Sunday, February 26, 2006

I do not have hypergraphia.

I wrote and did layout work all day, and my brain is drained. It truly does feel as though I used up the day's portion of words, with maybe the exception of "piquant" and "trenchant."

Saturday, February 25, 2006

I get engaged with the Olympics in embarrassing ways.

Like a dog rolling tongue-out on its back in grass, I wallow in the large onscreen glowing faces of women who have just won and parents talking in tears about the child who has just won (or even just made it down the hill, in the case of the skier from Madagascar). I also fantasize about the sport in which I will finally make it to the Games, but I think these days I watch more for the clarity, simplicity, and strength of the emotion.

And then I return to my undisciplined life of writing on demand -- although now trying to feel what it would be to do this as though I were Sasha Cohen in the short program.

The emotions evoked by what I see -- the transfer to me of Clara Hughes's joy at winning the 5000m speedskate, the joy reduced, of course, but still visceral -- are possible because of TV. I will turn from watching all this back to my writing, and the emotions will carry over a bit, for a little while that I wish I could stretch longer and that will make me regret the end of this Olympics, but I can stretch it some by recalling Clara Hughes's body on the ground, heaving for breath and in pleasure after she won. I can also call to mind Sasha Cohen's fingertips spiraling out from her body so lusciously, and feel -- because of my own memories of various kinds of movements -- something of what that must be, to let the whole of a body succumb into the curves demanded by momentum. Something of that I imagine I am feeling, a little bit of it, enough to provoke and tease and distract me from how today's work on a little book requires much smaller hand movements and bodily embrace.

Because I am fighting with the other writing I must do today, I am happy that the the televised experience of the women can meet up with my bodily memories and make my cells feel.

And this is why, of course?, television and movies are so delightful and dangerous?

Friday, February 24, 2006

the book is out

The book we developed within Jarndycean time is officially off the presses. We have received happy emails from friends and acquaintances all over the country and even in this town telling us they have received their copies, but we have not yet seen the book.

I am not sure I want to.

I will see only errors and what we could (should) have done differently.

The cat is snoring.

Brad Gushue

Schools in Newfoundland were closed today so that students could watch the Canadian men's curling team go for the gold -- which they won, allowing team member Russ Howard to become the oldest person (at 50) to win a medal in the Olympics. (Well, except that there's this: "The oldest man to receive a Winter Olympics medal is 83-year-old Anders Haugen. The Norwegian-American actually received his ski jump bronze medal 50 years after he competed in 1924 when a scoring error was discovered in 1974.")

Curling. The closest thing to bowling in the Olympics -- requiring more strategy but less cool shirts.

Marilyn came over tonight after dinner. We shared dessert and watched the Ice Skating Gala -- except that the ice skating was intercut with bobsledding on US TV so we switched over to Canadian TV during the long non-skates and watched the curling highlights. It is soothing, as Marilyn said, like watching the grass. But we can't watch the grass: when Marilyn left, there was 3" of new snow on her car. We have received 250 inches (give or take) this winter so far, and I can talk about curling with enough sophistication that it will undoubtedly show up, without any mindful effort on my part, as a metaphor in some paper I present in the near future.

Life in the north.

Thursday, February 23, 2006

my own observations about responding to student work, from a non-composition class

For the past 13 years, I have taught (at least once a year) HU2645, Introduction to Visual Communication. The class always goes well: people are there because they want to take the class, and the work of class is always fun, with lots of production and lots of people ooh-ing and ah-ing over what each other has made.

Because I have taught the class so much, and because I know it will go well, I am comfortable with using it as a little bit of a laboratory for tweaking different aspects of class in different semesters. So, for example, when I first taught the class, I would ask students to put together, two times over the semester, notebooks of their work, with annotations of the work; I would spend anywhere from an hour to an hour-and-a-half responding in incredible detail to each notebook, the equivalent of responding to every grammar error in a written paper as well as to larger, global issues. Eventually that became untenable; I simply did not have that kind of time -- when I was a grad student or afterwards.

I started keeping the daily homework of people in class, and then responding to it every 2-3 weeks with observations about global issues that I could see because I had a number of their pieces to compare. The time required was much less.

I felt guilty about it: students had commented on how much they liked the thick and detailed responses they got to their notebooks. But no one complains about the feedback they get now (except for the times I let those 2-3 weeks stretch beyond 2-3 weeks, sigh) -- and the work students produce is, ta-da, even better than when I would spend huge amounts of time responding.

They have always gotten huge amounts of feedback *in class*, from each other and from me. (Just about every class is shaped around all of us looking at each other's work and making responses based on guidelines taken from readings and observations.) So that is clearly a factor in the quality of the work they make.

But what I learned from all this is that focused, short comments from me were actually more useful to them than longer, detailed comments. Although they probably felt warm and fuzzy because of the length of my comments (meaning: "She cares about *me*!"?), the focused global comments -- to my observational eye -- seemed to keep them more focused on the approaches to their work that were most useful to them in making aware progress.

So I figure out other ways to keep class warm and fuzzy (lots and lots of positive spoken-aloud comments throughout class, and so on) and students aware that I am thinking about each one of them (pulling them aside at various times individually to make comments) -- but I sure am happy that I can see how effective it is to keep my out-of-class commenting time short and focused. I do like having time to breathe, sometimes.

