Revision, Word Count, and Readers

I would like to write about revision this morning--that, and maybe about ways to frame writing assignments.

Decades ago, I shifted from minimum word count (which matches grading/ranking student writing as one of the more counterproductive pedagogical strategies) to maximum word count--e.g., "no more than c. 1200 words."  The logic is obvious--as is the dis-logic of minimum word counts.

About two years ago, I started using time: "see what you can do in about one and a half hours of writing before posting. Spend about an hour writing and leave yourself at least a half-hour to look it over and make any changes."

I'll just say this works: when the students know that their primary audience is other students in the class (remember, I don't grade), they are concerned with how they textually appear to their peers--let's just say they care more about them than us. When you ask your students to spend about an hour and a half writing, about half of them will spend three. Students are not dumb. They know that what they write and how they write shapes how their peers will see them. We don't need grades to teach them how to see this.

I have been thinking about revision. I have for decades used the first draft/second draft/final revision. We have long noted that when students are writing with computers (like us), revision is not a matter of drafts. Now I hardly ever ask students to revise. I know they are revising as they write and before they publish. Today, I wrote a post on the CWPA list about the link between authentic revision and reading aloud to peers.

I have realized that there's a-textual revision. As well as revise before they send, students virtually revise when they read what others have written. Revision is in their minds: they see what others have done, particularly those who are getting serious responses from others in the class, and they think, maybe I could have done this or that, included or excluded, been more personal, taken a few risks, heard myself speak through writing. When students do this virtually (and I get them to write about it by inventorying their experiences about writing, reading, and being read), they are learning about writing. They don't need to rewrite. Sometimes, they just need to write something new, remembering what they learned from what they last wrote.

I can't help but add: I have been reading somewhat impatiently on the list about all the time teachers waste by having their students read out of readers--as if students don't have a million things to write about intimately connected with their lived experiences. Publishers and academics make money out of these readers. Teachers have students kill time by reading and writing/discussing about what they read (this is the critical-reading strand of our  field). Ways of Reading was one of the worst exercises in this misdirection of writing instruction. If you really want students to learn about writing, have them write--all the time, writing out and writing back and forth to each other. I am hardly the first to note that we learn to swim by swimming, not by reading about how others swim.

An Act of Grace

I'm working through grief about Ali. I've been here before--or at least in a place too much like this one, but that doesn't make the journey any easier. I'm one thought away from crying.

When people ask me, innocently, how are you?, they really just want an easy answer, a sign that everything's okay and we can continue on with our day unburdened by other people's griefs. My problem at this stage is that if someone asks me, I tell them probably in some attempt to unburden myself. I know from hard experience that keeping grief inside doesn't work. It festers there. On the other hand, you can't shout it from the rooftops. Some people really don't want to hear.

These thoughts and one of my friends led me to a new thought about personal writing. I have for decades used writing as a way of getting things more or less "out there," not keeping them "in here." Of course they stay inside, but by having them out there as well, they're just not as bad. Sometimes, I  even figure things out. I think that being able to use writing like this is an emotional resource and that we should at least in our writing classes give this gift of writing to our students.  A few years ago, my students wrote a book of advice for writing teachers. If you look at the chapter on "Journals," you'll see how students use writing to cope with some of the difficult problems we face in our lives.

Writing Ourselves into Each Other's Lives

A close friend of mine has been listening to me whining. I called her on the day Ali died. She had had a particularly hard day herself, coping with something very sad in her life. She listened to me for about an hour on the phone, I suppose you could call it bearing witness to my grief. I talked to her the next day and she said something striking.

She said something about how it made her feel better by making me feel better by her listening. I can't remember her exact words--but I had never thought of personal writing from this point of view. It goes something like this: the writer gets some sort of release by opening up those emotions, fears, hurts that our culture teaches us to cover--the places where we are most human, and as Bene Brown has said, most vulnerable. I had never thought about how opening up is a gift of sorts to whoever was gracious enough to hear you. I haven't quite said it yet: the reader gains by opening up to hear the writer. It's really an act of grace.

