A Day in the Life

I have the honor to work with a small group of committed teachers in the Seven Valleys Writing Project who have been thinking hard about their practice, their craft, in a way that's both generous and critical. We've managed, I think, to hit that sweet spot between our impossible aspirations and the easy "business as always" model. Like a carpenter or lawyer, trash collector or dancer, we wake up every day with the goal of accomplishing things. We have a plan, skill, experience and a lot of unknowns, and we are evaluated on our performance. I'd like to pause for a minute to say that, although it seems obvious,our work really is a "performance": we are operating on a tight-wire held on one end by our training and on the other end by the expectations of our students, colleagues, national affiliations, department, collage and discipline.

 I want to talk today about the challenges of their performance. We in Seven Valleys have been talking about ourselves as teachers, about our identity, the one we create through our practice and the one handed to us, and and how these two fit -- and don't fit.  Here is my reflective piece:

I suspect that the image of a teacher -- in my case that of a college writing teacher in a rural New York college -- is skewed, sometimes slightly and sometimes beyond recognition, by conventional images.  As a teacher-character, I would never make a compelling character in a movie or novel, I'm afraid, and a sitcom based on my teaching work would be both strange and more sit than com. It's hard even for those who have been to college to get a good snapshot of what a classroom day would look like.

My character does adhere to some of the conventions: I have a grey beard, I don't iron well or frequently, and sometimes what I am reading is as real to me as the hallways and offices where I spend most of my time. I get lost driving. I have trouble matching colors. I can quote from lots of dead people.

In the movies, male college teachers teach with the confidence of Moses parting the Red Sea, usually on great literature that gives their students purpose. (There is a sub-genre of the college English teacher cliché where English teachers get disaffected students and heroically convert them to the discourse of high literature, represented always by the august plays of Shakespeare, and in result watching them drop their gangster ways and become deeply civil with each other. In one, Marky Mark makes a rap song out of Romeo and Juliet, gets married to a nice white girl and buys a Subaru. Ok, I may be exaggerating. And he was a high school teacher, but the cultural context still applies). In the movies the teachers are always trying to sleep with their students, get drunk, smoke pot and quote more Shakespeare.  I don't really fit well in those images.

But the reality for a college writing teacher, much like that of a medical doctor, is that we are actually bureaucrats. For every arresting moment, there is the academic equivalent of reading drug interaction warnings or driving around town in the squad car. I sit through endless meetings where we discuss how there is no money for the initiatives the college requires us to perform; writing recommendations; advising students; sending email. The last is the most uninteresting. Though it is technically "writing," my email writing consists of well-crafted five-sentence explanations of a problem and the necessary solution. My latest drama consisted of finding ways to get the registrar to lift the electronic block that kept a certain course from being offered in the fall of 2011 before advising. Finding someone with enough clout to change this situation took me most of a morning; writing the emails took an hour; calling on the phone took fifteen minutes; the followup to my colleagues, the chair, the registrar, the person-with-clout, and the potential teacher took the rest of the afternoon. That's why I take papers home.

If you made a film of my professional life and stayed in through thick and thin, eventually you would indeed get a picture of me standing, bearded, in front of a class of undergrads with my hand in the classic "holding the grapefruit" position. I do lecture. I sometimes do know more than my students about the history and context of things, and my job in some ways is to make connections between the things my students say and write. In fact, with James Porter in his influential article "Intertextuality and the Discourse Community," my job is often to weave together scraps of text--spoken and written--into an intertextual whole. But the point of the class is not--as is often assumed and well described by the two Thomases (Thomas Patterson and Thomas Crumpler) in "Slow Transformation"--to test students on their ability to interpret literature in the way I want them to. In fact--and this is rather radical and a good argument why tenure is needed--I don't teach literature. I love it, I read it, I hope to sometimes write it, but I don't teach it. So what, in the 20% of my time that I actually spend in the classroom, does this writing teacher do?

