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.
Tuesday, January 20, 2009
Monday, December 22, 2008
Everything Comes From Seed
I'm not quite halfway through The Best American Essays of the Century, a book that I bought at Bookman's for nine dollars in trade credit over a year ago, maybe more. I bought it because I teach people how to write essays, and I have a philosophy of learning that involves learning from examples, and examples labeled "the best" by Joyce Carol Oates and Robert Atwan are worth learning from. I gave myself permission to read an essay a day or so. I have not kept that pace, but I do find the time to read here and there, so I'm slowly making my way through.
I have made discoveries while reading this book--really, while piling the readings up in my head, one essay by one essay, each a few years down the road from the one I read before it, each a record of how ideas are moving along the century.
1. Race Relations and Civil Rights permeate much deeper into the soil of American History than I realized (or was taught, really). It seems like one of every three or four essays tackles some varied perspective on minorities and majorities in our nation. The four that stick in my head are W.E.B. Du Bois's "On the Coming of John" (education, black/white, poverty), John Jay Chapman's "Coatesville" (repentence of racial crimes whose perpetrators were acquitted), Richard Wright's "The Ethics of Living Jim Crow: An Autobiographical Sketch" (education of a different, social, everyday sort), and Langston Hughes's "Bop" (pop culture's roots in dark dark things)
2. Writing that is worth reading is the process of a careful mind exploring simple moments, questions, or ideas. The ideas themselves do not need to be complicated. Hughes lays out a conversation between two black men about bebop music. James Agee, in "Knoxville: Summer of 1915," puts the evenings in his boyhood neighborhood under the poetic miscroscope. E.B. White writes about revisiting a lake, a place that he visited with his father, as a father himself in "Once More to the Lake." These are not complicated things, but the essays are beautiful, exact, detailed, and careful.
3. Organization is any structure an author uses to prop up his ideas; there are no rules--only control. I've told students before that, while teachers may ask for certain parts of particular structures, in the real world, all that readers ask is that the author seem like he is in control, that he knows where the writing is going. However an author can do that is okay by the public. These essays are examples of that. Wright goes so far as to build his essay in sections marked by roman numerals. They are conversational in tone and include dialect in dialogue, and are of varied length, but the roman numerals shows the reader that Wright knows where he's starting and stopping. He knows the limits of each story, and he lets each one live fully within those limits.
I think these discoveries could work to benefit a class full of learning writers.
The fact that race relations is such an integral thread to American life could spur a class to write about their own experiences living in multicultural environments, about their own life-lessons about "how it is" in terms of stereotypes and racial interactions and what can be done to move "how it is" toward "how it could be."
The idea of growing an essay from a simple idea could be important to the direction given. The work a student should do is not the work of diciphering an assigment; instead, it should be the work of taking a simple question or idea (either given by a teacher or unearthed from life) and mapping it, dissecting it, exploring it, and recording what is found.
Organization and control may be the most difficult to grade, but may also be fun to teach. It would allow a conversation between teacher and student in which the student is the owner of the idea--and of the presentation of the idea--and the teacher is the mentor+audience. In this mode, the student can discover and attempt to record, and the teacher can react, ask questions, and give gentle suggestions to mold people who can control the wild ideas in their heads that sneak around like mice or flail like loosed fire hoses. The only rule is: learn to control the idea, to package it so it can be unpacked and understood.
I have made discoveries while reading this book--really, while piling the readings up in my head, one essay by one essay, each a few years down the road from the one I read before it, each a record of how ideas are moving along the century.
1. Race Relations and Civil Rights permeate much deeper into the soil of American History than I realized (or was taught, really). It seems like one of every three or four essays tackles some varied perspective on minorities and majorities in our nation. The four that stick in my head are W.E.B. Du Bois's "On the Coming of John" (education, black/white, poverty), John Jay Chapman's "Coatesville" (repentence of racial crimes whose perpetrators were acquitted), Richard Wright's "The Ethics of Living Jim Crow: An Autobiographical Sketch" (education of a different, social, everyday sort), and Langston Hughes's "Bop" (pop culture's roots in dark dark things)
2. Writing that is worth reading is the process of a careful mind exploring simple moments, questions, or ideas. The ideas themselves do not need to be complicated. Hughes lays out a conversation between two black men about bebop music. James Agee, in "Knoxville: Summer of 1915," puts the evenings in his boyhood neighborhood under the poetic miscroscope. E.B. White writes about revisiting a lake, a place that he visited with his father, as a father himself in "Once More to the Lake." These are not complicated things, but the essays are beautiful, exact, detailed, and careful.
3. Organization is any structure an author uses to prop up his ideas; there are no rules--only control. I've told students before that, while teachers may ask for certain parts of particular structures, in the real world, all that readers ask is that the author seem like he is in control, that he knows where the writing is going. However an author can do that is okay by the public. These essays are examples of that. Wright goes so far as to build his essay in sections marked by roman numerals. They are conversational in tone and include dialect in dialogue, and are of varied length, but the roman numerals shows the reader that Wright knows where he's starting and stopping. He knows the limits of each story, and he lets each one live fully within those limits.
I think these discoveries could work to benefit a class full of learning writers.
The fact that race relations is such an integral thread to American life could spur a class to write about their own experiences living in multicultural environments, about their own life-lessons about "how it is" in terms of stereotypes and racial interactions and what can be done to move "how it is" toward "how it could be."