DeCentering Writing Studies

I have finished taking notes on Laura Micciche’s Doing Emotion. Her book was well worth my reading. I appreciated most of what she wrote. And in those places where I had to acknowledge different universes, she brought up points for discussion.

Her important point to me involves the materiality of emotion: that we see emotion and we read emotion in texts—again, understanding texts as only superficially static. When we read emotions in texts, we are obviously reading ourselves, our histories, out cultures, our relationships with others, our friends we have loved, those who have died, those who have faded from our lives but left in our minds their traces.

Micciche makes a convincing argument to the necessity of paying attention to the materiality of emotion through language. Her larger point contests the debilitating dichotomy between emotion and reason—as if they could ever be separated by a theoretical centrifuge.

I believe with Micciche that when students are emotionally invested in whatever they write, they will write better than when defending some kind of canned topic. Not only will they write better, they will learn more about writing by having been engaged in the writing act.

Although Micciche links Marx’s theory of alienated labor to her overly-labored argument positioning composition and writing program administration as subjugated and feminized, I might turn it against what I have previously called performative, fake, or school writing—when we ask students to write essays demonstrating their competence or knowledge in order to achieve an external reward—a grade (see Daniel Pink’s TED talk on extrinsic vs intrinsic rewards). Reframed, we can see this kind of writing as alienated labor, labor that is “external to the worker, i.e., it does not belong to his essential being; that in his work, therefore, he does not affirm himself but denies himself . . . mortifies his body and ruins his mind.” This frame of school-writing might help to explain the marked difference between the kind of writing we get when we ask for honest or bogus information.

I appreciate the general thrust of Micciche’s argument, but I have to wonder about the space between what she and I see or whether one or both of us are blind. I wrote in a previous post that I have never “felt” the subjugation of writing studies or writing program administration—and I have often wondered about the disenfranchised claims—which Micciche extensively documents. I don’t have space to disentangle our differences here. I have always felt respected within the academic environment—and I think many of my WPA friends  have felt the same. I think some of this difference might be located in social class relationships—I don’t know. I do know that as a Writing Program Administrator, as a Professor, I have occupied an incredibly privileged social position. And I know that as a WPA, one of my dominant projects is to abdicate disenfranchised academic labor.  There is absolutely no logic that supports requiring writing courses taught by part-time teachers (other than the logic of profit).

Micciche argues extensively that Writing Studies suffers from its link to materialism, caring, affect. I think as a field we may have overly disenfranchised ourselves. I have seen a long history of rhetoric and composition scholars (note the way in which we have linked composition to “rhetoric”) attempting to argue for the centrality of our field. To me, these arguments have seemed silly. I think it’s equally important for citizens to be able to name in distant order the planets in our solar system as to be able to define ethos, logos, and pathos. I think as scholars we need to pay some attention to how our arguments make ourselves the center of the intellectual universe.  I love to write. If I can pass that on, that seems good enough. I’m not certain that this love should be required.

A note to my students: Brainwashed in Writing Classes

Below is a note that I sent to my students about our next essay:

OK, here’s what I’m thinking about this next essay or re-vision of your current one. In general, I would like you to take this chance to rewrite and/or refocus your last one and make it an essay that you’ll feel good about. I want you to include more research, research of your classmates, on the internet, and in the library databases. Next week, we’ll work in class on the library databases—I’ll try to give you some search tips. I also would like this to be an essay that teachers in our program should read.

But right now, I want to talk about refocusing. Robert came into my office yesterday and we looked at his essay again—and we discovered a few things.

First, Robert and I saw several places where he could do some research to give more substance to his opinions. I’ll give an example. Robert thought that women in general were more stressed than men. As soon as you think something like that, you want to research it. Robert was basing this on his relations with his sisters (and the schools they went to), but a thought like that begs for research. Another common gendered thought is that men are better than women at math—again, begs for research.  In general, we hear in our lives common stories and if we hear them often enough, we think they are true.  If you’re a critical thinker, you check them out.