I teach students how to become writers by having them write, collaborate, revise and read.  I help them find things that need to be said about our reading and their lives  (and why those texts needed to be written).  The whole goal is not to increase their abstract "skills" but to help them learn those skills by writing important things.  They don't write great literature.  That's an absurd goal -- they haven't lived enough, written enough.   But they are absolutely capable of making meaning by assembling and ordering and explaining what they see as important.  For instance, recently we've been reading zombie fiction from Max Brooks.  That stuff is a lament, a reflection on a fallen world.  Me, I see it as stylized grief for the human and natural degradation we gleefully participate in daily.  Each of us is becoming less "natural" and less human.  But the theory isn't as important as these first-person narratives they write.  My students need to take on this voice -- they need to weave their own personal towns, friends, and griefs into these strange post-apocolyptic narratives.  In my class, these kids were able to produce some of the most exciting and powerful writing that I've read in years.  Several of them said that their zombie pieces were their "best writing ever."  Now, I'm sure that won't be true for long.  But the fact that they can identify something as their "best ever" implies a trajectory, a developmental arc -- and ability to change and grow, to improve.  And that, really, is what I do.  I help kids draw an arc of themselves as writers, attending to their "skills," abilities, interests, drive, audience and curiosity.  That is what I do -- when I'm not writing emails.

Stories

(In 2010 I was lucky enough to sit in on the Seven Valleys Writing Project's first Open Institute, a six-day intense hands-on technology seminar -- my experience from that first day stays with me and made me think about stories in a new way, which I share below). 


The Open Institute was devoted to MAKING: teaching strategies, practical knowledge, connections with other teachers, radical claims about technology, ways to teach writing.  What struck me was the deep way the participants, all teachers, were thinking.  At one point we were discussing whether speech transcribed was writing — that is, what’s unique about writing, what’s special about it.  What does it do that speech (or video) doesn’t do?  Lots: it makes the writer’s understanding proceed word by word, creating an extraordinary sensitivity to the meanings of words (or just driving the writer crazy with the complexity and the surging surplus of it all) — their rhymes, allusions, homophones, histories, syntax, etymology, and the like.  Walter Ong lists a lot more of this in his articles, and Bob Yagelski picks up on this in his (http://www.nwp.org/cs/public/print/resource/3220).  R.D. Walshe also adds some wonderful thoughts in this vein in his "Learning Power of Writing" (English Journal, 1987).  What got me enthused from stopping in is that the group was able to grab on to fundamental questions, not just safe ones such as “Does spellcheck make writers lazy” or “How do we protect kids from pornography on the web?” or even "Does Google make us stoopid?" 

Yet what struck me then and still engages me is the discussion about stories.  The teachers were saying that classrooms are really story factories.  That stories are attempts to make meaning, to find explanations for complexity and to arrive at satisfactory endings.  How stories are all we really share when we talk about process, history, development, reflection, and learning.  How stories are really the big challenge of FORM: finding a beginning, a buildup, a payoff.  I racked my mind looking for a genre that had no narrative.  A time-less collection of data with no beginning, middle, or end.  I guess painting might not “tell a story” sometimes.  An index.  A grocery list.  But just as any circle, no matter how un-face-like, will become very face-like if you put two eye-dots anywhere in it (try it, you’ll see), any list of more than one item starts to become a story, something that Stanley Fish discovered in his essay “How to Recognize a Poem When You See One."

So the real issue becomes, for us as teachers and students, what do we want our stories to do?  Whatever the answer, I am pretty sure everyone wants their stories to be memorable, sticky (pace Malcolm Gladwell), even transformative and restorative.  But what would such a story look like?  I can be sure that it’s a story that develops over time and grows up—that is, starts to accumulate a history, the callouses and shine that comes from frequent re-telling.  It starts to play a role, the characters become mythologized, the act of telling the story is socially sanctioned (or creates a social situation) that is recognized by others.  In other words, our stories start to tell stories about us when they are taken up as a collective, not just by one storyteller in first person.  One way to think of the purpose of the classroom is not as a tarmac for developing skills or knowledge, but as a campfire meant to elicit the art of storytelling in teachers and students.  If we do this through technology, great.  But whatever medium we use, the problems ultimately are of storytelling, not of spellcheck or pornography (though those are the sorts of stories that are more convenient and lurid to tell).  This Seven Valleys group was able to push for better stories regarding technology, and I found that thrilling.


