Prof Trupe's Blog

What I'm Reading Now: Too Many Books

2011-04-21T11:41:00.000-07:00

My current crop of YA reading includes Jonathan Stroud's new Bartimaeus book, The Ring of Solomon, which reveals some of the demon's past in Jerusalem, where he makes sassy djinn comments on humanity's weaknesses, with footnotes; Helen Frost's Keesha's House, a book in poems (starting off with sestinas! not an easy form) about kids in trouble who need a safe house; Paul B. Janeczko's Worlds Afire, also poems, telling the story of a 1944 circus fire; Paul Fleischman's Dateline: Troy, which I've meant to read for some time now and which tells the Trojan story in spare text juxtaposed with newspaper clippings from the present to make the visual as well as textual point that our great stories from the past are repeated today; Maggie Stiefvater's Shiver, a werewolf story told in two voices.

Then there are the professional books: Steven L. Layne's Igniting a Passion for Reading: Successful Strategies for Building Lifetime Readers; Nancie Atwell's The Reading Zone: How to Help Kids Become Skilled, Passionate, Habitual, Critical Readers; Donalyn Miller's The Book Whisperer: Awakening the Inner Reader in Every Child; Kelly Gallagher's Teaching Adolescent Writers; two by Tom Romano, Blending Genre, Altering Style: Writing Multigenre Papers and Crafting Authentic Voice. I just finished Cynthia Carbone Ward's How Writers Grow: A Guide for Middle School Teachers. I think that's all I'll admit to reading concurrently right now, though I've dipped into a few more that I plan to commit to quite soon--Packing for Mars by Mary Roach, Let's Take the Long Way Home by Gail Caldwell, and Storm Front by Jim Butcher (because Karrah loves the Dresden Files so much), along with James Bucky Carter's edited collection, Building Literary Connections with Graphic Novels: Page by Page, Panel by Panel and Penny Kittle's Write Beside Them: Risk, Voice, and Clarity in High School Writing.

I am a grazer and sampler of books. I love moving back and forth among a variety of genres and styles. At Christmas time I was rereading Jane Austen, and I've been working at a biography of Coleridge on and off for close to a year. Last (academic) year, I taught Senior Seminar in English and spent lots of time with nineteenth-century British lit (my first love as a reader--unless you count my childhood obsession with fairy tales), and while I was writing Reading Julia Alvarez (just released March 30), I read several Caribbean and U.S. Latino writers' works. Last fall I took a big turn back into the literature related to my upper-level writing classes, mostly creative nonfiction, and I just bought a William Stafford book I didn't already own, along with Bret Lott's Before We Get Started: A Practical Memoir of the Writer's Life and Amy Tan's The Opposite of Fate.

It's obvious that something ignited "a lifelong passion for reading" in me! In the past couple weeks I've loaned out several of my YA novels to students, borrowed a book from a student, and ordered Hamlet's Blackberry by William Powers. I attended a library-sponsored discussion of Elizabeth Gilbert's Eat, Pray, Love about three weeks ago and a conference panel on To Kill a Mockingbird more recently. And the Teaching Writing students are writing annotations of picture books, so my head's full of Cloudy with a Chance of Meatballs, The Stinky Cheese Man, and wondrous books for kids.

There. I've done it. I've admitted to my addiction. Where's my list of those twelve steps, now? Under that pile of books, no doubt.

Voice for First-Year College Students

2011-04-20T13:39:00.000-07:00

The power of voice is instantly recognizable in any writing we read. Voice is easy to see, difficult to define, because its very individuality is the point. If it's difficult to define, it's even more difficult to teach. How do you teach uniqueness?

So much of our schooling has drained voice out of our writing. The impersonality of so much "academic" writing, which we are trained to practice, and to value, leaches color from our prose.

As a college student, I aspired to be a writer. I had exploded into poetry in my teens--as so many teens do--and I loved to write. The courses that convinced me that I wasn't a wrter were my Advanced Composition and Journalism courses. I wish I'd never taken them.

I continued writing--I've abandoned my share of novel manuscripts--and I started producing some short stories that I thought were passable and publishable. But I took the wrong direction for a writer: I went back to school--a graduate program in English literature. I certainly enjoyed my Master's program, but reading fourteenth- through seventeenth-century poetry didn't do a whole lot for my writing.

I diverted my generative energies into child-bearing. After two babies, my marriage broke down. I wrote. There's nothing like emotional pain to drive the creative impulse. More short stories!

But needing to support us, I started teaching in the local community colleges. I immersed myself in trying to indoctrinate students in the academic non-voice that I'd mastered myself--students who came with colorful non-academic voices. I used to keep a count of how many classes of first-year writing (I and II) and basic writing (I and II) I'd taught, but I stopped somewhere around 100. Now I'd be hard-pressed to estimate how many students I've tried to teach "academic writing" to.

And now I want to teach voice. The books I love are full of personality--books by Jon Krakauer and Peter Hessler and Azar Nafizi and Elizabeth Gilbert and David Sedaris. The young adult literature I teach would fall flat without strong voices created by Laurie Halse Anderson and M. T. Anderson and Virginia Euwer Wolff and Chris Lynch. Their protagonists follow in the footsteps of Huck Finn and Holden Caulfield--so memorable that we feel that we know them personally.

The calm, dispassionate voice deemed suitable for academic argument is, however, a convetion, and it is a convention that students need to adopt for success in upper-level courses. The often flat voice of inexperienced academic writers comes from disengagement in their writing tasks. "Tell me what you want," they demand, "and I'll give it to you. How many pages? How Many sources?" Every time I say, "As many pages as you need to make your point" or "As many reliable sources as you need to make a good case." They put up with it, mostly, because I also meet with them individually and look at evolving drafts, and they end up with the 5-page academic essays that is the goal.

I'm hoping they'll bust open the academic paper in the next couple weeks, though, as we finish our semester with research-based multi-genre papers. They've done enough academic essay writing for the semester, I think. They're certainly engaged right now, as they develop their fictional diary entries, trifold brochures, and PowerPoint presentations incorporating their research. I don't think I'll get any perfunctory writing--but something I'll enjoy reading just as much as I enjoy those books by my favorite stylists.

Student Choices in Writing Assignments

2010-10-20T07:14:00.000-07:00

Giving students choices in writing assignments makes students better writers. The process model of writing instruction draws its rationale from the practices of "real" writers--professionals. Professional writers select topics and make choices about genre, style, length, and so forth. In many cases, they write to others' specifications (say, when writing for a specific publication or under contract for a book), but they do so by choice. When students can select their topics and make choices about genre, style, and length, they make writerly choices--not student choices. Too often in the classroom, we strictly limit these kinds of decisions. We tell students, "An essay should have five paragraphs and a three-part thesis sentence," "A paragraph should be five to seven sentences long," "Each paragraph should include a quotation from the text you are writing about," "Each quotation should be introduced with one of these phrases," etc. (Have you read an essay by Francis Bacon or George Orwell or Joan Didion?!) Students have figured out how school works, and when they associate writing with school, they boil it down to, "Tell me what you want, and I'll give it to you." Believe me, they will give you exactly what you have asked for. But what does this have to do with writing?

I don't want my students to "give me what I want." I want students to be good writers. I want students to surprise me with their insights and creativity. Most importantly, I want my students to understand that you write when you have something to say--about an academic topic or about a personal topic, for the campus newspaper or for a loved one, to make sense of life challenges or to organize a voluntary activity. To be good writers, they must make choices. If I am making all the choices, all my students are doing is playing at advanced Mad Libs.

If I'm not telling them how to write, what am I teaching? I can teach students how to pay attention to their choices and the choices that other, published writers or peer writers have made. I can teach students a repertoire of strategies for organizing, improving style, following academic conventions, incorporating dialogue, or overcoming writer's block. There are some elements that they must pay attention to in order to achieve maximum growth as writers. Paying attention to their writing and the writing of others facilitates their decision-making about their own writing.

Are there drawbacks for a teacher of writing in giving students a wide range of options? Yes, we don't get comparable "products" from students, and some might see this as creating more difficulty in grading consistently. Sam turns in an informal five-page narrative, and Sue turns in a succinct academic argument. Can we apply the same standards to these two texts? One way is to grade students' performance in realizing their rhetorical goals: we can assess whether they made good choices for the audience and purpose they envisioned for their writing; we can assess appropriateness of style and tone; we can assess adequacy of development. Another way is to assess individual development over time: is paragraph focus in this narrative more successful than it was in the letter to the editor that this student wrote two weeks ago? We can assess portfolios and require all the students to submit specific kinds of papers over the course of a semester, to be written in the order that each student chooses. And of course, another way is the tried-and-true assignment of a specific genre with student choice of topics, along the lines of the "I Search" paper, for which students conduct personally meaningful topics.

In most cases, students choose topics and styles that interest them, that are meaningful to them, given true choice. This makes the writing process more interesting for them, and it makes the products that we read more interesting for us as well.

Fragmenting my focus

2010-04-14T10:57:00.000-07:00

I am reading too many books, talking to students about too many topics, and I can't keep up with my responses to student papers this semester.

It's my own fault that I'm behind. Not only am I teaching an overload--2 sections of first-year composition and 2 sections of Teaching Writing--and directing the writing center, but I've agreed to too many "classes by appointment" (one-to-one teaching arrangements that allow students to take a class that conflicts with another class or take a class in a different semester than the one it's typically offered in, etc.). So I meet with one student to discuss 19th-century British novels and another to discuss writing memoir and another to discuss contemporary lit and another two to discuss YA lit. And then there's the research I'm doing on Julia Alvarez, re/reading all her books, looking up critical material, watching videos of interviews and talks.

But it's making me feel a bit like I'm suffering from multiple-personality disorder. This week I'm reading from a book on 6-trait writing assessment, rereading a memoir about growing up in a dysfunctional family, combing through something like 20 recent books of poetry to select poems I really want to share with a student, rereading a YA novel about a protagonist who's falling apart emotionally, and rereading Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde, reading The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao along with In the Name of Salome. (Actually, I'm beginning to see a couple of emergent themes, just listing these books--except for the 6-trait writing assessment, that is.)
I'm split between the freshness of immigrant experience and the familiar, loved territory of canonical Victorian texts, between making sure I know all the well-established critical arguments about a text and forming a critical perspective on poems and novels that haven't yet been loaded with the baggage of a dozen critical arguments.

The good thing about all this is the fun of sitting down with a pile of books, telling myself, "I'll assign myself about 50 pages of the YA novel, and then I'll read about 25 poems, and then I'll reread the last part of Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde. Then maybe I'll read 3-4 of my students' essays comparing the graphic novel American Born Chinese with the play Golden Child. And I'll check a couple of the logs that my upper-level students turned in."

The bad thing is that at some point I suffer brain fatigue, and I start watching Japanese anime, or I find a really good reason to go scoop out the cats' litter pan, or I get out my cell phone and watch all my videos of my infant granddaughter. Hmm, as I'm writing this, I'm thinking it's about time to get back to those essays . . . or maybe that YA novel . . . or maybe video . . . .

Writing Circles

2010-04-13T16:31:00.000-07:00

Thanks, Jim Vopat, for a wonderful idea--the writing circle. I selected the book Writing Circles (Heinemann, 2009) for my Teaching Writing class, on the basis of a quick review of the exam copy, and I've been delighted with it. The writing circles are modeled on literature circles, and they incorporate all the elements of writing workshop and process that I want students to be conversant with after taking the class, but they also give an extra dimension of structure to a couple of workshop features that can be challenging to manage: peer response and student choice of topics. The approach is suggested for all levels of writing instruction, and I look forward to incorporating it in my first-year and upper-level writing classes next year.

Personally, I've long been ambivalent about peer response, and I really distrust peer editing--something I've never implemented but that some of my students have participated in at some point in their writing careers prior to college. When peer response happens only a few days throughout the semester, it can be awkward and artificial. I usually give somewhat specific guidelines for peer response sessions, but I feel that students often go through the motions--knowing that what "counts" is the teacher's response because it's the teacher who gives the grade.

Moreover, I'm a great believer in more or less individual choice in writing topics, within certain parameters. It can be difficult for students to respond well to their peers' writing if their peers are writing about different topics. Yet I really like giving students some control over topics. In first-year writing, sometimes this takes the form of giving them a choice among readings from a limited list I've generated, and then writing essays in response to their readings that have specific parameters--such as a research base, or a requirement that their essay refer specifically to material in three different chapters of a book they've read, etc.

In the writing circles approach, the small group selects the topic all members will write on, but each student chooses the genre and style for the writing, the length of the text, and so on, individually. What this suggests, to me, is that students can explore a topic together, so that they share a knowledge base that will help them think critically about each other's writing. But the individual choices they make will mean that they aren't looking for cookie-cutter essays that follow teacher dictates.

The book has a lovely chart (on page 7) that shows how the small-group approach creates an important balance between student-directed and teacher-directed activities. Vopat also includes great suggestions for building rapport, generating ideas (with an impressive list of potential genres), incorporating the writing notebook, selecting topics for minilessons, giving response, and assessing writers' progress.

My Teaching Writing students, upper-level undergraduates who plan to teach at all levels from kindergarten through college (and some in Special Ed), have been practicing writing circles for several weeks. I've been impressed with their investment in their writing for their peers, and most days they sound like they're having fun reading aloud to one another and selecting the next topic. I'm really happy that I selected this book.

Why blog?

2010-04-13T15:18:00.000-07:00

Why blog anyway? That's the question I ask myself after long lapses between my posts. Nearly every time I start writing again, my writing is prompted by an assignment that I've given my students, when I ask, "How can I ask them to do something that I have such a hard time keeping up with myself?" I see two questions emerging here: (1) Is a teacher obligated to complete the assignments she gives to her students? (2) What are the advantages of writing in a blog as compared with other venues or genres?

(1) I believe that a teacher should complete a fair proportion of the assignments she gives, to make sure that she understands the effort and time involved in the work. When I assign poems, for instance, I think I should write in the same genres because I don't often write poems, and I need to remind myself of the challenges they pose: succinctness, use of metaphor, rhythm, precision in word choice. When I assign memoirs, I need to remember how scary it is to be nakedly honest, as is necessary in good memoir writing (and to remember it's especially scary to share that honest writing). When I assign blog writing, I want students to write regularly and to choose a tone appropriate to the subject of the blog--and to maintain a reasonable succinctness (something I have a hard time doing myself). Practicing blog writing throughout the duration of the assignment helps me appreciate the time and thought that goes into this regular writing on the web.

(2) Which brings me to the second point: why the blog, particularly? I think the blog is the best current venue for timely professional exchanges of opinion and ideas about teaching. When we articulate our ideas for the potentially larger audience that reads blogs on the web, we need to think through those ideas more thoroughly than often happens when we're writing for the classroom audience in a (relatively) safe space. When students know that the English teacher will give them another chance with revising, they sometimes turn in really rough rough drafts. In another manifestation of their feeling of safety, many students will write just about anything for an English teacher's eyes, sometimes confessional writing that I'd really rather not read! In contrast, much of the writing we do in the "real world" is not one bit safe--as young adults have been learning in social networking sites, sometimes to their great harm. So it seems to me appropriate to ask students to think carefully about what they can say for a potentially wide audience of people they don't know personally.

Today I got an email from someone who'd happened on one of the webpages I've posted as a resource for students and colleagues. The sender informed me that one of the links no longer works and suggested an additional link, something I really appreciated. I haven't used the page and haven't updated it for several years, and I'd completely forgotten it was still on the server. This email was a timely reminder that the web documents created for a specific, timely purpose remain available to a wide audience, once they're on the web. It reminded me that writing for that large, unknown audience puts us on our best professional behavior--a lesson worth learning by prospective teachers.

