Writing in Class

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!

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

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

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

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

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

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.