"What's fair is what's possible."

How's this for a powerful idea:

"Make friends with frustration; if you are not occasionally frustrated, even angered, by a teacher or learning environment that seems bent on nothing more than highlighting your limitations, you are probably wasting your time. The politically correct notion that no one should feel “uncomfortable” has no place here. Instead resist the temptation to build a case through appeals to what is “fair” when the going gets tough and you’re feeling sorry for yourself. What is fair is what is possible.  Creativity requires treating the impossible as possible."


It's from an article by a Forbes magazine writer, August Turak, called "Can Creativity be Taught?" He's talking about what makes a powerful, successful business leader, but the quote applies to students, too.

I may have to copy out this paragraph and post it on my office door . . . !

Good work

I'm in the middle of the kind of work I love: editing a document that will be used at our all-campus development day. I get to compile a bunch of people's contributions, make them uniform, and then them into "user friendly" (does anyone even use that phrase any more?) break-out session activities.

At the moment, I'm having the most fun developing gender-neutral names and constructing sentences to avoid personal pronouns. Rosalie Maggio's 1987 classic, The Nonsexist Word Finder: A Dictionary of Gender-Free Language, would come in handy -- if my copy was at home instead of on my office bookshelf.

So far, here are a few of the gender-neutral names I've come across in my teaching: Adrian, Alex, Aubrey, Cameron, Casey, Chris, Dana, Devin, Jamie, Jess, Kim, Lee, Merritt, Morgan, Pat, Quinn, Reese, Remy, Robin, Rylish, Sandy, Shane, Shannon, Shawn, Terry, Tracy.

Anyone else have any others?

Woolf

Virginia Woolf's brilliance still shines out through the Hollywood hype that's become her life story: a testament to her genius. Although students wanted to know if I thought Woolf was bi-polar (why does it matter, I asked back), they also wanted to wrestle with her formidable imagination and intellect.

We talked about "A Room of One's Own" today, and despite the students' insistence on talking *way* too much about the title's significance (yeah, duh), the conversation did turn around to her important honoring of the legacy of women who wrote despite *not* having that room (Austen, Bronte, Bronte, Eliot, Cavendish, Behn).

Her work gets better every time I read it: at 20, I didn't understand much but knew I liked her non-fiction more than her fiction. Now I think Mrs. Dalloway is one of the most *true* novels I've read.

What a great opening line: "Mrs. Dalloway said she would buy the flowers herself."

Student Writing

I've been thinking lately about the effect on a person -- me, perhaps -- that the continued reading of student writing has. I mean, what happens to expectations about coherence, fluency, style when one (me?) is inundated with novice/student/practicing writers? What does this immersion do to one's (my?) sense of the possibilities and polish of writing?

Maybe it makes me more compassionate, although I think I see a LOT more ridiculously unprofessional writing coming from my college's employees (don't ask). Maybe it makes me more pliable, able to make meaning out of discontinuity and sincere attempts at communicating. Maybe it makes me stuck, unable to recognize written prose as a communicative artifact instead of a thing to be graded. Maybe it makes me stupid. (That's truly what I worry about: that I lose a critical edge and then find any half-way coherent, innovative utterance to be impressive when it's merely pedestrian because I'm so used to seeing practice prose.)

Sometimes I think I should just quit reading all the writing my students produce (because I ask them to do so!), and indeed I don't read everything. But mostly, I want to know what they think, want to witness thinking on the page/screen, want to help them make sense of their own senses and sensations and sentience and sensibility. I really do.

Kill your babies

I've been telling my students that as they revise, they must get rid of some of the things they love (because they have written them) so that their essays are more focused, unified, organized. Now I find myself in a similar situation:

Going through files to organize before final portfolios come in, I'm clearing out all the old assignments and extra paper that accumulates during the semester. I'm finding essays/assignment that I've graded, commented on, and that weren't returned to students because those students disappeared. I have a hard time recycling these papers with all my carefully crafted penciled comments, all my conversation with the student.

