October 2011 – Lit Bits

Do We Teach Students How to Read?

To begin, two short memories. First, I’m sitting in my first undergraduate literature class. We’re reading Tobias Wolf’s In Pharaoh’s Army and I am captivated by the text’s structure and enthralled by the provocative storytelling. But, despite the fact that I have done my reading, I am stuck in my chair not knowing how to contribute to the discussion. I read the assigned chapters, but simply don’t know what to say about them in the context of this class. They were beautiful, emotional, surprising, but I’m not sure how to translate my reading experience to this critical and curious conversation occurring around me. And so I sit, gripping my text, listening but feeling lost.

Second, it is years later and I am now sitting in my first graduate literature seminar. We’re reading Leslie Marmon Silko’s The Almanac of the Dead and again I feel lost. By the end of my undergraduate career I was fairly adroit in literary conversation, but that was for the undergrad classroom. What’s going on around me now is completely different, including the sound of the conversation. The words and sentences being used to describe the text sound almost foreign to me. Again, I loved the book; and again, I was completely captivated by the narrative; but again, I am essentially at a loss for how to contribute to this scholarly roundtable discussion.

I know that these memories of classroom difficulties are probably not universal. On the other hand, I know that many students, undergraduate and graduate alike, struggle with how to read a text for class. And not because they can’t read in the conventional sense of the word, but because reading for the sake of scholarly conversation is difficult and requires an understating of how to approach a text with practical and critical strategies. Continue reading “Do We Teach Students How to Read?”

The Icky and the Weird: 2 Assignments

Earlier, I wrote about the value of students tapping into their own areas of expertise as the basis for their writing. Yet I also mentioned that I often steer students away from writing slightly fictionalized accounts of their own lives. Here are two exercises, one each in poetry and fiction, that require students to look beyond their own lives and communities.

Poetry: The “Weird News” poem. There are many sources of “weird news.” Simply Google “weird news,” and marvel at the results. The assignment is to find a recent news article that A) is weird, and B) the writer feels some connection to, and then to write a poem that builds on the article in some way. The poem should tap into the article’s deeper implications, or spin off in some entirely new direction—anything, really, as long as the poem goes beyond the facts presented in the article. The “weird news” poem can also be combined with a formal assignment, so that the student would be writing a “weird news” sonnet, sestina, etc.

One student of mine wrote a terrific poem based on the story of a Japanese clothing designer who, in response to increased street violence against women in Tokyo, created a woman’s dress that allowed the woman to disguise herself as a vending machine. If she were ever in a situation where she was being followed, she could simply pull up the dress and camouflage herself amid the urban landscape. The student’s poem explored the strangeness of protecting oneself by becoming a commodity, and in one stanza addressed the clothing designer directly. It was the sort of wonderfully idiosyncratic poem that the student wouldn’t have written in the absence of an assignment that had her looking beyond her own life and community. Continue reading “The Icky and the Weird: 2 Assignments”

Riders to the Sea

One of the things that humanizes the classroom is storytelling. In their reviews of my teaching, my students have often mentioned that our drama classes were enlivened by some of the stories I told of my own experiences in the theater seeing plays. That surprised me, but on reflection I realize they were right.

For example, when I taught John Millington Synge’s Riders to the Sea I told my students about the first time I saw the play. It was 1957 in tiny Theater East when the Abbey Theatre brought its company to the United States for the first time since the war. Siobhan McKenna played Maurya.

I was brought there with a group from my undergraduate class, taught by the late David Krause, who was an Irish Studies expert and my drama teacher. I had no idea what to expect. We had not read the play in advance. It followed the performance of Synge’s one-act In the Shadow of the Glen and seemed to us a riveting drama. Continue reading “Riders to the Sea”

Using Literature to Teach Argument and Academic Writing

Today’s guest blogger is John Schilb (PhD, State University of New York—Binghamton), a professor of English at Indiana University, Bloomington, where he holds the Culbertson Chair in Writing. He has coedited Contending with Words: Composition and Rhetoric in a Postmodern Age, and with John Clifford, Writing Theory and Critical Theory. He is author of Between the Lines: Relating Composition Theory and Literary Theory and Rhetorical Refusals: Defying Audiences’ Expectations. Schilb is also the co-author of several literature texts for Bedford/St. Martin’s.

