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).
  

A word is worth 1000 pictures??

In response to John Walter's response on Machina Memorialis, I've been exploring a little more my own ambivalences about the use of images in FYC. (It's relevant, I suppose, that although several of the blogs I regularly read beautifully use photographs--bgblogging and writing as jo(e) come to mind--this blog of mine is resolutely image-free.) I'll stick, first, fairly close to his points, trying on some contrary positions just for fun, then wander further afield...

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I'm interested in John's point that images were historically tied to words in meaning-making and that "composition sans image is deeply roots in and tied to print culture [...] and this move to banish the image from serious texts in fairly new." I'm interested as well in the neat sort of turn by which digital media have brought the image back into play (I hope I'm not mis-stating his point...)  But I don't quite understand how images played such a role pre-Gutenberg, when virtually all of the poetry-drama-fiction- philosophy-history -whatever texts I've read and that we ask high school and college students to read are indeed exclusively word-based. Were images stripped away from these texts at some point in the modern typesetting process? These early texts were distributed and preserved via recitation (aural memory) and manuscript. Were the images in illustrated manuscripts produced by the authors of the texts or the  manuscript-copiers, or doesn't that matter?  What do we know about the actual composition of these early works? To be flippant, is there evidence that Plato sketched out a floorplan to think his way through to Allegory of the Cave? (To anticipate my next point, I'm taking "image" here in the above to mean graphic image, that is, picture, since I don't see how aural/manuscript/print/digital culture issue affects either mental or verbal images.)

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I'm bothered by the commingling of mental, verbal, and graphic images. They seem qualitatively different to me in the processes of thinking and writing and reading. I am reminded of a post I wrote a few years ago on Words and thoughts, and I'll repeat the quote  from Steven Pinker's The Language Instinct:

In much of our social and political discourse, people simply assume that words determine thoughts....People who remember little else from their college education can rattle off the factoids: the languages that carve the spectrum into color words at different places, the fundamentally different Hopi concept of time, the dozens of Eskimo words for snow. The implication is heavy: the foundational categories of reality are not "in" the world but are imposed by one's culture...But it is wrong, all wrong....People can be forgiven for overrating language. Words make noise, or sit on a page, for all to hear and see. Thoughts are trapped inside the head of the thinker. To know what someone else is thinking, we have to use--what else, words!

That is, it seems to me that thought can take place pre-verbally, in the form of mental images, or even more amorphously, something like sensations, hints, intimations. My sense of my own thoughts is not I am producing and listening to a constantly streaming inner monologue, but that "things" flicker past without my having the chance or wanting to take the time to verbalize them. But to capture these images (for my own examination or to communicate them to others) I have to attach words to them (or make them manifest in some other medium, oil paint, say).  This is a necessary (I think) part of the critical thinking process and largely what we mean by the process of composition, to grab hold of these mental images and embody them in words.

Verbal images, associated with the poetic, seem to me something like what I'd call concrete details (words that refer to and create sensory images) and figurative language. The split that John identifies between poetic and rational discourses is tragic, in my view, resulting in the depersonalized, hyper-abstract, jargon-ridden forms of academic discourse that make my skin crawl. There are people I guess who aspire to write this way, but I'm not one of them (hence no Ph.D for me) and I don't take it as my mission in FYC to create such writers. I concede that for certain technical writing aimed at a specialized audience the poetic may be appropriately "purged" from the rational; for my money, though, in general terms, for a general audience  "good writing" requires these verbal images, not merely as stylistic flourishes but for clarity's sake as well.

So we have mental images integral really to the process of thought and verbal images a requirement for effective writing. For me, graphic images are a different sort of creature. Helpful in some contexts (maps of troop movements in Civil War battles--that is, for showing spatial relationships; bar graphs, pie charts, and other mathematico-statistical representations--that is, for summarizing data and depicting quantitative and qualitative relationships; photographs of people, places, things--that is, for presenting a version of apparently unmediated reality and thus short-cutting the need for physical description) but--here's the important thing--these graphic images are basically optional conveniences. Maybe. (I'm talking here about the use of graphic images within a text; as an aid to invention they seem potentially more useful. A side note: I am not a fan of the graphic novel, though perhaps I should give them more of a chance...)