All my hard work down the drain! I think to myself. Why do I *do* so much commenting? Why do I write so much on their essays? How can I possibly throw away all the evidence of my hard work?

Sir Arthur Quiller-Couch (1863-1944) coined the phrase "murder your darlings" in 1914, which came down to us as "kill your babies." I suppose he's right. Here's the full quotation:

“Whenever you feel an impulse to perpetuate a piece of exceptionally fine writing, obey it – wholeheartedly – and delete it before sending your manuscript to press. Murder your darlings.” In 12th and final lecture “On Style (given at Cambridge on 28 January 1914 in a series published as On the Art of Writing).

So I have to take my own advice already! Dang.

Students don't realize

In all my courses, I give exams. But these exams must be tailored to every class because my pedagogy requires me to teach the students who appear in my classrooms, not to teach subject matter.

In the liberal arts, my students and I become a community of learners that focuses on something slightly different every semester. This variation is especially common in a composition course because it's a skill-building course, not so-much a "content specific" course.

So this week, I've asked students what they'd like to see on the Midterm Exam because my philosophy of exams is that they're opportunities for students to show me what they've learned. I really want them to do well, to show me their strengths, to tell me what they feel confident that they've understood to this point in the semester.

This conversation often seems like a role reversal for students because when they ask me "What's on the exam? Will you give us a review sheet?," I say, "What would you like me to ask you on the exam? What do you think you've learned so far?"

Eventually, we negotiate a reasonable exam that meets the criteria I have, the learning outcomes I want them to achieve, which include being able to support their own points, as they do in during this negotiation. :-)

But they do not realize how long it will now take me to create the exams: two sections of FYC are getting slightly different exams. The third course will get an exam I create out of whole cloth since we're using new books this semester. All told, I expect to take more than 10 hours to create these exams.

I doubt some of my students spend that much time producing the essays that are also due at midterm, do you?

What's old is new

I found myself in an online article from the Wall Street Journal called "When Lit-Crit Mattered."

I'm not usually a reader of the WSJ, but this link was provided by "Arts & Letters Daily," a helpful, informative online "service of The Chronicle of Higher Education."

The article reviews the book Praising It New: The Best of the New Criticism, a collection of essays about New Criticism edited by Garrick Davis.

Reading the summary of New Critics' commitments and practices confirmed for me what I've always suspected but didn't quite know: I was trained in New Criticism. I've been a close reader of texts for most of my life, and those skills were honed by literature professors at St. Kate's and Penn State. At the U of M's rhetoric department, close reading became "discourse analysis" as a research method. I was also encouraged to read *everything* using such a method, including non-canonical authors thanks to my professors who practiced if didn't overtly teach feminist and critical theory. So my education didn't suffer from the narrowness-of-canon that New Critics are accused of perpetuating.

Because my grad school experiences were interrupted by child-raising, I missed the intense training in things like the cultural-studies-type of literary theory, structuralism, or deconstruction. Therefore, my classroom activities center around the ways-of-reading I found most effective. I've taught my own students critical reading practices that foreground the text even though students most often want to foreground the authors' lives as a way to understand the text. I've never encouraged that because it seems to take all the power out of an imaginative work, and the human imagination is what we praise in literature, if you ask me, not the life led by the author.

Another book for me to read in my spare time.

As we end

The summer session class meets for the last time tomorrow night. Despite the fact that the syllabus, the calendar, and the class website say our final will be ONLINE, not during the last class meeting, students were surprised last night to find out that the final class meeting would not be an exam.

Just goes to show the power of precedent: the midterm exam was in-class with a short-essay portion that could be taken home and returned online.

The way I set up my courses, students can take either the midterm or the final exam (or take both and the highest score will count). So students who did poorly on the midterm want to take the final; oddly enough, these students are the ones who didn't get that our last class meeting is an *actual class* not the exam.