I had another student in my office yesterday (someone else’s student). In our conversation he said something about in the United States, we tolerate crime less than anyplace else in the world. I raised an eyebrow. “Really?” I said. See if you can find anything about the crime rate per capita in all countries. A very quick search gets this:

The top ten countries in per capita crime rate are as follows:
1. Dominica: 113.822 per 1,000 people
2. New Zealand: 105.881 per 1,000 people
3. Finland: 101.526 per 1,000 people
4. Denmark: 92.8277 per 1,000 people
5. Chile: 88.226 per 1,000 people
6. United Kingdom: 85.5517 per 1,000 people
7. Montserrat: 80.3982 per 1,000 people
8. United States: 80.0645 per 1,000 people
9. Netherlands: 79.5779 per 1,000 people
10. South Africa: 77.1862 per 1,000 people

Crime rate per capita per country

That’s only one source, but a more extended search would tell us whether answers.com is overly fabricating the stats. The following source said that the U.S. was close to the leader in high murder rates in developed countries:

Murder rates in Developed Countries

But you of course have to check this stuff out—that last source is notably liberal (Rawstory.com).

Robert and I saw several other claims in his essay that could bear research and substantiation.  Here’s what I would suggest: when you make some kind of claim (like the United States is the best country to live in) that you might imagine others from a different belief system might challenge, ask yourself, how do you know that? Do you know that because that’s what everyone you know says? There was a time when everyone said the world was flat.

The most interesting part of Robert’s essay was about stress—the way his sisters were stressed out in STEM schools with a kind of side slide into the way in which students at Drexel are stressed. Behind this conversation lies our previous conversation in class about stress with some suspicion that teachers like to create stress as a way of control (Robert and I ventured here into the link between torture, stress, and control).  We have all wondered in this class as a consequence of your narratives about the turn in education somewhere around 5^th grade, at which point learning was no longer fun.

We can always question why schools/teachers emphasize stress/rigor rather than fun in learning. I have been asking this question lately—why do we try as educators to stress students out? Why aren’t we having fun? It seems clear to me that if we’re having fun doing one thing, we might want to do more of it. The other side of the coin might be true.

Toward the end of his essay, Robert threw in a casual thought. It was somehow linked to Elizabeth’s comment about grades—about how we are trained to think we have to get all As, that we have to be perfect. Schools, parents, and culture of course combine to create this drama about being perfect. You don’t, after all, want to be an F. You want to be an A. A straight A. I am sure that you all recognize that this line of thinking is connected to our overall investigation of how schools affect our identities—our ways of understanding who we are. In grade school, were you a cardinal or a blackbird?

In his essay, Robert threw in a comment about how schools brainwash us. I told Robert I thought “brainwash” might be a bit heavy.

In his concluding paragraph, he said something about the way in which we are brainwashed into not feeling good about ourselves so that we’ll want to buy things to make us feel better about ourselves. In essence, when we don’t feel Ok about ourselves (which maybe is what our schools are trying to make us feel), we’ll be conditioned into buying things, always buying more, to fill up that empty space in ourselves, the space school has created in order to perpetuate the culture within in which school resides, a consumer culture.

At the end of our conversation, I told Robert I thought his claim/insight was kind of veering into a new direction, and I said maybe you should just think that but not say it. But I thought a lot about Robert’s direction, and I have changed my mind. I think that direction could well be the focus of his essay, an answer to our question about why schools try to stress us out.  But maybe “brainwashed” isn’t it. It’s brainpolluted.

[Names of course have been changed.]

Rethinking Objectives

Two things of interest this morning: First is that I find it easier to write in here (i mean in this blog space) than I do in word, like in my diary, where I usually write something that I might paste somewhere in a more public forum.  I have no idea why this is so.

Second: I'm going to write something in here about personal writing and teaching every MWF (days when I'm not teaching)--and possibly SatSun, the days of reduced pressure.  This is a way of accumulating my thoughts about the subject, some of which will reappear in different forms when I write for publication.