Teaching Writing One-to-One

2009-11-06T11:35:00.000-08:00

This is not news. One-to-one teaching is more effective than one-to-many teaching. As a Writing Center person, I know that I can have a real impact on a student's writing when I can sit beside her and ask her about her ideas and push her to say more and to make connections. And we can talk about the stylistic choices she's making--word choice, sentence length--and what the implications of those choices are. Then, I hope, the student goes away with ideas she can put to use in further revising or in drafting the next text on her own.

So why have I structured my Professional Writing class with lots of class activities and readings this fall? Wouldn't it have been better to have set it up to revolve around regular conferences? Of course it would! That's the way I'll do it next time--since it's now too late to build in very many more conferences this semester.

And the books that I love--books like Bird by Bird and One Year to a Writing Life and Fearless Confessions and Eats, Shoots & Leaves--maybe I should make fewer reading assignments in this course. Since I get so much out of them, maybe I should take activities and short quotations from them into the classroom and give students short in-class assignments but stop expecting them to take away the gold from whole-chapter reading assignments.

I should know by now that most students will not read assignments if they are not tested on the reading, and they define learning in terms of the least they need to do to get a satisfactory grade in a class. But I read writing books that inspire me and make me excited about writing and I (foolishly?) imagine the students will love to read about writing and will suck up these ideas like thirsty sponges. Perhaps I'll continue to be a misguided idealist, counting on these English majors and Comm Studies majors and pre-service teachers to appreciate the writing advice these wonderful writers share.

2009-11-05T08:25:00.000-08:00

How much first-year writing instruction does a college student need? Are changing standards for writing instruction at the high school level going to have any real impact on the first-year writing requirement?

When I look at standards for high school students--our Virginia SOLs and the draft of the national standards--it looks to me as if those who develop the standards want students to leave high school with the writing skills we have taught in first-semester composition courses for the last forty years, at least.

But will that mean we no longer have to teach the same skills? Will creating standards for high schoolers to write well-developed argumentative essays actually make them college-level writers? Or is there a maturation factor involved that we can't hold high school teachers responsible for? That is, will they--like the 18-year-old students of my generation--simply write jejune essays that have a somewhat more polished surface?

I believe that young people can engage with joy and intelligence in intellectual debate in writing, but I don't believe they can bypass first-year writing courses (or writing-intensive courses in other disciplines) by doing more writing and receiving more writing instruction in high school. And standards, by their nature, tend to standardize writing. Good writing, by definition, is individual--not standardized. By all means, have students do lots of writing. But for heaven's sake, don't evaluate their writing ability with a standardized writing test.

Good writing is not just a product of thesis sentence + paragraph development + transitional wording + documentation + proofreading. Good writing comes out of a lot of thoughtful practice, and things to say--things which we learn over time. Most published writers at age 30 or 40 or 70 would be embarrassed if not downright mortified by their youthful scribblings. When we read the juvenilia of canonical literary writers, we read it as juvenilia.

On the other hand, that need for things to say is a strong argument for courses in various disciplines that include a significant writing component. The problem with writing courses--as a general requirement for all students--is their decontextualized nature. The "skills" don't transfer. Moving this first-year-composition approach into the high school will just produce more writing-that-doesn't-really-matter, writing-to-prove-I-can-write (no matter how gifted or passionate the teachers).

By all means, have students write more. Have them keep journals in all of their classes, write summaries of what they've learned in the last 5 minutes of a class, write collaboratively for projects in the subject areas, write creative pieces, write to make a difference in their communities, correspond with students in other states and countries, write their way through trauma, write poems for their grandparents and their mothers and their friends, create Webpage guides to their communities and reviews of their favorite music and books--write, write, write. Let's see them, from age five to age ninety, write for real audiences.

In such a milieu of writing, first-year composition might be a course in which students focus specifically on developing an academic tone and awareness of audience and hone their research skills--useful, but just a little piece of all the writing they do. And let's not try to move that foundational college writing into the high school, whether with "higher standards" or with AP or dual enrollment or promises of first-year-composition exemption on the basis of high SAT Writing scores. Their first-semester writing course is still a means of acculturating them to the expectations of the specific college writing community that they are joining. Let's keep it as such.

Former Students' Writing

2009-10-29T17:27:00.001-07:00

Homecoming at Bridgewater College--I had a long conversation late Friday afternoon with one of our former English majors, who told me, "Dr. Trupe, I'm writing two books," and eventually asked if she could send me a manuscript. I was delighted. I told her, "Sure. Just make sure to send it at the end of the semester, so I can look at it during the break." I'm passionate about writing, and when someone else is passionate about writing, I love sharing the enthusiasm. I am looking forward to reading her novel.

Homecoming, Saturday night--I was at a party, where I talked with a recent alum, who said, "Dr. Trupe, I'm really doing 'professional writing' now. It isn't very creative, but I write on my job every day." Once again, I heard the enthusiasm--and that underlying message that yes, my conversations with students about writing have some long-term effect, even if it's only that my former students recognize me as someone who cares to hear about their development of talents they honed as college students.

Nervous about Sharing Writing

2009-10-29T17:19:00.000-07:00

I hate showing my own writing to other people. This puts me in a contradictory position because I incorporate response--peer response, my response--into my writing classes and expect my students to use the feedback in revising. I should probably tell them how uncomfortable doing this makes me.

When I submit chapters for inclusion in books, I hang onto them forever, doing as many as 10 or 12 revisions. When I was past deadline for my book on young adult literature, the editor kept begging me for my manuscript, but it wasn't perfect yet. It's hard for me to let it go.

When I get a chapter or a book back in galley form, I procrastinate about editing it, because I know that it's set at that point and, while I can make minor editing changes, I can't reorganize the text or completely change my thesis.

When something is published, I usually don't look at it. When I got copies of my book, I couldn't open it for weeks, even though I gave away the copies I intended to. The first time I opened it up, I saw a sentence with a mixed metaphor.

So, when I read something I've written aloud to a class (unless it's something like a writing assignment!), I cringe. I can hear all the flaws. I want to sink into the floor.

But I keep writing anyway.

Time for another fresh start

2009-09-28T13:58:00.000-07:00

We're blogging in my Professional Writing class, so it seems like a good idea to start up here again. The fall semester is pretty full for someone who teaches three classes, directs a Writing Center, and runs a placement procedure for first-year students and works with selected students on a one-to-one basis. Committee work and assessment get squeezed in around the edges. Time for scholarship? Hmm. When will I get back to that writing project?
I get really excited about students' excitement when they are writing. I find writing not only relaxing, but necessary, and it's very difficult to make time for it. This is a challenge we all must cope with, students and professors alike. So far this fall I've been able to maintain my personal journal, writing 3-4 times a week, but I haven't done much experimenting, as I'd planned to do following Natalie Goldberg's writing suggestions in Old Friend Far Away.
I like to tell students that I write along with them because it "keeps me honest." But I didn't write a personal essay with them over the past couple weeks because I became a grandma Sept. 17, and the baby and her parents live with me--so my personal life has sort of overtaken my professional life. I've sent out quite a few longish personal emails to the people who want to know about her, and I texted my other daughter at some length yesterday, describing her and taking guesses at who she looks like. Speaking of baby--I think it's time to go home and see if her mama's ready for a break.

More Alternative Writing Assignments

2009-03-24T08:54:00.000-07:00

These may seem more appropriate to high school than to college writing courses, but I am more interested in having students enjoy writing (and reading) than in impressing me with their mature academic style. (And I continue convinced that such assignments can develop critical thinking skills, and can be incorporated into more formal critical writing.)

Students can write letters from Pip to Estella and from Estella to Pip (or emails or text messages);
they can write diary entries for any character they know enough about (and if their knowledge is limited, they can write a single diary entry, say, by Mrs. Pocket at the end of the day when Pip is introduced to the Pocket household;
they can write a dialogue between Matilda in Mister Pip and Pip, imagining them as contemporaries in one world or the other;
they can write a humorous narrative of a performance (a play, a movie, a TV show), as Pip does in Chapter XXXI, in which he sees Mr. Wopsle in Hamlet.

Alternatives to Critical Papers

2009-03-24T08:46:00.000-07:00

The longer I teach college writing courses, the more convinced I am that we drain student writing of interest and vitality when we teach and require only academic analysis. The language arts and secondary English teachers know that there are many ways for students to engage with literary and other texts and often make interesting assignments that engage students more fully than formal essays of literary analysis, book reports, or research papers.
So today my ENG 102 students have several alternatives that involve them in close, critical reading of Great Expectations but don't require a full-blown literary analysis:

they may lay the groundwork for a character analysis of a memorable minor character;
they may fabricate a life history, weaving together their own identity with either Pip's life story or the life of Matilda, protagonist of Lloyd Jones's Mister Pip;
they may do a close analysis of Dickens's style in a passage of their choice; or
they may imitate Dickens's style, choosing a passage from a text they've written in the past, possibly from another course (especially our first-year seminar), or writing a new passage.

These are all assignments I would have enjoyed at just about any point in my reading of Dickens--from my ninth-grade reading of Great Expectations for English to my current rereading of the wonderful novel.

Brainstorming about writing texts

2009-03-18T11:27:00.000-07:00

In the midst of working on my midterm grades, I keep thinking of wonderful ideas I just must pursue--avoiding the discipline of ranking and justifying the ranking. I truly love reading student writing, finding out what students have to say, commenting, inviting revision. I really hate having to give grades. After 24 years of this, you'd think it would be easier, not harder, right?
The latest scheme is the assembling of various instructional materials for our writing classes, to create a textbook of sorts. We have materials and assignments for our PDP program (first-year seminar, seminar for transfer students, second- and third-year reflective conversations, senior reflective essay/portfolio), and some of us share and modify colleagues' first-year writing assignments and classroom activities, and then there are the shared assignments for upper-level courses and the coordination of first-year and second-year writing courses for English majors, not to mention assessment rubrics. And, in this season of choosing textbooks for next fall's courses, I find that the textbooks just never match the ideas I have for classroom activities and writing assignments, so I usually pick several trade paperbacks that sort of work, and I tell people to buy the handbook but I don't much use handbooks myself (with so many materials online). This spring I'm thinking about spending my summer assembling various readings for the activities I want to do, drafting reading guides and activities related to the readings, and, in short, making my own master textbook from which I can draw various materials for an electronic-reserve anthology for each course I teach.
Maybe I should go back to grading, though!

Further reflections on reading Mister Pip

2009-02-24T08:35:00.000-08:00

In Mister Pip, Mr. Watts introduces himself to the village children as their teacher with a promise that he will always be honest with them. On their second day together, he begins reading aloud his favorite novel, Great Expectations, following the first chapter with the observation, "When you read the work of a great writer, you are making the acquaintance of that person. So you can say you have met Mr. Dickens on the page, so to speak. But you don't know him yet" (Jones 21). Implicit is a second promise, that the children will eventually know Mr. Dickens through hearing the text that Mr. Watts will eventually call "Mr. Dickens' greatest book," when he asks them to help him retrieve the text through their memories, after his copy of the book has disappeared, so that it will not be "lost forever" (129).
Yet the entire novel challenges the stability of a text, the stability of a reading of a text, through a series of accidental conflations of Pip, Dickens, and Mr. Watts himself, a circumstance that Mr. Watts himself will eventually take advantage of in spinning out his supposedly autobiographical tale to the rebel soldiers, emulating Scheherazade in forestalling their violence by playing on their love of story to keep the village safe until a boat can arrive to pick up a select handful of islanders who have arranged an escape. In the narrator Matilda's evolving understanding of the text and the first interpreter of that text in her life, we find confirmation of Roland Barthes's assertion in "The Death of the Author" that "Writing is that neutral, composite, oblique space where our subject slips away, the negative where all identity is lost, starting with the very identity of the body writing." The more Matilda seeks to know Dickens, and Mr. Watts, the less she knows him. Ultimately she concludes that she must seek her own individual identity by returning home, not by studying literature. Yet it is the teaching of that elusive interpreter, Mr. Watts, that lover of story, that steers her to this conclusion: ". . . my Mr. Dickens had taught every one of us kids that our voice was special, and we should remember this whenever we used it, and remember that whatever else happened to us in our lives our voice could never be taken away from us" (256).

Reflecting on Reading

2009-02-19T10:45:00.000-08:00

Just finished rereading Mister Pip with my ENG 102 class. I assigned it as an introductory text to two themes--the role of reading in our lives and the impact of Western culture on colonized peoples. I liked Mister Pip because I read Great Expectations in school in ninth grade and I didn't like it much then. I was in my 40s before I reread it, and then I really liked it. I can't help but think my experience of the novel might have been different if I'd heard it read aloud, as Mr. Watts reads it to his class in Jones's novel. In ninth grade, I found the dialogue unpleasantly challenging, especially to the eye, and the situations sometimes incomprehensible. It's difficult, though, to recreate much more than that of my initial reading experience, because by the time I reread it, I was so much more practiced as a reader. Matilda helps me recreate first impressions.
I appreciate Matilda's effort to enter into Dickens's/Pip's world--because I had a similar response to reading, from an early age. Reading was my gateway into other times and places and communities, and ultimately I would find nineteenth-century England my favorite place to dwell imaginatively. I had a secure childhood in a rural setting that now, in retrospect, seems idyllic--beautiful wooded Western PA hills, creeks to dabble in, abundant wildflowers, fossils to stir my curiosity about the distant past. But sometimes I remember my early reading more vividly than that quiet sylvan world. I have a reading memory of sitting on a log, reading Treasure Island, being simultaneously in the sunlit woods and on a ship with Jim Hawkins, weighing the fascination and threat of Long John Silver. Some of the time, no doubt, the ship was more present to me than the forest smell of leaf mold--despite the appeal of my surroundings.
If I lived in a community menaced by warring factions, like Matilda, I would no doubt spend more imaginative time in that remote world of the book than in my own, because the possible sights and sounds and smells of my present would not bear imagining. Fear would drive me to disconnect with the present.
Yet, reading Mister Pip as an adult, I have to sympathize with Matilda's mother, too, when she expresses her disapproval of Matilda's being caught up in an imagined Victorian England. Yes, Dolores is unpleasant and narrow-minded and judgmental, but she is right about the importance to Matilda of knowing her roots, of learning her family tree all the way to its mythological origins. The connections that Dolores tries to teach to Matilda are the skeleton of who she, Matilda, is. The made-up English boy has nothing to say to Matilda about how to live in her own world. When Dolores contemptuously points out that Mr. Watts knows nothing about feeding and sheltering himself on the island, with his white man's knowledge, she has a valid point--for what is an education that does not teach us how to live in the world that we actually inhabit?
But what does Matilda learn about from imaginatively dwelling in Pip's world? Courtesy. That people fall short of our expectations because they are only human. That we can love and long for someone/something that we can never have, and that desire can drive our lives and mold our understanding of our circumstances. That we can reinvent ourselves. That benefactors can deliver us from the limiting circumstances in which we find ourselves. That even though we know what it means to be treated cruelly by those we love, we can nonetheless treat others whom we love equally cruelly. That people can become stuck in a particular time, refusing to move on with life. Are these life lessons of equal value to lessons in catching and preparing fish for our dinner and building a home out of jungle materials? Mr. Watts makes room for both kinds of knowledge in his classroom. It seems that the only knowledge that is denied a place in his school is a narrow, literalist reading of the Bible, which Dolores sees as eminently practical, determining where one will spend eternity.

