciously aware that I have no idea what they are telling me--but I am interested in the details that are buried in their head if they would do a little digging.

After we break down what they know and I do not, they usually have a better understanding of what they need to provide so I can learn. I like to tell them that what is obvious to them is not obvious to others, so they should write what seems obvious. That way we can learn. And know.

Tuesday, October 6, 2009

You Can't Force This Stuff

ESPN debuts a new documentary series tonight. 30 for 30 is thirty filmmakers making thirty films about sports stories that happened in the thirty years since ESPN started broadcasting--not figures, not people, not big names, but stories that are great stories.

I read an introduction to the series by Bill Simmons today and found it relevant to the way I teach writing. I guess that means this is sort of a dispatch from the Writing Center, but more a dispatch more me as a Writing teacher.

Simmons was the one who came up with the 30 for 30 concept. After the suits at ESPN gave his idea the go-ahead, he and Connor Schnell (who was involved in producing content for ESPN in some way or another) started brainstorming ideas for stories. Then they created a list of filmmakers to tackle those stories. The idea was to play matchmaker, hooking up a filmmaker with the story, finding "the 30 best matches. Period."

That was the plan. What happened* was a little different. The filmmakers already had the stories. They already loved sports in the way that people who tell stories love sports. They weren't so interested in the overwhelming sports obsession with predicting the future. Instead, they recognized what was worth looking back on with a keen eye. The filmmakers already had their matches. They made them themselves.

They just needed the forum, and Simmons and ESPN provided that. Now the stories will be told on Tuesday nights and I could not be more excited.

Here are the parallels between 30 for 30 and Writing instruction:

1. Bill Simmons and Connor Schell = Writing Teachers
They love their subject. They spend time thinking about their subject. They plan things out. They discuss what would be worthwhile for the time they are allotted. The 30 for 30 series is their class time and they want to fill it with the best possible subject matter, so they dive in and try to do the best to fill it well.

But they are not the ones doing the work.

2. The Filmmakers = Writing Students
They are the ones doing the work.

Simmons and Schell couldn't get too attached to their list of desired stories because they couldn't force professional filmmakers to do work they didn't want to do. All they could do was present the framework and let the filmmakers run where they would.

In the case of 30 for 30, the power resides in the filmmakers. This project doesn't gain steam without them. Instead, it's just a couple of guys who love sports dreaming up a show that focuses on stories. They need storytellers to make it happen, so when those storytellers change the plans, the masterminds have to go along.

In the classes, the power resides with the teachers. They give the grades, so the students have to do what the teachers want.

Despite the different loci of power, the two cases are similar in that nothing will get made without those doing the work.

Simmons and Schell loved their idea, but they held it loosely. They developed more than they needed, going so far as to choose stories that they anticipated the filmmakers would tackle. What they really needed was just the framework: the thirty years of ESPN's existence, sports, and stories that "resonated at the time but were eventually forgotten for whatever reason." That is specific enough to provide the necessary boundaries to allow those doing the work to flourish within their limits.

The big difference between the series and the classes is the experience of those doing the work. The filmmakers are professionals who were sought after because of their work. The students and their abilities are unknown.

Sort of. They are able to learn. They are able to think. They have stories buried in their heads.

Students are perfectly capable of taking a loose framework and running with it. They need the forum to tell their story and some direction to learn how that storytelling can be done. They can be guided in the work, but they can most certainly do most of the work.

*As is usually the case with Plans and What Happeneds, they were not the same.

Thursday, October 1, 2009

Make It Your Own

I read across a wide spectrum of subjects. One of them happens to be sports uniforms. Uni Watch is a blog that not simply covers sports uniforms ("athletic aesthetics" they would say), but delves deep into the subject.

Here's an essay submitted by a Uni Watch reader named Matt King. He details his decision to own authentic jerseys with his own name on the back. The normal practice (and some would say the only acceptable practice among true uniphiles) is to purchase an authentic jersey with the name of an authentic player on the back.

I think he makes a good case for the practice losing its taboo status. I like that he took it upon himself to defend his Own Name On Back decision. He stops short of championing the movement, but he goes into the context of his own decision (which originated before authentic apparel was widely available) as well as giving us general reasons for putting your own last name on the jersey of your favorite team despite never playing a down/inning/minute for the club (now that authentic apparel is readily available).

Monday, September 28, 2009

Coming or Going

Here's something that happens frequently around here:

1. Teacher gives an assignment that can be described as "general." Said assignment usually includes language very similar to "make an argument about a significant experience/place/person."

2. Student chooses experience/place/person. Said experience/place/person is significant for some reason or another, but that significance is elusive and ethereal, tucked away in a messy drawer in the student's brain along with countless other experiences/places/people of varying significance, and thus any attempt to set it down on paper results in vague notions of importance that could be (and are) generated by just about anyone about just about anything.

Example: Student writes about significant place: home. Where is home? A place on the reservation. What place? A house. Student is able to verbalize little more than that. Reading the paper + inquiring verbally reveal that this paper is nearly fully focused on the student's experience with the Catholic Church across the street, specifically during Lent when she would venture across the street, despite not being Catholic, to experience the ceremonies at the church during the Easter season because they were Catholic, yes, but also wove in the ceremonies of her tribe.

