Monday, December 23, 2013

Another (Slightly Quirky) Christmas Season Blog



As I wrote in my blog last year at this time, I have my own way of ringing in the yuletide by rereading old books that friends have introduced me to. But for this year, I’d like to comment on my choice of music for the season. And what I have to say really borders on a true confession.

Like my reading, my choice of music for the season usually runs nostalgic. Sounds are chosen for the associations they can conjure. I know that for my parents’ generation, that would mean bringing out Bing Crosby and Harry Belafonte albums. Some of my favorite memories as a child involve Belafonte’s deep, lively voice; in fact, most of the time, when I hear carols sung on TV or in the malls, I think, “Oh, that was a Harry Belafonte song. But they aren’t getting it quite right.” Most of the Christmas songs, in my mind, belong to him.

But the real focus of this blog has to do with the fact that, for me this year, the season didn’t really get started in a meaningful way until I broke out my The Best of the Monkees CD.

As I said, this involves true confessions.

Trouble Getting Into It
The truth is that this year, this time around, none of the season’s big hits did it for me. This may just be my own psychology, but with Black Friday becoming Black Thanksgiving this year, and with Christmas stuff coming out as soon as my youngest son came in from trick-or-treating, I put up resistance. I didn’t fall for it (It doesn’t help that I live in California, where right now it looks and feels like early fall). And so this year I felt like someone was trying to trick me into making all of the Christmas associations far too early, and I wasn’t going for it.

I submitted final grades and settled in for some Christmas reading (This year it’s Dostoyevski—I’m rereading “White Nights” and a perennial favorite, Notes From Underground) and I waited. And I waited. Still no Christmas spirit. Still no cozy, warm memories or desire to make new ones.

In fact, it wasn’t until, as I said, I got out the old Monkees CD and got into that first guitar solo some studio musician made up for the Monkees TV show that Christmas really started to cook for me this year. 

I started to remember being twelve again. Davy Jones on “A Little Bit Me, A Little Bit You” sent me right back, as though by the TARDIS, to Northern Little League and that summer when that song was on the loud speakers over the concession stand most of the season. And then “She,” that great Tommy Boyce and Bobby Hart song, two giants of the Bubblegum era, blasted forth, and I was again hearing my sister listening to the album she got for her birthday that year. I was back in the living room with it coming over our old hi fi.

The Three Levels of Listening to the Monkees
The truth is, of course, that the Monkees require listening on several different levels to be fully appreciated, and with that I will conclude this yuletide blog.

The first level is the one the TV show invites. This is the level of the pre-teen, who believes these boys all play and sing like that, though of course by the fifth grade you’ve started to see that Mickey, the drummer, isn’t really drumming, and while Mike is playing legitimate guitar chords and must know something about the instrument, the sound track has at least two other guitars playing in addition to that organ sound. And where is that coming from, since Peter is playing the bass guitar?

TV, as we know, requires that we don’t ask too many questions. And this Christmas, I realized that I was still capable of this, that the pre-teen is still alive and well and living in these musical tracks.

The second level comes from going beyond being aware to frankly admitting that while that picture is quite cool and hip on the screen, there also really are some very talented musicians who laid down the instrumental tracks back in the studio. This isn’t hard to go with. People do it all the time with today’s country music and American Idol. There’s some singer with good vocals, but behind her is a class A band of unknowns.

The third level is to recognize that the Monkees are not lip syncing, and that in fact, they can sing and even play, but they just are not playing on these first recordings. But they sure do put a lot of teen passion into those words someone else has penned. You just have to appreciate the whole package, going back and forth between these three levels, appreciating the real musicians, appreciating the talent of the boys themselves, and appreciating the illusion that someone put some thought into so that we could have these memories.

Some Day, Somewhere
Somewhere, Davy Jones is breaking out again into that terrible song, the one I always skip over, “Day Dream Believer.”

Like most of the others, it reminds me of summer and being young. But this Christmas, what with Christmas coming early to the stores, I figure it’s just a matter of time before “I’m Not Your Stepping Stone” or “Valleri” become standards for the season--at least for me and my family.

I said at the outset that this might be confessional. And it is quirky. But for all of this, I wish you a Merry Christmas.

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Saturday, November 30, 2013

When Remediation Does Not Provide the Remedy



I do hear this from time to time. 

