Notes From Chicago

Jejak PandaSelamat Datang Dan Selamat Membaca
play bandarqThis week I’m in Chicago for the National Writing Project Annual Meeting and the National Council of Teachers of English Annual Convention. It’s sort of a bittersweet affair because the National Writing Project is trying to re-invent itself after the loss of direct federal funding, something they have enjoyed for the last twenty years, while the NCTE is celebrating its one-hundredth anniversary and its 101st annual convention. The first annual convention was held here in Chicago in 1911.

According to the convention program, the first meeting was a one and a half day affair attended by 65 teachers from twelve states. There were two meeting rooms, one shared meal, and the annual dues were $2. The charge for the banquet at the meeting was $1.50. A photo in the aktivitas shows just slightly more male members than female members.

This week, including the meetings of subsidiary groups within NCTE, the meeting spans a full week, fills two of Chicago’s largest hotels, and involves tens of thousands of teachers—the vast majority of them women. One of the most notable things to me when I walked into the headquarters hotel was the large number of teachers sprawled across the floor, on the stairs, and in every conceivable nook and cranny of the hotel. It reminded me of an infestation of ladybugs. There were teachers everywhere! I once had an acquaintance tell me that there is nothing more frightening than a high school English teacher (she clearly had some bad ones), and I kept imagining her reaction had she been here to see thousands of English and Language Arts teachers just swarming the place. I pictured her face looking something like Edvard Munch’s The Scream.

For me, the first day was all Writing Project related functions and panels. And sadly, or frustratingly, we talked very little about teaching but mostly about fund raising, federal legislation, corporate giving, foundations, endowments, and advocacy. Necessary, but nothing that really stirs the passions. All I can say is that we at the CWP are fortunate to be such a long-standing, well established and well funded site. Many sites have already disappeared, and many more will struggle to sustain themselves through next year till various new sources of federal, private, and corporate funds become available to replace what was lost.

Today I would have liked to have spent the day in NCTE sessions, but mostly I worked on stuff from UConn, such as getting ready to take over and run a conference Monday for a colleague who had a heart attack. He’s all right, but of course unavailable for Monday, so I will fly in from Chicago Sunday evening, get the kids from my mother’s, unpack, lie down, get up, and go run a conference!

Tomorrow will be my day to attend sessions. I’m planning to attend panels on new research in the teaching of literacy, MA programs in English for educators, teacher-research, high school-college collaboration on college-level writing instruction, teaching literary criticism in high schools, and teaching creative writing in high schools. All of these in some way deal with collaborative efforts between high schools and colleges, which is perfect for me and informs me in my instruction of my undergraduate, pre-teaching and teaching majors.

I’ve seen several colleagues here, both from the school of education as well as from the composition aktivitas within the English department, and I brought three teachers with me, which is always cool. I love being able to provide this kind of professional opportunity to teachers (though I worry there might not be sufficient funds to do so next year). I was disappointed that I didn’t feel I could afford to bring any of the graduate students this year. I have brought two each of the last two years, and that’s always been great, to give them such a terrific professional opportunity at the start of their career and to see them interact with the veteran teachers who come. The students and the veterans always get so mutually energized by the shared experience.

And as much fun as the panels and workshops and roundtables are, it is at least as much fun to go out and socialize with different groups of teachers. We have a few drinks and a lot of fun, and we meet a lot of new people, teachers from other parts of the state and country, from other levels and other areas of the fields of English, Language Arts, and Rhetoric and Composition. And we also share ideas and hatch collaborative plans, pick each others’ brains, share successes, commiserate, and build or strengthen both personal and professional relationships.

Moving Day

Jejak PandaSenantiasa Menyambut Kedatang Anda Untuk Membaca
bandarqqTill I was three I lived with my parents in the basement of my maternal grandparents' house. About that time, with the help of my grandmother's sister, my folks bought a house three doors up the road from my grandparents. I don't remember much about living at my grandparents' house, though I do remember the renovations they did shortly after we moved. And I remember crying, even though we moved only 100 yards up the street and I came home to my grandparents' house every day after school.

We moved from that house when I was seven, just in time for second grade. My parents bought in Madison, where I went to school through eighth grade. But we moved within town a couple times—once only two years after we moved to the first house, for reasons I never knew, and then again when my parents separated. My father moved in with his brother, my mother moved in with her new boyfriend, and I moved back in with my grandparents, who had by that time also moved to the shoreline. I only stayed with them till my mother remarried and I moved into my step-father's duplex. They took the downstairs apartment and made a room for the new baby that was on the way. (That baby is now in the PhD aktivitas in Math at UConn and has dinner with us every Tuesday night!). I moved into the upstairs apartment and lived like a virtual emancipated minor. I spent one evening a week at my father and step-mother's and Sundays with the grandparents. My first semester of college, my mother and step-father moved again. So for me, that was seven or eight houses before I was twenty, and the longest I spent in any one home was six years.