I feel wonderful this morning for reasons I can't explain. It's a lovely day and I enjoyed yesterday with my students and reading their work.  There is of course more to feeling wonderful than that. But when we feel wonderful, we should in some way mark it down so that on other more gruesome days, we can go back and say--there, it was like that, and I will feel that again.

I am thinking a lot about the kind of writing my students are doing and how this kind of writing might or should fit into an undergraduate curriculum and even in required writing programs.  I think I"m going to stick with only one thought this morning--the degree to which we have skated over our students' (dis)affection for writing--and whether we should elevate affect in our objectives--like consider affect as a separate outcome in the WPA Writing Outcomes. I don't think in all of our discussions in the 90s that affect even came up as a topic. Others can correct me here.

The real issue is the degree to which we backpedal a bit on our focus of preparing our students for the writing situations they are likely to meet in other undergraduate courses, one of the two most often cited objectives in our required writing programs--the other being critical citizenship.  Most of us probably recognize that the Service/CC objectives frequently alienate students from the writing habit that as writers we claim to cherish.

If you've read this far, I encourage you to read some of the autobiographies, reflections, and essays on vulnerability students in my Life Writing class have written.

Links:  Life Writing Essays

#personalwriting2.blogspotcom #ipeckham #personalwriting #firstyearwriting #studentwriting

An Andean Flute

I have had a few difficult experiences in the past several days, not the least of which has been my ill-advised zinger on plagiarism on the WPA-l.  These experiences have been difficult to internalize, resort and rearrange so that I could come out on the other side, having learned something that would help me make more sense out of my life and the lives of those with whom I intersect.

Being the kind of writer I am, I make better sense out of events by writing about them.  Whether I let anyone see the process is in many ways the subject of this blog. I began this blog simply because I was asking my students to create blogs.  When I began, I was decidedly blog innocent.  I still am significantly innocent, but through the process of writing these posts, I have learned a good deal about writing, private and public discourse and the many areas in between, and I want to try to get down this morning something of what I am learning.  One would think I would have learned more, having been teaching and writing for more years than I care to mention, but people who know me well know I'm a slow learner. My wife, Sarah, used to console me by saying at least I learn.

I ask my Life Writing students to write personal essays that they are willing to let the other nine students in the class to read.  Some of these students have been willing to edit their essays and allow me to post links to them on this blog.  Needless to say, this kind of exercise is a natural reader-oriented activity, quite a bit better than "Imagine you are writing a letter to . . . ."

I have imagined my blogging as something of the same, although exaggerated by the number of unknown readers as a consequence of my attempt to gain some kind of readership by announcing on WPA-l and with Google+.  For several reasons, I wanted to engage in the same kind of writing I have been asking my students to do.  First, I like this kind of writing--it's how I figure myself out.  Well, I'll stop there. It's dangerous to try to figure yourself out in a public space. I did know it was dangerous, but I know I'm trying to discover for myself something about writing and being somewhere on the continuum from diary (absolutely private) to published book--large, unknown audience (this is all Moffett stuff).

Truthfully, I like the risk. I can't explain why, but I do. Actually, I do know why, now that I've thought about it, but I'm not going to explain it. Key is resistance to a kind of enforced sterility that characterizes most professional writing. I'm not all the much different than one of my students I quoted in my last post.

But I have gotten into trouble, and now I'm trying to work my way out of it.