Frequent Assessment + Portfolio

2008-06-25T10:58:00.001-07:00

Next year, I think I’ll ask students to check their knowledge and skills in writing about every two weeks. This may take the form of a self-administered checklist or a short piece of reflective writing that answers the question, What do I know about my writing now that I didn’t know 2 weeks ago? This will probably work best with my presenting specific goals for each two-week period (which I’m already doing, but am not making so explicit; it’s contained in the topics of class discussion and the focus of peer assessment). So, for example, if the first assignment is some kind of self-assessment of oneself as a writer, and my goal for students is to craft recognizable thesis statements and well-developed paragraphs, I might give them a quick quiz (something I usually don’t do in writing classes) asking them to choose the better thesis sentence from a pair of thesis sentences and the better developed paragraph from a pair of paragraphs. Then I might ask them to look at two drafts of their current essay and have them write a paragraph of reflection on how they improved their thesis sentence or how they revised a paragraph, for example, by adding evidence or adding transitions or summing up the point made at the end of the paragraph.

Following up on this throughout the semester every couple of weeks would help students think about revising as they write every paper. Also, a series of such quizzers and reflections could give students some already processed data to consider as they write a final reflective essay as an self-assessing introduction to the portfolio. The habit of reviewing one’s own work for signs of improvement would be established.

The frequent assessments would also give students a stronger awareness of the structure that is present in a writing workshop class. The workshop environment can lead students to believe that teaching and learning isn’t really going on—since they are used to defining teaching and learning in terms of content delivered and tested. But the focus of each successive self-assessment with an actual score on the quiz would help students see their progress from focusing on thesis and paragraph development to skillful integration of evidence to documentation to improving transition to more self-aware word choices in general to improved conclusions.

In an upper-level class last spring, I assigned a final 4- to 5-page paper on “what I have learned about teaching writing this semester.” As students began listing the things they’d learned, they realized that quite a lot of ground had been covered—but, as one student put it, “It felt like we were just sitting around talking, but when I started listing things I’d learned, I realized how much I’d learned.” This, like all my classes, was a class evaluated with a final portfolio rather than an exam. I was gratified that students had learned a lot—but concerned that they had experienced the class as “just sitting around talking,” not recognizing they were learning anything till the end. Since they were sophomores and juniors with a strong motivation to get as much as they could from the class, I didn’t worry too much about it—but at the same time, one of my best ENG 102 students wrote in her final cover essay that she hadn’t actually learned anything but was a better writer. Her early essays and late essays clearly showed excellent development of her writing ability. So I began thinking about ways to help students see that becoming a better writer necessarily involves learning some things about writing.

All of the literature I have read about the “Millennial” generation in school and in the workplace suggests they need frequent reassurance that they are on the right track, that they want to feel they are making progress toward a goal. And, realistically, if I want my course evaluations by students to reflect a realistic picture of their learning, I have to foster their awareness of their learning to be better writers.

Portfolio Pedagogy

2008-06-25T10:57:00.000-07:00

Two epiphanies refocused my portfolio practices: the first when I homeschooled my younger daughter in fourth grade and she prepared a portfolio for the school district’s review (in Pennsylvania), the second when I read Portfolio Pedagogy, edited by Kathleen Yancey, while I was getting my Ph.D. At these moments of insight, I realized that a portfolio could showcase much of what a person had learned because it showed what that person could do, that it was concrete evidence of learning in a way that a numerical average of grades could never be; and that once I used that portfolio as the final evidence of learning in a course, I could shape the whole course around helping students produce that—so that everything we did throughout the semester was directly tied to the outcomes shown concretely in the portfolio.

That second insight helped me practice “portfolio pedagogy.” The A-word—assessment—is not scary if one teaches to the assessment, right? But for “teaching to the test” to work well, one has to define the test in ways that measure what one wants to accomplish in the course. Start with the portfolio: what products should it contain to show that students have learned the things the teacher expects them to learn? Once those products have been identified, say, five pieces of writing of different types, we can design the assignments that lead students to the production of those portfolio pieces (e.g., the research assignment). We can determine what lessons need to be taught and what practice activities performed to prepare the students to produce those portfolio pieces. This analysis leads us to our schedule of readings, activities, and lessons.

This approach to designing a course from the final demonstration of student learning seems obvious, once one’s perspective has shifted, but before I really “got” this concept, I’d start planning a course with questions like, What book will I use? What readings will I assign from the book? When will it be convenient for me to receive a batch of papers from this class? And I didn’t necessarily sequence or build activities and assignments to reach a specific goal (students’ production of a particular paper).

Watching my daughter produce her first portfolio, though, showed me the importance of involving students in their own assessment. We had submitted a long list of learning objectives for each academic subject in order to receive permission to homeschool. Then, as Natalie prepared the portfolio with my guidance, we looked at each objective and considered what work she had done related to that objective, and what showed best that she had achieved the learning objective. Working on the portfolio enabled Natalie, even in fourth grade, to think about what she had learned and how to present her learning to others—much more cognitively demanding than taking a test that someone else designed and graded, much more informative than receiving a numerical score from the grader of a test. When the student takes stock of what he or she has learned, that step consolidates knowledge and enables the student to take the knowledge along to the next step of education as a foundation to build on—rather than to forget the “knowledge” because a test score is all that matters in the contract that public education makes with students.

Why Assess with Portfolios?

2008-06-25T10:56:00.000-07:00

Why does portfolio grading work? How can it be practiced most effectively, producing the best outcomes for students? I’ve been committed to portfolio grading for many years, deferring all grading till I receive a portfolio—at midterm and again at the end of the semester. Now I am questioning elements of my practice because of generational changes. Today’s students are used to frequent evaluation. How can I reconcile their need to know how they’re doing with the pedagogical benefits I see in deferred grading?

As I have practiced portfolio grading, the portfolio receives a single grade that is an overall assessment of quality + effort. Before grading the portfolio, I have offered plenty of feedback on individual papers, and I’ve implemented self-assessment and peer assessment, along with lots of instruction in what makes writing good.

The rationale for this combination of instruction, peer and instructor feedback, and self-assessment is my belief that students who understand what makes writing good and who participate in assessing their own writing will not get any surprises when they receive the portfolio grade, that they will have realistic expectations of what the grade will be when they hand in the portfolio. They know what is expected of them as writers and they know how well they have achieved the level of expectation. Usually, they know whether they have invested sufficient effort to receive a high grade, and they know how their writing quality compares to the quality of their peers’ writing.

One of the major justifications of this approach is that it keeps students working on their writing right up to the point when the assessment instrument, the portfolio, is turned over for the grade: good students kept working on their writing to make it better, poor students kept working because they were not discouraged by low grades on early efforts, and most students felt less pressure because they had the whole semester to produce that final body of work.

My standards have been reasonably high—that is, simultaneously high and attainable, especially with the revising in response to my copious feedback on individual papers. My goal in giving lots of feedback and requiring lots of revising was to get students to internalize the revising voice—which at first was mine, and later would become part of their own writing knowledge. I was pleased a decade ago when a student told me, “All the time I was drafting, I kept hearing your voice saying, ‘More evidence, more evidence,’ and I put it in.” The student who hears that voice can look at other papers he’s written, as he’s preparing his final portfolio and can see the places where he might put more evidence into them—so that the effort he makes in putting together his final portfolio will result in his receiving a higher grade than he would have received as an average of grades given on each paper as submitted throughout the semester. Perhaps the most important lessons for students from portfolio grading are that writing is never really finished—we just meet deadlines with the best work we can assemble at that point—and that the overall quality of our education in any area may be better represented by the presentation of our best work than by a statistical average of the work turned in at various points during it—because we can slog away at a task over time and then have an epiphany that transforms our insight.

I have long believed that many students reached significant insight and improvement about 2/3 to 3/4 of the way through the semester, when the repetition of specific messages in the feedback they received reached a sort of critical mass, enabling them to significantly revise papers for the final portfolio—rather than insight’s coming in regular increments with each paper they wrote.

My dilemma now, in light of the way our students come to us now, expecting frequent evaluation and reassurance is: How can I preserve the advantages of my past practices with portfolios while providing students with the ongoing assessment they need in order to recognize that they are learning something and making progress in my class? This is especially challenging when I teach so many first-semester college students, who come to my classes with high school standards and expectations and little experience in taking charge of their education.

Rereading and discussing A River Runs Through It

2008-06-17T07:38:00.000-07:00

My ENG 102 class is reading (I hope) A River Runs Through It, and I am rereading it with them. I have used it several times in summer classes, especially, because the time feels right for thinking about an activity most of us would associate with summers and vacations--spending time outdoors, pursuing a leisure activity, getting hot and sunburned, cooling off with a few cold beers, eating sandwiches.

I use this wonderful novella because it asks a central question that I think is really important: How do I help someone whom I love when he doesn't want to be helped? And it places the problems of one human life, that of the narrator's brother Paul, in the larger context of Christian faith, the effort to explain the deepest dilemmas of human existence. "Am I my brother's keeper?" Cain asked. Yes, we must bear responsibility for helping or failing to help other human beings in their struggles in this life. But often we cannot do so.

This story, with its focus on family relationships, transcends the immediate circumstances of the Maclean family. I do not fish myself, and I've never learned to cast, although my father tied his own flies and both my brothers have loved to fish from an early age. I think I see some elements of my family life in A River Runs Through It, and that has shaped my reading of the novella every time. But I certainly have been in the position of being unable to help someone who needed help--either because I couldn't seem to say the right thing or because the person refused help. As one of my family members has said on several occasions, "You can't keep me from making my own mistakes." It's frustrating to be in this position.

But I also love the story as a Montana story. Having never been to Montana, I know it only through books and movies. Every time I read A River Runs Through It, I want to go to Montana, or I want to go to Colorado next time my youngest brother goes and follow him as he fishes, sitting on a rock and reading a book as I did when we were kids, and my family camped along Pennsylvania trout streams. I love the woods, the fields, the wildlife, the streams and rivers of the East, but I don't know the West, and this feels like a lack in my education!

Come August, though, I hope I'll be heading south rather than west. My plan is to read/reread a lot of Faulkner and Welty during the next six weeks of summer classes and then to take a trip to Mississippi and, hopefully, New Orleans as well, to visit some Faulkner sites. My interest in this has been increased by other reading I've done in planning this ENG 102 class--A Lesson Before Dying and The Secret Life of Bees--and my reading of an American classic that I've never before read (and shouldn't admit to, as an English professor)--The Grapes of Wrath--not the South but written while Faulkner was writing, about poor rural folk. Sometimes I think I live my life through reading.

Resuming my comments on writing instruction

2008-06-04T11:08:00.000-07:00

Most of what I've had to say about writing instruction over the past several weeks has been put into conversations with a wide range of people, and I've been keeping a lot of notes in my handwritten personal journal. I think I'll abandon the book reviews I've been writing in this space, at least for the present. I think I'd rather focus on a lot of the things I've been thinking about, as I've reflected on this year's teaching and writing center work, honors oral exams with senior English and education majors, editing our campus publication of exemplary student writing, some reading on WAC and first-year seminars with an eye to suggesting changes in our general education writing requirements, and conversations about writing with colleagues at other institutions as well as other disciplines at my own.

I want to comment on a number of things here, including some assessment issues, portfolio pedagogy, the kinds of writing we assign in college courses, the value of thinking programmatically rather than course by course or class by class, and the role of theory.

Review of The Falconer's Knot by Mary Hoffman

2008-05-01T08:10:00.000-07:00

Mary Hoffman's The Falconer's Knot: A Story of Friars, Flirtation and Foul Play is a medieval mystery, suspenseful if not especially fast-paced, which means it captured my interest but I know some young readers who would give up on it. Anyone who is interested in medieval illumination and the decoration of churches, or in 14th-century Italy, will likely find it a most inviting read. Several love relationships, some jealousy, and greed set in motion a grisly chain of murders, most of which seem to implicate one of the two men with whose affairs we are concerned. After young Silvano happens upon a dying man who's been stabbed with Silvano's dagger, he flees to a friary, where he plans to lie low, posing as a novice, till the truth of the murder is discovered. While there, he apprentices to a Brother Anselmo, mixer of glorious paints, a man with a past of love for a woman who was made to marry another man. When that other man spends the night with the friars and is found murdered the next day, rumors of Brother Anselmo's former life begin to spread, and the fact that this is another stabbing casts a shadow on the false novice as well.

Meanwhile, at the neighboring convent, the lovely but poor young Ciara is trying to adjust to the lot her brother has decided on for her--a life as a nun, despite her lack of vocation, because she has no dowry. Ciara also learns to mix paint colors to be used by the actual painters, Simone Martini and Pietro Lorenzetti. When the colors are delivered to the painters, or the painters visit the two religious houses, Ciara and Silvano see each other and are each attracted to the other. Unlike most women of her time, Ciara finds an escape from the unwanted life chosen for her, after she meets a strong widow who intends to carry on her husband's trade after his death. Before she does, though, she plays an active role in unraveling the murder at the friary, and the various murders that follow it.

In a concluding Historical Note, Hoffman points the reader to the Website for the Saint Martin chapel at Assisi, the locale that provides inspiration for much of the plot, at http://www.wga.hu/tours/siena/index_c2.html. Hoffman has a good site at http://www.maryhoffman.co.uk/. After reading The Falconer's Knot, I'm ready to read a few more of her books.

Review of Ironside by Valerie Black

2008-04-25T12:53:00.000-07:00

This is Holly Black's third "Modern Faery's Tale," and it resumes the story of Kaye and other characters from Tithe, the first volume in the series. Can humans and faeries be friends? Can faery changlings maintain loving relationships with the people they thought were their relatives, once they've found out the truth about their natures? The pixie Kaye is determined to find out.

Together with her gay friend Corny and Luis, her guide to the Seelie Court, Kaye tries to figure out why Roiben, now king of the Unseelie Court, who she once thought loved her, has sent her on an impossible quest. Until she fulfills that quest, she is not allowed to see him. What's worse is that in the Seelie Court, she must witness negotiations between Roiben and his erstwhile queen, Silarial, a magnificently beautiful faery. Filled with self-doubt, convinced that Roiben will never again love her, Kaye tries to do the right thing by her human mother and avoid death for her or her friends at the hands of the fey who pursue her out of the Seelie Court.

The suspenseful narrative maintains the seductive, darly fantastic pull of Black's earlier books, Tithe and Valiant, similarly blending elements of gritty urban life and contemporary teen concerns with the mythic. It's a good read!

Poetry by Cathy Song

2008-04-25T11:33:00.000-07:00

What do I enjoy about reading poems by the Hawaiian poet Cathy Song, whose life and landscape are so different from the life and landscape I inhabit? Some of her poems explore territory that is new to me, but others depict moments I know, relationships I recognize.

In School Figures (1995), she writes movingly of relationships with women, especially. One of my favorite poems in this volume is "The Grammar of Silk," about learning to sew, in which Song describes trailing her mother through the aisles of the fabric store, where her "fingertips touched the titles--/satin, tulle, velvet,/peach, lavender, pistachio,/sherbet-colored linings" but where her mother would find a bargain remnant of brown-and-white dotted kettlecloth that Song would settle for. Song's mother wanted Song to acquire a skill she herself lacked, and her lines recall to me the way my own mother happily gave up sewing to me, once I became reasonably adept at it. When I had children, sewing would give me "what she herself was missing,/a moment when she could have come up for air--/the children asleep,/the dishes drying on the rack." Acquiring the skill, operating a treadle machine, Song says that what she learned was "the charitable oblivion/of hand and mind as one--/a refuge such music affords the maker--/the pleasure of notes in perfectly measured time." In another poem, "For Her," in the section of the book that explores grief for friends and family members, Song begins, "I am sewing a punjabi/for a friend whose mother recently died," and I think of the many ways that sewing can bind women together. Another favorite poem in this volume is "Things We Know by Heart," in which Song addresses her daughter: "You heard me singing/deep within my body, those early mornings . . ." when "I knew you then as a rumor, a hunch,/ a month skipped like a heart beat."

