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This is a new post. I'm teaching my new class of Comp 1 students to blog.

Writing Class

The Year of Magical Thinking

In The Year of Magical Thinking, Joan Didion writes of the period in her life in which her husband died suddenly and her daughter was hospitalized with a serious illness that included ICU, coma, trach, medevac etc. Months and months of it. To think of anything even remotely similar happening to my own children is horrifying.

Yet I find my sympathy for Didion seriously limited.

For interspersed with her experiences with adversity, one also reads of dinner at a NY restaurant on the way home from the hospital where her daughter lies in a coma; a friend who offers a seat on his friend's plane when Didion needs to rush to her daughter's bedside on the west coast; memories of long term stays in Hawaii, trips to Bogota and France, the Beverly Hills hotel where she stays during her daughter's illness, of living in the gatehouse of an ocean front home when she and her husband were just starting our and  don't have enough money to tip the restaurant parking valets (her way of describing their limited funds); of Princeton and Berkeley, of glasses of wine while gazing out at the ocean,and of a nanny named Jennifer who accompanies them from NY to LA. Hotels, restaurants and celebrities are named as if readers should know who they are.

Instead of thinking oh how moving, oh what fine writing, oh what keen understanding, I grind my teeth and close the book.  I expected to say "achingly beautiful," but instead I think "self-absorbed." Does this make me a bad person?  Because Didion has money, she can not have my sympathy?

or did she write it this way on purpose so I would think about this very thing?

"This Schedule is Subject to Change"

As preparation for summer session, I have just finished revising my course description and assignments for English 101.  The language I use for talking about writing in these documents is the result of lo-these-many years of thinking about what I do as both teacher and writer. (I had to look up the phrase "lo-these-many years" which I wanted to write as oh these many years.  I had the meaning right if not the exact word) Thus I tell students the course is an "opportunity," that writing is a "process" of, among other things, "passionately pursuing" ideas. (actually I say "your own ideas"--a compromise based on my belief that the pursuit of ideas for young people has more value if those ideas are thought to be their own).  I say that students "will do" certain things during the semester, as opposed to they "must."  And I follow the advice to use active voice, opting for agency over officiousness:  not "This schedule is subject to change" but "I will change the schedule as necessary." 

But I do wish I was better at carrying this language over throughout the course.  For instance, I am happy with my philosophy of writing as individual and social.  It informs what I do:  teaching writing as an inquiry process that may or may not begin with a desire within ourselves--to know, to say-- but also as a product, something we share with others. I lose this language, though, in my day to day work with students.  I know this but I have not come up with a way to retrieve it. 

My course description (I learned to call it such as a grad student and it wasn't until much later that I learned that other faculty call it a syllabus) is a document I've been revising, naturally, for years.  This time, however, I forced myself to cut a lot of the redundancy.  The repetitions were obvious but still difficult to let go of.  For instance, I didn't like talking about grades at the same time as I talked about the work of the course.  Same with policies.  So for a long time I had separate sections: 1) describe the work , 2) explain how I evaluate the work and 3) state policies.  This kept points and penalties separate from writing in a way that was important to me.  But oh it made the document long--could I really blame students for not reading it all?

So I compromised.  It's still long but less so.  I have never wavered from the belief that the course description (not the syllabus, which I consider a schedule and policy statement as opposed to a description) is a crucial document for the teacher of the course; unlike the assignments, it's more for me than for my students.  At the beginning of the course, students are unlikely to have much appreciation for the subtle distinctions I worry over: when to use "we" as opposed to "you," for instance, in describing the work of the class.  I'm suddenly thinking that I should ask my students re-read the course description at the end of the semester when they might understand a little bit more what I'm talking about.  Maybe in the final reflection on the course?

Susan recently used the word contextualizing in describing one of the things she wants her students in research writing to do.  I like this term better than "situating oneself within the conversation."  I'm not sure why.  The conciseness? but also I tend to think of "conversation" as cliche for comp teachers and situating has become jargon (how is situate different from locate yourself?)   One of the things I want to do is de-mystify the moves good writers make as they develop their ideas.  I wish I had more of these moves to offer first year students other than on the other hand and for example.  But I wonder if it will just come back to narrate, describe, compare etc?  I am reminded that I need to address coherence earlier in the course and remember to illustrate the generative power of the so called transitional phrases. 