This student was having a difficult time zooming in to the specific place. She was stuck on "home" and didn't know that she could write about going from her backyard, where she grew up hearing the church bells and smelling the mesquite wood that the church burned for heat, over to the church itself every Friday and Saturday evening during Lent.

She didn't know that she could choose a topic so small. I see this all the time. General assignments like the significant experience/place/person often lead to big fields of thought, not small ones. To help her see how she could choose, I decided to tell her something about how stories work and go from there.

I drew two circles on the whiteboard. On one of them, I drew an arrow starting outside and ending inside. On the other, I drew an arrow originating in the middle of the circle and extending outward.

I told her that every story is one of these two. It is either someone/something new coming into an established environment or someone/something leaving an established environment to go on some sort of adventure or journey.

She recognized which hers was: Option #2, adventure. She recognized that the established environment (the circle) was her backyard and that the adventure (the arrow) was going to the church. I emphasized that she could pay attention to her time boundaries, all year vs. during Lent. We talked how she could smell the mesquite wood from the church. I asked her if this fell under all year in her backyard or during Lent at the church. Backyard. The Deer Dancer that was a part of the ceremonies? Church.

We talked about the intro could (and should) include details from all year in order to show us that she lives right near the church. The thesis is where the adventure starts. She journeys outside her backyard to the church itself.

I think drawing those diagrams helped her understand how the beginning of the paper related to the rest of the paper. At various points in the conversation, I added on to the drawings. I'd drawn them before, but never added on. I labeled the circle "backyard all year" and the arrow " church on Fr + Sat during Lent." I wrote the word "choose" above the arrow and "forced" below, then wrote "why?" I'd never thought about breaking the paradigm down like that, but it seemed helpful. I doubt that will be the last time that shows up on the whiteboard.

Monday, September 21, 2009

Fun with Informal Communication

Here a couple of pieces of communication I've encountered in the past week. Ah, words.

1. On a black sweatshirt in the Writing Lab when I came to work one morning, I found a Post-It note with these words handwritten in pencil: "Some Random Sweater."

2. On a peer-reviewed draft (handwritten and submitted for review instead of the typed draft due to a flash drive left behind at the UofA computer lab) of a student essay: "this is g. but you gosta give me more detail chica! and finishing it would help a little."

Thursday, September 17, 2009

You Teach Me Pia Gow, I Will Help You Write

Yesterday did not start well. We had a busy morning, normal for the Mondays, Tuesdays, and Wednesdays of the nascent Fall 2009 semester, and I asked one of the early morning students when his paper was due.

It's a simple question. When is your paper due? The answer: a date + a time. First, he told me that it's just a first draft. I asked when he had to hand it in, and he said something else that did not include a date + a time. That's two. I asked again. He said something else and I suggested that he look at his syllabus. He took out his syllabus and said, "I think it's ___," and I then I prodded him to make sure by checking his syllabus very carefully. He did, and he gave me a date + a time.

If this job had a fine print, it would definitely include some mention of the repetition of such questions to reach specific answers. It's the closest this job gets to water torture. Those drops are harmless on there own, but they just keep dropping dropping dropping.

Thus, yesterday did not start off well. Thankfully, it improved. Through Pia Gow.

Each semester brings us new regulars. One of our new regulars has been working on a paragraph about her favorite form of relaxation, going to the casino to play Pia Gow, for the past week or so. She's got the general idea of the assignment, but she keeps using the word "fun" to explain why it's relaxing, so I've been trying to draw some specifics out of her*. That can be a slow process sometimes because people don't realize what kind of details others need in order to understand the everyday, obvious things of life they are covering in their writing.

Yesterday, she didn't just bring her draft. She brought cards. She was going to teach me Pia Gow.

She spread the cards out on the table in seven stacks of seven. She was the dealer, I was the player. She told me that the dealer is always seven and then had me pick a number. Two (my number in whatever sports teams I find myself on). She arranged the cards according to my choice and began to explain how we play.

She told me about high and low hands, what I'm looking for in arranging each, and then had me give it a go. She explained this clearly, without hitch or hesitation, and when she showed her cards and flipped mine, she would flip one card with another. When they wouldn't cooperate, I saw that it was because of the too-smooth table, and the look on her face, a quick flash of frustration, told me that she has done this before on the right kind of table.

I was right. She told me she's a dealer. She deals all kinds of card games at one casino, and then goes out to play her favorite, Pia Gow, at another with friends--friend I found out later are also dealers.

I didn't find out she was a dealer until I told that the game seemed complicated and wondered why she found it so relaxing. She said it was part of the casino world where she felt comfortable. I asked why and she then let it spill that she works there, that she knows the other dealers at other casinos. That's when I got it. She found this complex game so relaxing because she knows it, she explains it, and she teaches it five times a week. She was able to run through various hand scenarios for me faster than I could actually pick up that she was presenting a new option for how I could play. She knew the ins and outs because she's seen them play out in front of her.