The Land of Bliss (2001) revolves more specifically around the Asian American experience--and yes, I know there is no unified Asian American experience, but Song's poems in this book range through her Korean and Chinese family background and Japanese/Japanese American and Buddhist references. I like the poem "City of Sleeves," which begins with a Japanese saying as epigraph, and "In the Far Wing of an Old Museum," which begins with an epigraph from Wakako Yamauchi that describes museum visitors. I love this volume, with its sections introduced by quotations from Joni Mitchell. But I don't feel that I've really wrapped my mind around it yet, having read it only a couple or three times through. Several of the last poems speak to me most clearly. The beginning of "Handful," for instance--which is nearly 1/2 the poem--focuses on the writing of poetry: "Like scooping water by the handful/out of a lake,/you write a poem,/contain it, gaze/into the small/cup of your hand." "Caldera Illumina" begins, "She came to regard the house of rain falling as her muse." The title poem of the volume, the last in the book, links this process of working and writing as drawing water with a universal concept (or rather, a terrestrial one): "Rain that falls and has been falling/is the same rain that fell/a million years ago. To think not/a single droplet has been lost/in the articulate/system of our blue planet/wrapped in its gauze of atmosphere." These three poems are poems I'd like to take into a writing class to share with aspiring poets.

A Return to Poetry

2008-04-17T11:40:00.000-07:00

I don't know whether it's spring or some other force of nature that has impelled my return to reading poetry recently. I am mostly a devourer of fiction, mostly novels. But from time to time, I read poetry voraciously. This time someone quoted William Stafford's Writing the Australian Crawl and when I was at the library to borrow it, I looked at some other autobiographical writing by writers--and I checked out Langston Hughes' The Big Sea and Li-Young Lee's The Winged Seed. And then, before I knew it, I was back in the poetry section, pulling slim volumes off the shelves.

So today I'd like to write about Ruth Stone, whose In the Next Galaxy (2002 National Book Award Winner) I read last night. I am primed to love those women artists who have a western Virginia-Vermont (or New York State) trajectory, and Ruth Stone started out in Roanoke, Virginia. Her poems are spare. It is typical for her to yoke disparate elements to arrive at some hard nugget of insight. She does not shy away from the hard insights either. Perhaps I'm drawn to her honesty about loss and deterioration. As I read In the Galaxy, with its many mournful remembrances of her husband, who committed suicide, I was reminded of Joan Didion's The Year of Magical Thinking. Also, perhaps, of Ted Hughes' Birthday Letters. There are some wounds that never heal, but we return to them again and again to process them from new perspectives. I thought, too, of Maxine Kumin's Inside the Halo and Beyond and recent poems. It is a reflection of my own aging, no doubt, that I love these writers' willingness to share their vulnerability. These are the books I'll be carrying with me into old age.

Actually, though, one poem that really spoke to me dealt with remembered experience from adolescence--"Reading the Russians," which starts, "Of course they are gloomy;/they drink a lot of vodka./It's a frost bitten country./The women are trivialized, used, thrown aside." Pretty accurate, eh? But the remembered experience comes here: "All those Victorian translations/where I was transfixed:/lying stomach down on my bed/that summer of my fourteenth year" after which Stone goes on to describe her "heart rushing/with the wolves, the exhausted horses,/the over-turned sleighs,/the cold veil of the Steppes." Here she's captured a feeling that feels very familiar to me--that enthrallment with an alien world that actually had started even earlier, when I read a biography of Catherine the Great in elementary school. Two years ago, on sabbatical, I reread The Brothers Karamazov and Crime and Punishment, which had nothing to do with my sabbatical project, nor will I ever teach these books. I realized that I'd been far too young for the books when I first read them--but I'm glad I did read them young, and I'm glad I reread them, and I'm pretty sure I'll reread them again, for no other reason than the reason I read poetry: these texts feed my soul.

But why Hughes and Lee? The pull of writers' stories, initially. As a teacher of writing, I'm constantly on the lookout for stories and quotations I can share with my students, and memoir and autobiography are wonderful sources. And then there's the fact that I didn't manage much reading of Black authors in February, as I intended, and the desire to read/reread/read further in the work of the Asian American poets I spent a year or so studying several years ago. I got away from my focus on American minorities' texts when I was writing my book on YA lit, but it wasn't for lack of interest--just lack of time. And I'm moving into summer mode--even though there are three weeks left in the semester: choosing books that I simply want to read, not books that I have to read.

In short, it's time for some poetry--some that maps out a path for me, that may help me through the decades ahead, some that helps me see the world through vastly different experiential lenses. Mostly, though, I just love to immerse myself in poetry--and it's way too long since I did so.

I am looking forward to Ruth Stone's forthcoming book, What Love Comes To: New and Selected Poems. It will be available May 1.

Review of One Good Punch by Rich Wallace

2008-04-17T10:53:00.000-07:00

Rich Wallace's young athletes are generally depressed by the culture they've been born into in northeastern PA, a blue-collar world hedged by a narrow Catholicism, alcoholism, boredom, and the decline of economic opportunities. They may feel loyalties to their friends, their schools, their teams--but the lure of "getting out" through college, and especially college sports, is a powerful motivator of their actions. One Good Punch underscores the limited opportunities that Scranton offers a bright young runner with its opening scene: Mike Kerrigan has a part-time job writing obituaries for the local newspaper, and his phone conversations with his contacts at the local funeral homes create brief portraits of the citizens he's used to memorializing, mostly elderly and middle-aged citizens with long ties to local organizations, their final terminal conditions often brought on by careers in the mines or textile mills or by the long-term health effects of addiction. Interspersed with the work-related calls are anxious calls from his long-time friend Joey, and through these conversations we come to recognize the situation that drives the plot of this short novel: Joey has stashed some drugs in Mike's locker, and the word is out that the authorities plan to do a locker sweep over the weekend. If they do, Mike's promising senior year as an athlete with prospects for scholarships at bigger, more prestigious universities than the local one where his father teaches will be cut short, and his dreams for a fresh start outside Scranton will die an abrupt death.

From the outset, Mike faces the dilemma of whether and what to tell school authorities. Should he blame the stash on Joey? Joey is a long-time friend, but not really a friend--just someone that Mike's known since grade school and continues to hang out with. But over the years Mike has seen the bruises Joey bears in the aftermath of getting in trouble with his parents--and he fears Joey's father may actually kill Joey if he buys his own freedom at Joey's expense. The people who attempt to influence his decision, his parents and his other long time friend (girl), don't have much effect, in the final analysis, but his conversations with them about the situation make it clear that Mike's a pretty solitary guy. The person who does have a significant effect on his thinking is Joey's father, whom Mike catches in a pretty good mood when Joey isn't home, and who shares his stew recipe and the story of his brief boxing career that ended with "one good punch."

As brief as it is, this novel is nonetheless provocative, giving the reader glimpses into the complexities behind apparently straightforward moral decisions.

Review of Evolution, Me & Other Freaks of Nature by Robin Brande

2008-04-17T08:36:00.000-07:00

This first novel by Robin Brande (whose book jacket biographical blurb makes her sound like a pretty interesting person) addresses the conflict that teens encounter when literalist Christianity challenges the teaching of scientific theory (you know, evolution is "just a theory") in the high school classroom. Protagonist Mena Reece comes from a very restrictive church and home background, and for reasons that are not fully revealed until well into the novel, she is further restricted as punishment for some major betrayal of the church and her parents. While Mena's own struggles to reconcile her genuine love of God and her sense of justice and integrity and her curiosity about the world are depicted well, the evil, hypocritical church members are pretty two-dimensional villains, and Mena's parents make a last-minute about-face to separate themselves from the narrow-minded persecutors of gay teens, science teachers, and any church member that doesn't toe the line.

The delightful part of this novel is Mena's developing friendship and romance with a marvellous, inviting family, the Connors. She is talked into visiting their home by her partner on the science project, Casey, and as soon as she enters his relaxed home full of Lab puppies and furniture designed by his mother, she is hooked by the atmosphere of love and mutual support she finds in this single-parent household. She is a bit overwhelmed by Casey's big sister Kayla, who edits the school newspaper, blogs, and is headed for an activist career, quietly shadowed by her very big, very smart boyfriend, a silent computer geek who designs and sells custom tee shirts. Kayla is on the hunt for information about the protest against the teaching of evolution that Mena's former friends are staging in Mena and Casey's biology class, so she pumps Mena for information and, eventually, gets her writing a column as Bible Grrrl, a thoughtful re-examiner of Biblical stories for less literal explanations of nature than those advanced by her church's pastor in support of intelligent design.

Forbidden to date or even to spend time with boys--to spend time with anyone unless it's on schoolwork--Mena's involvement with this pleasant family ensnares her in a web of deceit from the outset, as she allows Kayla to persuade them that the "Casey" Mena has referred to is "KC," Mena's older mentor. In order to spend time with the puppies, which she loves, and Casey, whom she thinks she's falling for against her will, Mena goes along with the outrageous stories Kayla cooks up. Of course the lies are bound to be exposed--but when the crisis comes, Mena fesses up, building a bridge to a new relationship with her parents.

The best part of this novel, though, is the way that Mena enters new, freer relationships than the church-group-restricted ones she's had in the past. Instead of being part of a crowd indulging in group-think--a social life that led to the persecution of a gay teen, followed by Mena's effort to apologize, the act that got her in hot water at church and home--Mena discovers the pleasures of spending time with a talkative, intellectually curious, mutually supportive family, and she begins thinking for herself. Thinking for herself does not mean total rejection of her upbringing. She has to think about the possibilities of reconciling her Christian beliefs with the science she's learning. She also has to think about the people she's met and decide for herself whether they are good people or not--since they don't come with the church group imprimatur.

Mena is a likable protagonist, Casey and his family are likable characters, and when the attraction between girl and boy becomes undeniable, Mena's feelings are portrayed in a thoroughly sympathetic way. This is, all in all, a very likable book, and for those who believe that only science--and not religious agendas--should be taught in the classroom and that tolerance is one of the best lessons young people can learn, it is a feel-good read.

Review of The Highest Tide by Jim Lynch

2008-04-13T11:39:00.000-07:00

This is a book that can draw the reader completely into a world on the edge of the Puget Sound. Thirteen-year-old Miles O'Malley is an only child, and it's pretty clear from his parents' conversations that he was an unexpected, perhaps unwanted, child, and they don't pay much attention to him. Miles, in contrast, pays attention to everything, and the life of the bay where he lives absorbs most of his attention, especially during the summer months. He spends much of his time out exploring and collecting specimens--to be sold to restaurants or private collectors. As an entrepreneur, he even employs a larger boy his own age to do some of the heavy digging and lifting. His assistant, Phelps, is obsessed with women's bodies and classic rock, and his pithy normality balances Miles's precocious wisdom, making them an entertaining duo, especially when Miles offers tidbits of information on sea creatures' reproductive processes.

Since Miles spends so much of his time on the water's edge, the reader is treated to his observations and discoveries and can learn quite a lot about marine life. Indeed, he is in a fair way to becoming the resident expert on Skookumchuck Bay, since he also reads extensively about the marine life he observes and has comradely chats with a biology professor. One reason that Miles sees so much in the environment around him is that he is an insomniac and goes out surreptitiously alone at night as well as during the day. He is also a fan of Rachel Carson's writings, and can quote whole paragraphs from them. This novel embodies an argument for knowledge of the environment and for paying attention to the details of the lives among which we live and die.

After Miles discovers a beached giant squid, he attracts the attention of the local media, and is on his way to being a minor celebrity. The fact that he is small for his age, and looks several years younger than thirteen, seems to make his pronouncements even more appealing to the reporters who seek him out, and the media attention in turn draws the interest of a local New Age cult. Because his closest friend is an elderly retired psychic named Florence, Miles gets in the habit of dropping "wise" observations, like "Maybe the earth is trying to tell us something." It's difficult for him to keep the media attention from going to his head, and eventually he repeats Florence's prediction of a record high tide that will occur on a specific date in September--and then worries about whether he's made a fool of himself.

But while this attention circles around him--and he tries to avoid it--Miles worries about (and gets angry at) his parents, he worships his former babysitter who plays bass and sings with a local band, he worries over the progress of the degenerative terminal illness that grips Florence. He's after all a reasonably normal kid, and as he grows into awareness of his own sexuality, he's thinking about some of those forces that drive human lives--the nature of love, the interrelationships of living beings, the factors that drive the natural world (and us), the inevitability of death.

This is a really wonderful novel--beautifully written, attentive to detail, realistic in characterization. I'd heartily recommend its use in high school classes and would certainly pair it with some of Rachel Carson's writing as well as reading about marine life and environmental issues.

The book has its own Webpage, complete with giant squid video, at http://thehighesttide.com/. It has been discussed or reviewed at http://www.reviewsofbooks.com/highest_tide/review/, http://www.hcplonline.info/weblog/readers/2007/05/highest-tide-by-jim-lynch.html, and http://rcbookclub.blogspot.com/2007/10/comments-by-moderator-jim-lynch_22.html (the Rachel Carson Centennial Blog).

Review of The Baptism by Shelia P. Moses

2008-04-12T11:44:00.000-07:00

The Baptism is a week in the life of the twelve-year-old twins Leon and Luke Curry as their baptism approaches. Leon is the narrator, and Leon manages to get in trouble more than any boy should during the week he's fixing to be saved--or rather during the week before the baptism his mother has dictated. Living on the Occoneechee Neck, the twins, their older brother Joe ("Joe Nasty" to Leon), and their mother Lemuel have had a tough time of it since the boys' father was murdered, presumably for asking a white man for money that was owed him for some work he'd done. It's no wonder Lemuel has remarried, but Leon has little use for "Filthy Frank," and eventually his suspicions of his lazy stepfather are borne out by events.

One reason Leon keeps getting in trouble is his propensity for picking fights with his "White Cousin"--everybody knows that Lemuel is the half-sister of the local landowner who has inherited the tobacco fields that have been in the family for generations--but people don't generally talk about it. Family relations are difficult with a history of racial injustice simmering on the edge of boiling over--and one cousin has had to hightail it North after being accused of interfering with a white woman.

The Curry family is poor, and they have had to face more challenges than such good, God-fearing folks should have to, including a storm that takes the roof off of Grandma Curry's house, but all the members are proud and honest. These characteristics are what get poor Leon whipped on a regular basis. Throughout the week this book covers, Leon tries to cope with the pressure to be good and to get himself to his baptism for his mother's and his twin's sakes, at least. It's a tricky battle, but he comes through, and when the next Sunday rolls round, some of the community and family tensions are resolved.

Moses has created a wonderful twelve-year-old character, a wry observer of the society into which he's been born whose sense of fairness is sometimes outraged but who mostly tries pretty hard to please his family and live up to his father's memory. Like Zora Neale Hurston's novels, this story is worth reading just for the sake of the story, but Moses also gives the reader a window into a Southern rural past with vivid dialogue and details.

Review of Storm Thief by Chris Wooding

2008-04-12T11:15:00.000-07:00

Storm Thief is a sci fi novel whose most notable feature, in my view, is the "probability storm." From time to time, unpredictably of course, the citizens of the islanded city Orokos face violent storms--but instead of thunder and lightning, completely random events occur. In a probability storm, a person may lose his ability to breathe, or the seeds of a terminal illness may be planted, or a cyborg changeling may take the place of a loved granddaughter. It almost goes without saying that alleyways or tunnels under the city may change their direction--no map can be presumed valid after a probability storm.

