Re: Thinking, Teaching, Writing

Composition class

Up until the age of eleven or twelve, I loved to draw and paint. I bought myself pads of drawing paper and artists' pencils, pastels and  cray-pas, tubes of oil paint, and I wandered around the house, outside and in, looking for a subject. I sketched flowers in the garden and my parents' faces as they sat reading after dinner. I examined my own face in the mirror, trying to separate myself into nonchalant model and  objective artist so that I could match in pencil the line of my jaw, the shape of my eyes. But some time around the beginning of adolescence, I gave up, realizing that, though I wasn't too bad at tracing outlines, I couldn't make my subjects pop into three dimensions. Shading and highlights eluded me. My drawing devolved into geometric doodles: boxes made by connecting the corners of two superimposed squares, stars of David made of isosceles triangles, the two-beat rhythmic swoop of treble clefs.

This spring, though, my youngest daughter asked to take a painting class at the local art museum, and I volunteered to take it as well to keep her company. The course title sold me: Composition: Painting Still Lives.

(I wondered how my situation and attitudes compare to those of a "reluctant" writer in one of my classes...)

What I learned as a student, with possibilities for translation to FYC teaching:

• I was surprised by how much I enjoyed collecting up the supplies (hog-bristle brushes both plump and narrow, tubes of paint with glorious names like alizarin crimson, Payne's gray, cadmium orange) and how it made me feel both excitement and a certain seriousness of purpose.
  
• Even when the teacher selects and positions the tropical fruit, adjusts the clamp-on light, shakes loose the draping of the background fabric, there is still such a range of possibilities for the individual student that the resulting paintings look surprisingly dissimilar. Despite this, I still feel the ache to pick my own objects.
  
• A framing device is useful to set limits, to focus one's attention. Move it around, bend and straighten yr arm, try out possibilities, but make a final decision not in yr head out of thin air but by sketching out some likely options.
  
• Consider what makes a composition desirable: how it's possible to have balance without a too-literal symmetry, what establishes the focal point of yr design.
  
• Before our first painting day, at home, we were instructed to lay down a coat of yellow ochre (apparently some artists choose other colors). There may be some technical reason for this, but our teacher emphasized its psychological value: to lessen the fear of marking a blank canvas.
  
• Class time is devoted primarily to making art, not talking about it. No one stands there paralyzed by painters' block.
  
• As we paint, the teacher roams around the room making suggestions, sometimes picking up a paint-less brush to demonstrate, sometimes calling us over to look at someone else's problem or solution.
  
• A painting is constructed by a process of layering ("fat over lean," it says in the books, but our teacher uses the more-PC "thick over thin"): first roughing out shapes, then patching in color, glazing shadows, and with thicker paint touching in highlights. Corrections and changes can be made at most any point along the way.
  
• Each class ends with critique, and everyone must talk, following a framework that sandwiches positive comments with suggestions.
  
• It is possible to abandon a piece without discouragement, to value what one has learned in the process without being entirely satisfied with the final product (cartoon pineapple, for example, or too-dark shadows that don't quite make sense).
  

Writing teacher writing

In the past few months, as I've been trying to figure out how to carve out more time for my own writing,  relevant articles and passages have been dropping from the sky. First someone slipped into my mailbox a NISOD Innovation Abstracts sheet, Stephen A. Catrello's "Practicing What You Teach". He recounts, when he was an adjunct, bringing in samples from his technical editing "real job," both to show his students real-world writing and to let them see him as a fellow writer. Later, when he landed his full-time gig, he wrote the narrative essay assignment along with his students, emphasizing the value of their seeing his process and his struggles (and successes presumably).

I often have thought about doing assignments along with my students, but hadn't  found the time until this semester (although I do generally talk about how I'd approach the assignment and toss out some of my conceptual-art-essays).

Warning: digression ahead. Which makes me think about the essay-of-the-mind (to echo Wallace Stevens' "On Modern Poetry"). I'm not sure whether it's an occupational hazard or my natural habits of procrastination (probably both), but I find myself with a sizable collection of ghost-essays, germs of ideas floating around in my head or at most scribbled onto some back-of-an-envelope to-write list , but not yet fleshed out into actual words. It's a dangerous practice, I'm afraid, for several reasons.

• It's too easy for the concepts in my mind to seem clever, insightful, poignant so that it's with stomach-churning disappointment that I see them lying there lifeless when finally captured on paper. Hypothesis: the longer the ghost-essays wander around my head before venturing out to test the air the more painful the disillusionment. Learning to tolerate this pain is (one) key to overcoming writers' block, which is a serious problem for so many of my students. The idea, of course, is to convince them that Revision will come riding to the rescue on that cliched White Horse.
• The other important thing, for me to remember and for students to understand, is that in the process of putting down these ideas on paper brings up more ideas. As the mathematicians say, this is a nontrivial statement.