She also found Pia Gow relaxing because it's a slow game. I didn't know she was a dealer, but she did let me know that detail early on. I just didn't understand it until we played. Remember those high and low hands? Each hand played in Pia Gow gives the dealer and the player two chances to win, which leads to a lot of pushes. She told me that this game is a push game. There's not a lot of big wins, but more importantly, your fifty dollar buy-in lasts a long time because your money doesn't bleed away every hand.

Pia Gow's nature as a push game allows for socializing, imbibing (for free in Vegas, she said, but not at her casino), and watching other players. Earlier, I told her that she needed to explain why the game is relaxing because not everyone finds gambling relaxing. As we played and pushed often, I told her I understood what she meant about the slow pace allowing players to enjoy hours at the table.

She helped me understand Pia Gow, and then I helped her understand how to go about writing about it. She found it so relaxing because it was familiar, it let her play for a long time, and she got to enjoy it as a player, not a dealer. She needed to tell readers how she grew familiar with the game as a dealer, and then explain why she so enjoyed sitting at the table as a player.

I told her to go pack her paragraph with details and come back so I could help her see how to decide what details to keep and what to cut**.

After she left, I couldn't help but think about how writing classes often separate writers from their subjects. We gather in rooms with tables and computers, we discuss, we put black marks on pages, and we rarely send people out to interact with what they are supposed to be putting down on paper.

Is this a breakdown in immediacy, in the connection between the word generating person and the subject those words are attempting to convey? Journalists go knock on doors, talk to people, look at places, and experience the environments they are writing about. Novelists go to the places they write about or spend time with people who inspire their characters (or look up journalists' accounts as research).

I remember reading that David Foster Wallace immersed himself in tax laws while preparing to write The Pale King, and that "A Supposedly Fun Thing I'll Never Do Again" was written after he actually went on the cruise it discusses.

I wonder how we could shorten the gap between classroom and subject, bring some immediacy to writing assignments, place those recording the sensory details in the same place as the stimuli, and make writing the result of an experience, not just the recalling of one.

I say all this because it was genuinely fun to learn this game from this student instead of just talk about this game with this student. She was an expert, and we were doing something real. We weren't stuck in the realm of the abstract, detached from what she was writing about. We were doing what she was writing about, and then we moved to writing about it while the cards were still on the table.

*All the time. I actually made a sign that says BE SPECIFIC and placed it between two of the computers. Yesterday, I was telling a student that she needed to bring specific promises and changes into a paper hinging on President Obama's failure to deliver on said promises, which were alluded to but never named. I didn't just tell her this once. It came up multiple times. Her friend, who was waiting not working, walked over to the sign, picked it up, and waved it in front of the writer's face.

**I often tell students what I was told by good teachers. Phil Heldrich, my poetry professor at Emporia State, told us that it's always easier to cut that it is to add. It's true.

Thursday, September 10, 2009

Drawing the Lines

Two students just left. They each had an essay about something they liked. One: soccer. The other: singing. The assignment: argue that something they liked is worth liking.

The drafts were about as general as could be. He liked soccer because of health, and she liked singing because it relieved stress. That was about all that was there, so I started asking questions.

He doesn't just like soccer. He is on a soccer team in a league here in Tucson. He plays every week. She doesn't just sing. She goes over to a friend's house every weekend to sing karaoke.

They just needed to set up their boundaries. A soccer game needs the white lines at the edge of the field to determine when the ball is in play and when it's not. Once those boundaries are set, the teams can generally do whatever they what to score as long as they follow soccer's basic rules*.

An essay needs similar attention paid to where the limits are in order. I told these students that they are free to zoom in from soccer and singing to playing on a soccer team and singing karaoke at a friend's house. That tells them what kind of details are in play. He can discuss who is on the team, how often they play, how often they win, where they play, who they play, and why he enjoys being a part of all of this. She can examine why she loves going to this friend's house at the end of the week to sing someone else's songs into a microphone in front of her friends.

This is doable. They are both perfectly capable of writing about these experiences. They just need to know that they can.

*Don't touch the ball with your hands, stay onside, don't foul anybody. Other than that, it's wide open for creativity in tactics, team setup, and ball movement. I would argue that this is how essay should be taught, as well: give writers a goal, set up the basics, and let them set up their paper so as to accomplish that goal in their own fashion. You can always talk through their tactics, team setup, and ball movement after they have given it a go.

Wednesday, September 9, 2009

FAQ: Can you make sure this is good?

That is not a generalization. We are asked that exact question--Can you make sure this is good?--frequently. Those are the words.*

The simplest of answers: No.

The process is always longer than that. People come to us for help, they just don't know what help we have to give. Instead of a bunch of marks on a page that will turn into corrections that students may or may not understand, we have questions.

I usually ask student writers who ask this question if they think their paper is not good. They are not accustomed to this question. It shocks some people visibly. They get a strange, confused expression on their face. If they were moving, they stop. Not everybody reacts this way, but a good number of people may have never been asked to think about the quality of their own work before.

My question leads to why they think their paper is not good. This is the important point in the conversation. They usually have a good idea. Suddenly they are able to verbalize that they know their paper has no thesis, that they need to work on organization, that the are struggling with the conclusion, or some other specific issue that was lurking behind their general request for goodness.

