Teaching Letter of Reflection

The following is the letter of reflection I wrote for the pedagogy course I took this semester. The course is required for all first-time teachers. I might have sunk without that class.

This letter isn't long, but it might give you an idea of what I've been doing for the past 2 months while I clearly haven't been writing for this blog. Teaching has taken an extraordinary amount of physical, mental, and emotional energy, far beyond my expectations. Whether or not the amount of energy required will change as I become more comfortable and experienced remains to be seen. No matter what, though, the energy is worth it. It gets returned to me, albeit sporadically and unreliably, from students making brilliant remarks in class and students coming up with just the right way to say things and students teaching me about their interests.

Nonetheless, I'm glad it's winter break time.


Letter of Reflection
December 9, 2010

Before coming to graduate school, I supported myself as a Starbucks supervisor and a Tae Kwon Do instructor. While these may seem like disparate experiences, I found that I enjoyed each job for the same reason: each one gave me the opportunity to teach. At Starbucks, I trained new baristas, helped them with first-time jitters, soothingly explained to customers why their latte was taking longer than usual. At Desoto Taekwondo, I trained beginning, intermediate, and advanced martial artists from the ages of 3 to 65. If only the similarities extended far enough that I could have made mean Starbucks customers do push-ups when they complained.

Neither Starbucks nor Tae Kwon Do felt quite right, though. They taught me that I wanted to teach; the question was, what did I want to teach? English, whether composition or literature, was the obvious answer. I have a BA in poetry writing, read to the point of eyeball decomposition, and talk about words like it’s my job. So why not make it my job? For that, I needed to go to grad school. Coming to UNLV was thus not only a new step furthering my own education, but the ultimate litmus test of whether or not I should grow up to be a college English teacher.  

So, come August 2010, the pressure was on.

I began nervously, unsure of how interactions with my students would go. I knew I wanted to run a casual classroom, full of intellectual discussion and aha moments. I didn’t necessarily want horses running wild and/or free, but I won’t deny setting my hopes a bit high. As is my wont, I combated this combination of nerves and hopes through outlandish over-organization. Lists, documents, lengthy lesson plans, and a stuffed 3-ring binder were my armor against disappointment. If I walked into class without any of these things, I felt off-kilter, as though I weren’t heavy enough to be a leader.

Clearly, that state of affairs was too precarious to last. Around Week 4, I began forgetting things. Logistical details that I hadn’t thought through began to go wrong. Collecting 46 writing journals became a nightmarish task involving one very sturdy paper bag and a loss of feeling in my arms. I felt my control spinning away, particularly in the second section I teach.

With that section, I not only contended with my internal struggles trying to balance organization and control with the fact that life happens and things change. Over the course of several weeks, I also realized that the combination of personalities and learning styles in that section would require a different kind of teaching than I had been doing; they needed slow build-up, and firm guidance. The former would ensure that they saw the connections between the different things we discussed, and the latter would ensure that several outspoken students did not sink the discussion.

This was my first big lesson: different classes have different personalities. Moreover, these different personalities have a concrete bearing on how I should best teach. And this leads to big lesson number two: overplanning makes me deaf. In other words, I spent so much time creating and organizing lesson plans and assignments that I never wanted to deviate from them. It felt like a waste. But deviating is the name of the game when real, live people are involved. Luckily, my students were so real and so alive that they quickly taught me to listen to their needs. I certainly haven’t perfected the how of listening to their needs, but I fully acknowledge the need to actually listen, rather than impose.

I could go on for pages (in fact, I did, in the teaching journal I kept this semester), but my penchant for depth over breadth isn’t appropriate for this forum. Instead, I’ll stick with the selective depths I’ve already plumbed, and return to the beginning for a nice full-circle finish.

This was the right choice. Teaching English is the job that all my other jobs have funneled me towards. Some things have changed, though. As it turns out, I’m passionate about teaching composition and about theorizing about teaching composition. That was an unexpected twist whose ramifications keep getting bigger, including (hopefully!) providing me with my first professional publication. I’m concomitantly less concerned with teaching literature. I’m sure I would enjoy it, but it doesn’t seem important in the way that composition does. Check in with me in a few years, and maybe I’ll say different.

