$16, Well Spent

preterite Asides, Writing

I just picked up The Best American Poetry 2007, and I’ve had mixed feelings. There’s an interesting mix of really, really good stuff and stuff that seems to me silly, gimmicky, and simply self-indulgently bad. Stuff by prominent folks we all know (Louise Glück, Robert Pinsky); stuff by less prominent folks doing increasingly interesting work (Brian Turner, Joe Wenderoth); and stuff by former teachers and classmates, none of whom remember me, I’m certain, which is a good thing, because I’m disappointed by some of it, and genuinely amused by one comically pretentious and awful instance, but as it comes from someone who takes himself Very Very Seriously as a Poet and Artist and wanted to make sure all around him knew what a superior Poet and Artist he was, I can’t say I’m surprised.

But the primary reason I picked it up is the fact that former West Point Cadet (class of 2007) Marya Rosenberg has a cycle of haikus included that she wrote as an undergrad here. While some of them aren’t as strong as the rest (I got kind of an Andy Rooney in seventeen syllables feeling from a couple, if that makes any sense), there are also some that are as wonderful and brilliant as any haiku you’ve ever read, and perhaps even moreso in the ways they play with and press at the boundaries of the conventions of the genre. Among various fine examples, my favorite:

Springtime at West Point
boys in combat boots, slipping
on cherry blossoms

Overall, the book is an interesting and diverse collection. And I’m happy to see a Cadet’s poetry receiving public recognition as being at the level of our poet laureates. For me, that recognition of excellent writing — and those fine haiku — are sixteen bucks well spent.

I say check it out. Or write a haiku that nobody else but you could write. Or both.

The Section Marcher

You call attention,
report, breeze, windows wide, and
write — your fingers fly.

That dashed-off attempt isn’t very good, and not even close to being anywhere as good as any of Marya’s, of course. But there’s the breeze, windows, fly thing, and it’s what my section marchers do: they’re in charge of the class. They open windows strategically to make sure the air flows through the old classroom; they take attendance, call the section to attention, offer their reports — and then they do the written work of the class, as well. So: seeing the writing of a student from my school has got me doing more writing and thinking. That’s a good thing, and I look forward, hopefully, to meeting more students like the now-Lieutenant Rosenberg.

UNH07 A3: The UNH Longitudinal Study

preterite Composition Theory

Mike Garcia, Jim Webber, and Kate Gillen presented on various aspects of the ongoing University of New Hampshire longitudinal study assessing the university’s current writing requirement. Mike led the presentation with a relaxed, comfortable talk offering an overview of the various forms the study has taken and the way it’s evolved over the years. The university has a set of writing-intensive courses, and according to Mike, the study was designed to assess what writing- intensive meant, precisely, and whether as a course requirement it actually did any good: in sum, the longitudinal study responded to the fact that the Writing Program had instituted a writing requirement without any built-in assessment method.

Read more

The Writing Muscle

preterite Writing

For the past two days, I’ve been at the University of New Hampshire 11th Biennial Composition Conference, where I was part of a panel presenting on “Shame, Shame, Shame: Literacy and the Public Regulation of Affect” that explored the implications of Elspeth Probyn’s book Blush: Faces of Shame for the teaching of writing. It was a good conference in many ways, and as is my habit, I’ll blog my notes on a few of the sessions here in the next few days. One of the enjoyable aspects of the conference was getting to re-connect with Peter Elbow, and he and my friends Lauren Rosenberg and Collie Fulford and I shared a pleasant lunch on the lawn today, talking about matters scholarly and personal.

And for me, the funniest thing was seeing, yet again, how canny a negotiator of the rhetorical situation Peter can be. I recounted some of the challenges and difficulties and complexities of being a professor at a military academy, and Peter — who helped conscientious objectors draft personal essays during the Vietnam war — expressed interest in the way we sell the project of writing at West Point. I told Peter and Lauren and Collie about the ways in which West Point sometimes frames or praises academic achievement in the terminology of athletic achievement, almost as if a highly competitive baccalaureate degree-granting institution doesn’t quite know how to talk about or reward being intelligent in ways that recognize the deeply necessary virtues of smartness for our soldiers and officers-to-be.