Some of them fall back from making sure it's good to wanting to make sure "it makes sense" or "it flows." I keep on going. I ask them why they think it doesn't. Eventually, they are able to evaluate their own work, and most of the time, they are right.

These students have somehow grown accustomed to other people making sure it's good. When asked to be specific in what they think is malfunctioning in their paper, when they start to think about it, when they do that work, they are able to start to make sure it's good, and we are able to help them do so.

It all comes down to ownership. I find that most people are perfectly capable of crafting a thoughtful paper if they are willing to think about it, answer questions, and dig into what they are trying to say. That's why I make them dig into what they think is wrong in the first place.

Monday, August 31, 2009

FAQ: Print in the Library

It's the beginning of the fall semester, so we, along with every other office on campus, are peppered with questions. People want to know where classes are, how to get ahold of people, where to find services, and we usually know where to send them.

Those are the general, new-student, beginning-of-the-semester questions. We also get certain questions that pertain to our specific expertise not only around the time when classes start, but throughout the semester.

One of those is about printing. People see computers here in the Writing Lab, so they think printing happens here. It doesn't.

A few people asked today. We have one sign that says Print in the Library, but it's not enough. I printed a twin* sign for our door. I told Larry** about our new sign, and Brooks made a joke about having a Frequently Asked Questions (FAQ) list for the Writing Lab.

I thought, "Hey, that's a good idea." I told Brooks I would put it on the blog. So here I am, starting a new feature on the blog. Whenever a frequently asked question comes up, I'll post how it's asked, who asks it, and how we usually answer it.

*A fraternal twin. I changed the wording just a bit to make sure people know not only to go to the library, but that the library is upstairs in the other building.

**The math guy, who also fields this question all the time.

Sunday, August 2, 2009

Never an Off Day

It's Sunday. I'm not at work right now, but I was thinking this morning, for whatever reason, about writing and research, about simple assignments and the complicated papers that can grow from them, and I decided on something I would like to do in the context of a research+literature class (like Pima's Writing 102).

It's in two stages for two specific reasons.
Stage 1: Meet an Author
Stage 2: Tell Someone Else to Read an Author

Here's the first stage. I'd like to have students research contemporary and recent authors. That could be pretty broad in terms of places, but I'd try to keep the timeframe fairly recent. I think I would make a list of authors and tack on a little info about that person. I'd let them choose who they want to look into. They could even go off the list as long as they convince me their choice is worth it.

Here's the reason for the first stage. I work with a lot of student writers who don't have the knowledge of their subjects and arguments that they need to form a solid essay because they have not invested the time into the process of research. I'm not blaming anyone here. I'm not pointing my finger at lazy students or teachers who rush through a semester. I'm just saying: writing is a result of thinking, so let's give folks we expect to write a little time to think. Let's make sure they have it. Let's make sure their brains can soak up enough information to form an opinion.

The first stage allows the student to get to know the research process while getting to know their author. We could work on database searches, knowing what kinds of sources are legitimate*, how to quote and paraphrase, choosing what to quote and what to paraphrase, organizing information from sources in a paragraph in your own paper, and all kinds of other little things that pop up in research.

The second stage would move on to adding in an argument. Here's my plan**: As a class, we would present our findings on our authors. Then each student would choose an author to support as someone people--not just academics or students or bookworms or nerds or kids whose parents don't buy them XBoxes--should read. They would have to think critically and connect who that author is, what that author writes about, where they came from, where they went, when they lived, and other contextual whowhatwhenwherehows with the same kinds of contextual issues in the people they are saying should read their author.

I'd love to see the arguments people come up with. I guess this comes from my desire to simplify assignments in order to let the complications grow organically from the students' thought processes, my hope that people see value in reading, and my observation that Writing classes often ask people to learn a skill which they have never seen in use. This assignment (which would really stretch over an entire semester in three large parts; the third being a revision stage that rarely gets taught but nearly always needs learning) would allow students to form their own ideas about something they have worked at gaining familiarity with, argue for time spent with your nose in a book, and learn more about people who choose to spend their time writing.

*Too many times I see people rushing through a research paper of one kind or another and all they've done is go to a few different basic sites like encyclodepias, Wikipedia (No!), About.com, or some other surface level biographical site with information gleaned from some other surface level biographical site. That's shoddy researchmanship.

**This is all just thinking and hoping because I'm not teaching right now, and if I were, I would be teaching Writing 70, which exists to help people write a solid sentence and then a solid paragraph.

Wednesday, June 24, 2009

The Microbiologist in Room A107



This is a bulletin board I put up in one of the Writing classrooms here on campus (all the bulletin boards were all either blank or full of remnants of material from before I started at Desert Vista in 2006). It's a quote I found from a microbiologist from an article on how research should make you feel stupid.

That particular classroom is most often used for Writing 101 and Writing 102, which are research- and argument-focused classes. I thought it would be helpful for the students in that classroom to remember that scholarly, professional people don't know everything. They just press on and keep figuring things out.



