What I'm Reading Now: Too Many Books

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

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

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

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

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?

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

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.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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?

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

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.