I really liked Peter’s response. Put it in physical terms, he suggested. Encourage cadets to do interval training with freewriting: start them at five minutes, and get them to go longer. Ten, fifteen, twenty: who can freewrite like push-ups? If the physicality of freewriting is important, if that act of keeping the hands moving is what brings out ideas, why not treat it like PT, like physical training? If you can freewrite at five minutes and freewrite at thirty minutes, and if you do that three or four days a week for a year, you’re sufficiently trained and honed as an intellectual that you can squeeze out a smart and eloquent paragraph in ten minutes. It’s the habit that does it.

Writing is a muscle, Peter said. Welcome to my gym.

(Addendum: Collie recently clarified to me that the writing/muscle/gym metaphor is indirectly from Keene State tutor emeritus Josh Bond.)

In the Valley

preterite Politics, Teaching

In this week’s New York Times Magazine, my colleague down the hall asks:

What does it mean for an undergraduate to pass the morning reading Milton’s “Paradise Lost” and the afternoon parachuting from a helicopter?

It’s a form of the question I’ve been asking myself in the year since I came here, and it’s a question she’s been asking herself much longer. I admire the way she extends the questions she poses into a meditation on the purposes of teaching, and I admire the conclusions she draws as well. Her article is the most thoughtful representation I’ve seen of what it means to teach here, of what it means to teach English here, and of what the productive complications teaching here might bring to the teaching of English. She’s working from the perspective of the teaching of literature, and some of the ways I look at concerns associated with the teaching of writing here are somewhat different — but for much of what she wrote, I found myself nodding my head and saying, “Yes, yes, yes.”

The essay well describes what we do. I’m interested to hear what you might think, reader, especially if you work in rhetoric and composition, or are at all curious about this place. Check it out.

NASCAR Teaching

preterite Composition Pedagogy

Our students have turned in their first essay assignments, and we’re deep into grading. For me, here, the first essay is all about navigating the rhetorical situation, helping the students figure out how to closely read and respond to the writing prompt. In terms of the grade, it’s fairly low-stakes, and my responses tend to be in the my-experience-as-a-reader mode but also attempt to illustrate to students the alignments and gaps between how they performed and the task they were set.

So a number of us, military and civilian, met at the Officer’s Club yesterday afternoon to unwind over a few pitchers and compare notes. One instructor was upset: he’d had seven Fs in a single section, and didn’t know how to account for it; wondering whether there was something wrong with his teaching or the way he posed the assignment, or how his students could so misread what was asked of them.

Another instructor posed an analogy that I’m not sure whether to like or dislike: people who teach writing, he proposed, like to teach writing for the same reasons that people go to NASCAR races. They love the skill that they see, the persistence and mastery of technique — but there’s also the love of the wreck, seeing something go incredibly and colossally wrong into a huge, end-over-end tumbling fireball. As he was saying this, I wanted to stop him, to interrupt and say no, that’s such a misguided, punitive model of instruction, that’s not what we want — but he took the analogy and made a turn into Mina Shaughnessy territory, proposing that the appeal of the wreck is in investigating its causes, seeing how it happened, how it could have happened, examining its conditions of possibility.

Maybe it’s an old or facile or obvious insight for those of us who teach writing. But right now, as I work through getting first essays back to students, it’s a useful reminder, and I think I can work with that. Reading writing as a way of investigating the conditions of possibility involved in its production.

The Long War and Its End

preterite Economics, Politics

I met with a group of seniors today; students I’m mentoring in their writing projects as they apply for certain nationally-known graduate scholarships.

There’s a lot of interest among these soon-to-be Army officers, as one might hope and expect, in international relations. Perhaps less expected was the interest taken in international relations in conjunction with development economics.

But when one of the intelligent and well-read young officers-to-be elaborated upon a claim in his essay by proposing to us that the American campaign to end global terror might most effectively begin by seeking to remedy two of terror’s dominant causal economic factors — entrenched third-world poverty and gross international economic inequality — I steepled my fingers to hide my grin.