And this is my story of that event.

Schematics

So I went into the basement the other night, back a long stretch of weeks ago, before my father died, and started rooting around in the tall metal stack of junk amps I have there, most of them found at the side of the road and hauled home in my trunk.  I dug for a while and exhumed this really lovely Kenwood amp, the same kind I used through college, but this one was my Dad’s and had been shorted it out at the speaker wires.  My dad really never understood how anything mechanical worked.  His wiring mistake had killed the power supply section.  It was powerful its prime (dual mono power amplifiers), rugged and mechanical all the way through (no computerized functions and twitchy delicacies like that).  It was amazingly heavy, an anvil of an amp, and I rescued it from his house years ago when he moved into assisted living.  When I got home to New York I just threw it into the basement.  Too nice to toss, too damaged to use, too expensive to repair.  So one day, given that I had tons of papers to grade, recommendations to write, emails to send and bills to pay,  pulling the amp out of the basement and plugging it up — just to test it, purely out of curiosity, won’t take but a minute — seemed like a sensible choice. 

           

I’ve been messing around listening to old music lately, mostly because of Pandora.com.  I can aim my musical compass at one band or guitarist or song, letting the invisible algorithms shuffle songs all day long.  My wife and I set it to play on autopilot while we were preparing for Thanksgiving.  Cleaning the kitchen was done to a flock of songs in a Tommy Bolin vibe; the living room was vacuumed to Walter Trout and The Black Keys; the dining room got Bach and those guys.  We argued intensely through a Neko Case playlist and made up to Peter Green.  You cover a lot of ground that way.  Sarah Vowell says in her book on the Puritans that the Indians of the time – the ones the Puritans exterminated, of course – were in the habit of calling any excellent thing “Manitou,” the name of their Higher Power.  Any form of excellence would count: A great mountain lion (they were everywhere back then), a storm, a true speech, surprising immunity to smallpox – all Manitou.  I think of it as saying “There is spirit moving in there.”  So that’s what I heard while we were prepping for Thanksgiving – a lot of songs with the spirit moving in them.  It doesn’t seem a bad way to think of a Higher Power’s manifestations, as well-wrought tones, not stentorian voices.  As displays of power and grace in motion, not diplomas or assertions.  It was fall and the hillside behind our house was still senescent  and the light was weightless and fair, coming in now at quite an angle, the cusp of the season, the place between two worlds.

Tracing my mind over old songs is strange because they were first embossed in my mind when I was between 14 and 30.  I bet the same is true for most of us.  I heard somewhere that some species of birds learn songs not from their DNA, but learn them from their own species – which means birdsongs would change slowly over time.  Would we even recognize the call of a medieval North American meadowlark, singing to the oblivious mammoths and saber-toothed tigers?  What a delight to even contemplate the tenor of that ancient accent.  We are desperate to know the lyrics of our own species, that I’m sure of.  I remember ritualistically, intently, writing all the words to Neil Young’s “Needle and the Damage Done” on the side of a yellow forklift at some low-paying high-ceilinged warehouse when I was eighteen and working in Chicago.  I suspect these tribal songs perform a biological role, locking us in to a people and a history, marking us as members of a particular village or tribe. It’s a watermark on your heart that you can still see if you hold it up to the light just right.  Although the songs I know best were in fact distributed by mega-corporations trying to get rich, it doesn’t matter.  It’s still my history and it’s still the moment of history that shaped me. I’ve tried to be cool and avoid looking like I value things that might mark me as an nostalgic fuddy-duddy, but I don’t care about that any more.  I can listen to most old songs much better than I can listen to, say, the Black Eyed Peas. (I have no idea how one would actually sit down and listen to that music.  I think it is meant to play in the background while you aerobicize with weights or dance with drunk girls. Neither of these occasions presented itself recently at my house, so I have to admit to speaking without experience).  Traffic’s Low Spark of High-Heeled Boys, I can understand.  I know how to pay attention to the pacing and the suffering, their amateurishness and wonder. 