"The five paragraph theme should be taught because it introduces structure to students." 

Most recently, I heard it yesterday from a friend. He was bemoaning the complete absence of structure in his students’ writing. The joke here, the point that my friend missed, of course, is that these students who don't know how to structure their writing have all been taught the five paragraph theme.

My friend’s answer to this dilemma? "Teach the five paragraph theme more. It's about structure."

"Do you mean that they haven’t gotten it yet?" I asked. "They've been taught the five paragraph theme, and they still don't get structure?"

This is how we approach students we believe are in need of remediation. When we see the abundance of surface errors and the lack of a clear thesis or even the lack of paragraphs in their writing, we think that they haven’t been taught any of these aspects of writing yet.

In most cases, they have.

What they haven’t been taught is how to structure their thoughts for the current assignment. They know the structure of the five paragraph theme. And they know that the current essay the teacher wants them to write in college will not fit the five paragraph structure. So what do they do?

The answer is this. They try their best. 

And it is our job to teach them new structures.

What the Five Paragraph Theme Teaches

Here’s what students learn from their lessons in the one essay format they've been taught to write. First, pick three things to say about a topic. Those three things do not need to be connected, and the writer won’t need to defend those three things to an audience that doesn’t agree that these are three items to discuss. 

In fact, what the writer is doing is merely stating facts that are evident to most people already.

Next, students are taught to open with a generalization, not a specific case. They are also taught to repeat at the end what they said in the introduction and the body. In other words, they have been taught that their audience is not very interested and lost track of what was said a paragraph ago.

These three items add up to poor rhetoric. Imagine, though, if we taught the five paragraph theme and then followed it up with a theme that required writers to argue why the three things they have written about, say, HIV, are the three things that are interconnected in some way.

Teach that and we have begun to teach thinking.

Teach that and we have begun to introduce students to audiences that are thoughtful.

Wednesday, October 30, 2013

Learning to See*

A friend tells of when he took his first photography class in college. The instructor opened the class with the following advice: "Now that you have your cameras and your pass to the dark room," he said, "go ahead. Get all of those sunset-at-the-beach pictures out of your system. Take all the cute puppy and baby shots you think you need to take. And when you've done one too many of your sunsets. when the forth or the fifth one starts to feel old, come back and we'll discuss where your pictures are going to be found. We'll start talking about seeing."

My friend's teacher noted for them that the history of photography is bigger than what we find in the greeting card stores. Some photographers have shown us the Grand Canyon, of course. Others have shown us social injustice and labor conditions that should be changed.

But he was also used to new students all seeing the same things, and this sameness came through their pictures. These we call cliches. There is probably some deep reason why cliches stick around. Probably they emerge from the same community well that most commonplaces do. But as this teacher was saying, for any who would listen, the difference between the casual tuourist with a camera and the photographer comes down to this: The tourist gets the camera out only on a trip and sees only what has already been shown to her; the photographer sees what is there, which is always more than what has been shown to us. One follows others' visions; the other has learned to see.


 *This blog is from Pretexts for Writing, page 114.


Wednesday, September 25, 2013

Worth and Currency*



I fear the following might not interest anyone outside my own age group. As a post I recently read on one website from a young person has it, “I never like reading about when my parents were young.”

That this one is also about different kinds of faith may give it even less appeal.

Still, as our economy has continued to show upward motion that mainly helps stock holders, and then sputters because there aren't enough new jobs, and then evens out and goes through the cycle, again helping stock holders, I feel I must write about a song I listened to back in 1972. It’s a Don McLean song called “The More You Pay, the more it’s worth.”

Today, I hear people refer to Don McLean derisively as a “one hit wonder.” They don’t know, of course. And attitudes in popular culture tend to reinforce the idea that “what you don’t know isn’t really important.”

I’ll just say that it’s not that simple with McLean. Today, certainly, he is remembered, if at all, for the songs “American Pie” and “Vincent,” the latter a ballad about Dutch painter Vincent Van Gogh, a song Simon of American Idol fame once referred to as “pleasing the grandmothers.” But McLean actually made four very good albums “back in the day.” Some of the songs seem a bit dogmatic now, but some still have great insight.

