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.

Pond Scum, Part I

The trouble started with the food supply. Not supply, really. No, the trouble started with the food shortage.

The pond had always been covered over with algae, a layer that obscured where water ended and land began. In the marshiness around the pond, the distinction between land and water was academic anyway. But marshiness won't fill a hungry belly the way algae does. So in surveying his home, the irregular pond with its tall reeds and wind-whispered surface, Apple Snail tended to notice the algae in the way we notice roofs on our houses and windows in their frames. We only truly notice them when they're not there.

And the algae was most certainly not there. It had been so plentiful. It had been an ocean contained in a pond, a life-sustaining, viridescent sea of sumptuous banqueting.

Now, in its place, swam a sea of fellow snails, sharing all of Apple Snail's alleles, down to the one that patterned his left side with flesh tones above and a half-circle below, making his left profile look for all the world like a half-closed eye. No matter the time of day, Apple Snail seemed sleepy, only partially aware of what was going on around him.

Maybe that's a true impression. Maybe he wasn't hip to what was going on. But how often do we all fail to face a problem until its many faces get up in our face and demand to be seen?

All those faces, exactly like Apple Snail's own, had finally gotten his attention. He had reproduced asexually all through the spring, because it seemed the thing to do. And then, whenever his offspring had matured a bit, they started reproducing asexually, and what had been something to do became something he had to do to keep up. It wouldn't be right if one of his clones out-cloned him. No, not right at all.

All these clones were taking their toll. And Apple Snail had no idea what to do about it.

Until she showed up. Another apple snail, but with a shell rippled and colored like freshly churned butter. Butter Snail laughed when Apple Snail told her his name.

"What a misnomer!" Her laughter rippled too.
"Whaddaya mean?"
"All these other snails, they're your clones, right?"
"Ummm." Apple Snail looked around, making sure she wasn't talking about some other snails that might have snuck into the pond while they had been chatting. "I guess so."
"Apple Snails are gonochoristic, One-Eye! You can't be an apple snail if you clone yourself. We real apple snails have to have sex to make more of us." On the word sex, her voice dropped, as though she was keeping a secret from the rest of the snails.

She needn't have bothered. Apple Snail was more observant than his clones, who all seemed a little slow. They only paid attention to the algae in front of their faces. But even with his observant habits,  Apple Snail only knew a bit about sex, mostly from overheard conversations between the excitable ducks that sometimes bathed in the pond, scattering algae and snails with every frenzied wing-flap. Sex involved at least two ducks, maybe more, and sounded just as frenzied as the flapping. Hell, maybe the wing-flapping was sex. Except that Apple Snail was pretty sure sex included a she-duck and the ducks talking about sex were all boisterous drakes.

So Butter Snail wasted her breathless delivery of the word on a clueless audience. Equally wasted were the huge eyes she batted at Apple Snail as they chatted. Apple Snail was finally moved to ask, despite his worries about the improprieties of drawing attention to someone's personal tics, if she maybe needed a rinse or if he could help her get something out of her eye, maybe with his long toothy tongue.

Butter Snail didn't answer, just batted her eyes again. Apple Snail didn't find that very helpful. Really, Butter Snail was being far more helpful than even she knew. Apple Snail needed to get used to being confused, and quickly. For now, there was a woman, and this woman had brought sex to his recently barren pond.

Check out Matt's take on this issue of the JWP! 

Joint Writing Project

My good friend, Matt Ireland, and I have decided to embark on a Joint Writing Project (JWP). This JWP will serve two purposes: get us both writing and get us both writing outside of our comfort zones. For Matt, I don't think that latter purpose means too much, as he seems comfortable across any number of genres (see his blog for proof). For me, that latter purpose means I write fiction.

For this first issue (episode? attempt?) of the JWP, we have selected a prompt which I will not share with you. I don't want to ruin anything before you get started reading. I will share, though, that I drew heavy inspiration from David Sedaris for my story. Writing about people scares me, so I went with writing about animals. Sedaris has proven that it can be interesting and effective, both qualities I aimed for.

Please navigate on over to Matt's blog (I'll include a link with every issue of the JWP) and check out what he's written. I promise it'll be worth it. (Matt, don't let me down!).

