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.