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.