High Tech Fence-Sitter

March is shaping up to be technology month. I just finished Clifford Stoll's High Tech Heretic, and now have plenty of brain food for the next few months.

The book is largely outdated, which becomes excessively clear in his laundry list of failed technologies. In the belligerently-named chapter "Arrogance of the Techies," Stoll condemns those who "waste enormous resources by making grandiose predictions," including that "network computers would work without disks by hooking up directly over the Internet" and that "electronic commerce, based on cryptographic payment systems, would bring a whole new model for doing business." Done and done.

So Stoll misses the boat on a few things. A few others, though? I wonder if he is not frighteningly on the mark. He insistently returns to the theme of the varied quality of real-world vs. virtual-world interactions. Although not always explicit, this theme peeks its imaginary head out everywhere in a digerati version of whack-a-mole. The technocrats predict that the web will spawn unity, prosperity, and an ever-larger and ever-more-diverse community. Stoll takes great delight in poking that balloon to siphon off its overblown predictions.

Over a decade after this book's publication, though, I don't think either camp's got it quite right. I worry that this is one more instance of my interminable waffling, but I'll break out the maple syrup and forge ahead anyhow. The forging will be into a cornerstone of Stoll's argument: that computers have no place in education, particularly for young children.

Stoll convincingly lays out a depressing future in which teachers are passé and children interact only with monitors, not each other. To the best of my knowledge, that future has not come about. Computer usage in kindergartens and elementary schools seems to be balanced with an understanding that each room still needs desks, books, art supplies, and teachers. In all fairness, I base this assumption of how-things-are on one particular instance of how-things-were-in-one-instance. I recently participated in Nevada Reading Week by volunteering to read to several classes at a North Las Vegas elementary school. The librarians were beyond helpful, recommending books at the 3^rd and 4^th grade levels for me to read and inquiring after my own favorite childhood books. Armed with their suggestions, I wandered down the hall to the first classroom I was slated to spend time in.

No one was there: the room felt oddly hollow with so much evidence of students, but nary a student in sight. My guide, herself a student, said they must be having computer time, so we toodled around the corner into an extra-wide hallway filled at one side with computer terminals, each partitioned from the other. The teacher seemed ambivalent at my presence, calling the students to group on the floor around the chair where I would read. She gave them no instructions for whatever project or game or lesson they were completing on the computers. Frankly, I have no idea what these students were doing before I arrived, but it felt odd that the computer activity could be so easily interrupted for me, a volunteer who could stand to wait for a good stopping point.

Perhaps it is unfair, but I do wonder what pedagogical purpose the computers played for this 3^rd grade. They were not unduly ruffled at abandoning their workstations, but neither were all of them bright-eyed and bushy-tailed at the prospect of sitting quietly and listening to me read at whatever pace I chose. In fact, the only moment during the session that the whole class seemed interested came during our post-reading question-and-answer period. I myself was highly interested in how many of these tots asked about college: what was it like, did I ever get bored of reading, why did I go to college. They were desperate for answers from me, a real life human who had Gone To College. They showed a desperation that simply wasn't there as they sat at their terminals or listened to The Penguin and the Pea.

To cut this long story short, the next class carried a completely different vibe. In this 4^th grade classroom, there were no computers, only desks with students quietly doing their work. The teacher asked them to finish what they were working on, then gather around my undersized reading chair. The students all did so, with a certain--and expected--amount of silliness and feet-dragging. They listened respectfully while I read, and were eager to join in when I proposed an interactive reading involving lots of winking and sound effects. But, just like the previous class, they were most animated when the time for questions arrived. My personal favorite: "Can I go to college and be a professional skateboarder?"

Again, these students were desperate for information. The information they sought wasn't generalized, however, nor was it available in Math Invaders or Word Twist. It was personal, it was experiential, it was responsive to their queries. Like the best storybook, I could give them my point-of-view. Like the best edutainment, I come in multimedia: I operate through sound, picture, language, references. We are our own tiny universes filled with both knowledge and hypertext.

So my take-away message may seem to confirm Stoll's argument that students need live teachers, not web interfaces. But that's not quite where I'd go with my message.