How do you test out similar approaches in your classes?

what I learn, 2

At the end of last 5931 Yang described an incident in her class that had upset her (the same incident she described in a blog entry). In the quickness of class ending I responded with assumptions about what had happened, and I was wrong. Yang and I sat and talked about what had happened afterwards, and looked the work of people in her class, and she had made beautiful comments on the student papers.

How do you handle the frustrations of students not understanding how much time and effort you put in to the work of class?

what I learn

It has been quite a week, with much going on -- and visiting classes has been the best part by far. It has been like Christmas, each class a different gift: inside the same little cramped 143 or 144, each teacher sets up different approaches, different ways of being with students, different rhythms to the class. Each class is for that reason refreshing, and might set me off to thinking about (for example) how important the phrasing of questions is for how students will respond (or even if they respond), how important setting up class patterns is (start each class with writing, or with a review of the assignments; end each class with a recap of what happened and how it ties to what is to come, or with chances for students to write questions about what's going on), and how important it is to vary the rhythm of a class (as I watch different teachers move from whole class discussion to small group discussion of a text, or vice versa).

I am reminded, more than anything, of how a successful class is woven out of decisions big and small. And of how the big, more structural decisions about the overall tenor of a class and about how we want to shape our authority are played out through the small decisions about where and how we sit and stand and move and talk, about how we phrase questions, about how we ask students to get up and move, all that. But those big decisions, too, the ones tied to the kinds of choices offered in the Tate book between different or overlapping conceptions of who students and teachers are and what learning it, give us the grounding for deciding what small specific moves we make in a class: If I want to take on feminist practice, will I sit up front the whole time? If I want students to question and experiment with how communication shapes the power relations among us, how do I phrase the questions I ask or, even, who asks the questions?

It's all fascinating, and subtle, and amazing to watch. Neither Fred nor Ginger -- even for all her dancing backwards and in heels -- had anything on a successful classroom waltz.

Wednesday, February 22, 2006

meanwhile...

a propos of some discussions we've had in 5931 about student email addresses, there was an article in yesterday's NYT about this, and it's been picked up on more frequently updated blogs -- with more tellings of why it is good reason to tell students you will only communicate with then through their mtu accounts. (But thank goodness, mtu -- in spite of other loosenesses with our social security numbers -- doesn't use them as our addresses.)

done

The three weeks of traveling: done.
The root canal: done.
The filling: several days later, done.
Hotels for three upcoming trips: done.
Flights for three upcoming trips: done.
Rental cars: check.
Email inbox: think of the time you walked into a goverment office of some kind, in a large city, and you took a number -- ah, a good prime, say, 137 -- and the receptionist-type person calls number, oh, you pick it. You know where this is going.

Tuesday, February 7, 2006

tomorrow

Tomorrow is the third flight in three weeks, this time to UWashington-Bothell to give some workshops on new media, scholarship, student writing... This is with the wonderful Becky Rosenberg who was at CIWIC last summer.

I never even unpacked from the last trip. I've acquired clothing that doesn't wrinkle, that resist wrinkles, that will come out of the suitcase in 6 years looking unwrinkled. I will look wrinkled. I will look sleepy and crumpled and flight-worn. But my pants will do all the work for me. In return for letting them out of the suitcase, they've promised to take over the talking at the workshops. I wish they would take over the last bit of preparation, too. Oh, and if they could get the root canal surgery for me next week, too, and help pack up and move my parents out of their house in March -- that would be a good pair of pants.

I am most happy to report, however, that the website for Writing New Media now works in IE as well as in all the better browsers. It wasn't until I was forced to do email in a cramped office off a hotel lobby last week, on an old computer, that I saw how badly IE munged the website. Microsoft never fails.

Monday, February 6, 2006

I want to teach elementary school

or in a one-room schoolhouse, sometimes.

Today Johndan has a link to an invigorating description of someone teaching base 2 counting through a Socratic approach.

How would this -- could this? -- work in a first-year college writing/communication class?

Sunday, February 5, 2006

home again, again

We came back into a light snow very late Friday night -- or very early Saturday morning -- and spent yesterday catching up, as much as was possible, on email and bills and the odds and ends that are easy to forget when your attentions are completely absorbed elsewhere for a few days.

Last night Mary Durfee had one of her always-good wine tasting parties, with the theme of fault lines, and it was an almost raucous evening where we all told long stories (and learned how hard it is in Spanish to put pants on an octopus) and came home in a thick snow to our little but welcoming lit-up front porch. The cat is happy we are back, and is showing it in the best possible cat way, by sleeping for long and snoring hours pressed up against one or the other of us. For her, we take turns making the sacrifice of working in bed.

And because it is Sunday morning I have lulled a bit through Sunday morning reading, the Times and then across the blogs, finding thoughtfulness in this, for example, on Brokeback Mountain, the writer getting it right (I think) in the New York Review of Books. Jane has good openings into talking about the technological savvy of people in our classes. And Marilyn Manson is working on playing Lewis Carroll, which could, maybe, you know, perhaps be good if he gets the math right. Manson and Svankmajer could make a good evening together, perhaps, you know, maybe.

But what is perhaps, maybe, you know, more important, is this on what happens when science is trumped in order to "make the president look good."