But that’s the point. If I should deviate to meet my students' needs, then shouldn’t I also deviate to meet my own?

A List-less Life

I don't know when the list-making started. Maybe it was my first trip journal, recording every souvenir bought on our traipses through London and Cornwall. Maybe it was when my mother would read us to sleep with Emma and processions of ladies and gentlemen waltzed through my dreams. Or I could have been hooked by the orderly rows of numbers progressing across my arithmetic homework. I don't know when it started, but that doesn't matter. I want to know where it will finish.

Without lists, I would spend my days under Damocles' sword, constantly wondering what latest task I've failed to complete or which friend I have snubbed by forgetting a phone call. I would live in a messy house with smelly dogs. I would never change my oil, return library books, or register to vote. I would get up in the morning and wonder what my day held.

With my lists, I certainly can't tell the future. What I can do is make an educated guess about what comes next: off to school, print a paper, deliver a card, teach a class, work in the library, stop at the store for eggs and milk on the way home. Any one of these items could be lost, abandoned to the place where uncompleted tasks go. But my list keeps them safe, like a rope guiding pre-schoolers to the bus stop. My list ropes my tasks in, and sends them off only when they're ready to go. I even have a ritual, a game of sorts, to celebrate the completion of tasks on my to-do list. I draw little boxes for the pure pleasure of x-ing them out. The ink always runs deeper in the x than in the box's borders, as though it were made heavier by the deep satisfaction is expresses. When I complete a list, I christen it with a bright blue x, highlighter or marker, depending on what's handy.

Not all lists receive this treatment, however. I've listed books to read, music to hear, cities to visit, life goals, short-term needs, reasons for reading comic books, ideas for Christmas gifts, important family dates in September, and items to include in my commitment ceremony vows. Occasionally a few items make the move to my to-do list and receive their x in turn. On their original lists, these items still stand, however. They bear silent witness to who I've been and what I've concerned myself with. Each year, these lists swell, mirroring my own mental and social growth. Fantasy novels give way to literary fiction, Ben Folds to Sigur Ros, Rome to Grafton, WV, home of my in-laws. The I-Want-To-Be list moves from pilot to astronaut to poet to English teacher. Comic books and Christmas gifts intermingle as the friends who introduced me to comics make it onto my Christmas list. My ceremony vow list I have never shared with anyone, nor do I intend to. The final vows speak for themselves.

These are useful lists that map me as certainly as any psychological profile. But memory is a tricky thing, and I too often forget how to read the maps I myself created. At seven years old, why was I so intent on collecting all the Little House on the Prairie books? I don't remember anything about them, other than the name Laura and a single wispy image of hot bricks warming frozen feet on a long sled ride. At thirteen, who was Mary, and why did I consider inviting her to my birthday party? Perhaps these lacunae are for the best, however. They remind me that not all things worth listing are worth remembering. For I commonly forget this fact, and would no sooner leave my house without my to-do list than without my glasses. Each enables me to make sense of the world.

I recently took a Miggs-Bryers personality test and discovered that my type is characterized by a deeply analytical approach to life. No wonder I so love lists; they break the world into manageable parts. But I worry about the tendency to overlay complexity with a disarmingly orderly appearance. Life isn't orderly, no matter how badly I wish for it to be. I've gotten myself into trouble by forgetting this fact. I once lost several hundred dollars from the change bank at my Starbucks job, because I could only think to run through my checklist of cash handling procedures. The moment I realized the money was missing, I grabbed my morning's to-do list and checked every place I had been, remembering where the money was while I was stocking pastries, grinding coffee, driving to the bank, setting the safe to open. The money was nowhere, and I panicked for three hours, repeatedly searching my car, missing a Sociology test, and sweating huge crescents into the pits of my black polo. Only then, at another barista's suggestion, did I consider whether I had gone anywhere not on my to-do list. Sure enough, the two hundred dollars sat tucked by the toilet in a nondescript gray satchel, right where I had left it, overlooked by dozens of patrons who had used our facilities in the meantime.