Because my experiences and my answers and my tiny universe was shaped by computers, for good or ill. Computers have given me tools to aid my writing, to increase my pool of potential metaphors, and to showcase my thoughts in this very blog. But just as so much that I could fit into a conversation just won't fit into this blog, everything a student--hell, a person--can learn cannot be contained by a computer or the internet. But then, it can't be contained by a book, either.

Ultimately, I think Stoll focuses far too much on the 'how' question, to the exclusion of 'what.' How did I learn? From books and wide-ranging foreign travel and well-read parents. What did I learn? A lot of things, all of which I'm grateful for.

But here's the ultimate ultimate, the tiny doubt that got me questioning Stoll's argument. What I didn't learn young was computing and how I could have learned it was by having computers around to tinker with. So many of my successful engineering friends talk about playing with computers from a young age. I don't mean playing computer games, I mean playing with computers: their innards, their programs, and their languages. I can only wonder how differently my ill-fated attempt at an engineering education might have turned out with similar childhood experiences. I believe enough in myself and my interests to know that literature would have prevailed in the end. But maybe those engineering courses wouldn't have felt so much like being sucker-punched in the gut.

Computers and internet and technology as the answer? No. Computers and internet and technology given some due for shaping people's lives in positive ways? For sure.

A Polemic on Reading, Neither For Nor Against

“The causes of a revolution are usually sought in subjective conditions--general poverty, oppression, scandalous abuses. But this view, while correct, is one-sided. After all, such conditions exist in a hundred countries, but revolutions erupt rarely. What is needed is the consciousness of poverty and the consciousness of oppression, and the conviction that poverty and oppression are not the natural order of this world. It is curious that in this case, experience in and of itself, no matter how painful, does not suffice. The indispensable catalyst is the word, the explanatory idea. More than petards or stilettoes, therefore, words--uncontrolled words, circulating freely, underground, rebelliously, not gotten up in dress uniforms, uncertified--frighten tyrants. But sometimes it is the official, uniformed, certified words that bring about the revolution.” (Kapuscinski 103)

And this is why I cannot understand those who say, “I love literature, but theory. Ugh, I hate theory.” Without theory, we cannot understand how words could be so powerful. Loving literature and hating theory creates a milieu in which literature is merely enjoyable and never earth-shaking. If a few tremors do surface, we have no way to connect them to each other, no way to show the rest of the world how the work we do can topple structures, both real and metaphorical.

In Shah of Shahs, Kapuscinski records an interview with a man who specializes in pulling down monuments to the Shah. The man, Golam, describes the moment in 1953 when statues began to crumble yet again under the weight of released repression. He recalls “the radio saying that the Shah had escaped to Europe. When the people heard that, they went out into the street and started pulling down the monuments” (Kapuscinski 135). Even this man, not an intellectual, not a writer, just an actor playing his bit part to the fullest, even he recognizes the word as the spark and the subsequent piles of rubble as its consequences.

I’ve been reading Foucault lately, and under all the generalized theory and personalized jargon, he makes the same point as Kapuscinski about the importance of words. Words circumscribe the space in which we may act. The voices on the radio announcing the Shah’s departure redefined the space of that historical moment as a space in which stone and metal should explode the Shah’s shape, with the help of the people. In this new space, stone and metal can once again be just base materials, containing innumerable constellations of possible uses, free to be a road, a building, a copper filament, a disordered reminder of the true disorder of life. Before those possibilities, there was only the Shah, and his show of control. The statue, the monument, by forcing tons of material into a single shape repeated ad infinitum across an entire nation, contains all the tensions of a political system in which the appearance of order is the tissue separating injustice from righteous and active revolt. Words can tear this tissue.

We speak freely in our country, but our words have been cheapened. Demagogues on TV, half-baked romances in the bookstores, serious literature reserved for reading by serious literati. It is not that our injustices are so small that they do not need to be separated from the righteous anger that might correct them. It is rather that we have created our own intangible tissues which inscribe boundaries between people. Our country’s words have not created a space in which all action is possible. Instead, our words have created innumerable spaces in which we each move, thinking we are free, but unaware of the true freedom that merging these spaces together would bring. Instead, we defend to the last the arbitrary borderlines that demarcate what each of us can and cannot talk about, can and cannot be concerned with, can and cannot accomplish. In the end, those tissues exist, but our words do not tear them. Our words approach them, build bulwarks around them, bring us always back to our own comfortable space.

