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.
Subscribe to:
Post Comments (Atom)
No comments:
Post a Comment