I suppose that story doesn't really illustrate my getting myself into trouble. Thanks to a lot of luck and dash of incuriosity, my reputation and job were safe. The dangers constantly lurking in my mind showed themselves clearly that day, though. I stand in constant peril of ignoring the important if I haven't written it down. Not only the important, but the obvious, stands to be lost. I cannot bear to think that I am missing the subtle nuances of life and being human and aware and lost in the thicket of other people and their emotions simply because I've started to think in bullet points.

Perhaps it is to ward off this ill fate that I've begun my Ph.D. in English literature. Literature cannot be reduced to a checklist. Nor can rhetoric, or criticism, or theoretical schools. Literature forces my thoughts to web together, in intricate and unpredictable ways. Quintilian links to Vonnegut, who references old dead Englishmen, which group includes Pater, who led me to Longinus, who pops up in Quintilian. Intertextuality, both within and between texts, saves me from a life of checking things off my list just to check them off. I'll keep making lists, and I'll definitely love marking my x in the box. But when I use lists, I won't quantify the items. I'll get things done. And I'll let other things go, ignore a task or two, wander aimlessly with my dogs in the desert, pick books based only their covers, send cookies to friends if I feel like it, and--every so often--I'll leave the house without my to-do list.

Why I Am Not the Grammar Police

I spent the summer working at an administrative office at UNLV, doing all sorts of interesting and largely non-English things. I did write and design a handbook, but in some strange way that often felt more like programming than writing. Of the dozen or so people working on the same project as me, I was the only English student. My fellow graduate students were studying in the Department of Higher Education, Neurobiology, Psychology, and surely at least one other department which I've missed. I apologize, unnamed and forgotten department. While working in this office, I became a de facto editor, revising and copy editing almost all the writing associated with this one large-scale crazy project.

I suppose I should tell you about this project. Then I won't have to keep using vague nouns like "administrative office" and "project." Otherwise, this essay will devolve into meaningless, tenuously connected statements. ("Freedom is good. Support the troops.") They might be powerful and evocative in my head, but right now I'm concerned with your heads, not mine.

And, really, the need to substitute specific nouns for vague ones stabs right at the heart of the titular claim: that I will tell you why I am not the grammar police.

I worked for the Academic Success Center (ASC) at UNLV as a graduate assistant. My duties centered on a new academic coaching program which is currently being implemented for undergraduates. Along with two other folks, I designed and made happen the training program for 15 coaches who are now helping undergrads with study skills, time management, and all those other aptitudes of which we college teachers lament our students' lack.

Whew, what a sentence that was. "...of which we lament the lack..." Wowzers, that one popped my eyebrow up a scoch. I'm pretty sure it's grammatically correct. Anyone who knows better, feel free to comment; not being the grammar police does not mean I don't appreciate those who are.

While at the ASC, co-workers frequently looked to me when unsure about the propriety of their use of English in casual conversation. These looks tended to be wary, and mildly self-deprecating. There was often a bit of the dare in their own raised eyebrows. The expression read, "I think I'm wrong, catch me if you can, I know you want to." At first, as a people-pleaser, I fulfilled the implicit conversational expectation and jumped into the breach with a quick lecture on dangling whatchamadoozits or the etymology of "virulence." I did not jump happily, however, and that got me thinking.

Never was I unclear about my conversational partner's meaning. Never did the grammatical mini-lecture contribute to greater understanding of the topic at hand. I was no Santa, doling out the gift of grammatical expertise. I was a Krampus, delivering metaphorical knocks to misbehaved users of poor syntax. At points, these knocks derailed a conversation, destroying rather than enabling meaning and communication.