The literary debates about text, work, word, author, these debates matter. These debates could circulate freely, tunnel underground between spaces to create connections between them. We could use these debates consciously to find the ties between each instance of injustice, spread across the whole of experienced life. We could find the ties between injustice and the “official, uniformed, certified words” that would hide injustice from ourselves and from each other.

But we lose ourselves in the chaparrals of other debates, which are themselves self-contained in the limited spaces of ‘politics,’ ‘marriage,’ ‘rich people,’ ‘hobbies,’ ‘intellectualism.’ I would say, to combat losing the forest for the trees, that we should all read across these spaces. I truly believe that such a strategy could change the tenor of every conversation, every decision, every tiny shift in direction our country takes. But many do not read. Them, I do not judge, I do not wish to harangue into reading. Rather, I challenge those of us who study reading, who are willing to wade into the theory of reading, I challenge us to make use of the full potential of the word in other media. Television and radio are not the enemy. They may in fact be the saving grace.



Kapuscinski, Ryszard. Shah of Shahs. New York: Vintage International, 1992. Print.

Twitter Me This

I've recently joined Twitter, and was promptly welcomed by my much tech-savvier friends to the "Twitterverse." Until this week, I avoided joining for reasons which remain quite murky to me. I can only hope that the process of writing them out, as I plan to do here, will clarify those reasons to a shiny sparkly finish. Without further ado, let's take the plunge into Murky-ville together!

Until seeing a presentation in technical communications recently at a conference, I would have argued that Twitter was an unnecessary timesuck living parasitically off the back of the greatest of timesucks, the internet. What is the use of yet another social networking tool for those who already post to facebook, write a blog, keep up with e-mail, use all of their unlimited texts, and call their parents back home on a regular basis? Oh, little did I know.

A techcom professor presented a fascinating case study of a group of folks from Wichita, KS who named themselves "ICT2DC." They describe their group formation process as: "meet on twitter, celebrate Obama's election, & take a road trip to the Inauguration." Each separate piece of this process provides plenty of thought-food, but we'll just start with "meet on twitter."

The idea of actually meeting someone new on Twitter astounds me. Three days into my Twitter experience (For which there should really be a word. I suggest "Twittience," although I am open to other, better neologisms.), I have eleven followers, with all of whom I have an "in-person" or "real-world" relationship. Of those eleven, ten I met while studying engineering outside of Boston, MA. These are the people I turn to when I can't figure out how to resize a photo or I just need to mainline some quick conversation about scientifically nerdy stuff. They're fantastic, and provide a fabulous counterpoint to the English/literary/book-centric mindset that could easily overwhelm my life. I feel more balanced and knowledgeable for their friendships, not to mention less like a humanistic, technophobic Luddite. It would certainly be a steep and slippery path to that latter state of affairs if I limited my interactions with my mac to the necessary word-processing and e-mailing of everyday graduate student-hood.

But had I not had those friends already, had I not made some mixed-up choices at seventeen about what I wanted to be when I grew up, had I not met these smart, funny, interesting people who just happen to build robots and widgets and real things while I make mountains out of intangible molehills, had none of these things happened, would I now be enjoying a tech-fix on Twitter?

I would wager not.

But this group who met on Twitter: they found each other through shared interests, particularly shared political interests. Were I to go scouting for people from here who think like me and happen to post on Twitter, I'm still not clear what added value I would bring to my life. The ICT2DC group actually got together in person and took a thoroughly blogged and tweeted road-trip to the capital. Although the experience sounds interesting, it's not one I'm up for. I have close relationships here in Vegas, not to mention dogs and school responsibilities. Road-tripping is a blast, but riding in a borrowed van with five potentially smelly people who I don't know well enough yet to make fun of for being smelly? Pass.

If Twitter doesn't provide new friends who may cross over into real-world friendship, then what about new friends who stay happily ensconced in the Twitterverse?

Cue a discussion of the law of diminishing returns. I have met a fantastical array of amazing people in my quarter-century or so of kicking around this earth. Many of them I already communicate with almost exclusively on-line, as they're out of the country, or leading busy busy lives, or at least in a distant time zone. But the on-line communication reads as an extension of their personalities, an on-going development of adult relationships which can encompass adult concerns as well as memories of good times in high school or college.