Amy had a similarly peripatetic upbringing, moving from Dubuque, Iowa to Vernon, Connecticut when she was four, and then to Simsbury when she was seven, and then within Simsbury once before her parents divorced and so began a similar dual home existence. And she also never lived in any one place more than six years.

We just sold our house. It was our first home, and we lived there for twelve and a half years. Our kids, who are eight and five, have only known that house. Elsa is in a private pre-school, so she will stay put, but Cormac began a new elementary school this past Monday, and so today completes his first week in the new school. We're only renting for the time being, and likely will be for at least another year, but we plan to remain in Storrs, and hopefully can keep the kids in the same school till middle school begins, which in Mansfield is in fifth grade. I especially want Cormac to be able to stay in the same school next year and not have to change again. Elsa is more flexible, both because she's younger as well as because she's just that way constitutionally. She's happy and optimistic in some deep, genetic way, whereas Cormac is profoundly pensive and sensitive.

I joke that the next house we buy is the one I want to die in, and I say that because I just don't want to move again. Travel is nice, but moving is awful in almost every way. I want to buy a home that our kids can grow up in and know intimately, where there will be childhood friends, childhood memories, and eternally familiar streets.

So far, the transition has gone well. Cormac has been surprisingly adaptive, making new friends quickly. It helps that he likes his new teacher (especially since the one he left was awesome, and the first he liked in three years at his old school). And quite simply, he's getting more opportunities at his new school. He has regular art and music classes, and daily Spanish lessons. I asked him if he had learned any words in Spanish that he didn't already know, and he said no, but that he was learning to write in Spanish, which is new for him. Amy has spoken almost exclusively in Spanish to him since he was born, but we have only read to him a little in Spanish, and not required him to write at all.

Elsa, well, she can't wait till next year, but for her it's mostly because she wants to ride the bus. Actually, I think she wants to drive the bus, but that will have to wait.

Books!

Jejak PandaSelamat Membaca Di Blog Kesayangan Anda
bandarqI've spent the better part of the last couple of weeks unpacking boxes and putting things on shelves. I've concluded that my family owns mostly books. We have ratty, hand-me-down furniture, old furniture, and damaged furniture; we have prints and children's art but no real art, unless it was painted by an uncle or my step-mother; we have really faded carpets we bought at Target about ten years ago. Our television is about twenty years old and it's enormous. Quite simply, we don't buy nice things for ourselves. I have more clothes from Kohl's than from Nordstrom's or anywhere else. Besides food and utilities, we spend our money on education, travel, and books.

The kids themselves have hundreds of books. When we go places, our kids, like everyone else's kids, ask for everything, and we usually say no, because they don't really need that tchotchke thing they'll forget about in an hour and also because my salary has been frozen for four of the last five years and therefore I have no disposable income. But books I always buy. I buy nice books at the UConn Coop and I buy ridiculous books at Stop and Shop. Elsa has a thing for Disney Princess books that make me roll my eyes, but I still let her buy them. Cormac has graduated to really expensive, hard bound nonfiction like the Guinness Book of World Records or Ripley’s Believe It Or Not books, but he's at least old enough to know I can’t buy those every time we go to Stop and Shop. So he keeps a running list that he hauls out at holiday season and around his birthday.

Honestly, though. Each kid has two book shelves in his or her room, and then four big shelves at the bottom of a large book case in the living room of our new house. And Cormac has a Kindle, too! Amy and I have two floor-to-ceiling book cases in the living room, another two in this odd foyer-like space, and a smaller one near the front door. There's a system of shelves that comprises the entire wall of one room in the new office (which doubles as a playroom!), and then we have a wall of shelving in our bedroom, along with another floor-to-ceiling shelf and two smaller ones. And all those shelves are packed to capacity, even though a bunch of older books are packed away in boxes in the garage, and over the last two years we have given away literally hundreds of books. Truckloads, I kid you not. (And this doesn't even include all the books in my office).

We have one whole large book case full of just books in Spanish (Amy's) and another of books translated into English from Spanish (mine), and at least one long shelf of books in Italian (also Amy's). I have one whole book case just dedicated to African and African-American authors. Nineteenth-century American authors. Twentieth-century American authors. Modernist poets. Contemporary poets. Modern novelists. Composition theory. Literary criticism. Religion and mysticism. Erotica. Anthologies. Collections of short stories. Books on baseball. Travel books. Protest literature.

It's like a disease.

