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.