About fifteen years ago, I published in an online journal an article documenting/interpreting the origins of the Conference on the Theatre and Pedagogy of the Oppressed (PTO), featuring the work of Augusto Boal and Paulo Freire.  I was one of the original organizers in about 1994 or so (it is still ongoing--this year's will be in Omaha, NE, the place of its origin.  In the article, I recounted several very difficult moments in the conference. I had occasion to reread this essay yesterday and I thought I would include here a couple of paragraphs near the end of the essay when I wrote about my decision to make public some of the problems that might have perhaps been left private, reminding me of one of my previous posts in which I wrote about crossing the line [the essay was called "The Flute"].
---------------------------

After multiple identity conflicts and role juggling, the advisory committee [I was a member] reconstructed itself and moved forward.  I would like to expose these conflicts because they reveal the underbelly of social relationships and the liberatory movement, but in any movement, as in any relationship, there are things one shouldn’t talk about because the public right to know conflicts with the individual’s right to privacy (a statement that is itself conflicted by the linguistic social construction of  “individual” and “public”).  There is a point at which one glosses over discomforting issues and gets on with the business of living.  Where we place that point defines us—as I have defined myself by telling you this story.

I know that in order to hear Paulo’s music through the cacophony, one has to see beyond; one has to focus not on individuals, not on class, race, or gender but on the contradictions within the system—and on the possibilities for action.  That’s what Paulo means by conscientizaçao.  I think that we also have to move beyond blame.  We have to stop blaming others and we have to stop blaming ourselves.  But it’s hard to remember that amidst the finger-pointing and shouting.

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DeZenning Zen

I spend most of my day writing or reading and thinking about writing.  I know I'm trying to reforge my identity by all the writing I do, constantly trying to write myself out of who I am and into a me somewhere else.  I know how unZen and uncool my stance is here, but it's me. It's possible of course that Zen is the flip side of what is commonly imagined.

I have a million things I want to say/write, but I've lost my voice tonight for reasons I could never explain here, all of them in a space that simply has to remain my own. I'm thinking about my students: how easily they can be shut down as I feel shut down tonight.  I'm thinking about the tender relationship between writing and self and how easily as teachers we can be oblivious to the almost supernatural link between who we are and what we write.  Teachers have commonly claimed they are critiquing the writing, not the writer.  One might say comically claimed.

Maybe I can let one of my students speak for me:

 I’m writing in the way I speak because essentially, that’s who I am. Sometimes, I wish I could send Standard English and grammar rules back to where they came from. My vendetta against those two are pretty intense mainly because they take away the one thing I should be able to show at my own discretion. My vulnerability is made candid because of the way I speak. My dialect, my disposition and the sass within my voice reveals so much about who I am. I hate that my flaws are exposed to the world when I “be talkin’.” No matter how hard I try to tell my story from a mainstream perspective, I always feel like I’m pretending to be someone I’m not. 

I'm wondering now what my first two paragraphs and my student's quote have to do with each other.  Probably nothing--self, writing, silence, being elsewhere, zen, ~zen.  Maybe I'll put the pieces together tomorrow.

Learning too much about each other

I'm not enjoying working on the article I have obligated myself to.  I find myself fighting forward, sentence by sentence and wondering how I got into this.  I have to kind of see it through--but I'm telling myself, I'll never do anything like this again.  I'll write only what I want to write--self-indulgent again.

Here's an interesting (to me) tangent.  (I just rethought--and decided not to write about that).

Here's a related one: it seems to me that a love relationship is perhaps the most important thing in most of our lives.  There are people (and I've been running into them) who want to pretend they can get along just fine without being in love.  To me, this is just crazy.  I know how important love is to me.  Because of their writing, I also know how important love is to most of my students.  I know they are seriously looking for life-partners.  We're kind of supposed to pretend that's not what we're doing, but that is what we're doing.  The other stuff we do--search for career and all that--lie on the periphery, but we're supposed to pretend that the periphery is center and the center the periphery.

The subject is a bit edgy.  I know that in my class, my students are reluctant to come out front with their desire, really, just to have someone to fully love who fully loves them.  It is of course worth asking (and I ask myself a lot) why I would want another love like this--after all, I'm not in the procreation game.  Across the decades, I know my students are asking themselves the same question.  When it hurts so much, who wants it?

I would like to leave this post here--but I have to remark on something else, just because I don't want to go back to that article.  Where is the line in this blog, which is really about personal writing, between my personal life and yours?  When I slip over that line, how and why will you be offended? How would I be offended if you let me know too much of you? And why?