Orokos is a city built on the remnants of a past civilization that possessed scientific know-how that is inaccessible to its present inhabitants, and artifacts from that earlier civilization are prized. It is a deeply divided city, moreover, with a comfortable middle class civilization ruled by a dictator, the Patrician, who preserves its prosperity and purity and large numbers of ghetto folk, who are tattooed early in life so that they cannot infiltrate the prosperous sections and who must maintain themselves, always hungry, by whatever means they can. In the case of young protagonists Rail and Moa, this means a life of thievery, but like other young thieves, they are under the "protection" and bullying direction of a thief-mistress. When Rail discovers a beautiful artifact from the earlier era in a cache they have been sent to raid, he hides it from both his partner Moa and their mistress--and from then on, their lives are at risk. They are tracked by their most bloodthirsty peers, and then by the secret police as well, once they've taken up with the "golem" Vago, a winged cyborg with phenomenal warrior capabilities.

Vago proves himself most useful against the other element that threatens the middle-class citizens, the Revenants, spirits that possess the bodies of those who can't evade them and then sabotage the technology that provides the city's infrastructure. The Revenants are methodical antagonists, taking over the city one section at a time, and keeping the secret police engaged in constant battles against them. They are interested in Vago--but neither Vago nor his young companions know why, nor do they know anything about his origin or purpose. When the three take up together, it is against Rail's will. He is bent on survival and sometimes wonders why it is that Moa is so important to him that he acts against his own self-preservation at times to protect her. He has no use for the despised winged outcast, but Moa, who remembers a free society beyond the reaches of the Patrician and his police force, recognizes a kindred spirit in the dangerous and unpredictable golem. Together, the three seek to escape death or control by others in a mad dash through the dangerous Revenant-controlled districts, and ultimately they are forced into difficult choices by the secret police.

Major themes in the novel are the importance of kindness, even when people are forced into situations that threaten their survival; the dangers of prosperity and the inescapability of human nature; and possibilities for rebirth--as individuals and as societies. In the era of the "war on terrorism," it is hard to avoid drawing some political comparisons between the have/have-not social division, with its tattooing and persecution of the have-nots and the haves' fear and loathing of the have-nots, and contemporary Western societies' attitude toward the Other. The pace speeds up as the characters converge and plot elements set in motion resolve with the mother of all probability storms, when it becomes difficult to guess what will be taken from them, what restored by the mythical "storm thief."

CCCC, New Orleans, 4/2-4/5: Jed Horne and Chris Rose

2008-04-08T16:29:00.000-07:00

Jed Horne is an editor at the Times-Picayune, one of those heroic newspapermen who stuck around New Orleans when his paper's offices were under water and wrote about the impact of Katrina. He subsequently wrote a book that's been called the best book written about Katrina, Breach of Faith: Hurricane Katrina and the Near Death of a Great American City. If you want to check out his Web site, you'll find it at http://jedhorne.com/. I'm seriously thinking about using his book in a class next year, maybe ENG 101 or PDP 150, even though it's over 400 pages long! Take a look at the reviews posted at Amazon.com. I know you'll want to read it.

In his speech at the convention, Horne discussed the media misrepresentations of New Orleans in the hurricane's aftermath and scathingly dismissed the scanty efforts of the administration and the Corps of Engineers, efforts that have failed to revitalize the city's economy, restore some measure of livability to the most thoroughly devastated areas, or protect the city from future storms. He compared New Orleans' flood and hurricane defenses, at this date as the third hurricane season after Katrina rapidly approaches, with the new protective measures taken by the Dutch after they suffered devastating flooding in 1953, saying that they cannot believe how little has been done to improve on--or even restore--New Orleans' protection.

Furthermore, one can't help but conclude that to take a pseudo-objective stance in reporting the struggles and sorrows of New Orleans' people as they sought to re-establish their lives is to be complicit in preserving a hierarchy that privileges white middle-class people at the expense of poor people of color. Do we have an obligation to take some kind of action? I think so. Not only Horne, but the Louisiana State U professor who introduced him, Lillian Bridwell-Bowles, expressed appreciation of the private efforts and initiatives to relieve suffering. It is students like you--when alternative spring breaks take them or you south to build houses for people who need help--that give me faith. Horne expressed his disappointment in the current Presidential campaign for its lack of attention to New Orleans' plight--except for John Edwards' brief campaign that started and ended in the city. He--and some of the attendees--also emphasized the need for bearing witness, for telling what is going on, persistently reminding lawmakers of the untenable situation that has left many families disrupted or in limbo.

This presentation made me think about the great power of the written word to shape our thinking and, I hope, move us to action.

My title mentions Chris Rose. I bought his book, 1 Dead in Attic: After Katrina, at one of the shops where I looked for a gift for my daughter Natalie, and I read about half of it during my long journey homeward (lots of time sitting around airports, maybe 2-1/2 hours of actual flight time, and 2 hours' driving time after we got into Richmond). Rose is another Times-Picayune writer, who collected and self-published a number of his post-Katrina columns. The book went through multiple printings and sold 65,000 copies before Simon & Schuster offered to publish it. This book has the raw immediacy of day-by-day reactions to the destruction that Rose saw around him. Having safely evacuated his wife and three small children to his parents' house in the DC suburbs, Rose went back and daily looked at his city and wrote about it poignantly, vividly, often bitterly. His columns, taken together in this book, memorably depict the landscape and the emotions of residents whose city, they feared, would never be restored to the city they had loved. This is still true, of course.

If you haven't read much about Katrina, I urge you to. While there is much to spark sadness in these books, I hope that these books can also move you to civic action. Our first step to being better citizens and advocates of policies that heal and restore is to be informed. And I believe passionately in the power of the written word--whether it's addressed to Congressmen or survivors or church groups, anyone who can do something to make a difference in the lives people lead daily.

CCCC, New Orleans, 4/2-4/5: Peter Elbow et al.

2008-04-08T15:23:00.000-07:00

As I've promised my Teaching Writing students, I'm going to devote some blog posts to the conference that I attended last week, the Conference on College Composition & Communication, which operates within the larger professional organization, the National Council of Teachers of Writing. I came back really energized and newly inspired by a number of conference sessions, and I'd like to report and reflect on them.

Peter Elbow is one of the "stars" in the college composition field. His most famous book is Writing Without Teachers, and one of his most significant contributions is the practice of freewriting, which he believed in 1973 would help writers discover their true voices. I am a believer in freewriting, and in recent years, I've found that students all too often lack opportunities and time to just write without pressure, so I incorporate some freewriting into just about every class I teach.

Another of his important ideas, though, was addressed in the appendix of that ground-breaking book, and is titled "The Doubting Game and the Believing Game--An Analysis of the Intellectual Enterprise." In that essay, he discussed two kinds of intellectual activity (the "games") that we can bring to arguments: we can question and challenge them, the standard form that academic critical thinking takes; or we can try on the ideas we encounter, try to appreciate the writer's or speaker's argument as though it were our own, try to truly understand the writer's thinking--finding reasons for believing as he or she does. Elbow says that when we affirm, we can correct any misunderstanding "by affirming, believing, not-arguing. Your two possible mistakes are blindness or projection" (165): we either miss what's there or read into the argument some meaning other than the intended one.

Now, using the believing game in critical thinking, as Elbow has been doing recently, gives us an empathic alternative to challenging and questioning with the intent to find flaws in arguments. It's a practice worthy of those who want to make the world a better place, in my opinion.

Let's consider how this might work in our classes--as students and as teachers. Let's say we encounter an idea we disagree with when we are students in a class. Does Elbow ask us to accept uncritically what we disagree with, to be good little robots instead of real students? No, but he might ask us to consider the idea carefully and try to understand it instead of dismissing it because we disagree with it. He would tell us that playing the believing game would prevent our missing or misinterpreting something in the argument. As teachers of writing, we might encounter a sentence or an idea in a student's text that we feel compelled to dismiss--but are we sure we're reading it as the student meant it? If we use the believing game, we try to think as the student is thinking, to understand where he or she is coming from--and we may find that our initial reading of the sentence or idea was wrong, that we missed or misinterpreted something. (I can't tell you how many times I've caught myself in a misreading of a student text over the years! I shudder to think how many times I haven't caught my misreading!)

So . . . here's a vastly oversimplified take on Peter Elbow's comments at the conference. I'd like to add that Nathaniel Teich gave an intellectual history of what Elbow calls the believing game, finding precedents for it over several centuries of Western thought, with a special emphasis on the dialogic, empathetic elements, linking it with Rogerian therapy. One of my favorite teacher-writers, Mary Rose O'Reilly, had written a paper that was read by someone else at the conference, who takes the "game" and students' critical thinking efforts seriously and argued for creating a "contemplative space" for students' struggles with new ideas, telling us our job as teachers it to protect that contemplative space. (Again, I fear I'm being very reductive here.) Finally, Patricia Bizzell, who this year received the highest award this organization can give for lifetime achievement, discussed the way that emotions keep insisting on intruding into arguments--even academic argument that we profess is emotion-free. She said we need to come to terms with emotion, rather than pretend it isn't a part of the positions we hold and the arguments we advance for those positions.

This was a very stimulating and thought-provoking session, and I'm very glad that I attended it.

To my Teaching Writing students--you should read Writing without Teachers.

The "difficulty" of teaching writing

2008-03-19T13:29:00.001-07:00

In recent conversation with someone seeking a college teaching job that involves a large amount of writing instruction, that person mentioned twice that teaching writing is "difficult." The individual's background and scholarship are not in writing instruction, but if he's to present himself in job interviews in such a way that this "difficulty" doesn't come across as a disqualifier, he might consider some of the following ways to talk about teaching writing.

"Teaching writing is really challenging. I've tried a variety of approaches over the years, and while I'm still not convinced that anything really works, here are the most successful strategies I've used in the classroom: . . . ."
"Teaching writing is difficult, because we see our students for such a short period, really, in their development as writers. But in the short 14 weeks or so when they are working with me, I try to convey the ideas that . . . ."
"I'm still not convinced that any one person can 'teach' writing to another, but I believe that a semester's conversations about writing, combined with a lot of practice of writing, can aid a student in developing greater awareness of . . . ."

Actually, I have to agree that teaching writing is difficult. But that's what I do for a living. So I spend a lot of time thinking about--and reading about and writing about--what might work in each situation I'm currently confronted with. In the time that I've been doing writing center work, I've been more firmly convinced than ever that most real teaching happens at the level of the one-to-one interaction. It is a luxury to work with one individual for a half hour or more on his or her paper while that paper is still evolving. It is also hard work. After I've spent a few hours in the writing center, working one to one with several students, I'm really tired. Such work requires continual adaptation--constant assessment of the text and of the student's understanding of what needs to be done, a repertoire of strategies for eliciting the student's thinking and for tutoring him or her in the writing skills most needed at the moment--and one may be doing this with one person working on a history paper, followed by another working on a research paper for a computer science course, followed by another outlining a speech, followed by another writing a critical paper on a literary text the tutor hasn't read. Even the peer tutors who staff the writing center, with all their youthful energy, attest to the tiredness they feel after a busy shift of several hours' duration.

And it's difficult to teach writing in the classroom, because literacy is developmental and, all standardized testing to the contrary, each individual writer's understanding and repertoire of skills, as well as motivation to communicate in a classroom setting, are different from those of all his or her classmates. In some way, the teacher of writing must outline tasks or facilitate investigations that draw students into engagement--because without engagement, no one writes well, or at least more than perfunctorily. And then the teacher must decide when to intervene in students' writing--at what stage(s) in the process--and how to intervene, whether through brief or detailed feedback, whether in writing or in formal or informal conference, whether to refer the student to a peer for feedback or give it oneself. And the teacher of writing must devise relevant instruction--ideally, "at the point of need"--and must deliver it in such a way that it reaches all those who need it (and doesn't confuse or terminally bore those who don't need that particular lesson), enabling them to apply the instruction to their practice of writing. And finally, the goal of the writing teacher is ultimately to be self-effacing: the successful student is the student who has made the writing instruction his or her own, with the strategies needed coming to mind as he or she composes or revises. What the student once heard only in the teacher's voice will eventually be heard in his or her own internalized voice--and often, that growth in writing seems simply to be natural--not the outcome of the timely help that a good teacher gives--so that ultimately, much of what the writing teacher does goes unacknowledged: the student is simply a better writer at the end of the course than at the beginning.

Sure, it's a difficult job. But the joys of working with texts and working with student writers--the joys of those breakthrough moments and suddenly inspired papers--make it really worthwhile!

Review of Finn by Jon Clinch

2008-03-19T12:33:00.000-07:00

I loved Finn, Jon Clinch's first novel. I loved the style, the feel of the narrative. As one can discover from any brief review, Clinch takes Huckleberry Finn's character Pap and gives him a past offstage from Twain's main action--and a present, since Pap Finn's death is one of the events of The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn, its circumstances mysterious. I have recently read other novels that build on classic texts, an intriguing form of reader response--a kind of fan fiction taken to high literary levels? This is one of the best. Clinch takes as his premise that speculation advanced by critics and readers of Twain that Huck Finn is himself Black and envisions Pap as the White ne'er-do-well who can't stay away from Black women. Thus Huck's biracial status places him in a tricky position along Illinois-Missouri border, his status changing as he moves from his orignal home with Pap to his home with the Widow.

But this is Pap's story, and throughout much of it, Huck plays little part, although Clinch has made maximum use of Twain's details, giving a history to the objects in the river-wrecked house in which Huck and Jim find Finn's body, along with writing and pictures on the walls. Finn is not a pleasant character. He is filthy and uncouth and opportunistic and, for a surprisingly long time, a survivor. He is simultaneously drawn to Black women and a virulent racist, and his father has disowned him and threatened him with the death sentence for a murder he didn't commit (but not for the murders he does commit) because he has so flagrantly disregarded the father's values. A hopeless alcoholic, he squanders the money that comes his way, and the money he hasn't come up with yet, to keep himself in drink, most often the cheapest whiskey he can cadge, even the woods-brewed poison of a local moonshiner. Drinking makes him randy, touchy, aggressive, violent with the woman that he clearly comes to value, Huck's mother. When she is not caring for his home and cooking regularly for him, he lives in squalor and foregoes nourishment.

There's sometimes something likable in him, though. He lives off the river and is handy enough in his way, and he cherishes the boy at first. The turning point in his relationship with the woman, Mary, though, comes with his year-long imprisonment, because his absence means that she must taken in laundry to earn some money, that she runs up some debt for food, and that a kindly neighbor has taken care of a couple items around her house. Finn is not only fiercely independent (except from his brother, who has financed his household) but also jealous and distrustful, and once he's been to prison, whatever peace and stability have come to him in family life are precariously balanced on that knife-edge of distrust. When his violence finally drives Mary away altogether, he feels as much relief from responsibility as any other emotion. But before that point comes, we see him teaching his way of life and values to Huck, and thus he makes a substantial contribution to the charm that Twain's Huck has for us. From Mary, Huck acquires the folklore that endears him to the boys he meets once he's living in the Widow's household. For the most part, he rejects her, though, as his mind is poisoned by his rare contacts with his father.

The novel has a strong Faulknerian feel, some of the same darkness, pathos, and humor. I'd love to quote a couple of sentences or paragraphs as examples of Clinch's mesmerizing and original style, sometimes nearly as leisurely as Faulkner's, but I don't want to violate copyright restrictions. Read the novel yourself, to see what I mean, to select a couple memorable passages you'd like to share. After you've read this, you'll go back to The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn, I suspect, because you'll be reminded of the wonders of life on the river and moral dilemmas shaped by conflicting values at a crucial moment in our national past.