After American Pie and Celebrity
One of them was released after the American Pie album and included a story song about a faded celebrity, a person of “minor talents,” a former Saturday matinee singing cowboy star. Now I was one day to become an English major, and I remember wondering, “Is McLean drawing on this 'Hop-Along Cassidy' type to explain how his own popular work and the work of his peers would one day appear?” 

Deep, I know, but hey, this was the early '70s. And here was a singer-songwriter, whose song “American Pie” had left him struggling with fame and all of the hyperbolic acclaim that brings. While most today would lust after that fame, real questions must eventually come—some of the questions McLean raises in his post-American Pie songs.

Set in this collection of songs about love, nostalgia, faded celebrity, limitations (minor talents), and self-deception, one song called “The More You Pay, the more it's worth” chronicles a horse auction where a horse is practically given away. The song is harsh, with “The more you pay, the more it’s worth” repeated in the chorus. But at the end, a quiet diversion in a different chord sequence almost whispers, “And where was the boy who rode on her back, his arms holding tight around her neck?” Quietly, an after-thought raises the real question: Is payment the only determiner of worth? Where was the boy—now a young man—who could speak to another kind of worth?

After the Romance
This song is the work of a romantic sensibility, of course, and certainly very much part of the early 1970s. It audaciously questions the value system of this world, buttressed as it is (not too thoughtfully, I would imagine Don McLean would think) by money.

But what else is there for us to base our worth on? Where I live in California, cars, expensive clothing, the right neighborhood, the cool neighborhood, all speak to this, because it is very easy to be cynical and value only those people who can help you further your career.

I fit none of this, never have and probably never will, even as the cultural determiners of worth come and go. For young people, it’s friends—I had few growing up. For adults, it's ambition, achievement--I question my “achievements,” wrung from “minor talents,” every day.

Christians argue that God also has a value system. In my twenties, I sometimes thought that Christians themselves weren’t too interested in those values, or perhaps didn't seem to understand them. It seemed--sometimes it still seems--that grace is so free that we can't possibly understand its value. It can't possibly be real or deserved or can't possibly help anyone. So some Christians I know run around doing certain things, as though they are going to earn something more than others have. Others--this is more like me--don't care to allow it to work. 

The main idea seems to be that God has placed our worth—everyone, from the most broken and most self-righteous and most addicted to the most deceived to the most religious—in terms of the life of His Son.

“The more you pay, the more it’s worth.” Whatever our own innate sense of economy or value might be measured by—usually today it’s a matter of money or celebrity, or now, the new measurement, metrics—it seems there is an even deeper bottom line. I can still hear the voice of Don McLean reminding us of some lost, forsaken worth, asking, "And where was the boy...?"

*A slightly different version of this blog was previously posted in "Run the Path in 2010.

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Saturday, September 14, 2013

Writing: To the Classroom...and Beyond!



It's September and my students again consume my attention. For some introverts like me, teaching is difficult. To want to fall back on habit, or to draw on old techniques that worked before and not be present and aware, this becomes a daily hazard.

With this consideration, I wanted this blog to focus on teaching and writing. And given that already, in the first week of classes,  some of my students have risen to the defense of the Five Paragraph Theme—and I didn’t even attack it--I wanted to focus on the ongoing controversy of how writing is taught today.

This becomes a little technical, but stay with me.

Writing For the Classroom
My students are not blank slates. They come to my courses with a long history of learning on their subject. Some of the learning has to do with facts, techniques, or other kinds of subject matter, but some of that learning is what I would term cultural, even ideological.

Linda Bergmann and Janet Zepernick, two teacher-researchers in composition, have conducted a study of transfer knowledge and First Year College writing. They report that every student in their study “seemed to have internalized a strong sense of the real rhetorical situation of the classroom” (133). This “rhetorical situation” is not of the greater world they know. It is the classroom. Bergmann and Zepernick typified this in the following terms:
the purpose of school writing is to get a grade,…the audience is the teacher,…and a successful paper must take into account both stated constraints (length requirement, number of sources, and sometimes even sentence types that must be included) and unstated (a teacher’s known preference for papers that exceed the length requirement, or a teacher’s obsession with what students typically see as meaningless details). (134)
This school “rhetoric,” which comes complete with an audience, structures, and purpose, has been explored since the 1960s, perhaps first by Janet Emig, who noted that when doing writing for school, students’ tendencies to simplify assignments could be compared to a routine form of “stale art” (53).

