Month: January 2013

It’s on the Syllabus: Creating Sacred Space

The bad poet is usually unconscious where he ought to be conscious,
and conscious where he ought to be unconscious. –T S Eliot

Recently, I planned out my courses for spring. I wrote new syllabi for poetry and fiction workshops and revised my existing syllabi, too. And, this year I decided to include a new section.  After explaining to my students the Grades and Attendance and Formatting Your Work parts of my syllabus, I added a section called Creating Sacred Space.

This is new territory for me, and will be for most of my students, I think, and I’m curious to know what you think.

What I have noticed in the past couple of years is this. Students rarely take phone calls during class. Most of the time, they silence their phones, though a few times each semester (usually during an in class writing period, or when a student is reading an incredibly moving, incredibly personal poem aloud—aka The Worst Time), a phone will hum and buzz and there will be a frenzied patting down of a backpack or self, a litany of apologies, or, worst, weird silent ignoring while the buzzing or belling persists.  Once in a great while a student will take a call in class:  “I have to take this! It’s my mom!”

Ugh.

But last year, I noticed something truly deleterious, in my opinion, to the workshop itself. When we take our break halfway through the three hour workshop, many students get out their phones and text. Some of them text during the entire break. Often, I’ll see the little thumbs, the downward gaze, when we are in class, not on the break. Texting in class is okay, students believe, in a way that taking an actual phone call is not.  But, I think it’s very much NOT okay. So, this semester, I’m creating a new policy: Sacred Space. Continue reading “It’s on the Syllabus: Creating Sacred Space”

Attack the Block

The question took me by surprise.  We were about halfway through the semester, and I’d finally figured out the rhythm and patterns of my 10:10- 11:40 Techniques of Fiction class.  I’d come in just before class started to a roomful of students talking and joking with each other.  I’d try to say something pithy to get us started, then remind everyone what we had read for the day—typically, two student stories to workshop and one story by the likes of Faulkner or Cather or Baldwin.  I’d say, “Let’s start with the workshop—who’s dying to go first?”  The student authors would exchange glances, both shrug slightly, and then one would finally speak: “I’ll go.”  This was business-as-usual.

But on this day, I walked into the room and, before I could make any type of witty remark, a student said, “Can I ask a question?”

“Sure,” I replied, settling into my seat.

“What do you do when you have writer’s block?” Continue reading “Attack the Block”

Literary Themes and Connections

I’ve previously discussed on this blog ideas about the ambiguity and open-endedness of interpretation. Today I’m thinking specifically about how making connections across texts is central to the work of the literature classroom.

This is something, I think, that students often need to be given permission to do.  I’m not sure if it’s a matter of fear that they’ll have the “wrong” answer, or if it’s simply a matter of not remembering things, but I’ve found that my students  need some prodding to answer the question: “Does this text remind you of anything else we’ve read this semester?”  While I certainly include that question among their reading journal assignments, I’ve also found that a bit more direct intervention is important.

Certainly, we can do our own modeling of making connections, announcing when we see a connection with something else in the text.  (In fact, one of the things I love about teaching an intro to lit course is that I read things that are normally outside of my immediate area of expertise, and thus I begin to see connections I might otherwise have missed.)

But we can also create a situation where students are required to make those connections on their own.  Continue reading “Literary Themes and Connections”

The Only Way Out Is Through: Revision as Play

Recently, I did a webinar for Bedford/St. Martin’s (which you can find here). During my lecture (which I pretended was a kind of little TED talk—I did so many rehearsals!!), I talked about the top three concerns students have when it comes to revision:

1. It takes a ton of TIME

The most frustrating aspect of revision is the time it demands.  –Morgan

2. Losing my voice: AUTHENTICITY

I write from inspiration deep down, and pre-Junior year I believed that deviating from that inspiration was untrue to myself as a writer. Now I know: the stuff that spits out onto the page at 1 AM isn’t necessarily what should be published in a book.  –Becca

Continue reading “The Only Way Out Is Through: Revision as Play”

Embracing Ambiguity

I once had a delightful student who, despite her actual talent for interpretation, would get incredibly frustrated by the ambiguity of much of the literature that we would read for class.  I could always see the wheels turning and her brows furrowing when she would begin to explain her interpretation, particularly when she didn’t quite have an end in sight.  As a major in social sciences, she wanted unambiguous results and quantifiable answers.

And that’s just not what we do in literary studies.