I worry that meeting new folks through on-line media would detract from the attention I can pay to folks I already know without adding substantial social or personal benefits. This worry--or fear, even--relates directly to the overwhelming heaviness I feel every time I consider trying to keep up with daily, or even weekly and monthly publications. There're too many, and they just keep happening. There's never an end in sight.

Aha! I feel a break-through. My fear is not that I will meet new people, but that I won't know when to stop meeting new people. Life just washes over you, again and again and again, without even the brief respite a true tide waning would provide. Shutting off entire avenues of communication, like Twitter, is not a reasonable coping strategy, but it is at least a clear one with easily defined boundaries. Just don't do it.

Call me the anti-Nike, but I do pride myself on having overcome this fear even before I figured out its true nature.

But then, I can't really claim credit for that. Really, despite all my mental bulwarking and hedging of bets, I succumbed to the lure of Twittience for one simple and underwhelming reason: A totalizing lack of resistance to peer pressure.

This one's for you, Miks. Don't worry, I really am enjoying Twitter.

Fear of Fiction

I wrote before that I might write on this. Now I have, but I don't think I'm done. There's too much still that I haven't dug up.

Reading Maus makes me want to write about fiction. You see, fiction frightens me.

I fear the criticism it might engender.
I fear running out of ideas.
I fear not being interesting enough.
I fear writing stilted dialogue.
But most of all, I fear truth.

In Part I of Maus, Art Spiegelman’s father, Vladek, finds and reads a short comic Art wrote about his mother’s suicide. For me, the suspense of reading that short comic before discovering Vladek’s response, of seeing how personal and critical that comic is, this suspense wore my nerves down to nubs.

Here would be a good place to point out that I don’t deal well with suspense. I cannot bear to watch any sitcom whose plot revolves around the inevitable revelation of someone’s deception. Just sitting there, knowing that Joey has been lying all along, and dreading the moment--because it will come--that Monica catches him in his lie. I’d rather change the channel, thank you.

Of course, the moment doesn’t always come in real life. For Art Spiegelman, it came when his father read a comic that Art never expected him to even know existed. Vladek’s response could hardly have been better: “It’s good you got it outside your system” (Spiegelman 104). But one could easily imagine a world in which Vladek did not find the comic, but in which the possibility that he find it dangles constantly, Damocles-style, over Art’s head.

And this is what I fear. What if I create something so personal, so critical, so true, that I stand suspenseful, every day, nervously glancing up to make sure that the possibility of a certain person reading it has not yet crashed down on me.

But wait, you say. Fiction is all about lies. So what truth is there to fear in it? And perhaps, yes, the things that happen in fiction are lies, and perhaps even the people are made up. Fiction is not about what happened, though, at least not the fiction I would like to write. Fiction is about how things are, and what people are like, and why we do the things we do. It may not have happened, but it must be believable.

I know that I’m making insanely gross over-generalizations here. ‘Fiction’ simply encompasses far too much for the things I say to hold true across the board. By ‘fiction,’ I actually mean, ‘the fiction I like to read, because that would be the fiction I would want to write.’ Certainly, I could write unbelievable and wildly popular romance novels if I desperately wanted to stuff my bank account, but I’m not that poor yet. Even then, I wouldn’t want to be writing them, I’d simply want to sell them. So ‘fiction,’ in this essay’s context, refers to something fictional I would be proud to have written for reasons entirely internal to the work itself.

Having worked out this definition, I don’t think I’ll ever write such a book. It frightens me. I can imagine, but only by straining and wincing, creating a portrait as raw and true as that of Vladek Spiegelman. In fact, the obvious thing to write after reading Maus is a portrait of one’s father. I can’t do that. I cannot submit someone so close and dear to me to such scrutiny.

I tend to forgive, to overlook one’s faults. I always go for the benefit of the doubt. I would make the worst cop, because I would believe every criminal that says she’s innocent. I am not naive. I am simply willing to make mistakes if it means the world I live in is a pretty good place.

Case in point: with that confession, I’ve hardly admitted a deep dark secret. And the confession itself is something of a gloss. At times, I try for forgiveness and fail. I am mean, and convince myself it was necessary. When I’m not avoiding thinking about the faults in others and myself, I’m focusing on them, bringing them into such sharp relief in my mind that all other thoughts fade away. But then, eventually, I find something shiny to distract me, and the world is a pretty good place again.