Here is what happened after I put up this bulletin board. Not graffiti, but conversation.



Here's a closer look. What is this anonymous person thanking God for?



The idea of trying. The microbiologist's "it" in this case is a research problem he was having trouble with, so he asked a Noble Prize winner--who said he didn't know how to solve it.

So many people just need to know that they don't have to know, they just need to attempt, to guess, to explore, to walk out on a limb and see what happens.

That line under "things" is not a stray pen mark. It travels downward.



to the final piece of the quote.



It's my favorite part of the whole quote. I love the use of the word "muddle." I think it's important to hear "as best we can." That's all we can do. Muddle the best we can. What we do not know has no boundaries, so we can just keep pushing forward with what we can learn.



And this final anonymous note encapsulates the entire goal of the bulletin board. The microbiologist and all his scholarly research experience sounds like the community college student writing a paper and finding sources in the library database. The context is different, the scale and scope of the projects are different, but the idea stays the same: do what you can, keep moving forward, and keep learning--even if you feel stupid.

Tuesday, June 2, 2009

Type for Free, My Friends

Last week, a student who visits the Writing Lab often came in with an urgent problem: the trial edition of Word on her laptop expired, but she needed to type a paper.

I contacted a friend of mine who works with Ubuntu Linux (he has written technical books for them, as well as rescuing another friend's computer by installing Linux). I figured he would know if a free or inexpensive word processing program existed for this student. He did.

He pointed me to OpenOffice.org. I knew nothing of Open Office, but now I'm sad that many students do not know. It's a free batch of programs from Sun Microsystems that match up with Word, PowerPoint, Excel, and more. I'm all for anything that will help students spend less, and this student got the equivalent of Word for free.

Now she can work on her papers at home when she has the time instead of trying to work all her writing time into her busy schedule and the Writing Center's summer hours.

Monday, May 11, 2009

Titleist

Many people have trouble with titles. They come in with the assignment (Paragraph 2, Essay 3) on the top of their page, or they use the title of an assigned article/essay/story as the title of their analysis/reaction/response (The Red Convertible, sans quotation marks), or they use a general word or phrase (Mother, My Vacation, Believe in Yourself) that is much too large for their specific insights on the subject.

Here's the thing: I love titles. I'm a huge fan. I see titles everywhere. I love how a writer can capture the essence of a piece in a single word, a small group of words, an intentionally long string of words, or a title: subtitle combination.

I pay attention to titles, and I particularly enjoy the titles This American Life assigns to both their full-hour shows and the acts they divide those shows up into. They do something that I don't think most know they can do: play on existing phrases to create titles.

Here's a taste from the last few This American Life shows:

D-U-Why?
Return to the Scene of the Scene
Our Man of Perpetual Sorrow
This I Used to Believe
Scrambled Nest Egg
Team Spirit in the Sky
Pants Pants Revelation
You're as Cold as Ice
You're Willing to Sacrifice Our Love

They are all taken from existing pieces of language. DUI. Return to the scene of the crime. Our lady of perpetual sorrow. This I Believe (another radio show). Scrambled eggs + nest egg. Team spirit + "Spirit in the Sky." Dance Dance Revolution. Two lines from Foreigner's "Cold as Ice." Most students don't know they can do such things.

I'm going revisit this idea periodically.

Wednesday, May 6, 2009

Brand Recognition

Last week, I went on vacation to San Diego. One day we were leaving our hotel and we stopped by the main building to mail postcards. I waited in the car with Elly while Janice went inside. While I waited, a man came out the front doors wearing a Billabong t-shirt. I see people wearing Billabong and Hurley and Volcom and Famous Stars and Straps t-shirts and hats, and I doubt many of those people know exactly what those companies make or do, aside from producing t-shirts with their names on them.

I thought this could be a good opportunity to get students to research the names they are paying to wear. They could choose a shirt or other piece of clothing that they own. It could be from one of those brands or from Hollister or American Eagle or Abercrombie & Fitch or any other company that puts their name on the front of a t-shirt to act as a mobile billboard. Then, they research that company. Who are they? What else to do they make? Is clothing their main business? Who makes their clothing? Why do people wear the clothes they make? How many people who wear those clothes actually know much about the company?

I would be interested in seeing what happens to student perspectives after they learn more about where those clothes come from. This could lead to writing about fair labor, materialism, fitting in, trends, authenticity, and a host of other issues.
________

Also on the research front:

Today, a few guys were in the Writing Center. One of them had a recent haircut. From the front, I thought it was mohawk-fade hybrid. I saw the back and discovered it was just a fade. I told him I thought it was a mohawk and he laughed. Mohawks are everywhere, I pointed out, so I thought he had one, too. I told them all that I saw a guy in Target with a mohawk--not the brightly-dyed, spiny dinosaur, punk kind of mohawk, but still a few inches high from forehead to neck. It was a near-punk rebel style haircut--and he was wearing a striped polo shirt, blue jeans, and running shoes. Hardcore.

We laughed about how the mohawk is everywhere, and then I mused that looking into where the mohawk came from and how it got to be everywhere would be an interesting research project. I asked the guys if they would be willing to write about that if their teacher asked them to. It wasn't an overwhelming response, but they were up for it. One of them was excited, even.