From my perspective, it was actually delightful: when I see students struggle like that, I know that they’re developing intellectually.  I’ve always enjoyed the ambiguity of interpretation – or at least the possibility of multiple interpretations.  I’ve also generally been most interested in the many links that we can make across works of literature. Continue reading “Embracing Ambiguity”

Answering Questions, Questioning Answers: A Collaborative Assignment

In the student-centered literature classroom, one of the skills we try to teach is the ability to evaluate other people’s claims about a work of literature.  We can do this in a variety of ways, but one way I’m particularly fond of is based on an exercise that I found in Collaborative Learning Techniques: A Handbook for College Faculty by Elizabeth Berkeley, K. Patricia Cross, and Claire Howell Major.  Their exercise is called “Send-a-Problem,” and it asks students to answer a series of open-ended questions about theme and character development, and then evaluate a set of answers. Their version of the exercise calls for the instructor to write each question on the outside of a manila envelope.  Students then work in small groups to answer the question, slide their answer into the envelope, and pass it along to the next group.  Eventually, groups will have answered all but one question; upon receipt of the final envelope, each group will evaluate all the answers to that last question, a question they have not yet themselves answered.

Conceptually, I like this exercise. Logistically, I hate it. So I’ve adjusted it to suit my needs. I simply create a list of questions, print each on a separate sheet, and give each group all but one of the questions.  Students take their time – often the bulk of a 50 minute class period – answering the questions as thoroughly as possible, then we redistribute and evaluate. Continue reading “Answering Questions, Questioning Answers: A Collaborative Assignment”

Winging It: On Teaching Novels Blind

I’m sitting on the train from New York City to Boston, writing my talk for the annual meeting of the Modern Language Association which I don’t have to give for a couple of days yet so please don’t judge, and I’m watching the trees and snow fly away from me, backward. I sat down facing the wrong way, but it seems the appropriate orientation for a year-end post.

The past year of teaching, looking back, was a lesson in the value of being unprepared. I say this with some trepidation, for the obvious reasons—as academics, former good students all growed up, we are conditioned to do all our homework and the extra credit—but due to circumstances both beyond and entirely under my control, the last two semesters were My Year of Winging It. In the spring I took a course over from an instructor a few weeks into the semester, inserting myself into a preexisting syllabus and telling the story of American Literature since 1865 that it was designed to tell. So my winging it here was not completely improvised; like the actors hurrying to learn their lines just offstage and receiving prompts from the wings, I had a script, I just didn’t write it.

This past semester I taught a new course on the rock novel (which I’ve already written about here). In the past, I’d occasionally included a novel in a course that I hadn’t read prior to putting it on a syllabus. Once or twice I’d not read it until the semester had already started. This time out, for reasons practical and pedagogical, I hadn’t read most of the books on the syllabus prior to putting together the syllabus, and chose not to read them until teaching them—that is, I taught  the novels blind, reading only the pages assigned to the students and reading them the night before. Continue reading “Winging It: On Teaching Novels Blind”

The Tallest Men on Earth

There’s a band called “Tallest Man on Earth” that for quite awhile I thought was called “Tallest Men on Earth.”  And I was disappointed to realize I was wrong (never mind that the band is just one guy and so the singular is appropriate), because Tallest Men on Earth just sounds so much more interesting than Tallest Man on Earth.  This to me is the perfect lesson on titles.  When you see something titled “The Tallest Man on Earth,” you know, or at least you assume you know, exactly what it’s about (he’s a Turk named Sultan Kosen, and he’s eight foot three).  But if you see something titled “The Tallest Men on Earth,” that sets a greater mystery—it raises a reader’s curiosity right away.

At the moment, in fiction, nobody is coming up with better titles than Karen Russell.  Her short story collection, St. Lucy’s Home for Girls Raised by Wolves, establishes her sense of humor, the stories’ strangeness, and their originality.  But she topped that with her second book, Swamplandia!, a title that I sometimes call out just for the fun of it.  Never have I loved an exclamation point more.  It’s a title that actually gets stuck in my head.  Easy to remember when you’re in the library or the bookstore or recommending things to friends.  And like St. Lucy’s Home for Girls Raised by Wolves, it sets the reader up for what’s to come—a strange, atmospheric novel set largely in an alligator theme park.

Students often struggle with titles.  They use a lot of clichés.  Or puns.  Or abstractions. They often use words that appear in the very first sentence or line of the piece.  My advice to students is twofold:

1)     You want a title that will draw readers into the poem/story/essay before they read it.

2)     You want a title that helps readers see the poem/story/essay in a new light after they’ve read it. Continue reading “The Tallest Men on Earth”