Review of Capote in Kansas by Kim Powers

2008-03-17T13:35:00.000-07:00

Yes, I do read adult fiction from time to time. Kim Powers admits to a bit of obsession with Nelle Harper Lee and Truman Capote, chronicling her fascination in an Author's Note at the end of the novel, where she also distinguishes the work of her imagination on the materials from the historical, biographical, verifiable information that she includes. Her inventions are plausible, based on the sound research she brings to her portrayal of the famous authors. She imagines a drunken Capote vulnerable to visits from the ghosts of the Clutter family and their murderers, whose misery and horror he used to craft the work that stands as his enduring bid for fame. She imagines the reclusive Lee haunted in a different way--hated--by the sister of the man who inspired Boo Radley, one of the most memorable characters in American fiction. She imagines Lee--and her sister--continually troubled by the rumor that Lee's masterpiece was "ghost" written by Capote. She imagines Lee's injured feelings about these Capote-instigated rumors after her generous help in helping him win the trust of his informants in Kansas. And she imagines Capote's spiteful gossip and self-centeredness as the triggers for this plot that involves a laying to rest of all the ghosts--subtitling Capote in Kansas with the descripive genre category, A Ghost Story.

It's a pretty good read, made more pleasurable for the reader who has traveled some of the same territory--as fascinated by the relationship and mutual influence of Lee and Capote as by their wonderful texts. Powers's style gets a bit tedious at times when she draws ideas out in successive single-sentence, or single-frament, paragraphs. But like some other works that draw for their inspiration on the work of masters, this novel yields a high degree of enjoyment for the reader seeking new perspectives and new ways of engagement with the originals that sparked it. After you've read this, you'll want to go back to To Kill a Mockingbird and In Cold Blood.

Review of Night of the Soul Stealer by Joseph Delaney (Book Three in The Last Apprentice Series)

2008-03-14T12:39:00.000-07:00

There are terrifying creeping and crawling feral things--female things--imprisoned in the basement, and once again, Tom Ward is up against them alone. This time he's engaged in desperate battles of wits against creatures of the dark without his master, the Spook, for a couple of reasons. First, the Spook's weakness is his love for a woman in pointy shoes (hence his warning Tom away from the likable Alice, an adolescent witch in pointy shoes) and this weakness ends up in the Spook's imprisonment in the cell he's devised for others, muzzy witted after being dosed with his own potion, which he's been administering to the love of his life to keep her from draining his neighbors' lifeblood. Second, Tom foolishly keeps secret from both his master and Alice the information that a rogue apprentice, now dabbling in the dark arts, is bending Tom to his will by exercising power over Tom's recently deceased father--who wants only to rest but whose soul is forced to suffer by the infamous Morgan. Morgan wants Tom to become his apprentice, and he wants Tom to steal a spell-book from the Spook so that he can summon a terrifying pagan god, Golgoth, and plunge the land into perpetual winter and misery. Tom's reluctance to speak openly to the Spook comes from two sources--first, he knows the Spook keeps secrets from him, and, second, the Spook is ill, then imprisoned by his love, the lamia witch Meg, so his counsel is unavailable during the time when Tom must make crucial decisions. Tom's emotions are heightened by his father's death and his mother's disappearance from his life; he feels guilty that he did not make it home in time to say good-bye to his father--the letter informing him that his father was dying having been conveniently misdirected through Morgan's interference. And Morgan has managed to inform himself rather well as to Tom's circumstances so that he can manipulate Tom, especially during the Spook's imprisonment. So Tom finds himself underground and in danger twice, trapped by Meg and her scary sister, Marcia, and then later bound underground in a barrow with Morgan, awaiting his sacrifice to Golgoth.

Tom is separated from Alice, whose quick wits and practicality helped him battle monsters in Book Two of the series, for most of the winter when these events build to a dire climax. Tom is increasingly on his own, using the knowledge he's acquired to help his master trap a boggart, to rescue his master from the lamias, and to save himself from Golgoth and Morgan. We know that he is the Spook's "last apprentice," and we see his sources of support for his battle against evil failing him--his mother will return home to her own country, now that his father has died, and the Spook is aging. The Spook's routines and teachings have shaped Tom's practice of his craft, but he recognizes he is free to disregard at least some of what the Spook says. And even the Spook can be brought around to appreciate Alice's efforts on his and Tom's behalf. So the way is paved for some of the dangerously powers of an adolescent witch to weave their way more firmly into Tom's life. Will he fall in love? Will his love for Alice let him keep his wits about him when he must save ordinary people from the monsters that prey upon them? Will he renounce love to live priestlike, so that his power will not be sapped?

We'll all have to wait for the sequel to find out.

Great Class!

2008-03-14T11:04:00.000-07:00

Today, in Teaching Writing, a question was raised even before class started--about a student in a public high school whose family was told she must have tutoring but who was accused of plagiarizing when she turned in a paper written under the tutor's guidance. The student who raised the question was incensed, but she brought the question into class for discussion, and it sparked a truly passionate discussion that served to bring together a number of important issues we've been talking about all along.

The circumstances: An administration required the family to provide tutoring for the student. No list of tutors was provided to the family. The family selected a friend, not trained in writing instruction or tutoring but characterized in our class discussion as "very smart." The student who was being tutored was said to have "good ideas" but needed help with essay structure and editing. According to the student who reported the situation to us, there was some feeling that the tutor began taking over the paper, so that the final product was, perhaps more representative of the tutor's thinking than of the student's. After the student turned in the paper, the teacher, without any consultation with the student but in full awareness that she was being tutored, reported the student for plagiarism.

Who's at fault here? What could/should have been done differently?

First of all, it seems to me that if the administration requires tutoring, they have some obligation to set guidelines for families obtaining tutoring, perhaps developing a list of qualified tutors. Who is a qualified tutor? Someone with some training in writing instruction, in the ethics of tutoring, or in both. Second, it seems to me that if the teacher has been informed that the student is being required to work with a tutor (as this teacher was), she has some obligation to communicate with the student, ideally with the tutor as well, about how the tutoring is being conducted. In a school with a writing center, regular communication among all of the stakeholders is a key ingredient for successful tutorial work--work that helps the student grow as a writer and that is informed by familiarity with teacher expectations and standards. This is not to say that a writing tutor should contact a teacher to say, "I'm working with so-and-so. What can you tell me about her needs?" But tutoring that is going on outside of the system may well go astray--as apparently happened here--and if the system is mandating the tutoring, it is up to those who do the mandating to facilitate the communication process.

Our discussion proceeded like this. Some of our class members are tutors in our Writing Center, under my direction. I asked them what might be a problem with employing a tutor who had no background in tutoring writing, and they responded based on their knowledge of how we work with writers without taking over their papers. We talked about ownership of a paper, and we situated teaching relative to tutoring and editing--noting that editing is not teaching or tutoring, and that a student whose papers are simply edited by someone else is not learning more about writing. This brought us back to considerations of writing process--of why an understanding of process is important, so that we can prioritize our responses to learners' texts, moving from global, or whole-text, considerations to local, or sentence-level and word-level, considerations. We revisited a topic that had come up earlier in the week: what if you don't know what to do with a text, even if you know it's below-average, and we saw how these process-embedded priorities could help teachers work with students and help us look more carefully at our own papers.

What if you have good ideas but can't get them onto paper? was another question. We talked about ways to work with individual students, taking dictation, for instance, and getting those ideas onto paper where we can, then, work with them. Of course, no one can take a tutor along to a standardized test session, so it is useful to give students a quick test-prep mini-course in the couple of weeks leading up to a standardized test, when a pretty standard approach to essay writing will work quite well.

Talking about standardized tests and test scores, and the pressure to prepare students to perform well on a small subset of lifelong real-world literacy skills, we noted how grades, essentially meaningless and arbitrary numerical assessments, have become the currency of education. One participant in the discussion reminded us how GPA affects college admissions and financial aid packages. This awareness led us back to the important principle that learning literacy is a developmental process--that despite all of the standards set for certain grade levels, in reality, people can learn or improve literacy at any age. We revisited the important elements of writing instruction that can foster substantial improvement: (1) write a lot; (2) write about something you care about; (3) write to communicate. We linked this approach to writing instruction to the ways we'd work with students who didn't read well and/or didn't like to read, noting that our top priority would be to find texts that those students would find interesting. That affective dimension of literacy learning plays a far more important role than our standardized-test promoters will acknowledge.

Because it is so important that we devote adequate time to helping students care about writing and find ways to use writing to accomplish their purposes--like getting the school picnic organizer to provide food for the vegetarian students!--we know that we must work against conventional wisdom in planning for writing instruction. And I mentioned that at the end of the semester, we'll be talking about professional communities and staying in touch with other people who believe in giving students choices in their writing and ownership of their texts, once we all go our separate ways, possibly into schools that don't support best practices for literacy instruction!

That's my summary of what we talked about today. Many people volunteered, and I suspect the conversation will continue in the logs students are keeping for this class. I hope my students will review this post and add to what I've said here--qualifying, correcting, and reflecting on our discussion.

Review of Millicent Min, Girl Genius, by Lisa Yee

2008-03-04T09:51:00.001-08:00

This is a book for fourth- to sixth-grade readers, shelved in the local library in Juvenile Fiction rather than Young Adult. Millicent is a phenomenon, already attending high school and enrolling in a summer course in poetry at the local college at age eleven. Unfortunately, Millicent's genius has isolated her from others in her age group, and the social behaviors she has developed to cope with her isolation have only exacerbated her oddness. She has been teased and tormented by kids her age, excluded by the high school and college students she meets. Her only real friend has been her grandmother, Maddie, a feisty, independent-minded, sociable woman who gently probes Millicent's self-isolating behaviors, like putting up a wall of 4-syllable words when flustered. Millicent dismisses much of her fun-loving parents' behavior as immature, and she is embarrassed by them, but she listens to Maddie, even if she seems unable to act on Maddie's advice. Except for Maddie's company, Millicent seems determined to live life exclusively in the intellect, reading sophisticated books in trees and training her binoculars on the neighbors.

But this summer is different! Millicent's family members have conspired to plunge her into social situations with kids her age. She's been signed up for volleyball and hired as a tutor for her nemesis, Stanford Wong. Volleyball gives her the opportunity to make a real friend her own age--the new-to-town, homeschooled Emily, who doesn't know Millicent's history as child genius/social leper.

Now at this point, I have to say that I came to Millicent Min, Girl Genius by way of Stanford Wong Flunks Big-Time. Having read the second book first, I came to Millicent Min with a great deal of fondness for Stanford, whose summer has been ruined by his failing English--he has to attend summer school instead of attending the awesome basketball camp he's been dreaming of for months. And when Stanford works hard, actually listening to Millicent, and is thrilled to get a C+, everybody around him seems to be disappointed that he didn't get a higher grade.

So reading Millicent Min, Girl Genius, I lose some of my sympathy for Millicent in the tutoring situation. She does not understand Stanford at all, and she does not understand how Emily can find Stanford attractive. She doesn't recognize his small overtures until he teaches her how to serve a volleyball--and then she remains suspicious of him. Millicent has a lot in common with Harriet the Spy--just not very likable. She keeps a lot to herself, including her misconceptions about others. Readers can't help but cheer, though, when she takes a few small steps into appreciating friendship and appreciating her parents--and when her progress in volleyball is acknowledged.

I haven't decided yet whether Stanford Wong Flunks Big-Time is a better book. I kind of think so, but I'd hate to be cavalier in dismissing Millicent. She may not be likable, but she's got the weight of the world on her shoulders, and she can't figure out how to be normal, so she dismisses normality as irrelevant to her goals and her life. You gotta feel for an 11-year-old who's living that kind of a life.

Review of My Swordhand Is Singing by Marcus Sedgwick

2008-03-04T08:57:00.000-08:00

In My Swordhand Is Singing, Marcus Sedgwick gives young adults another totally absorbing, dark novel, this time revolving around the undead in Transylvania. Protagonist Peter is a woodcutter because he's the son of a woodcutter, Tomas, now an alcoholic. They've led an itinerant existence until settling outside the village of Chust, where they've built a cottage so near the river's fork that Tomas has been able to island their home by digging a trench across the yard. Living on the edge of a magnificent forest, the villagers are subject to the ravages of recurring waves of vampire activity. In the past that Tomas has hidden from his son, he fought with the king, wielding a magical sword against the creatures, but at the point when Peter discovers the villagers' fears are not merely superstition, as his father has claimed, Tomas has renounced warfare and hidden away the sword. He refuses requests made by the gypsies, who have sought out Tomas to ask him to wield the famous sword again against the supernatural invaders. Their other weapon is a famous song.

In the course of this creepy invasion, Peter must give up the girl he hopes to marry but finds he's drawn to a gypsy girl; he learns that his father has sought to protect him from disquieting knowledge and that he loves Peter, even if he has allowed drink to make him into an abusive and neglectful father; he learns that the tales his father dismissed as superstition are, after all, true; he learns that he has the courage to choose the right side and to fight against the forces of darkness led by the Shadow Queen; and he learns that he is not as committed to a stable life as he thought when the gypsy wagons lure him back to a roaming existence.

The story is suspenseful and chillingly spooky. It is rooted in Eastern European stories from the 16th through the 18th centuries, though fortunately for us as readers, Sedgwick has wrought the creative transformation that a gifted storyteller can bring to his materials. Readers will have difficulty putting this book down.

Review of Glass by Ellen Hopkins

2008-03-04T08:23:00.000-08:00

I have read two of Ellen Hopkins' earlier books, Burned and Impulse. This 2007 novel in poems is a sequel to Crank, which I haven't read. In Glass, we follow teen mom and addict Kristina Snow's return to using meth, the "monster" from which she doesn't want to escape. The book opens at a point when Kristina is still free from earlier use, working at being a responsible mom, with functional relationships with her stepfather, mother, siblings, and infant son, conceived when she was raped by her supplier. The first few poems describe how her life as a good student and happy teen was disrupted during a summer visit to her father when she was introduced to crank, an experience that enabled her to discover her inner alter ego, a brash risk-taker whom she's named Bree. Baby Hunter is demanding, and Kristina's relationship with her mom is fraught with tensions, and Kristina-Bree is ready to take the plugs out of her ears and listen to the siren that is luring her back to feeling good, living in the moment, and taking whatever desperate measures she can--from robbing Hunter's piggy bank to taking a job at the local convenience store where the manager cops a quick feel on every possible occasion--to hook up with a connection again. And when she starts buying from the gorgeous Trey, a college student whom she sees on his irregular visits to his cousin for replenishment of his supply of Mexican meth, she finds herself not only hooked up, but even falling in love.

Kristina's addiction rapidly destroys her family relationships. When her mother kicks her out of the house, denying her access to her baby, she flees to Trey's cousin's home, where she soon wangles a job as nanny--with benefits--at least until Brad's wife reappears. The relationships among the four individuals in these two couples are complex but end in betrayal. Homeless, on their way to California to deal, Kristina and Trey are arrested, ending Kristina's second dance with the monster--though the irrepressible Kristina ends on a note of hope for her future.

I like Hopkins' stories, even if they are sometimes melodramatic. When it comes to stories of addiction, I find her plotting and characterization wholly believable--every time Kristina starts using, she goes overboard overnight, and if casual sex, loss of friends and personal goals, stealing from her family, rape, and the decision to deal seem melodramatic, I'm nonetheless convinced. I like her poems, too, which take a variety of contemporary forms but read like dialogue in a novel or a drama. I did find Glass a little long, at 681 pages, especially any time that it became clear that Kristina was not going to hold out too long against temptations to engage in increasingly outrageous behavior. On the whole, though, it's an absorbing read. Hopkins' books have been recommended to me by first-year college students, who were pleased to discover I was already acquainted with her work. They are for older teens, not middle-school students, given the gleefully antisocial tendencies of the protagonist, even though this behavior ultimately leads to the appropriate comeuppance.