I care about grammar. I think it's important to understand proper usage. Proper usage is, however, not a goal in itself. Proper usage is the means to the end, which is meaning itself. If you make your meaning clear, no matter any mistakes, you've gotten where you need to go. In fact, mistakes can contribute to meaning, in a way that the grammar police (GP) often elide. In On Sublimity, Longinus writes that hyperbaton, a linguistic tactic sure to make the GP squirm,

"consists in an order of words or thoughts thrown out of the natural sequence, which conveys a very real impression of impassioned earnestness. For when actually angry or terrified or vehemently excited either by rivalry or by any other of the innumerable, indescribable host of human passions, under such circumstances men quit their path, when they have begun with one thing frequently spring off to another, interpose parentheses without any connection, then wheel back again to the original subject, are torn suddenly this way and that by their excitement acting like a fitful wind, and, in short, invert in a hundred different ways the words, the thoughts, the order, out of the natural sequence." (85)

What a beautiful example of meaning expressed by demonstration, of the capacity of language to stretch beyond all the rules we try to impose, forgetting that language is an unsquishable force, utterly and subtly resistant to our attempts to reify ourselves as its creators, outside and above, rather than admit that we all grope our way through it, at times successfully, and, at times, with little forward progress.

Success is not good grammar, though. Good grammar often enables success. Just as often, however, talking about good grammar distracts us from the actual conversation at hand and blinds us to all the wonderful things bad grammar can do. No matter how perfect the opening two paragraphs of this mind-dump, their vague nouns and lack of connection to reality don't create meaning any more than do dangling whatchamadoozits and unnecessary etymologies. So please don't ask me if your grammar is correct. That's not my job. Ask me instead if our conversation makes meaning and I'll happily explain what meaning means to me and what wonderful meaning you make.

New Post at Shoestring Serenade

Having finally given in to my mother's not-so-subtle hints, I've written a short sequel to "Pond Scum," which you can find over at Shoestring Serenade. Matt's sequel has been up for almost three weeks; clearly he is a more talented getting-off-your-duffer than I.

I do hope you enjoy!



P.S. As a teaser, the post for this blog that's been rolling around in my head and should be rolling out my fingertips, through the keyboard, and onto your screen soon will be titled "Why I Am Not the Grammar Police!"

New JWP Post Up...

...over at Shoestring Serenade.

The prompt this time around was Gabon, as in the country on the west coast of Africa. After much back and forthing with myself, I decided not to use it as a setting for a story. Although it would have been challenging (which is precisely the point of the JWP), I didn't feel comfortable writing of a setting I know absolutely nothing of. It was but a short hop from that conclusion to what I ended up writing.

Go check it out. It's weird and I'm not sure how I feel about it. But I put it on the internets anyway, so read, please!

The Use of a University Education

For M. Ire

We are done now. The first year. Graduate school. Completed, reached its terminus, capped off, put to bed. I am no longer the new kid in school. I'll have to find a new theme song for year two. Any good toddler's songs about the Terrible Twos out there?

As usual, however, I cannot leave well enough alone. Despite this semester's satisfying denouement, my mind worries away, picking at the scab that never quite healed from my undergraduate years. Namely: What's the point?

For me personally, an easy answer quickly shoots up its hand, begging to be called on, that insistently silent pickmepickmepickme chorusing at the back of my head. The answer, you ask? 

I love doing this. 

The pure joy of creation based not on a void but on the writings of others, writings I would likely never have encountered outside of academia. My amazement, still, that other people care about these things too. The serendipitous intertextuality that would have slipped by unnoticed had I not been required to read a lot of things in very little time, chosen by different professors for different reasons, ignorant of the sparks their choices set off when these seemingly unrelated texts/ideas/discourses come in contact with each other.

This joy is a flirt. It loves to tease with intimations of greater bliss, distant by just a paragraph, thesis, chapter, book, course. If I can bare the right idea at the right moment, all that has come before, all yet to follow will fall into place, revealing the beautiful anastomosis of human thought funneling through the ages and ending in my head.

That image doesn't serve, though. A funnel suggests guidance, from specific departure point to directed destination. It suggests a move from broad to narrow, from messy to neat. How incongruous with the truly disheveled state of my brain.