Just goes to show that the weaker students are weaker in more areas than one: they're not great readers, writers, or planners.

I have one who was going to skip the last class because s/he's working at WE Fest. Another student missed last night and was hoping to miss tomorrow too, in effect taking a 15/16-week literature course in 5 weeks (and using it to substitute for another course at her/his home university where the course would have cost about $2800.00 instead of $450.00).

Hmmm . . . maybe I've got it wrong: maybe these students are very good planners . . . ! At any rate, I've answered four panicked emails today from students who need extensions or something because of their life situations and the grades they've earned this semester. I do wish I could encourage more responsible behavior on the part of students: how do others help students stay current with the course requirements, short of hand-holding and acting like the students' mother? I'm just not interested in that (mis)understanding of so-called "ethic of care" pedagogy.

Out of Touch

I've been traveling for 10 days -- to Philadelphia and Lancaster, PA, visiting a friend who's a professor at Franklin & Marshall. Ah, the life of a small, liberal arts college in the Amish hills of eastern Pennsylvania.

This idyllic setting seems to be the assumption many people have about where a college education should happen: brick buildings, ivy, intellectual conversations under tree-leaf canopies (remember Plato's plane tree in the Phaedrus? F&M does indeed have sycamores, our name for the plane).

When I returned from my travels, my son asked if I'd read an article called "In the Basement of the Ivory Tower" in this month's The Atlantic magazine, an article that bemoans the state of higher education. Of course, I realize that this bemoaning is nothing new: every professor remembers the past rosily; every new generation of students is dumber than the last; every social force conspires to erode the idyllic intellectual investigation that's supposed to happen in college.

Coincidentally, this article is being discussed in one of my online lists, where many folks take issue with this Professor X's attitude and approach to his/her students. Others decry the institutional pressures that make such attitudes/approaches necessary. Still others recognize the hazy-memory assumptions behind what's supposed to happen at an institution of higher education.

What interests me most is something not many folks are talking about on my list: the centrality of writing to the educational project. Professor X notices that his/her students "cannot write a coherent sentence." These students fail as a result -- and this failure happens in their composition course, the one Professor X is supposed to be teaching, the one upon which most other courses rest. Other departments/disciplines depend upon our composition courses to "teach students how to write" so that said students can communicate their learning in a complex way, a more complex way than memorizing facts and filling in bubble-sheets.

So I would posit that writing coherent English prose (what we used to call Standard American English or English for Academic Purposes) is a *necessary condition* for the educational enterprise, not simply a *sufficient condition*.

Yet, sadly, while many educational practitioners are aware of this necessity, they're woefully out of touch with how those writing skills/habits/practices develop or can be developed. They're out of touch with their own working conditions in their own classrooms and institutions. They're out of touch with how they, themselves, developed these skills/habits/practices. They're out of touch with the hard work we rhetoric/composition instructor/scholars do to help remedy the situation.

*P.S.* I've ended on a pretty depressing note, which is NOT where I want to end. I don't want to be the same kind of doom-and-gloom emoter as Professor X or as Alan Charles Kors, who's written "On the Sadness of Higher Education" in The New Criterion.

What's up with the world that we higher education professionals, people with some of the best, most important work on the planet, are getting depressed?

Most days, I think my work is profound, useful, a gift. My students are curious, ready, willing (this to me is the most important emotion) and able. My classrooms are dynamic, friendly, inquiry-based sites for real learning, real knowledge-making, real community. Most days I "love my job" so much that it's not a job: it's my way of life.

It'll look/be different

Coming back after sabbatical, I will be part of a department that I will only partially recognize. The number of leave-takings surprises me, and I hope everyone who's moving on is going to something good/better.

P.S. Speaking of "different," I found this blog article called "Blogging: Content is King" full of definitions, tips, thought-provoking assertions. Not sure, yet, what I think of it. You can find it on a blog called "one cool site: wordpress blogging tips," which may be a sponsored blog created by the folks at wordpress, I don't know for sure.