The Search for the Red Dragon by James A. Owen

2008-03-03T05:59:00.000-08:00

This is the second volume of Owen's Chronicles of the Imaginarium Geographica, following Here, There Be Dragons. I found I liked this volume better, maybe because I knew more about the "territory" from the beginning, but I think that the pacing was more even, on the whole. Similarly to Here, There Be Dragons, The Search for the Red Dragon begins with a summons to a quest beset with dangers that require quick-witted responses along with interpretive abilities on the part of the three Caretakers of the marvelous atlas and the lands it maps. They go to the city of Paralon (in each volume the section that moved most slowly for me as a reader--and I got stopped for a bit at that point), and they spend some time with their engaging friend, the charming talking badger Tummeler, consult the mapmaker in the Keep of Time, and escape in a dragonship (converted at the beginning of this volume to an airship) to embark on a perilous quest in which they explore lands known to the rest of us through fiction, epic poetry, and myth, meeting an array of historical and fictional characters, including the aged Peter Pan, and tracing the "origins" of the pied piper/pan/Orpheus's seduction of children.

One of the pleasures of reading this second volume is starting it with knowledge of the identities of the three Caretakers, John, Jack, and Charles--J.R.R. Tolkien, C.S. Lewis, and Charles Williams. The experienced reader can enjoy tracing Owen's layering and linking of many, many stories, ranging from Greek mythology through the Children's Crusade through Dante's exploration of the inferno through the fate of the Lost Colony on Roanoke Island through Sir James Barrie's writing of Peter Pan through the mysterious disappearances into the Bermuda Triangle. It's probably a mistake to search this volume too closely for logical connections--although as a free-associating trip through legend and mystery, the novel is highly successful. Above all, it is immensely entertaining, made more appealing by Owen's illustrations and chapter titles that keep drawing the reader in.

Owen's Amazon Blog at http://www.amazon.com/gp/blog/A2M4WN9FNQA837 summarizes the "history" of the Imaginarium Geographica, conceived as an actual rare book that Owen tracked down in Vienna.

Writing in Class

2008-02-29T08:20:00.001-08:00

I am stealing time from my students today because I'm writing in class. Of course, the students are writing now, working on revisions of the first out-of-class essay of the semester. I could roam around the classroom and look over their shoulders, but I've already answered their most pressing questions, and they know they can ask me more questions as the need arises.

I really love the writing workshop approach, most of the time. When I am working with a small class, like this one, I know that I can get to each of them who needs feedback from me, and their drafts were pretty strong, for the most part. This group had thesis sentences and pretty clear organization, so mostly I've been asking them either to add more evidence to their arguments or to do more interpreting of the evidence they have presented. When they start revising immediately after getting back their drafts with my comments, I know that they're well on their way to crafting better essays. It's the improvement in their writing that I'm primarily invested in--and their ability to see their own writing clearly and begin to figure out what I'd be likely to ask them to do with their writing as they are drafting and revising on their own. Essentially, I ask them to internalize my voice. I remember how thrilled I was when a student showed significant improvement several years ago, and he volunteered the information that as he was writing, he kept hearing me ask him for more details and more evidence--so he just put that into his writing, and of course I was happier with his paper than I'd been with any of his earlier writing.

I think that much of the improvement that came about in my own writing, especially early on, came from my similarly internalizing a teacher's voice. I can remember some specific instances, one of them my first-semester composition prof in college, who got me to put in more detail. (Sounds as if my writing concerns haven't changed much over 40 years!) In graduate school in the 90s, when I was first using computers and also writing long papers, I kept failing to put in adequate transition. I think this came from my processing the evolving text a screen at a time, and the lapses came between screen-sized sections. But as I drafted my dissertation, and it kept coming back to me with long wavy lines in the margins and the word "transitions" as the only comment, I learned to pay particular attention to the connections between my screen-sized chunks of text--and it was Ben's voice I heard in my head. It was the dissertation, too, that first alerted me to my difficulty with drawing conclusions, and I think this is particularly true when I'm writing about classroom studies or other matters pertaining to teaching writing, because it was never much of a concern for me when I wrote papers about literature, back in my undergrad days and my master's program. But I didn't overcome this difficulty in revising my dissertation, since reaching conclusions has sometimes been a problem for me in writing conference papers and book chapters for publication.

So what conclusions do I draw from these experiences? I tend to be alert to the need for transitions in my students' and writing center clients' writing, and I try to challenge my students to draw good conclusions from what they've written--not to simply wrap it up neatly with a recapitulation of the paper's main points and a restatement of the thesis, but to actually think a bit more about what all of this evidence and argument means. This is a challenge, I know, since it's the challenge that I struggle with in my own writing. What are the implications? I am evolving a theory that we are, as a society, more in the habit of saying simply, "I think this," than of reflecting on why we think it. Then, if we do reflect on why, we come up with evidence for a previously held belief--but we often neglect to really think about our evidence, to spend time thinking about what it really means, and whether it could mean something other than the point we've used it to support. Am I making sense here? I think as a culture we're stuck in the initial claim based on our preconceived opinions, and that we select evidence to support it, often ignoring contradictory evidence--and our arguments don't actually reach conclusions but simply restate that initial position.

My students have shut down their laptops and left the room now. They asked a few individual questions on the way out, but it's Friday, and they're ready for a weekend. It feels to me as if it's been a productive week. I am enjoying this semester's teaching, and I've already started seeing some evidence of good revising and rethinking coming out of our process approach in the classroom. I've worked one-to-one with several students--mine and others--in the writing center, and I've been gratified at the improvement I have seen.

I measure my success by the quality of my students' writing--a scary notion if I can't engage them or motivate them sufficiently so that they want to change their texts and they have confidence that my advice is worth following. I also measure my success by their degree of engagement--similarly scary if I have a group that isn't very invested in reading and writing. I've been fortunate this semester in having three classes of pretty motivated students.

As the class period draws to a close, I think about how much I care about writing, and how important it is to me to get my writing "fix" every day. Perhaps this time that I've spent writing voluntarily, for no purpose other than reflecting on classroom literacy experiences, will convey, at the very least, my enthusiasm for writing. After all, if I'm willing to do this when no one is making me do it, it must be worth something.

And I note I'm having difficulty concluding today.

I'm Reading Too Many Books!

2008-02-28T11:16:00.000-08:00

I have a (bad?) habit of reading several books simultaneously. I like to have choices of the kind of book I want to settle in with at the end of the day. So I'm usually at various points in different books till I either get totally absorbed in one book and don't want to read anything else or I decide it's time to finish several of them and I just set a goal of finishing a number of them before starting something new. And I tend to order up ILL books 6 or more at a time, so when they come in, I want to take a "taste" of several of them.

But this time I may have let it get out of hand. I set down Inkheart by Cornelia Funke a couple weeks ago, halfway through it. I am nearly finished with James Owen's The Seearch for the Red Dragon (the second volume in his Chronicles of the Imaginarium Geographica series. I'm about halfway through Marcus Sedgwick's My Swordhand Is Singing. (I just recently discovered Sedgwick's YA fiction, and this is the fifth of his novels I've read.) I'm about 100 pages into Ellen Hopkins's Glass, after reading her Burned and Impulse sometime in the past couple months. I started Jim Lynch's The Highest Tide, and I really like it, but I haven't been in the mood to return to the world of the giant squid in the past several days.

I'm reading Finn by Jon Clinch, and I love it. It feels a bit Faulknerian--maybe because of the darkness of its subject matter. I realized a couple weeks ago that I hadn't read anything specifically for Black History Month, so I picked up a book I've never read but have meant to for years, Ishmael Reed's Mumbo Jumbo. I love it too. Both of these books use language in extraordinary ways. And I've started Lloyd Jones's Biografi, after reading Mister Pip. I haven't gotten very far with it yet, but I'm intrigued. Over several months, I have been reading/rereading Iris Murdoch's novels, and I'm currently on The Unicorn, which I haven't read in 20 years or so. Because I noticed I was pretty ignorant about the British novel in the post-WWII period, and I was thinking about this while I was teaching a seminar in George Orwell in our 3-week Interterm in January, I decided to start reading John Wain's first novel, Hurry On Down, published in 1953.

Of course I'm reading several professional books, as usual: Differentiated Instruction in the English Classroom by Barbara King-Shaver and Alyce Hunter; Teacher Identity Discourses by Janet Alsup; Literature & Lives by Allen Carey-Webb; and Personally Speaking: Experience as Evidence in Academic Discourse by Candace Spigelman--to name a few.

Then there are the books I started reading before Christmas, from which I got distracted by the end of the fall semester, the holidays, and the challenges of teaching a 3-credit seminar in a 3-week period: Truman Capote's In Cold Blood; William Faulkner's The Hamlet; Julia Alvarez's In the Time of the Butterflies; Charles Dickens's Bleak House; Koren Zailckas's Smashed: Story of a Drunken Girlhood. This last is one that I've recommended to my comp students, and I've seen some good essays come out of their engagement with this book. Then there's Barack Obama's The Audacity of Hope.

As I write this, I am beginning to wonder why I'm sitting here, writing about all of these books instead of reading right now! Maybe I'll steal a few minutes for reading before I turn my attention to some ENG 102 essays that I need to return to students tomorrow.

YA Literature, Circa 1960-something

2008-02-27T13:11:00.000-08:00

One reason that I get so excited about contemporary YA literature is that today's choices are astonishingly better than the books published for teens when I was at the age to read them. It's no wonder that S. E. Hinton, who is about my age, wrote The Outsiders as the kind of book she wanted to read as a teen--an amazing accomplishment! I read Almost April and Mrs. Mike and most of Poe's and Conan Doyle's stories. I'd already read Treasure Island and Little Women and Kidnapped. The classroom fare for ninth graders in the mid-1960s was Great Expectations, which I didn't learn to enjoy until I revisited it in my forties (though I loved A Tale of Two Cities). A little later, I read To Kill a Mockingbird, This Side of Paradise, A Separate Peace, and The Catcher in the Rye. I have fond memories of Jane Austen's and the Bronte sisters' and Hardy's novels, many of which I read on my own in eighth through tenth grades. I'll bet I'd have loved The Outsiders if it had been published before I graduated from high school.

When my students tell me that they've been reading The Canterbury Tales and Beowulf and The Odyssey in high school, I can't help but wonder why they aren't getting opportunities to read wonderful books like Monster. Some have read Speak, more have read Hatchet and The Giver. So much YA lit revolves around sensitive issues--and then there's the use of profanity. My goodness, you'd think that teens would never hear "the f-word" unless their English teachers brought a contemporary YA novel to class! This has been my students' objection to the wonderful Fat Kid Rules the World by K. L. Going, a truly joyous novel about the reconnection of estranged brothers, the commitment of a strait-laced military man to rescuing an over-the-counter-medication-addicted punk rocker, and the emergence from outcast status into coolness of a suicidal overweight teen. (And K. L. Going was gracious enough to respond to an email from one of my students who decided to write his critical paper on Fat Kid.) A couple years ago, after reading student journal entries about cutting in my writing classes, I decided this was an important issue that could be confronted through literature in my YA lit class, and I selected Cut by Patricia McCormick. Some of my students felt very strongly that it might put ideas into the heads of teen readers who otherwise would not have thought about cutting, and I couldn't help but wonder whether these students had heard of the Internet.

The fact remains that we want sanitized literature in the classroom, whether young people are really reading the classics or the online guides to them at Bookrags or Spark Notes or--you fill in the rest of the list. There's nothing truly sanitized about The Scarlet Letter which, after all, is about adultery, but it's clothed in the respectable language of the nineteenth century and proper remorse is shown. In contrast, wonderful books like Dance on My Grave by Aidan Chambers and Rainbow Boys by Alex Sanchez and Inexcusable by Chris Lynch are likely a bit too explicit about sexuality to receive any administration's or school board's seal of approval. Too bad, because these are books that teens might actually read.

YA Literature, Summer 2008

2008-02-27T12:41:00.000-08:00

It's time to select books for my summer courses, and I've just made my list of books we'll read. The problem is that there's probably too much on it! I've selected a dozen books, some of which are really fast reads, some of which will take longer. Since I'm including Marcus Zusak's The Book Thief at 576 pages, I guess I really should reduce the rest of the list--but what shall I cut? Right now my list looks like this:

Sherman Alexie, The Absolutely True Diary of a Part-Time Indian
Julia Alvarez, Before We Were Free
Laurie Halse Anderson, Speak
M. T. Anderson, Feed
Nikki Grimes, Dark Sons
Angela Johnson, The First Part Last
Chris Lynch, Inexcusable
Walter Dean Myers, Monster
An Na, A Step from Heaven
Virginia Euwer Wolff, True Believer
Gene Luen Yang, American Born Chinese

And of course The Book Thief. This list is, clearly, multicultural and gender-balanced in terms of protagonists and authors, and it includes a range of genres, styles, and significant issues. All of the books are award winners or honorably mentioned.

It gets harder and harder to limit my list, because every time I teach this course, there are more wonderful books that I want to include. Some of the students who take this class plan to teach. If more of the students were preservice teachers, I might select more YA "classics." But many students who enroll are taking this to meet a gen ed literature requirement. For this population, I want to select themes, characters, settings, styles, and genre experiments that will stretch them as readers. At the same time, I want to say, "Look what's new in YA lit since you were in middle school!" And I want to say, "Try on this protagonist's point of view for a while, and see what it means to live as an immigrant or as a child of divorce or as a victim of poverty or discrimination or abuse. I want them to see hope and courage and humor in confronting some of the many challenges that contemporary teens face. Above all, I want them to get caught up in "good reads," and all of these books have proved satisfying, for me at least!

I just checked online reader reviews of The Book Thief, and they are stellar. Still, I could substitute the much shorter The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-Time by Mark Haddon or Mister Pip by Lloyd Jones. Uh oh! I've done it now! I'm starting to think about substituting Blankets by Craig Thompson for another book on my list or Upstate by Kalisha Buckhanon or Looking for Alaska by John Green or . . . and so it goes. This is why I struggle so with choosing books--so many utterly wonderful books for young adults on the market now.

DeLillo's White Noise: The Movie

2008-02-25T09:53:00.000-08:00

Today my ENG 102 students made group presentations on their casting, setting, and envisioned scenes from chapters of DeLillo's White Noise. While I knew the groups had been enjoying their discussions, the presentations to the whole class generated little discussion. "How did you arrive at casting Russell Crowe (or George Clooney) as Jack Gladney?" I'd ask, or "What made you decide to set White Noise in 2050?", and I didn't get much feedback. But when I said, "Okay, pick one element that you suggested or your group decided on, and write about why you chose to do it that way," the keyboards clack-clack-clacked steadily. They had a lot to say, individually, in writing--more, surprisingly, than they'd had to say in their group presentations and follow-up whole-class discussion.
Any activity that stimulates a copious flow of writing--especially writing with some element of analyzing or interpreting--is worth the time it has taken in class, far better than equal time spent in my lecturing about analyzing fiction and writing argumentative essays embodying that analysis. So I'm really looking forward to reading what came pouring out when I told them to write.