I think a paper about the origins and spread of the mohawk would be fascinating. It would require historical research from multiple times (book research, database research, Internet research) and allow for the students to conduct interviews and look into current media to find mohawks and the reasons for them. I would love to read that.

Monday, April 27, 2009

This and That

1. Last week, a student researching her Writing 102 essay was highlighting. A lot. Way too much. I looked down at her printed page of research about JFK (she was investigating the context of his inaugural speech) and saw mostly orange. The lines she left white were few.

I asked her why she was highlighting all of that. She told me that she was going to possibly use it later. I then explained that she would simply be reading through lines of orange-and-black, not the white-and-black original, to find what she wanted to use. The work she would be doing later would be the same as the work she was doing right then (perhaps more because she probably doesn't read from orange pages that often).

I told her to simply highlight keywords and dates and leave the rest white. Then I drew this on the white board
__________ _______________ _____ ___
________ _________________ ________________ ____
________ _________________ _________ ___
________ _____________

to illustrate my point. The first part is highlighting as she was doing it. The second part is the highlighted keywords, which are much easier to spot and distinguish from other highlighted keywords.

She said, "Nobody ever told me that before. Highlighting keywords." I told her that one of the advantages I have in the Writing Lab is that I see people working. I see the formation, not the formed, so I get used to helping that formation happen more efficiently. I really do think this is making me a better teacher.

2. A panicky student who often drinks enough caffeine to make her leg shake* came in last week and calmly ran through her plan of attack for her research paper. She knew each section she wanted to cover, and her sections grew more specific as she proceeded through her paper. I was impressed. This student had cried earlier this semester. Writing overwhelmed her. It was too much and she had to leave for awhile. And here she was, calmly speaking from the notes and visual organization she put down on sheets from a legal pad.

All I could do was say, "That's great" and watch her go. She had no questions. She just needed time to work.

3. I love watching people think. At breakfast with a friend this Friday, he asked me if I would be busy that day. I said yes and no, that there would be people in working on research papers and they would be working working working, only asking questions when necessary**. I love when students sit down with their piles of research or plop down and type away at their drafts. I feel like they are understanding what it means to write. They aren't worried so much as focused. There will be time for revision after a conference with a teacher or a peer review. This is the time to forge ahead, and I love being in the room when that happens.

*Not a hyperbole. I've seen it. Although I suppose the stress of writing a paper contributes, she does drink a lot of caffeine.

**Like swimmers breathing only when necessary and concentrating on their stroke, their goal.

Monday, April 20, 2009

Good Day So Far

What I've helped with so far:

The project on mental illness + creativity: going from the student saying, "Yes, there is a connection" to figuring out what connection she sees. Specifics!

Research on Dr. Seuss + historical/social context: looking for direction and questions, narrowing the focus, learning that Cat in the Hat was written to combat illiteracy.

Rhetoric: explaining logos, pathos, and ethos to those about to persuade; getting four students knee-deep into their potential arguments.

To Call It an Article or To Not Call It an Article

Good question today: Are the Question & Answer features in magazines called articles?

A couple of students working on responses to articles in The Aztec Press wondered if the Q&As were "articles." I looked up explained what people usually mean when they use the word "article" to describe writing in a newspaper or magazine, and I looked up "article" on dictionary.com to show them the true definition of the word. We talked about all the small lists or graphs or blurbs that magazines publish and how they are different than the articles those same magazines publish.

I liked the question, and the follow-up was even better: If not "articles," what are they called? I'm not sure. I suppose Q&A would apply, but not all of those little bits in the fronts of magazines are answers to questions. Do those have a name? I'm not in the magazine publishing business, but I suppose they do. I'll see if I can do some digging.

Friday, April 17, 2009

Links of Note

1. Stupidity in Research: an article by a microbiologist (and they don't just let anybody do that) about the necessity of that I Don't Know feeling. If I were to make a pie graph of my job, which I have considered doing, I imagine a fairly large chunk of that circle would be labeled, "Telling People It Is Okay To Not Know." I ask students this question: What do you think? They reply: I don't know. I counter: I know you don't know, but I didn't ask what you know; I asked what you think.

2. John McPhee: an NPR piece and a Princeton Weekly Bulletin article on my newest authorial discovery. I think this guy is cool. The foundation of his livelihood is his curiosity. He is not a specialist in anything other than nonfiction. I just finished his first book, A Sense of Where You Are: Bill Bradley at Princeton, which follows now Senator Bill Bradley during his college basketball career and paints him as a sort of savant on the court, hyper-aware and capable of physical feats others don't know are possible.

Part of what I love about this book is that it came naturally to McPhee. He has lived most of his life in Princeton, and Bradley's presence slotted right in. The book grew organically from their intersection at the school. Another part of what I love is that McPhee is not a sportswriter. He is a writer who covers anything and everything (read the articles; you'll see), and this book happened to be about a basketball player.