I remember when handbooks used to have a section on creating emphasis.  Maybe they still do.  It was seen as sentence work or sentence variety.  I've been teaching something called "heat." I think it's a concept Susan told me about that she got from a talk that Dave Bartholomae gave (maybe a workshop on working with sentences?)  Anyway, I use Gibson's work on the "sweet" style and modify it: heat is created through the use of intensifiers and emotion words and I'm not sure what else.  What else goes into sentences where it sounds like the writer is truly committed to what he/she has to say?  ah "truly"--an intensifier, committed--an emotion word.  Yet it's in the passive voice.  I will have students find sentences in the books they are reading and we can analyze them.  oh I like that idea.

Lincoln's Melancholy

Of the books on adversity that I've been reading for the past 2 months, I think Lincoln's Melancholy has had the most profound effect on my thinking.  The author gives readers a lot to ruminate over, especially when he critiques our own time period and the way in which we undervalue seriousness.  Lincoln's experiences with depression, the author theorizes, are what made him great.  He had deep empathy with those whose suffering he witnessed, and an early encounter with shackled slaves being returned south had a lasting impact on him.  Thus when he rejected suicide as a solution to his misery, he vowed to make a difference in the world.  In his mission to end slavery, he found a reason to live. Our culture, especially our politics, denigrates the pessimist.  But sometimes, and especially in our times, perhaps what some call pessimism is actually realism.

Personally, I find happy people difficult to interact with.  While I admire them and the way they can find joy in their everyday lives, I can easily feel small and inadequate in their presence. Though I'm not a depressive--I'm not subject to bouts of melancholia like Lincoln--I identify myself more with that way of looking at the world. As far as I'm concerned, it is more likely to rain than for the sun to shine (perhaps even optimists will agree that such a view is realistic if you live in Pittsburgh); the half-empty class of juice is likely to spill and then make the floor sticky;  the book that the catalog says is in the library is probably not on the shelf.  If something bad can happen, it probably will.  Sooner or later.

Anyway, I really found a lot to like about this book.  When I have a chance, I will add some quotations...

There Are No Children Here

I am reading There Are No Children Here and trying to decide if it should be on my list of books  for students in College Writing this summer.  Our theme will be adversity, and we will be looking at how people cope with adversity.  But because this book focuses on children, I'm not sure it will work.  Children, after all, have limited choices in what they can do when faced with difficult situations.  For instance, the boys Pharoah and Lafeyette want some spending money.  They are 10 and 12 years old, so there's not much they can do to get it.  Lafeyette "watches" people's cars for them during Chicago Bulls games.  It's his attempt to solve the problem of not having money--what psychologists would call "problem-based coping."  Other than asking his mother over and over again (and hearing No also over and over again) what else could he do?  Or when Craig is killed by the police.  Lafeyette asks how such a good person could come to such a bad end.  No one, including the adults, seems able to do anything but grieve. 

The helplessness of everyone in this book is puzzling to me.  I think the writer wants me to accept that there is nothing that anyone could do to change their situation: they are poor, with little education and few skills.  They don't have the power to do anything to improve their environment.  It's hard for me to accept that.  Why can't Craig's mother get any answers to her questions about his death?  What if she went back to the police another time? perhaps then they would tell her what really happened.  Why can't LaJoe get a job?  Couldn't she be a waitress or find some other kind of work that would bring income (other than public assistance) into the  house?  And why does LaShawn, her daughter, keep having children?  She is 18 with 3 kids!  Maybe children are the one joy that they have.  I find it hard to sympathize because no one seems to do anything to change their situation.  In fact, the things that they do seem to make things worse.  Perhaps it's the difference between 1988 and 2011: I'm much less inclined to sympathize with the family's problems than the author wants me to be.