I Get My Best Ideas While Driving

2008-02-25T09:04:00.000-08:00

One of the questions that people often ask professional writers is "Where do you get your ideas?" I'm not at all sure I could answer that question myself, but I certainly could tell anyone "when" I get ideas--driving, especially driving distances. I put this into practice in an intentional fashion when I was working on my PhD in the mid-1990s and driving 60-70 miles each way to my community college part-time teaching job from the town where I was living and getting my graduate degree. I often laid out my time at the beginning of the trip like this: I'll spend 1/3 of my travel time thinking about the dissertation, 1/3 of my time working on the paper I'm going to present at a conference, and 1/3 of my time preparing what I'm going to say in my class. This worked out pretty well for a 1-1/2-hour commute on back roads followed by stop-and-go traffic into the city.
Now I don't get so many opportunities to brainstorm or draft while I'm driving, unless I'm making a special trip, because I commute under 10 miles to work. But it seems as if every time I'm on my way somewhere, I start to tell myself a story or craft a poem or plan some professional writing project. Yesterday, the urge to record some of my planning was so strong that I started writing myself notes in my cell phone, which doesn't offer a whole lot of space, but can be adequate for jotting down 3 chapter titles for a book, for example.
I think the stimulus of car time comes from the fact that I don't have a working CD player in the car, and I often find myself in areas in the mountains where I can't pick up much of NPR. But it's also been my quiet thinking time during many years of running around from campus to another when I was patching together part-time jobs and going home to a couple little kids and, later, patching together part-time jobs and getting a PhD and going home to a couple middle schoolers. So I turned off the radio and reflected.
This reflective time paid off when I'd sit down later to write--or when I'd walk into the classroom and start to address my class--because I'd really been writing and planning in the car, trying out ways of saying things, and the drafting experience seemed to work, even though those drafts never made it onto paper.
Over time, I came to expect to be flooded with great new ideas every time I got into the car and started off for an hour or more of driving time.
But that didn't come till I'd trained myself to use that time well--by promising myself I'd work on a particular writing problem and setting limits to the time I'd spend on it and making sure that I got to a notebook or computer sometime shortly after completing my drive so that I'd enjoy the fruits of my labor by actually producing the texts I'd been thinking about.
I think any activity would do. My daughter, a knitter, showed me an article about novelists who knit, who say that they can work their way through writing problems while they're knitting and that sitting down to knit can focus them on the problem-solving.
On one level this practice troubles me. I believe there's a great deal to be gained from mindfulness, from living in the moment and paying attention to the activity one is engaged in, and it is certain that I drive mechanically while I am in the throes of writing. On the other hand, I've been driving for 40 years, and it isn't something I have to pay full attention to in order to accomplish the task efficiently. I am happy to be mindful about kneading bread or even mowing the lawn, rather than off in the stratosphere with my thoughts.
And although I'd like to associate this kind of thinking with what William Golding called "grade-one thinking" in his often-anthologized essay, "Thinking as a Hobby," I have to admit that the quality of my thought isn't particularly earth-shattering, either when I'm mindful of mowing or I'm absent-mindedly driving: I'm usually just writing--just clothing some of the ideas I've held into a useful form for sharing with others, or even making up a story that will likely never make it to the computer screen. (I've started two different fantasy novels that I revisit mentally from time to time, feeling almost as if I were reading them--which seems to make writing them down superfluous.)
Most of all, I simply enjoy the activity of putting thoughts into words. I think of myself as being much like Dr. Johnson's "harmless drudge" of a lexicographer: what I do with words gives me mental exercise, hurts no one else, and garners no fame.
But since it has worked for me, I highly recommend it, especially when you are hard pressed for time to complete a writing task by deadline. Set yourself a goal and a time limit, get in your car, and think about your writing task while you drive through the countryside. Then, once you've reached your destination, sit down and get as much down on paper as you can. Let me know if it works!

Reflecting on the Read-Around

2008-02-22T06:14:00.000-08:00

In my Teaching Writing class, we had two read-around presentations this morning. The read-around is a variation on the choral reading recommendations that Katie Wood Ray makes in Wondrous Words: Writers and Writing in the Elementary Classroom. In my assignment, students bring to class the texts they'd choose to read aloud in a classroom, and then, in groups, they use these texts to create a new text, collaborating in the writing of their new creation and then performing their text for the rest of the class. Typically, students take bits of different books and put them together, adding some text as necessary, to create a new story. Sometimes they use one of the texts as an anchor and incorporate elements of other texts into the story based on that single text.
I am always impressed with my students' creativity with this assignment. They combine the texts they've brought in interesting and usually humorous ways. They get quite involved in writing their text, and they often comment to me, while they're crafting it, on how good their group's text is and how much we are going to enjoy hearing it.
They are usually quite good performers, too, and the rest of the class enjoys hearing each group's story.
I have several goals for this assignment. One is to illustrate in a concrete way the bridge between reading and writing: when we write our first stories, we are more or less consciously making use of the elements of story we have learned from hearing stories and, eventually, reading stories ourselves. We often echo the style of the writers we've heard read to us. This assignment explicitly calls for such echoing. Another goal is to involve students in a collaborative writing project. Despite the clear need that students have for collaborative skills, many college students go through class after class without having an opportunity to work together to craft a text. I believe that teachers-in-training need to experience the kinds of activities that I recommend they implement in their own classrooms, so this experience prepares them, in a small way, to use collaborative writing assignments themselves. My third goal is to illustrate the performative dimension of literacy. Too often, reading aloud is something that teachers do well; children's reading aloud, in contrast, is not practiced beforehand and may be painful in its exposure of inadequacies. When students have worked together on making a new text and have planned how they will present it, they've had enough practice to perform it well. This performative element, the sharing of one's own take on a reading experience and one's own writing, requires real involvement with the text.
And really, the tendency of authors to write stories in response to stories has been rewarded in recent years with publication of books such as March by Geraldine Brooks, a novel that takes Louisa May Alcott's Mr. March of Little Women and gives him a past, and Finn by Jon Clinch, a novel that creates a past for Huckleberry Finn's Pap. The phenomenon has less formal expression in the world of fan fiction and in some gaming communities, where users make up narratives for their characters and even suggest modifications of the games. These are all illustrations of interactive, communal literacy, extensions of Frank Smith's "literacy club"--activities that exhibit and stimulate excitement about literacy.

Writing Along with My Students

2008-02-21T08:39:00.000-08:00

One of the best practices for writing teachers is to write with their students, to write on the topics they assign, and yet it's surprising how many do not. One of the assignments I regularly give is a journaling or notebook assignment--so many pages a week, or reflections on readings, or reflections on writing practices, etc. Last semester I kept a writer's notebook with one of my classes (not one for each of the three writing classes, which I couldn't possibly have made time for), and I found it relaxing and rewarding.
Similarly, I resumed this blog because I assigned blogging to a student who is taking a writing class with me by appointment. In addition to her blogging, she is conducting a campus survey to find out who reads blogs and who writes blogs on our campus. I am very interested to see what she finds out.
I have been reluctant to assign blogs because I sometimes feel discomfort myself about posting my opinions out here where anybody can find them. I know that my students' relation to the public realm of discourse is very different from my own. I am sometimes inhibited from writing in particular venues by a fear of sounding stupid. My students are more comfortable with risk-taking in a public discussion forum.
So one motive in my keeping a writer's log in a folder on the network so my students can read it, my keeping this blog, and my working on a revising assignment in front of my Teaching Writing class yesterday (projecting my efforts to the screen at the front of the room) is to take some of the risks I ask my students to take regularly in their writing, to move out of my comfort zone. I am also interested to see whether I can make a true commitment to the same kind of regular reflective writing that I ask of them--or will I make excuses for not keeping up? "I'm too busy" is my usual litany. Writing takes time, writing takes concentration. In addition to writing myself, I'm rereading the assignments I make (I do try to reread along with students each time I use a text, even if I've read it several times previously), and I'm commenting briefly on students' logs and writing exercises and commenting fully on formal papers, and I am involved in three time-consuming committees this semester. I also direct the Writing Center, and I work with individual students. I need to reread Brave New World so I can be a better help to an international student as he writes his paper on that book for a colleague's ENG 101 class. I need to write my paper for the Conference on College Composition and Communication. I'm on my church's Board of Directors, and I play the organ for almost every Sunday service. Etc., etc.
But then . . . I don't expect my students to tell me that they don't have time to do the reading and writing I assign them. I feel that I have more credibility with them if I can do the same work I'm asking them to do.
So . . . I guess it's time for me to start thinking about whom I'd cast as Jack and Babette Gladney, their children, their friend Murray, since the ENG 102 students are working on their White Noise: The Movie assignment.

Writing Activities to Aid Critical Thinking about Prose Fiction

2008-02-20T10:34:00.000-08:00

In ENG 102: Effective Writing II, I have introduced one of two activities that I have planned to promote my students' critical interpretation of White Noise by Don DeLillo. I asked them to imagine themselves making a movie based on the book--to cast the movie, to decide whether to set it in the 1980s or give it a contemporary setting, to envision the town, the college, and the Gladneys' home; and to select 2-3 chapters to make into scenes in the movie, imagining camera angles, dialogue, and visual images to convey symbols and themes. Students are working on the project in small groups.
My goals for this assignment are to encourage students to visualize the characters and setting; to select particularly significant plot points; to identify symbols and themes; and to become more involved with the text. It is my hope that the attention they bring to seeing the characters and the events of the novel, and endowing them with significance in the imagined movie, will help them read the rest of the novel more critically and write analytically about the novel. If such is not the case, at least I know they've been having fun today.
The other activity that I hope to incorporate either over the weekend or early next week is an imitation exercise. I am interested in having students "try on" DeLillo's style, with the goal of focusing their attention on his style and on stylistic options available to them. For this I've chosen a passage on shopping in a mall, an experience that we all have had. DeLillo names and briefly describes the mall and does his typical listing--of the foods they purchase, the smells, the products, synonyms ("gifts, bonuses, bribes, baksheesh"). I ask students to follow DeLillo's sentence and paragraph structure as much as possible, using details from their own shopping experiences.
I am quite sure this writing exercise will generate less enthusiasm than the movie-making activity is generating, but I am confident that it will help them identify their experiences with his and I hope it will help them see their own experiences through the eyes of his narrator. I also want to use this as a route into discussing why it is that DeLillo does so much listing of things.

Review of Ashes of Roses by Mary Jane Auch

2008-02-20T09:25:00.000-08:00

I teach a class in Young Adult literature and have written a Thematic Guide to Young Adult Literature, published by Greenwood Press. So I read a lot of YA literature, and my current reading is guided mostly by the ALA's Best Books for Young Adults list.
Ashes of Roses is a historical novel, set in New York City in 1911, chronicling the immigrant experience from the perspective of a 16-year-old Irish girl who finds a job in the infamous Triangle Waist Company, the sweatshop where a fire killed almost 150 immigrant workers, mostly women, because they were locked into the shop on the ninth floor. The title grimly puns on the popular pastel fabric shade, "ashes of roses," and the deaths of protagonist Rose Nolan's two friends, Rose Klein and Rose Bellini. Their ethnic identities are typical of the majority of the women employed there. In an Afterword, Auch writes that she used her immigrant grandmother's name, Margaret Rose Nolan, for the protagonist, having learned that the company employed at least one Irish immigrant, and her research revealed that seventeen of the young women employed there were named Rose. While many of the victims died in the fire, as on 9/11, many leaped to their deaths rather than burn, some of them hoping against hope that the firefighters would be able to catch them.
In Auch's story, the tragic fire is linked explicitly with the union movement, as the young woman, Gussie, who gets Rose her job in the factory is an active labor organizer. In the novel we see only the labor issues prior to the disaster, since the novel ends almost immediately after the fire, somewhat abruptly. In actuality, the Triangle fire stirred public sympathy and advanced the union cause of more humane conditions for garment industry workers.
Auch's story shows clearly why so many immigrant women were willing to accept the exploitative conditions in which they worked. Young Margaret Rose, who sheds the first name she shares with her mother in her effort to forge a new identity for herself in America, experiences the breakup of her family when, first, her baby brother is turned away at Ellis Island and her father accompanies him back to Ireland and, later, her demoralized mother follows him back to Ireland because she is made to feel unwelcome, ignorant, and indigent in her brother-in-law's home. Rose and her twelve-year-old sister Maureen balk at being taken back to Ireland, where they know the limited and limiting future that awaits them, lying to their mother so that she will leave them behind and then trying to support themselves, first with piecework at home, then with factory work. Rose's encounters with the disdainful prejudice against the greenhorn make her desperate to be self-supporting, at the same time that she is ignorant of the dangers that lurk not only in the alleys but in the exploitative businesses that offer work to young women with limited skills.
Rose's hope for her future rests on the skills she has begun to learn from her mother, a seamstress and maker of fine dresses in Limerick. She owns a lovely dress made in the fashionable "ashes of roses" fabric because her mother was given a damaged length of fabric rejected by the Limerick shop, fabric from which she designed a fashionable dress for her oldest daughter. Significantly, Rose is wearing the dress on the day of the fire, because she plans to go out to a movie with her friends after work.
Auch is at her best in portraying the challenges of finding one's way in a new country, fresh from Ellis Island, challenges that are exacerbated by the forcible splitting up of families. The hopes and fears, the confidence and strength of determination that turned immigrants into American citizens are sympathetically depicted in the naive Rose and her feisty little sister. She also provides a sympathetic portrait of Rose's uncle, a man transformed by his years in America who treasures his youthful memories of home and family but who has adapted to his new home by becoming just a little less Irish, a little more Irish-American.
One feature I found a bit annoying was the author's substitution of an apostrophe for the g in present participles/gerunds. I probably wouldn't have minded it in dialogue, but it was also used consistently in the first-person narration.
This novel would be an excellent text to use in conjunction with social studies lessons on the immigrant experience and the union movement. Cornell University hosts an excellent documentary exhibit on the fire at http://www.ilr.cornell.edu/trianglefire/. Scholastic maintains an interactive teaching site on Ellis Island at http://teacher.scholastic.com/activities/immigration/tour/index.htm, and several immigrants' stories are featured at the Ellis Island.org site (http://www.ellisisland.org/).

Starting Over: An English Professor Writes

2008-02-20T09:12:00.000-08:00

I guess I didn't have all that much to say last year, when I started the blog, since I posted only once last March. Or maybe the issue was getting the time for writing. It isn't easy for a fifty-something-year-old woman to change her writing habits. I keep a personal journal, handwritten, in a handmade blank book. And I write a lot of instructional materials for my classes. I even kept a writer's notebook on the College's network last semester, a notebook that my students had access to. I figured that if I asked them to write 6 pages/week, I should keep pace with them. So that was significantly more public than my usual journal-keeping.
But I find it difficult to get into the habit of writing regularly in a public forum. I don't even post often to the listservs I join. I ask myself, "Who cares what I think?" and that's my excuse for not writing.
But I'm going to take the plunge once more. This is where I'll post some of my thoughts about teaching, about writing, and about the reading I'm doing. And maybe I'll get some of my students to do the same, to move their writing from their classroom logs to the blogosphere.

plunging right in . . .

2007-03-26T11:02:00.000-07:00

I have a history of teetering on the brink of new experiences for months, even years, then one day taking the plunge. One day in 1979, after several years of avoiding Parkway traffic around Pittsburgh because I feared the speed, the congestion, and the necessity of knowing what lane I needed before I got snared in the wrong one, I decided I couldn't face another trip across town in 35 mph zones with stoplights every quarter mile, and I got on the Parkway East in Monroeville, funneled across the bridge and through the tunnel onto the Parkway West, and drove home to Moon Township. I avoided learning word processing in the late 80s and early 90s, even avoiding computerized card catalogs at first, and then I signed up for a class that met primarily through asynchronous computer conferencing and volunteered to teach basic writing in a LAN classroom in the fall of 1993, so I learned some Unix commands, Word Perfect, and Daedalus Integrated Writing Environment all at once.
Today I begin my all-purpose writing-prof blog. Perhaps it will branch into postings for ENG 102 and ENG 315: Teaching Writing and writing center commentary, but for now it's my leap into public journaling, a particularly scary venture for someone who can't take the shrink-wrap off the publishers' copies of books she's written chapters for. Are those bungee cords secured to my ankles, or is that loop the noose that will tighten around my neck as I free-fall?