Thursday, April 16, 2009

Eats, Shoots, and Leaves

I'm currently reading Eats, Shoots, and Leaves by Lynne Truss. I have completed the introduction and the first chapter on the apostrophe. I'm ankle-deep in the second chapter, covering the comma. Here are my two favorite observations:

1. Various grammar books have various rules. Some say "Keats's poem" is correct. Others say "Keats' poem" is correct. I love that. The rulemakers can't even agree on the rules. How then can we expect non-rulemaking college students to follow them?

Everybody always comes in asking about grammar. One student came in today with a sheet of feedback from his teacher. Nowhere in that feedback did she mention anything about his grammar. She asked for focus, for clarification, for specifics, but said nothing of commas or sentence structure. I read the feedback and read over his essay. His teacher was 100% correct, and as I began to discuss her feedback with him, he waved his hand over his paper and asked if I could just look at it and tell him about his grammar.

I don't him he doesn't care about grammar at this point and explained that ideas come first. Most people think in this manner: writing=grammar. That is not true. Grammar is an aspect, not everything. I think that is driven home by Keats's poem/Keats' poem; does it really--really--matter? Not particularly. We still know who wrote the lines.

2. Truss quotes Sir Ernest Gowers: "The use of commas cannot be learned by rule." True. I can't remember a single writing student who learned where to put a comma based on an explanation of a rule. Rule + example is the minimum. The rule is theory, but the example is practice.

I can always tell readers when they come in. Their sentences bounce and flow with rhythm. They can't necessarily explain the placement of a comma, but they usually don't need to because their commas are properly placed. They have seen the tool in use enough to understand how it functions in live action.

This is same way I learned to use a semicolon. I saw enough of them in print and it sunk in that they pair sentences.

Friday, March 6, 2009

It's Not Brain Surgery

I try to get out of the Writing Center at least a couple times a day and take a walk around the outside of Desert Vista's two-building campus. These walks remind me that I do not live in a windowless box*, that the sun shines and there are mountains and breezes--all of which are good things to be reminded of from time to time.

Last week, I passed Evelyn Martinez, one of our counselors here at DV, and we shared a quick conversation about helping people, persevering in helping people, and remembering that we cannot do it all for them.

Evelyn is a generally upbeat and encouraging person. She told me that she'd had a tough beginning of the semester, but was reminding herself that what we do is not brain surgery and that the power belongs in the choices people ultimately make, not solely in our advice. With that, she went her way and I went mine.

I've been reminding myself over the past couple weeks that what I do here in the Writing Lab is not brain surgery. It helps me keep work simple and to remember that I can't teach someone everything there is to know or think about writing in twenty minutes or three hours or even a few weeks or an entire semester. I can't go in an connect wires or smooth out wrinkles to fix thought processes in a short amount of time. I can suggest and model and guide, but the choice belongs in the writer.

But then, this morning, I was thinking about what I do kind of is brain surgery. I'm not a surgeon in the sense that I use my knowledge and skills to fix problems, but I do root around in writers' brains, challenging them to use the mass of cells they carry around in their skulls as more than an instrument of instinct. So often writers present me with their problems or questions, I turn it back to them in some form or another as an opportunity for them to ponder and explore, and they crumple into their own lack of knowledge, waving I Don't Know like a white flag, pleading for terms of surrender.

I suppose what I do is brain personal training. Not surgery to repair, but challenge to build up--both the ability of a person's brain and the belief a person has in the ability of their brain. Student writers say, "I have no idea," and then I push them further and their idea pops out like a just-born foal, shaky but trying to stand and closer to walking than it may appear. It usually finds its feet (hooves, to be consistent with the metaphor) fairly quickly, and they have seen that I Don't Know is not a stop sign.

They have either been taught that I Don't Know=Stop Thinking (I always tell them, "I didn't ask what you know; I asked what you think") or they have never been taught that there is more to life than Not Knowing. I suppose, if we want to wax philosophical, we could say that much of life is not knowing and that we must learn to push forward through that or be crippled by the blank page that is tomorrow and the next day and the next day, etc. That is the More: keep on going.

I will remind myself that I am not a brain surgeon. I will remind myself that I am a brain trainer.

*Okay, technically I do have a window, but it does not give me a view to the outside world or let in natural light. Instead, it functions like those large panes of glass at zoos, the ones that allow us to look in on the lives of captive gorillas and polar bears. It is a glass wall that passersby occasionally choose to tap or pound on, which reinforces my zoo metaphor and my conclusion that, while it is made of glass, it is not a true window.

Monday, February 23, 2009

My Dilemma: There's No Home For You Here Idea, Go Away (There's No Home For You Here)*

I'm always getting ideas and trying them out (such is the life of someone who believes in the writing process). In my Summer 2008 Writing 100**, I tried out this idea:

1. I cut out words and phrases from the pages of magazines. There are always plenty of magazines lying about, so we might as well put them to good use: giving people a chance to work through the thought process*** necessary to develop an idea into an essay.
2. I put the now-separated-from-their-original-context words and phrases into a small white envelope.
3. Each student blindly chose a word or phrase from said small white envelope.
4. Each student set to work thinking of what they could**** write about based on this word or phrase. They brainstormed in whatever way worked for them. I walked around and gave feedback, mainly trying to get students to think sharply and specifically*****.
5. After each student had their list, which they posted on our class message board, they formed groups of three to choose one topic from their combined lists and then set to work outlining the main ideas for an essay on this topic.