So I carried the heavy, dark, glinting, arcane, stainless-steel amp upstairs.  I flicked it on, waited impatiently, and turned it off.  Dead as a doornail.  But then it occurred to me.  Though the power amp part was dead, I really liked the front section of this machine, the part called the "pre-amp" that that controls the volume and tone, the expensive feel in the massive volume control, so I looked around online and found a post from someone who was thinking like me.  He said that he was able to open up a similar amp and cut the right wires, solder in a connection, and pipe the signal to an external power amp.  This is just the degree of Macgyvering and hacking that so appeals to me.  Nifty bypass. When I find a piece of furniture on the side of the road, it becomes mine only when I can take it apart and rebuild it, repairing it with paint, compression clamps, solder, glue or solvent.  If I just carry it indoors and set it down, what’s the point?  Unless it involves me in some way, why bother?  How can you care about something if you don’t have a history with it?

Finding the schematics for the Kenwood wasn’t easy.  People want to sell that sort of electrical information to you, not give it away for free, so I searched until I found a discussion list where I caught wind of a Russian website that might still carry the info.  I went to Russia from my living room, got a password, and started searching for my particular amplifier’s info.  During my time following down clues on the computer, sitting there as I do for many hours a day at work, watching the screen, I was thinking about a conversation about music I had with a friend a few years ago (you can tell that by now this minor project of just “plugging up the amp” has become a side project).  This guy—a good singer, very knowledgeable about bands, songs, artists, dates, instruments—he and I were listening to some Wal-Mart-quality blues guitar – no one memorable.  The guitarist would make some runs in one key, then make some runs in another with all the grace of someone setting a table – fork here, knife there, all correct – but there was no development, no call and response, no storyline to the music.  The tone was generic, the statement was muddy even if the notes were clear and I complained about this to my friend – the guitarist was hitting the correct notes, but not really saying anything.  If he were a writer, we’d say he had no “voice.”

But my friend, he had no idea what I was talking about.  He doubted all this “development” or “storyline” stuff.  He had no concept of the blues “completing” a statement or coming back to reiterate a point. It was all just a package of notes, just sound, a notch above noise.  He reminded me of my college kids who read a poem and think the figurative language is just padding to the poem’s Real Point.  The guitar, to my friend, was padding, a bridge back to the singer.   So I’m thinking about this, amazed that this guy didn’t get it, and wondering what he did hear when he listened to guitar music.  And I’m thinking of the guitarists who can haunt, celebrate and testify with their guitar, vindicate with their guitar, quote Scripture with it.  They can carry on a conversation and yet assert the Noble Truth that human suffering is undeniable and demands to be confronted.  What is and what should never be – that is what Mr. Page laments as eloquently as Mr. Plant.  What Dicky Betts and Walter Trout understand. 

So I got the schematics. They were in English, not Russian, but it hardly mattered.  They were still a maze.  They had the same abstract relation to the actual amplifier wiring as subway maps have to the subway tunnels, but without labels, colors, or people sitting around to give me advice about taking getting off at the next stop.  The schematic diagram was simplified, and, of course, two dimensional.  The actual wires dove into and under printed circuit boards, thorough obscure knobs and switches.  They emerged unpredictably as a snake popping out of a woodpile.  But after a while it started to make some sense.  I sought and found the three wires, right, left and ground, that passed through a gap between the front and back of the amp, between the controls and the power, three thin threads that carried the decisions about tone, volume, balance and such to the primitive cerebellum of the machine, the power amp section.  They were thin as nerves, and I was thrilled to find them.  I could almost touch the solution.  As I closed in, I noticed how well made this whole thing was inside – neat and thought through. The source selector was on a long rod that ended in a delightful device in which a ball bearing rolled inside a ring under a taut metal tongue; to make the right connection, the bearing would snap into a little indent in the inside of the ring, held there by the tongue.  The ball bearing was a perfect conducting surface – it was metal, it rolled, so it wouldn’t get gummed up, and it would be impossible to break.  Very cool.  Some Japanese guy thought of that while in the shower one day and probably burst from the shower shouting “Eureka” and running naked through the streets of Fukuoka.  I would have done the same, I’m pretty sure, but might try shouting “Manitou" because an eloquent jig like that definitely reveals a spirit moving through it.