What do we teach about when we teach about writing?

A couple of articles I read this week, though they had nothing overtly to do with writing, set me to wondering about the "teachability" of the activity I profess to teach. I remember years ago reading John Holt's claim that most children can learn to read by spending, on average, 40 hours reading aloud to an experienced reader (I may not have the details quite right) . Is writing competence achieved in similar fashion, through hours of practice and the almost-incidental presence of a benign instructor? I started to catalog the specifics I remembered from my own reading/writing education:

• I don't remember first learning to read, but by first grade I was bored by the school's Tip and Mitten reader (though I loved to go to the library with my father, brought home stacks of books by Carolyn Haywood and Beverly Cleary).


• My sixth grade language arts teacher chanted repeatedly "I-T-apostrophe-S means it is."


• In eighth grade we diagrammed sentences, endlessly, under the sharp eye of Dorothy Wilcox, whose retirement at the end of that year--1970--started the downward spiral in school-wide grammar competency and general literacy that continues to this day. (She also made us memorize and recite in front of the class, one by one, William Wordsworth's lyric "Daffodils.")


• My high school writing workshop teacher wrote on the blackboard in her spidery handwriting specific detail. When I met in conference at the round table she used instead of a desk, she would pull an issue from a sloping stack of New Yorker's and flip open to a story she told me to read, a story presumably chosen to illuminate in some mysterious way my own fiction.


• My favorite professor from undergraduate days, a masterful reader, magically seemed in his lectures to focus and clarify everything we read (though I did also enjoy Famous Poet's class on form and theory, his fingers twirling a slim brown cigarette while he talked about Wallace Stevens at the insurance company and old Doc Williams making his morning rounds to the ladies of Patterson).


• A graduate school teacher, who wore a clown nose while he chimed it don't mean a thing if it ain't got that swing,  was a model of intellectual curiosity and a joyous openness to literature of all varieties.


• Another graduate school writing teacher suggested that I read A High Wind in Jamaica to  learn how to "torque my syntax."


• And, finally, as I've written elsewhere Semi-Famous Fiction Writer explained to me that "Fiction is life, not a godddamn equation!"

The first article that sent me off on all this memory-scavenging was Justin Davidson's "Measure for Measure" in last week's New Yorker (8/21/06), a meditation on the art of the conductor.  Now I have very little musical background (six months of flute lessons, five and a half of which I couldn't get a sound out of the blasted mouthpiece; a junior high music class of Name-that-Tune classic melodies (Polovtsian Dances, 1812 Overture, Flight of the Bumblebee), but I'm always scouring the countryside for metaphor material, and Davidson's article offers a nice assortment of analogies between teacher-writer-reader-text and conductor-composer-musician-score (not perfect analogies, I'm afraid, but interesting parallels nonetheless).

Thoughts on the personal and the political

Initial positioning.  As a rather solitary person, I ally myself by temperament with the personal, with the individual work of the artist over social machinations of the group, the lyric poem over the complicated collaborations of film (though, strangely, I prefer formal to free verse). For me, the word "political" evokes images of men in smoky rooms hammering out compromises that don't fully satisfy any of their constituents, tempted always by the lures of corruption in its various permutations of money and power.  The power that interests me is that of control, not over other people or outside circumstances but over what I produce as an individual; is it nave to believe that, although I'm socially and culturally influenced, still I have autonomy when I sit down with pen and paper? (A further admission: by the time I finished graduate school, the thought of having ever again to adopt graduate-seminar-speak made me queasy. Nowadays, in trying to catch up a little on comp studies, I shudder at the sight of words like "hegemony" and "hermeneutics.")

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An aside. I want to distinguish between personal writing and the standard "personal narrative" (significant experience) of FYC. In fact, in many cases it seems to me, the personal narrative assignment is most definitely not an example of personal writing.  Such "impersonal writing" derives from formulaic genres such as the legal brief, lab report, business proposal, writing that employs conventional vocabulary, predictable syntax, preset structures, and socially modulated ("inauthentic"?, but that's another kettle of fish) voice. Of the qualities that mark personal writing I am much less certain, or at least less able to articulate.