They never actually turned these outlines into essays. That was not the point. The point was to help them develop as thinkers--which has to happen before they turn into writers. So much focus is placed on the final product in many classes that student writers don't concern themselves with learning to grow a small, simple idea into the complex, intricate thing that we call an essay. Thus, many students don't get their reps as Idea Developers. They rush through to finish because finishing a paper is finishing one more step along the way in finishing the class, which is one more step along the way to finishing their degree and getting a job.

I see that all the time in the Writing Lab. Honestly, it's one of my favorite things to work on with people. That's why I love having a whiteboard in the lab. We work out their essay together, and I show them what you can do with a blank page. But I wish I could do more of that. That's why I did that exercise with the random phrases. I wanted to give them reps. I would love to develop that exercise into a full-blown essay project that extends over weeks and allows us to examine stages of the thinking process that happen while writing. I just don't have a classroom environment to do that developing. I tossed the idea of a workshop around with Matt Matera, but we both know that workshops don't fly here because they are extra, and anything extra doesn't attract people who are learning+working+raising families, which many of our students are.

So the idea will be just that: an idea. Eventually, I hope to get a chance to see what could happen if I keep working on it. We'll see.
_________________

*This title is a modified version of The White Stripes' "There's No Home For You Here." I merely switched "girl" in the lyrics to "idea."

**The last class I was allowed to teach at Pima due to some new (I'm assuming budgetary) constraints placed on full-time staff who also served as adjunct faculty. That made me very sad. Hopefully that changes in the future.

***ESPN.com's Bill Simmons (The Sports Guy) has a theory that "it's all about getting your reps." This applies to basketball players, Miley Cyrus, and, I believe, people learning to think like people who write well; hence this exercise.

****This is about "could" because this exercise is about possibility. Most of writing is about possibility. Like Anne Lamott said, "Very few writers really know what they are doing until they've done it." We should focus on student writers' ability to work through the unknown and the possible toward a more finite product.

*****The best example of this, I think: a student plucked the phrase "Carve out some family time" (originally in an ad for Big Love). He wrote ideas about family. That is the obvious one. What he was neglecting was the idea of carving out time. We talked about what the word "carve" means, about what it implies when combined with the concept of time, and what those ideas meant for family. Often people ignore words that are right in front of their eyes.

Friday, February 6, 2009

So Far, So Good

The Spring is always a little slower around Desert Vista, and the beginning of the semester sometimes takes awhile to get going, but it's been a good beginning of 2009 around the Writing Lab.

I'm basing that solely on the students who have crossed our door so far. They are eager and curious and self-deprecating. That means they pay attention and ask questions. I've already had the chance to explain comma splices to some foggy-minded students, who usually need to be told that breaking words into sentences is not a bad thing, that they can still explain what they are explaining in the next sentence, or who just need a little warning to think before sprinkling commas throughout their papers.

I also had the chance to explain the ideas of rhetoric to a couple students engaged in breaking down Martin Luther King, Jr.'s "I Have a Dream" speech. Honestly, I love watching people realize that they can not only read the What of a speech or essay or book, but also the How and Why that is tucked in those same words. That's the foundation of a critical thinker.

Early on this semester, I helped a student move from a dull summary (mistaken for description) of a movie to a lively little essay on her fish. Her refugee fish. See, she and her husband are Tucsonans via relocation from New Orleans after Hurricane Katrina. They got on a plane without knowing the destination, leaving everything, including their fish, behind in their flooded home. When they returned months later, the looters had removed everything of value but left the fish, which was just fine. It's now a Tucsonan, too.

I'm hoping the semester continues like these few early weeks.

Tuesday, January 20, 2009

January 20, 2009: A Notable Day

1. I watched Barack Obama take the Presidential Oath of Office with somewhere between 150 and 300 students, staff, and faculty here on campus. That was special. There was clapping. Much clapping. I love having a president who uses words to inspire and lead. I would love to print off his speeches and go over them with a Writing class to show them how words can be sent forth to change The Way Things Are.

2. We got an ID scanner for our sign-in computer. That's a big deal and we're thankful for it. I don't think people outside the Pima institutional behemoth will understand. We asked for this (officially) at the beginning of the Fall 08 semester. Mary Beth Ginter was our temporary VP of Instruction and, apparently, she moved things along so much so that today, the first day of Spring 09 classes, I unlocked the door and found a new computer complete with a new Accutrack program and a new scanner. To Dr. Ginter and Whoever Else Made This Happen: Thankyouthankyouthankyou. We anticipate this making the procedural part of our job much easier.

3. I overheard a conversation between Writing tutors that centered around the new film JCVD, which invovles Jean-Claude Van Damme playing Jean-Claude Van Damme, and then bloomed into a discussion of the films of Mr. Van Damme, as well as the acting prowess of Mr. Van Damme, Chuck Norris, and Stephen Seagal.