Here's an indication of how bad it's gotten generationally. Cormac had his eighth birthday this past September. I told people that he didn't need things but to get him gift certificates to the movies or to a restaurant where we could go with the friend who gave the gift. So most people complied with this request but a couple gave Cormac gift certificates to Target or Toys R Us, and a couple just gave him cash. So one day I took him to the abomination that is the dreaded Buckland Hills Shopping area, but when we went to Toys R Us and Target, Cormac couldn't find anything he wanted. He settled for some art supplies at Target, but was hard pressed to locate toys he really cared for. But we took that cash and went to Barnes and Noble and he was in heaven.

Some day I hope to live in a house with a really cool library or office where there's ample space for books upon books, and of course I don't want to ever have to move from this place. I want lots of shelves, good natural light, a nice big wooden desk, and a good chair. (In my most indulgent fantasies I also throw in a fireplace, a small porch with French doors, and a wet bar, but that's probably asking too much).

Originality And Assignments

Jejak PandaJumpa Lagi Kita Diblog Kesayangan Anda
ceme 99 onlineI had an unusually long time between my last class of the semester and the tamat exam. My students had over a week to prepare. I do not give a traditional sit-down tamat exam, especially since I teach a writing intensive course. Students spend the entire semester working hard on a full, fifteen-page term paper, so I don’t see the need for them to also come in and take a timed test with short answers to uniform questions. I’m not convinced that would be an accurate or useful assessment of anything in particular, and certainly no more rigorous than what I have already required them to do.

The last two regular class meetings were dedicated to response groups, supplemented by lots of one-on-one conferences with me. But since we had this long week and a day between the last class and the exam, I had many students in my office over the last few days, too, finishing up their drafts and working on bedeviling details like useful quotes, proper citation, or how to effectively conclude this paper they have been plugging away at for the past fourteen weeks.

During one conference that took place earlier today, a student remarked that professors must get tired of reading students’ essays, especially if they are all on the same topic and even more especially if they are poorly written. I agreed, but I also observed that many professors have none but themselves to blame for this situation when they give a uniform assignment to all the students. Of course they are all going to write similar papers if the topic is the same for all, and of course many of those are going to be poorly written, because there is only a small likelihood that many of the students will find such a canned topic of any direct interest to themselves.

My students might have to struggle with being given more independence and autonomy than they are used to or comfortable with, but most of them end up with interesting topics that, ultimately, they enjoy researching and writing about. And as for me, I get to read an incredibly varied set of essays.

This semester, I had twenty students. We read Hawthorne, Melville, Poe, Twain, Dickinson, Whitman, Emerson, and Thoreau. Pretty straight-forward, canonical stuff. (It is a survey course, after all). But the students’ papers were anything but straight-forward or canonical. No discussion of the symbolism of Hester’s A. No discussion of the whiteness of the whale. No discussion of the personification of the House of Usher. No discussion of Thoreau, Whitman, or Dickinson’s embodiment of an Emersonian ideal.

Alana wrote about Joshua Komisarjevsky and the death penalty through the lens of Edgar Allan Poe. Andrew wrote about the entrapments of celebrity, focusing on Tiger Woods and Anthony Weiner, and in addition to Hester and Dimmesdale, discussed Don Draper from Mad Men. Liz wrote about female sexual repression in Poe and Hawthorne, but read additional texts by Henry James, Sigmund Freud, and William James. Brittany defended Harry Potter from attack by Harold Bloom using Emerson, Twain, and Joseph Campbell. Matt wrote about the importance of place in Whitman, Hawthorne, and various contemporary musical artists, such as Bruce Springsteen. Andrea wrote about educational leadership and read texts by Emerson, Twain, Paolo Freire, and other less well-known contemporary educational researchers. Alyssa wrote about abortion and gay rights, and cited texts as varied as the US Constitution, "Resistance to Civil Government," The Scarlet Letter, the New International Bible (used by Assemblies of God), and various abortion and gay rights rulings, including Roe v. Wade.

Bobby wrote about bullying. Spencer wrote about the sea. Kristina wrote about Casey Anthony. Mary wrote about theocracy and Rick Perry and Michelle Bachman. She’s a science major and had 21 sources, mostly news articles but also Puritan texts from the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. Peter wrote about American History X. Alex is a psychology major who wrote about isolation using several relevant psychological studies on monkeys and humans. Mark designed a course on minority literature. Steve wrote about the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. Alyssa wrote about the Byronic Hero, and brought her discussion into the contemporary kurun using Dexter. Laura wrote about the American Federation of Teachers New York City chapter, and read educational theory going back to Emerson, Bronson Alcott, Horace Mann, and Elizabeth Peabody. Jessica wrote about Landscape Architecture, and Gina wrote about Charles Manson.

Now I can’t guarantee that all of these will be well written, but I certainly won’t be bored reading twenty dull, uninspired versions of essentially the same assignment.