Self-Indulgence

I'm becoming more comfortable with simply writing something down here and in an uncritical moment, clicking on publish--of course I can think later and come back to delete a post, but if I've left it up for an hour or so, it may already have done its damage.  After a couple of conversations with forgiving friends who have been reading some of these posts, I have had to think about the self-indulgent character of blog writing, or at least my blog writing.

Carra stepped out a bit farther on the limb and noted that a good deal of my writing seemed self-indulgent--and I realize that right now, I am proving her point, writing about the writing life--as I see it.  I want in this post to reflect (there it is again) on two characteristics of personal writing and the kinds of writing my students do, particularly in Life Writing.  I think I first want to talk about my/our sense of readers, the readers in our heads and the readers who most definitely are not in our heads but who nevertheless stumble across our words and on occasion get back at us, letting us know they were, in fact, there.

When I'm writing in this blog, I have a sense of some of the people who might read these posts: several of my students because I usually let them know when I've made an entry (let's call this the rhetoric of enactment); many of my WPA friends, some of whom know what I went through two years ago (there's the self-indulgence in spades again); and some of my Facebook and Google+ friends, because I'm trying to promote this blog in both these venues (I'm going to try Twitter next).  And then there are some people who stumble across these posts and read them in any number of surprising ways, ways I could never have anticipated.

In our field, we generally emphasize to our students audience awareness--an emphasis Peter Elbow has at least partially challenged, noting that at times we need to be able to write without a sense of audience on our backs.  As a writing teacher, I have generally gone along with the audience-awareness trope, but my recent experiences have, at the least, complicated my sense of audience.  I know that when I am writing here, I am mostly trying to get down some thoughts about an issue, almost as if I were writing in my diary.  Getting the thoughts down is my priority--knowing I can always go back and get rid of deadwood and really stupid thoughts (assuming i can spot them).  But while I'm writing, I have a vague sense of some of my close friends who I think will be reading this--but it's as if I'm talking to them.  And then in the distant corners of my mind are memories of negative responses I've received about my writing over the years and a couple of negative responses to this blog.

To a certain extent, all the people who have responded to our writing/being in one way or another are on our backs as we write. I think the degree to which we can shake them off is some measure of our writerly self-indulgence.  And personally, I can say (Peter's point), the more I can shake this audience-burden, the more I enjoy writing.  I know that at times, I have to pay attention to audience (I'm trying to rewrite an article on the ecology of assessment right now--well, it's what I'm supposed to be doing, but I'm writing this instead, writing my way, if you will, into work).

I think I've worn this topic out.  I want to move from readers & self-indulgence to vulnerability and what my students are writing (and maybe, self-authored revision).  I'm going to try to make this quick; actually, the moves are obvious.  When writers self-indulge, they open themselves up.  And when we open ourselves up, we of course risk a lot, but we also open the door to other people, kind of like asking others into the party.  Some people are not going to have a good time, won't like the pictures on the wall and so on, but others will feel more or less at home.

That's not a very good metaphor--so let me try it this way.  In my Life Writing class, my students have really opened themselves up to each other.  Maybe rather than let people in, they have let themselves out--walked into the street and found a lot of other people like them, with the same problems, the same hurts, the same desires, the same fears.  Their words have helped them get out of their culturally imposed prisons (you are not supposed to go naked in public).  When my students discover commonality through their writing and when they write back to each other about these hurts and desires that we are taught we should keep under wraps, they discover writing.  It's not too hard to theorize how one can move from the self outward in this kind of writing (Chapter Two in Teaching the Universe of Discourse), but this post is already overly-long, and I really do need to be working on that article.

But a final word on revision.  You will see when my students give me all the links to their reflections on writing and vulnerability (you can see some of them by clicking on the Life Writing Autobiography page above) how they are paying attention to audience (the class as an audience and readers of this blog as a potential audience [and to a certain extent, me as an audience]) and both writing and revising with these different rhetorical situations fully in mind.  In my last class, to a person, they all said about my linking to their vulnerability essays, they wanted to look them over again first.