In The Composing Processes of Twelfth Graders, her classic case study research with 8 high school student writers in the Chicago public schools in the late 1960s, Emig describes the “prewriting periods” of "Lynn," noting how "the length of the prewriting period available affects the choice of subject matter” for Lynn. When she decides to shorten this period, she avoids
work on a topic or problem…(that is) cognitively or psychically complex and instead selects one that is more 'programmable'…one (s)he has already learned or been taught, and one (the student) has internalized. For Lynn…this schema is for some kind of extensive expository writing that does not require the deep personal engagement of the writer. (79)
Emig calls this work “school-sponsored writing,” in contrast to “self-sponsored writing.” Like Zepernick and Bergmann, Emig notes that school writing has the audience of the teacher, and these teachers’ concerns tend to be represented by the students as a concern with picky issues like penmanship, good spelling, or, in the case of “Lynn,” writing a title (71, 79).

To clarify the problem of "school sponsored writing," Emig cites linguist Leon A.Jakobovits’s definition of “stale art”: an “algorithmic…computational device that specifies the order and nature of the steps to be followed in the generation of a sequence” (50). Emig notes the similarity between this and the “kind of essay too many students have been taught to write in American schools” (53).

Writing is Not Math
This use of “stale” structures may result from any number of student perceptions that lead to their sense of hurry, of short circuiting their period of invention. As a teacher, I’ve noticed that the value the student places on an assignment may determine the time she thinks the assignment is worthy of.

There are so many K-12 writing assignments that preach this school, classroom rhetoric, all of them exercises in structure and not invention, all of them assignments that represent the audience as the teacher/grader, and all of them having a grade as their purpose. And for all of them, deeper thinking, problem solving, and writing with a purpose are "left behind."

In giving writing assignments, I have the hardest time getting students to really think beyond the classroom and how I might grade them. Like Linus, from the Peanuts cartoon, much of the time I have with my students involves helping them “unlearn” the lessons of their schooling,

Works Cited
Bergmann, Linda S. and Janet Zepernick. “Disciplinarity and Transfer: Students’ Perceptions of Learning to Write.” WPA, 31.1/2 (Fall/Winter 2007): 124-149.

Emig, Janet. The Composing Processes of Twelfth Graders. Urbana: NCTE, 1971.

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Saturday, August 31, 2013

Aristotle’s (Indirect) Answer to the Question of Shortened Attention Spans*


(*This blog is from page 42 of my textbook, Pretexts for Writing, 2nd edition, pictured here in the side panel and just released last month)

The argument has circulated for some time that too much TV viewing reduces viewers’ attention spans. By taking in programming interrupted every ten minutes for advertising, or so the argument goes, we have become habituated to resting our minds after little effort. We can’t pay attention for very long. This state of affairs has affected the way we are able to take in information. Perhaps most sadly, some suspect, TV viewing has resulted in impoverished political discourse. When viewers can’t handle complexity, politicians don’t have to explain themselves very clearly. They can get away with not having to talk about their policies and instead run negative political campaigns in which they portray their opponents as “socialists,” “right-wingers,” “cowboys,” “friends of terrorists,” or whatever current “devil terms” are enjoying cultural currency.

In the 4th century, BCE, Aristotle noted something similar about attention spans. When attending to a speech—though TV was nowhere to be seen—most people were not trained in concentration. It was Aristotle’s view that people could only listen to so much in a speech and still follow it. For this reason, he noticed, the most effective public speakers tended to rely on shortened syllogisms, or chains of reasoning, which drew on what he referred to as commonplaces and opinions, sources of reason where groups of people found agreement and shared assumptions (42). These commonplaces might or might not have much reasonable support, but they were found by most members of a culture to be persuasive and intuitively correct.

One example of a commonplace found today, certainly, is this notion that watching television shortens one’s attention span. Again, this is a statement that may or may not be true, and it may or may not be supported by evidence. The important part of it is that it is recognizable as an intuitively correct possibility, which then encourages social assent. And, of course, it can be either confirmed or contested. That is, it can itself be debated.


Work Cited
Aristotle. On Rhetoric: A Theory of Civic Discourse. Trans. George A. Kennedy. New York: Oxford UP, 1991.

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