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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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..."