“You might want to put that in there,” I said.

Months, Hours, Years

preterite Academia

It’s only September, but I’m already deep into my second year as an assistant professor, and I’m feeling a bit at sea. My first year, I was protected; given the space to adapt to my institution and its habits and quirks, its possibilities and limits. Here, now, since mid-August, I’ve been plunged into committee and mentoring and extracurricular and planning work that sucks time away from my scholarship in far more concrete and visible and obligatory ways than the unfamiliarity of my first year did. Certainly, September is a particularly bad month, what with various mandatory government three-hour training session foolishnesses upon which I won’t elaborate, save to say that the alcohol and drug abuse prevention briefing began with a lecture on the dangers of absinthe, and went downhill from there. Would that I had the leisure for such dangers: I’m finding that I feel best when my weeks at the office run from about 7:15 to 5:30, and we’ll see how much that schedule lets me get done.

It looks to be a busy year, and while the book is gestating, I don’t think I’m going to be able to get an actual good solid start on it — for various professional reasons — until spring 2009.

So of my good rhet/comp readers, I’ll ask: is that too late, for somebody hired as an assistant prof in 2006?

Starting Again

preterite Academia, Teaching

I taught my first class of the semester on Monday. It felt good — it always does — to be back in the classroom again. New semester, new duties, new responsibilities: the bureaucracy here is the temporal equivalent of a gas, expanding to fill the available time. Which means I don’t have much time for leisure reading, but I’m riding my bike to and from work when the weather permits, and getting up early (5:15) to do PT before going in around 7. I’m trying to do the job stuff when I’m at work — I got some good work done in the office this summer, helping out with a Kairos issue (I won’t mind at all if you tell me how cool that logo is, and — while certainly partial — I really like what Steve did with his article), submitting one article for publication, and working on another, plus two more to go — and leave it behind as much as possible when I come home in the evening, but I know with the first batch of papers to grade, that’ll change. Still, I’m feeling well-adapted: I was one of the lead people working on our FYC curriculum over the past year, so I’m somewhat satisfied with the way we’ve worked the syllabus, and have much more comfort with the mesh between my expectations and my institution’s expectations than I did last year — to be blunt, it’s been a bit of a battle, and I felt like I took some flak last year. This year, I know the ropes, I know the responsibilities, and I know how the cadets are. Again, I love the plebes — the freshmen — because of their openness, their willingness, and their enthusiasm, but it’s also interesting to me that the cows — the juniors — that I taught last semester are now back as firsties with full firstie privileges, so I’ll run into them in their civilian clothes when I’m in town running errands. I’ll be mentoring some cows for the Marshall and Rhodes scholarship applications, and I’m mentoring a senior as a part of a pilot academic advising program, and that feels good as well. So: a new start, and I’m hoping it’s a good one.

Seven Last Lines

preterite Asides

Amanda at Household Opera has been thinking about literary endings, and has posted some of her favorites with invitations to guess. I think it’s too cool a game to pass up, so I’ll add my contributions, and offer my invitation as well: feel free to post your guesses in the comments, and consider yourself tagged to put up your own list of seven last lines, as well.

  1. “Am I?” Jesse said.
  2. Gold-glowing child, it steps into the sky and sends a birth-song slanting down gray dust streets and sleepy windows of the southern town.
  3. Let me pray that, if I do not survive this manuscript, my executors may put caution before audacity and see that it meets no other eye.
  4. She sat staring with her eyes shut, into his eyes, and felt as if she had finally got to the beginning of something she couldn’t begin, and she saw him moving farther and farther away, farther and farther into the darkness until he was the pin point of light.
  5. No one watching this woman smear her initials in the steam on her water glass with her first finger, or slip cellophane packets of oyster crackers into her handbag for the sea gulls, could know how her thoughts are thronged by our absence, or know how she does not watch, does not listen, does not wait, does not hope, and always for me and Sylvie.
  6. We were alone with the quiet day, and his little heart, dispossessed, had stopped.
  7. The cults of the famous and the dead.