Let us therefore return to anastomosis. Biology, Geology: connection between parts of any branching system, as veinlets in a leaf or branches in a stream. How sublime the image. If only we could map our minds, not their physical thing-ness, but the invisible pathways burrowed by experience, education, interactions with others, and the odd predisposition. More than a fingerprint, more than a snowflake, this map would redefine unique to orders of magnitude beyond any usage the term has ever seen before.

As an undergraduate, I fought against the imposition of a predetermined blueprint on my mental map, although I certainly would not have put it in those terms at the time. I told myself and others that I chose English because I did not want to be an engineer, and from the moment I made that choice I wanted control of my education vested in my hands, not in hands divorced from my body and self. And the wound of leaving a school that I loved for a school I learned to care for scabbed over just a bit. I told myself that English was clearly the right choice, because it came easily and offered its bounties freely. And the scab grew.

So here we are,  with the never-quite-healed wound suddenly begging for fresh air. In my mental map, fresh air is but a figurative stand-in for honesty, so prepare yourselves for a cold northerly blast of honesty.

Engineering also gave me joy, although not so freely or easily. But I didn't try. I still wonder, what if I had? What if I had bulldozed on through, decided I could do it, gone for the gusto?

Let me be clear. I have no regrets, would change nothing, and wake up every day still excited about the academic road I've taken. But I must be honest about the roads not taken. They were hard; the effort frightened me. They were not guaranteed successes; I judge my self-worth against failures both felt and avoided.

All of this navel-gazing, by definition, is highly personal, applying only to the exact traces of emotion, motivation, and knowledge that only I can follow from the start of my university journey to this exact moment.

What then, as the title promises, would I say is the use of a university education?

I have no idea.

Instead, I would offer faith. In lots of things, mostly very small, and always having to do with the notion that every moment may burn another connection, create a further anastomosis which belongs to you and you alone. However insufferable the circumstances, however unbearable the people around, however questionable your motivation, however incompetent the system, something happening right there could be the thing that fills out a tiny corner of your mental map, and you may never know that that's how it happened, but you will reap the benefits of being a more complex person, which will some day allow you to combat all the insufferable, unbearable, questionable, incompetent elements of this crazy kaleidoscopic world in which we all must figure out how to communicate across the differences that divide each of our mental maps from each other.

Joint Writing Project II

Matt, my joint writing project buddy, and I have moved our joint writing pieces to Shoestring Serenade. We've both been enjoying this experiment and plan on keeping it up for the foreseeable future. This week's piece was inspired by the following prompt: Something to do with a letter.

I took the opportunity to write from a perspective wholly divorced from my real-life self. Strangely enough, the easiest voice I found to impersonate was a slightly creepy coffee shop manager. I'd rather not dwell too much on what that reveals about my own psyche, but I'll do the next-best thing and dwell on the experience of writing in a voice with which I do not sympathize and with which I would not wish to be associated.

In the mess of writing advice that has somehow gotten into my head, although I couldn't tell you where it came from, the old adage about writing what you know pops up incessantly. Coffee shops certainly fall into my what-you-know category, so a character defined by his position in a coffee shop is actually a pretty safe choice.

As concerns his vaguely slimy personality, I have a different explanation. I've decided to make Shoestring Serenade my personal challenge, my chance to explore the ideas I have about how literature works. Don't fear; I have no delusions about writing literature. I just wonder, with all the literature that I read, about the author's relationship to the text. It was this very line of wondering that got me excited about reading de Man on autobiography this past semester.

I read that essay in Dr. Becker-Leckrone's course in literary theory and criticism, which I think should receive full credit for my new-found interest in creative writing. Reading de Man, and Derrida, and Lacan inspired me to find a voice, one uniquely my own, for my critical writing. What better way to do so than to write in a wide range of voices, try them all on for size? And what better way to try them on than to write fiction?

So without further ado, I present again: Shoestring Serenade. I hope you enjoy.