John Schilb teaches argument and academic writing—working with literature as the core texts for his course. “When you argue,” Schilb says, “you attempt to persuade an audience to accept your claims regarding an issue by presenting evidence and relying on warrants.” Literature is chock full of issues—but how can we get students (of our composition and introduction to literature courses) to identify and argue about them? Get some tips from Schilb’s recent webinar discussion to see how, working with William Blake’s “The Chimney Sweeper,” he helps students move from an obvious thesis to identifying issues in the text and developing a solid argument. Listen to the recording, view his slides, enjoy, and discuss.

Teaching Playwriting: “Theatricality”

Dramatic texts are one part writing, one part performed experience. In other words, a script must be judged not just by the quality of the writing, but by how well it works on stage. This concept is difficult for beginning playwrights to grasp. Textbooks try various ways to explain. For example, some call the script a “blueprint” for performance—a means to an end, rather than an end itself. Additionally, some instructors discuss the magic of “theatricality”—that je ne sais quoi that separates dramatic writing from the other genres.

Because “theatricality” is inconceivable apart from action—apart from the act of doing that constitutes performance—the teaching of playwriting requires performance as part of classroom activities. The concept of performance as pre-eminent should undergird all course structures. For example, when possible, written assignments should be shared aloud in class: hearing texts with an audience is preferable to at-home silent reading because the former better approximates how scripts are meant to be experienced.

Dramatic writers must learn to see themselves as performers. They do not need to be good performers, but they need to be willing. They need to be able to play roles well enough that they can hear in their minds the characters’ voices as they commit words to paper. It is not the same skill as that of the actor, who hears primarily one voice at a time, but is more like that of the stage director who understands the interplay of multiple voices. Most playwrights, I believe, mutter to themselves. And, while a little murmuring is probably common to all creative writers, I would guess that playwrights spend an inordinate amount of time muttering speeches and singing songs to themselves. This skill—necessary as a “trying out” of characters—can be nurtured in students by having them perform. Continue reading “Teaching Playwriting: “Theatricality””

Can Class Participation Data Help Us Teach Literature?

My wife, who teaches kindergarten, just started using a new web service called ClassDojo. On their website, ClassDojo claims to be a service for real-time behavior management: teachers input their roster, structure what kind of behaviors they want to measure, and then start using the service in the classroom by logging student behavior through a one-click action. The service catalogues the inputted behavior and creates reports for the teacher so that she can see how individual students or the class as a whole are performing in the various categories. To make it really easy for teachers, ClassDojo also has a mobile application that allows for quick and on-the-go recording of student behavior. This service is designed for K-12 educators and so it may not be all that interesting or useful for literature teachers in higher education. At least, I initially thought so. But when my wife was telling me how she used the service in her class of wild 5- to 6-year-olds to track behaviors such as class participation, I started to think differently. And, in that moment of contemplation, my wife turned to me and asked, “If the literature classroom is all about participation in discussion, how do you guys really keep track of it?” Good question.

My wife was right, the literature classroom is often structured around the discussion of a text—and class participation, either graded or un-graded, is important to the whole enterprise. Yet, the way we structure participation varies from class to class and tends to be potentially more assumptive than quantitative. Some teachers may reward students with daily participation points (which are generally somewhat nebulously defined); others may base student participation on the completion of daily assignments; and still others may encourage participation but may not worry about measuring it or keeping track of it in their grade books. However we assess participation in the classroom, there are often a few things that are easy to identify: namely, who participates the most and who participates the least. Students who fall on either end of the participation spectrum generally, for better or worse, tend to stick out. But what about the students in the middle? How do we understand their levels of participation? And further, can our current methods of assessing participation generate enough actionable data that can help us better understand our students and courses? Of course, participation data should not drive our literature classrooms, but it could help to enhance them. Continue reading “Can Class Participation Data Help Us Teach Literature?”