Ok--to the article.

#personalwriting2.blogspot.com #personal writing #writing #writing for fun #vulnerability #Irvin Peckham #Peter Elbow #audience #self-indulgent writing

The Space of Writing

Now this is interesting--to me at least: I just want to write a short blog entry today--nothing serious, and I found myself preferring to write in the blog space rather than in Word and subsequently cutting and pasting into the blog.  The choice has something to do with formality, revision, and spontaneity, and it taken far enough might have something to do with authenticity and personal writing.

In my Life Writing class, we always begin with about ten-fifteen minutes of writing in our personal diaries (I think I've said this in a previous posting).  We turn the lights down a bit and listen to music, like Gil Evans, while writing.  It's a quiet, lovely time, ten students (yes, small class) and me, going into our heads and writing about ourselves and our lives to ourselves, just figuring things out.

I had a lesson plan yesterday that quickly went awry.  The student who was supposed to give us our daily grammar lesson was missing, so we skipped that.  I had planned on having the students who hadn't yet posted their vulnerability essays upload them into the forum where we read one another's essays and then move on to our next personal essay--a good one that one of the students suggested (here it is, word for word as she suggested it:

Coming to terms with "reality". Eventually there comes a times when we realize that wanting to be the next Bill Gates or The president of United States takes a whole lot more than just saying so. How has the shock changed your perception on life as you've gotten older? Have there been any situations/life events that may have altered your "reality"? -The Success and/or Failure of relationships (love and/or platonic) & the lessons taken from them.)

Well, three or four students wanted to make a few more changes on their essays before they posted them, and none of us had finished reading all the new ones that had been posted, so some of us started reading and writing back to the newly posted essays while the others kept working on theirs.  Lights still low.  All of us reading on our laptops.  Gil Evans.

I finished reading and responding to two of them & looked up (we're all in a circle); everyone still reading and writing; period half over.  I mean seriously reading and writing.  I mentioned something about my plan to move to Sha'Myra's topic.  Everyone liked it, but they were busy reading and writing; they wanted to read what everyone had written, and that's what we did for the rest of the period--until the time came for our class journal--a place where I usually have them comment on what we did for the day, how the class is going, and where they would like it to go.

We usually have some very interesting discussions about writing and who we are and writing about who we are for some of the class period, but we didn't yesterday.  it was just into our laptops (even for the one student who RADICALLY prefers to write with a pen and read hard copy), Gil Evans playing.

I guess I'll just leave this entry here.  But not quite.  Their vulnerability essays are really interesting to read.   I hope they'll let me post links to them on this blog.  I'm really finding out what students can do when the teacher just basically gives them a space in which they explore with each other (and with me) their writing and who they are--with a little bit of organizing on my part.

These students are mostly juniors and seniors who signed up for this odd course because they like to write (not all of them are English majors).  I have my 7:30 morning English 2000 class with whom I am not terribly satisfied.  This is a required writing class.  I have about 12 out of 22 students who are there every day.  They are thoughtful students who are enjoying the freedom to write.  I have three or four more who get there most of the time.  And the rest, some of the time.  I'm thinking a lot about this class and the possible role of the professor.  And about grades.  And "rigor," tough-love kind of stuff.  And--I can't quite put my finger on it--but the relationship between my blaming some of them for being who they are as a way of avoiding blaming me for being who I am and that space between where no one is to blame for occupying the space s/he does in a cultural system into s/he was born.

Retethered

Normally, I write off-line before I post something here.  Although it may not seem like it, I look at what I've written two or three times before I post it--taking words out and so on.  With this post, I'm more or less writing uncensored.  And that's dangerous business.  My students know it; I know it.