So on Craigslist (another apostrophe dies) I found this old Onkyo power amp to take over for my Kenwood’s power amp, a huge monster with giant VU meters that glow yellow while the huge capacitors are filling and then changes to green when everything’s ready.  Powerful, yeah, but it’s those old-school meters that I wanted, big as a billboard and expensive.  I called the guy, talked him down, figured it was hot, and before I went over to buy it, I decided to give the Kenwood one last chance.  With a pair of little bookshelf speakers, I plugged the amp in and turned it on.  Nothing. 

As for my dad’s death, there are rivers of words and plains of silence to explain that, but in the end, I can’t really.  This is what it felt like, though: "nothing you can say."  I feel silly for even mentioning it since I’m not exactly the first child to lose a parent and because the event was, any way you look at it, a tiny bit more tragic for my father than for me.  But somewhere in this narrative he died, and it might well have been here, while I was standing in the room, in an empty house, listening closely.  Waiting patiently, playing with my childhood toys.

For at least a minute, nothing.  But deep into the second minute, deep inside the steel box, a loud “ping” sounded. After fiddling with it, the room was filled with music.  There is no way this can be, but it works [now some weeks later, it still works.]  It works!  Wonderful!  I suspect it always worked — I was just never patient enough to wait for it.  In my rushing, forcing myself through the last few years of raising kids and watching my parents decline, buying houses and falling in love and climbing the ladder at work, I assumed the amp was broken because at no point could I stand still like that, in an empty house, listening.  So I unplug it all, find some stainless steel polish, Q-tips and a steel wool pad.  I clean it meticulously.  It shines like a wet rock.  Ok, I know it might be slightly wishful thinking, but right now I’m listening to Pink Floyd’s Dark Side of the Moon and the detail and separation are great.  Here is what I think: the past sounds better through this amp than any other.  I think: it’s a machine for reverence.  Against the backdrop of dark chords I quietly sing:

Far away across the field /

The tolling of the iron bell 
/

Calls the faithful to their knees /

To hear the softly 
spoken 
              magic 
                           spells.

My memories are getting watery.  I think I recall long ago sitting in the basement room of my parents’ house listening to that song in the middle of a winter night, my back to the sliding glass doors, thinking about the future and the past.  I seem to remember the pattern on the couch, the taste of the cigarette, the way the light played on the wall across from me.  As a young man everything was the future, and the future was opaque. It was like driving into fog on an unfamiliar road, and you’re late, and you’re not very sure you even want to be there. And then one day, after enough people die and you start to see the mortal rhythm, after you sense a time signature emerge from the noise, you see that the latest wave of musicians — those generations at their song — have grown old and failed to prove themselves immortal.  And you’re surprised!  —which itself seems strange to you, since you saw this coming, even then, even now as you are standing there in an empty house in one season or another, waiting for some sort of resolution, for your life to fall into place and start making sense.  And do you at that solitary moment sense the way ahead coming clear, more clear maybe than you want it to be?  Do you know when you pass over that moment?  When you hear the spirit moving through it? Is that where the belief starts, when you start to suspect that learning to play the blues, learning to bend your oh-so-suffering heart to the living day seems not so much a cheap cliché as a schematic for living rigorously?  And with joy?  

Gratitude

didn’t appear with angels,

though they’d be nice, all that hubbub

and buzz and the onerous nod from above.

It’s more like the flump at the top

when the stair runs out of steps

before you do, or the basketball

you threw in desperation

that hits the rim for three

bounces, then finds its way

through the simple middle.

Or it appears this morning,

unfolding myself from a dark bed

like a letter to the day

and knowing what to do,

happy to carry a thermos of coffee

to the car and stand under the vague sky,

stars letting in light like bullet holes

over new snow, over
the car that starts while the heater

does its good work.  A straw of dark
steam rises from my chimney 
and the ashy light falls down on us
( & x 1000 sleeping houses), 

all my brothers and sisters and me.