The idea of growing an essay from a simple idea could be important to the direction given. The work a student should do is not the work of diciphering an assigment; instead, it should be the work of taking a simple question or idea (either given by a teacher or unearthed from life) and mapping it, dissecting it, exploring it, and recording what is found.
Organization and control may be the most difficult to grade, but may also be fun to teach. It would allow a conversation between teacher and student in which the student is the owner of the idea--and of the presentation of the idea--and the teacher is the mentor+audience. In this mode, the student can discover and attempt to record, and the teacher can react, ask questions, and give gentle suggestions to mold people who can control the wild ideas in their heads that sneak around like mice or flail like loosed fire hoses. The only rule is: learn to control the idea, to package it so it can be unpacked and understood.
Wednesday, December 10, 2008
And They See That It Is Good, So They Try To Cram It All Into Their Allotted Two-to-Three Pages
Focus is one of the most addressed issues in the DV Writing Lab. Often, student writers come in with a draft that they cranked out at home and ask us to "check it." What they mean is: Find my mistakes, oh writing nerd (basically, if not in those exact words). What they need more times than not, however is: focus.
I usually make people talk through their papers before we read them to see how much control they have of their ideas apart from the pages on which they flung their words in a coffee-infused, television-distracted, text-message-interrupted whirl of keystrokes. I ask them, "What is your paper about?" It's a simple question based on the precision of the second-person pronoun that ninety-nine percent of the time results in a student regurgitating the question or prompt given them by their instructor, or spitting out a one-to-three word phrase such as "construction" or "global warming" or "legalization of pot."
The former could go anywhere, really, but the latter, after combining their answers to my questions with a quick review of their essay, leads to a discussion of the idea of focus, a slippery rascal that is deceptively simple ("focus" is not some esoteric literary term) to the point that it could be slipped into a lesson on writing by a teacher and assumed to be understood without a hitch.
Even the student could assume they get it. They fill a few pages with their thoughts on construction work. They tell some stories, build their credibility with experiences working alongside construction-working fathers and injuries earned with the mis-hit of a hammer (or even worse, injuries observed in coworkers involving nail guns or falling _____ stories). They slip in a sentence here and there about how the foreman's job is to keep people safe and make sure the job gets done, and they have an essay on Why They Want To Be A Foreman. Done done and done.
Here is where one of the more important discoveries about writing I've made while tutoring full-time comes in. They assume that, because they did not talk about anything but construction, they have achieved focus. The problem is that the essay is not supposed to be a collection everything they know about construction (or global warming or pot or anything else). It's supposed to explain why this certain author wants to be a foreman on a construction crew--not a worker and not the project manager, but the foreman, who has specific responsibilities and duties.
The stories about smashing thumbs and nearly missing getting impaled with nails were interesting and detailed and appeared to be on topic, and they could be, if the student sees how to focus. Everything goes back to the central idea. Everything. If it's in the neighborhood, that's not focus. That's blurred edges.
This happens with essays about mothers and fiances, jobs and family vacations, hopes for future jobs, favotire holidays, scars, characters in books, and everything else that students are asked to write about. They see stories they want to tell or facts that they think would be interesting or information that they assume is indispensable and try to get it all down on the pages, all of it all of it all of it, and it's too much because they thought about the general topic, but not about what they are specifically saying about that person or thing or idea.
I usually make people talk through their papers before we read them to see how much control they have of their ideas apart from the pages on which they flung their words in a coffee-infused, television-distracted, text-message-interrupted whirl of keystrokes. I ask them, "What is your paper about?" It's a simple question based on the precision of the second-person pronoun that ninety-nine percent of the time results in a student regurgitating the question or prompt given them by their instructor, or spitting out a one-to-three word phrase such as "construction" or "global warming" or "legalization of pot."
The former could go anywhere, really, but the latter, after combining their answers to my questions with a quick review of their essay, leads to a discussion of the idea of focus, a slippery rascal that is deceptively simple ("focus" is not some esoteric literary term) to the point that it could be slipped into a lesson on writing by a teacher and assumed to be understood without a hitch.
Even the student could assume they get it. They fill a few pages with their thoughts on construction work. They tell some stories, build their credibility with experiences working alongside construction-working fathers and injuries earned with the mis-hit of a hammer (or even worse, injuries observed in coworkers involving nail guns or falling _____ stories). They slip in a sentence here and there about how the foreman's job is to keep people safe and make sure the job gets done, and they have an essay on Why They Want To Be A Foreman. Done done and done.
Here is where one of the more important discoveries about writing I've made while tutoring full-time comes in. They assume that, because they did not talk about anything but construction, they have achieved focus. The problem is that the essay is not supposed to be a collection everything they know about construction (or global warming or pot or anything else). It's supposed to explain why this certain author wants to be a foreman on a construction crew--not a worker and not the project manager, but the foreman, who has specific responsibilities and duties.
The stories about smashing thumbs and nearly missing getting impaled with nails were interesting and detailed and appeared to be on topic, and they could be, if the student sees how to focus. Everything goes back to the central idea. Everything. If it's in the neighborhood, that's not focus. That's blurred edges.
This happens with essays about mothers and fiances, jobs and family vacations, hopes for future jobs, favotire holidays, scars, characters in books, and everything else that students are asked to write about. They see stories they want to tell or facts that they think would be interesting or information that they assume is indispensable and try to get it all down on the pages, all of it all of it all of it, and it's too much because they thought about the general topic, but not about what they are specifically saying about that person or thing or idea.
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.
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..."
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).
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.
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.
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