I really didn't like my last post because I didn't say what I really wanted to say.  I thought maybe it didn't fit--and besides, it was a little too private for a public audience.  And it also involves another person.  So what's at stake here is wildly interesting and complicated--the question of locus.  A blog is more or less a public space.  So how much of yourself  do you let hang out there?  I said in one of my previous posts that vulnerability isn't an all-or-none dichotomy.  How much we let others know of our story (under some kind of vague assumption that our story is not only our story) is situated.  No--I'll never let it all hang out, certainly not in a public forum.  I'll tell more to my students, for instance, than i will to others in this space.  And I have some very close friends to whom I'll tell a lot more than that.

My students are placed in this same situation--they have to make decisions on precisely how much generally not-public information they can let go.  The situation is always complicated by the vulnerability-authenticity-interesting relationship.  When we say just what people would expect people to say, well, that's boring.  And I think that's what I said in my last post.  I was uneasy about going a little further and saying, I'm not alone anymore, which is probably obvious to any reader of these posts.  My story is really not about the astronaut who sailed off.  My story is about rescue and the importance of love.

There is some kind of relationship that I shouldn't be avoiding: a relationship between my students and the other students (and me) and between me and you.  Of course that's not a strict relationship, but it's not far off.

Untethered

In the days of the early space explorations, I imagined the possibility of an astronaut being cut free from the mother ship (duh) by in improbable space particle zinging through the steel tether.  I know we have seen this in some movie (probably in Kubrick’s 2001): the jet pack fails to ignite and you see the astronaut floating off.

You might have a few hours before the carbon dioxide filter fails to operate, a few hours of drifting off.  That’s seriously alone, entirely disconnected.  I’ll leave you there, with your memory of things you have done, people you have known and loved, all of it on the beautiful earth below, while you drift off in space, the brilliance of the stars around you.

Since my wife died twenty-seven months ago, I have had to think carefully about being alone—although I would hardly call my first year of thinking careful.  My neighbor’s wife also died a few weeks ago.  She was 42.  I like Matt, so he has been on my mind. Knowing what he’s going through, I should go over to talk to him, but so far I haven’t.

Both of us know there is quite a difference between being alone and being lonely.  We had very strong marriages, which in an odd way, prepares the surviving spouse for the single life, protects him or her from loneliness.  But he or she is very much alone, not to the same degree as my imagined astronaut, but alone, the empty house, the empty bed, the solo meals.  After a while, you almost get used to it.  Some people even say they like it.

I generally enjoyed reading my students’ essays yesterday-the English 2000 students were writing about the significant changes there have or are experiencing in their lives; the Life Writing students were writing about being vulnerable in their lives and writing.  I was a little disappointed by some of the Engl 2000 students’ essays—many were a bit flat, one or two not very well written. This shouldn’t surprise me because I don’t grade them, have minimum word counts, or require reviews and rewrites.  I just have them write—kind of as I am doing here.  Mostly, I just give them the opportunity to write and be read. 

There were some good English 2000 essays, however.  I saw only two Life Writing essays, both of them striking.  I'm going to comment here on one—it was long, as if the student couldn’t stop writing until she had worked out through her writing this problem of being alone.  She is twenty-two and has never had a boyfriend.  She focused in her essay on dealing with that.  Her essay gripped me and it will anyone else who reads it—it was a serious meditation on the link between being vulnerable and being alone.  Like Matt and me, this student is not lonely; she has a loving family and a plethora of good friends.  Nevertheless, she wants a relationship, which puts her in the alone category.  Remarkable about her essay was both her insight and her willingness to come out there with her desire and self-questioning.  Most of us prefer to pose in the we’re-all-right-by-ourselves-don’t-need-anyone-else category.  I’ve done my share of posing there, too, although I know without a doubt that I’m hard-wired for love.

I think that for many reasons, most of us are looking for a life-partner, but for perhaps more reasons, the search too frequently leads to heartbreak and after a while, people begin to pull in on themselves.  It takes courage to stay out there—that was the point of Brene Brown’s TED talk and my student’s essay.  Courage to stay out there.  In writing, in love, both of which may be a symbol for everything else.