Angell (and others) on baseball

Having just finished Roger Angell?s new book Let Me Finish (and in the middle of a Yankees-Red Sox series), I've been thinking the past few days about baseball. Though I've been a baseball fan of sorts for decades, I had never read Angell very carefully, just a semiannual skim (spring training and season recap) through his New Yorker pieces looking for a mention of the Red Sox. In the past few years, though, I read a couple beautifully written essays of his, "Andy" (centered of course on his step-father E. B. White) and "Here Below" (a meditation on graveyards and other sorts of memorials--but I'll save that for a later post), so I happily snatched up the new collection, which includes those two essays, and went back as well to dig out "Long Voyage Home," his account of the 2004 baseball season.

Let me start small, with a sentence that caught my attention from that last essay (New Yorker, Nov. 22, 2004):

On his off days, Pedro Martinez settled capless into his upper corner of the dugout, wearing only remainder bits of the Boston uniform, and delivered momlike nods and smiles toward the unbuttoned Manny as he ambled toward the bat rack again.

It?s hard for me to separate out my own knowledge of the players and the scene described, but the sentence seems to me packed with information, the visual image of the two as well as their characters and relationship, a sentence almost ambling itself and deceptively casual in its diction, with that final word ?again? setting the scene into the cinematic clich of flipping calendar pages.

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Red Sox fans: a study in details. In another of my perennial attempts to sell my students on the specific detail, that winter I read a few passages from the same article:

I didn?t think much about my Red Sox fan-friends until the World Series was over. Now they are triumphant, and their old pains and desperate attachments have become historic and quirky. They won?t need their amulets and game-watching rituals anymore?the stuff that was mentioned in so many of the TV news stories the day after, and in some New England newspaper feature stories. A copy of the Bangor Daily News mentioned a family in Old Town that mowed a "Go, Sox" pattern in the lawn, and a ninety-four-year-old lady in Lakeville, Massachusetts, who made herself a little ceramic Fenway Park each year, with porcelain nuns at play inside.

Doesn't that beat "Red Sox fans sure are a quirky bunch"? I tried to convince them. I asked them to what degree is your pleasure as a reader derived from such details. Where does a writer get this stuff?

Another passage suggests comparisons to movements of a camera (far shot, wide angle, pan, closeup):

The Sox came down to their last six outs, and the cameras, sweeping the first-base-side stands at gelid Fenway, brought us close-ups of a ten- or twelve-year-old kid peeking out from between his fingers, a grandmother in a rally cap, a couple of glum youngsters in Sox war paint, and a woman with stylish dark-red nail polish on her long fingers, which were clasped to the side of her face in imitation of "The Scream." Unbearable.

To back up a bit, the televised game, especially if it's an important one, often starts with the blimp-view of the tiny stadium, a distant glowing jewel or, to use John Updike's familiar phrase, "a lyric little bandbox of a ballpark." As game time closes in, the cameras on the ground pan the nearly bare field, the singular rump of the umpire bending to sweep off home plate. The camera slides across the hubbub of players in each dugout, the pitchers warming up in the bullpens, then passes in swoops through the crowds in the stands, a full house. The crowd at Fenway was tense with anticipation. Is that sufficient, or would you rather see a few of those devoted fans, the ones whose parents and grandparents have been brought so heartbreakingly close so many times? The camera stops in close-up: this is what it's like to be a Red Sox fan, and this, and this. The art is in the selection. But how many do we need to include, surely not every face in the crowd? How do we choose that sufficient representative sample? Those are central questions for any writer.

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Epistemology for Dummies

That's the approximate title of the book I was searching for the other day in my visit to the mega-bookstore. My mistakes were several: I first made a quick detour through the fiction section (where I grabbed Robert Hellenga's new novel Philosophy Made Simple, pristine copies of which had clearly been stacked there by some Higher Power, awaiting my notice), then doubled back past the new paperbacks (where I happened upon Mitch Cullin's A Slight Trick of the Mind, main character an aged Sherlock Holmes; since one of the dozen or so books I'm partway through is Michael Chabon's The Final Solution: A Story of Detection, also featuring an elderly Holmes, it seemed necessary to pick up this one as well), ...

Just a thought, but what about using these two books plus maybe a Sherlock Holmes story or two, maybe an Agatha Christie, a bit of John Dewey's How We Think plus who knows what else for a class focusing on thinking, C/c of several Holmes a natural assignment. Another possibility: give groups a problem/puzzle of some sort to solve, then have them describe and analyze how solution was or was not reached. More to come, maybe�

...then (on a search for the bathroom) skimmed past the remainder table (where in short order I scooped up three or four novels I'd considered buying last year), by which time I figured I'd spent my monthly allotment of book money, so had to beat a hasty retreat to the cashier to avoid further temptation.