Twitter in the Literature Classroom? Part 2

Last week on this blog Kelli Marshall explained how Twitter can be used as a discussion tool in the literature classroom. Building on that, I want to look at the nitty-gritty of what to consider if you decide to experiment with Twitter in your course.

There are three main things you and your students need to know to have a good conversation on Twitter.

How to tweet.
How to @reply or @mention people.
How to use #hashtags.

Tweeting is pretty simple and is similar to SMS texting—though you may want to show students how to shorten links (through services like bitly.com) and provide them with rules for decorum. @Replying or @mentioning people is also really easy: you can either hit the reply button below a person’s tweet, or, in your own tweet, type in that person’s Twitter handle preceded by the @ symbol. Either way, that person will be notified of your reply and can then tweet back to you, a system that encourages conversation.

Using #hashtags is also simple but requires some initial setup. A #hashtag is something that you include in a tweet in order to categorize it. #Hashtags are commonly used in tweets that mention trending world or local events; they are also created for conferences and gatherings. Basically, #hashtags bring together tweets that are related by topic area. The easiest way to set up a discussion for your class is to create a course-specific #hashtag and have your students include it in any of their course-related posts. Then you can all search for the #hashtag on Twitter (or by using a service like hashtags.org) and find an up-to-date listing of all tweets that include it. Continue reading “Twitter in the Literature Classroom? Part 2”

The Shakespeare Sonnet Slam

Poetry is an oral as well as written tradition, and we are only doing half the work—and having half the fun— if we silently read a poem on the page. Unfortunately, I don’t always have the chance to emphasize this enough in the classroom. As I struggle for both depth and breadth in my courses, I often run out of time before I can focus on the performance of poetry.

At least a few times during the semester, though, I create opportunities for students to engage with the performance of written texts. This might seem like an optional activity that doesn’t have the substance of a lecture or in-depth discussion, but I would disagree. In fact, in-class recitations can generate real excitement among students, in part because memorization requires a slow, attentive reading that we wish for every time we assign a new text.

With this in mind, I recommend the Shakespeare Sonnet Slam as a classroom activity. In an English literature survey we spend a couple of classes reading sonnets by Shakespeare and his contemporaries, but because these sonnets represent one small unit out of many in a survey course, that’s about all the time we have for The Bard’s sequence. Even so, the memorization requires students to read their poem with a quality of attention that they wouldn’t ordinarily have. Even if our activity means that we get to spend less time discussing other poets, students quickly understand the power of a poetic sequence, and how it can convey a variety of emotional and intellectual struggles in innovative ways.

Here’s how it works:

First, I ask students to memorize one of Shakespeare’s sonnets. If students are anxious about the process of memorizing a poem, I offer them several strategies: they can write the poem, longhand, several times until they get a sense of how the lines fit together; they can photocopy the poem and carry it with them, memorizing it throughout the week; or they can memorize the poem by reciting it once through, then hiding the final word of the poem and reading it through, then hiding the final two words of the poem and reading it through, and so on until they’re reciting the poem with no words exposed.
Continue reading “The Shakespeare Sonnet Slam”

Not All Cows Are for Milking

Several years ago, a student of mine (we’ll call him James) stuck around after my introductory fiction-writing class because something was on his mind. This was around week three of the semester. He’d seemed highly engaged in the course so far, but today he was being quiet.

We waited while everyone else cleared out. I smiled reassuringly. He cleared his throat and looked at his shoes. When the room was empty except for us, I asked, “So what’s up?”

He told me that he would never be able to complete the exercise I’d assigned that day.

I had asked students to brainstorm some interesting details from their pasts, and to incorporate these details into a scene of fiction. The idea was to get students to use pre-existing knowledge as a way to give their work more authority.

I asked James what the trouble was.

He shrugged. “There’s nothing remotely interesting about any part of my life,” he said. Then, so I’d understand his dilemma, he elaborated. “I grew up on a farm, in a town of fifteen people, where everybody is related. The next largest town was ten miles away and there were only fifty or sixty people there.”

I told him that to me, a guy who grew up in densely populated New Jersey, his life sounded completely fascinating. Continue reading “Not All Cows Are for Milking”