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Words and pictures

I've been thinking the past few months about the place of images in composition classes. Like the shift from black-and-white to color television in my childhood, our textbooks have turned technicolor as the dawning recognition of the importance of visual rhetoric sweeps the comp/rhet field like those waves of colored cards across a football stadium. I understand its attraction, the carnival-like appeal of all those quirky advertisements to analyze. And learning to look, of course, is a vital skill for the writer. But is making visual rhetoric the cornerstone of comp classes a service to our students, helping them make judgments in a culture saturated with images, or is it a surrender to a public discourse in which people take positions on stem cell research via youtube clips and on political candidates via 30-second Swift boat ads?

Observation Day

Inspired by an interesting New Yorker article by Caleb Crain ("Surveillance Society: The Mass Observation movement and the meaning of everyday life"), I have declared yesterday and today Observation Day(s), yet another exercise to encourage students to pay attention to their world. I asked students to pick a spot on campus where they could sit for 15 minutes and take field notes: physical description of the space (what details create its atmosphere?) and the people moving through the space. I am again this semester asking students to consider and write about various aspects of technology, so I doubled-up assignment objective to introduce them to the wiki (the first time I've used one as well), asking them to post their observations here.

Cartoonist in the classroom

As a devotee of thinking about thinking, I am a sucker for all sorts of books on how the mind works in its tasks of remembering and analyzing, problem-solving and designing. I'm also always on the prowl for analogy-fodder, extraneous raw material that nonetheless manages to shed some light on the composition process.

Digression. My fascination with the ties between different creative activities dates back some twenty years to a conversation with my brother, one of those Renaissance types who combines his profession of ER physician with passionately pursued "hobbies" ranging from community theater to mountain climbing, writing to gardening to carpentry. On a lightbulb-flashing walk around the block, he explained to me that carpentry and sewing, though using different materials and tools, share the same logic of assembly. My experience with carpentry up to that point consisted of a six-week stint in woodshop fifteen years earlier, where a group of us eighth-grade girls worked together on a small stool; petrified of cutting my fingers off in the bandsaw, I limited my contribution to measuring the pieces and marking the pencil lines for proposed cuts. At sewing, on the other hand, I was already quite the expert by eighth grade, to judge from my closet stuffed with kettlecloth dirndls and doubleknit pantsuits. After my talk with my brother, though, I picked up a few handtools, a couple hammers and handsaws, an eggbeater-type drill and a set of chisels, and summoned the courage, starting small, to construct a colonial-style candlebox. A jigsaw and router later it was on to a cradle and changing table for my oldest daughter, then a few years later, most ambitiously, a 4 by 8 foot chicken coop, outfitted with roosting perches and nesting boxes.

Along those lines, recently I've been reading and looking at The Naked Cartoonist by Robert Mankoff (cartoon editor at the NYer), which has spawned some questions about the place of creativity in the composition classroom. To what degree is fostering creativity an important goal (or a goal at all) in freshman composition? (On a personal level, to what extent does my fiction-writing/MFA background skew my teaching?) Are there any correlations to be drawn between cartooning and essay-writing?

Learning to look: the degenerate case

For most children, I think, there's an innate thrill in discovery. I don't mean exploration of the unknown, setting out westward across the coyote- and Indian-ridden prairie or down those steep steps into the cobwebs of a dark basement, but rather a cozier sort of finding-within-the-familiar: Cracker Jack prizes and hidden Easter eggs, neighborhood pals in a backyard game of Hide and Seek, faux dinosaur bones buried in sand, the timeless appeal of chameleons. In this vein, a couple of other paper-and-pencil activities come to mind, lessons for sharpening the child's powers of observation in game-like guise.

Hidden pictures. For many (I think) of my generation these pictures bring back memories of visits to the dentist, Highlights for Children magazine for some years having apparently provided complimentary subscriptions to the entire membership of the American Dental Association (a curious marketing ploy to link yr magazine so inextricably to anticipation of pain). It was a largely passive activity (mere identification rather than the construction involved in Connect-the-Dots pictures), undertaken while captively killing time: to search the busy background (frequently barnyards, it seemed, or peasant cottages) for a collection of always-generic objects as easily identifiable as Monopoly pieces or the drawings on a kindergarten phonics sheet. One learned to identify likely hiding places, those fussy outcroppings of details. (These days the genre has shifted tone, with the urban overpopulation of Where's Waldo? and the hyper-realism, sharp-edged photography, carnival colors of I Spy.) My students last semester seemed to view reading as a nasty version of such a game, their assigned task to scour a cluttered area for the simple meanings hidden by a malicious author.