My background in philosophy is sketchy at best. I did read the whole of Plato's Republic in high school Latin class (quite an ambitious undertaking, I now realize), but took only two philosophy classes in college. From my aesthetics class the only things I now remember are learning about the phenomenon of synesthesia and thinking that there were only two main ideas in this particular branch of philosophy, restated over and over again (unfortunately, of course, I can't now remember what those ideas were). I also took a Philosophy through Literature class (Camus, Sartre, Dostoevsky, et al.); what stuck with me from that class, which seems with each passing semester a better and better idea, is the professor's requirement of a 2-3 page response paper each week, due before class discussion of the assigned reading. When I was a graduate student, my roommate's electrified, contagious fascination with Ernest Becker's Denial of Death led us to cobble together an independent study class that involved reading Baumer's Modern European Thought and buying many pastel paperbacks that made up Copleston's A History of Philosophy, whose spines uncracked to this day still line a shelf of my bookcase.

My more recent exposure to philosophy has been teaching a section of BW, a few years ago, at a Local Private College, a class that was linked to a Literature-and-Philosophy core class, so that course writing for my class amounted to text-wrestling Plato (an almost comical--if I hadn�t had to teach it--perversion of the thought that student writers should be encouraged to find subjects that they knew or cared about). It�s a source from this class (Christopher Biffle's A Guided Tour of Five Works by Plato) that I have handy for a thumbnail sketch (which, come to think of it, is another one of those interesting metaphor-turned-cliches) for later reference:

In general, there are three answers to the question about how the knower knows the known. Empiricism holds that the knower knows the known through the senses. Rationalism holds that the knower knows the known independently of the senses. Skepticism holds that the knower can�t know the known with or without the senses. (103)

(Semi-snide aside. I'm not quite sure, with this last one, how there can be a knower if nothing can be known, or am I just picking a fight?)

The Curiosity Factor

My students' second blog assignment (to brainstorm and post a list of questions related to their topic) prompts many questions for me about the curious absence of curiosity in students raised in a culture of reality shows and endless deconstruction of the melodramas of other people's lives. Students have great difficulty posing questions. I'm just beginning to grasp the extent of that difficulty and how problematic it makes the invention stage (for personal, expository, or research-based writing).

Digression on sequencing in the composition class. It occurs to me that it may be easier to talk about the "curiosity factor" wrt research-based writing rather than personal writing, so that there may be some justification in flip-flopping the often-used ordering of assignments to end rather than start with the personal essay. The "successful" personal essay may demand a degree of self-questioning and self-reflection that is difficult for many beginning writers to muster. To what degree the personal essay is a necessary or desirable part of the FYC experience is, of course, a subject of debate (within my mind as well as the wider community).

The Wizard of Oz: Teaching notes

• Consider the totemic function of the writer's notebook (cf. the diploma conferred to the scarecrow, the medal of honor to the lion, the heart-shaped clock to the tinman). The important point: that these symbols were bestowed after the fact, not creating an identity but as manifestation of skill/characteristic the individual already possessed. How do the ruby slippers function in this sense? Why does Dorothy get her totem at the beginning, while her companions must wait till the end? The comforting message for all four, though, is "you had it all along."

The transforming power of composition classes

I came across Thomas Newkirk's provocative essay "The Dogma of Transformation" the other day and have been using it as a touchstone for some beginning-of-the-semester thoughts about course objectives. Newkirk has examined exemplary student writing done at the University of New Hampshire in the years 1928–1942, focusing on what he calls "conventions of self-presentation" ; he goes on to "contrast the pedagogical assumptions (and developmental assumptions undergirding this pedagogy) with contemporary constructions of student writers and their needs" (252).

The 1930s student-writer is is very much the detached observer. Newkirk characterizes the pedagogical climate as follows:

The young writer should "hold to his own experience" and convey the "freshness and objectivity of reality" rather than philosophize and ponder. The goal of instruction is to develop the attitude of observation and the perceptual writing skills that are preconditions for any future writing development. And even if the student chooses not to continue writing, this attention to lived experience, this alertness, has its own value in human development. (254)

Questions, questions, questions

Though thinking of myself as a scholar makes me squirm (like doctors and lawyers calling themselves physicians and attorneys), I do find myself overwhelmed with questions I'm interesting in thinking and reading and writing about. To break the long silence, I thought I'd try to collect up some of them:

• To start at the/a beginning (this being semiannual syllabus-writing time), I need to refine my course objectives: what skills and sensitivities do I hope my students at least move towards attaining? What is the hierarchy of these skills, and how do they inter-relate? How do I account (or need I account) for the fact that student abilities and career goals are so varied?
• Next come a variety of curricular questions: What is the underlying logic for my sequence of assignments? How do students' strengths/weaknesses and instructor's style affect an optimal sequence?