This is the other side of my fear of writing fiction. On the one hand, I do not want to write something so true that it offends my loved ones. I could give a hoot about strangers. Even if I overcame this aspect of the fear, however, I would have to contend with the fear of deliberately sending my mind into a dark place that it usually works overtime to avoid.

If best-selling romance novels are a field of flowers and butterflies, then fiction is the abandoned well at the field’s edge, with a thin voice screaming out of it to be rescued. I’d like to think of myself as a rescuer, but honestly, truthfully, painfully I am but a bystander.

Even this essay, non-fiction, uncritical of others, this doesn’t quite feel right. What matters? Art Spiegelman worries about portraying his father “like the racist caricature of the miserly old Jew.” This worry is much bigger than any I can have about the few words I’ve written here. Nonetheless, I will borrow Spiegelman’s defense, and write “I’m just trying to portray [my fear] accurately!” (Spiegelman 132). Whether or not that fear matters to you, I can tell myself that at least I’ve done it a little bit of justice.

Waterfowl Lullaby

after Miguel Hernández

I see you on a beach, one
of many you have been to.
You eat seaweed
from the rocks to keep salt
always at the ready. Your eyes
tint my skin, they grow roots
under my feet. They give
sense to my shape.

There is nothing I can say
to change your hours. Each one
comes and goes, a wave
evaporating into sand.

My sister is an island, lying
in the ocean. Please laugh,
laugh into the wind. I can hear you
in the taste of the desert,
sucked dry but for faint traces
from beyond the places I have been.

The ocean is a sky. You will die
if you fall into it. But the bird
can wave the white flags
of its wings and fall, falling
which is flying which is floating
and each one remote
from the beach where a wave’s
dissolution ends only itself.

The body with wings beating
flies blind and erratic,
the sun has never
shone so brightly.
How have I never seen
your outline pasted
against the clouds?

Now, so far from the water,
the sky distinguishes
shades of blue only
from itself. How, how
can I tell it your eyes
go deeper, you know more
than it will in seasons of days?

Your eyes are the Pleiades
less five, leading only in loops.
They cry out for corporality,
for the death of all illusions.

You remember, you remember me.
You remember each one of me,
and you are the only one.
Tell your eyes if they no longer
see me, I will not cry. Stay blind
to what’s happening
and to which thing
I tell you is a lie.

Nabokov & Neologisms

At some point in Memphis, after my laptop was stolen, I began recording words on loose paper stuffed into the profuse pages of my dictionary. No computer meant no internet, which meant trolling for unknown terms in my large cochineal Merriam-Webster’s Collegiate Dictionary, Eleventh Edition. It had been a graduation gift from my parents when, at seventeen, I was preparing for a new life in Boston, far from their home in Montgomery and my high school in Mobile. Although I must surely have been given the book at some gathering or other congratulatory event, I clearly remember opening the package alone in my room at my parents’ house. The generous windows welcomed in huge swathes of summer light, marking out the shifting rectangles of warmth that I followed around the room for catnaps when I still lived at home. With that familiar illumination, I perused my new treasure, this book that would slowly reveal new thoughts, useful terms, hopelessly precise jargon, and a raft of memories floating along behind each.

The practice of tracking each of these things came to an unmemorable stop with the purchase of a new computer. Mac’s dashboard screen, so helpful for keeping up with sports stats and stock prices, lets you link directly to an on-line dictionary, putting you at just a few keystrokes’ distance from the definitions you need. Searching for and learning terms this way happens in the moment, however, putting the emphasis directly on the need, not on any kind of pleasure or enjoyment of the process itself. You lose the phylogeny of a word’s slow insertion into your vocabulary, the seductive tangibility of the crepitant pages, the numinous experience of an unexpectedly apt word jumping from the page in its unmistakable bold print, as though to say, I’m here! Use me! Pass me on to others and make me your own!

Phylogeny, I looked up while an undergraduate. I no longer recall the source of that word, but the words which precede and follow it fire up the associative links in my head, rushing me from one possibility to another. In the penciled chaparral of script filling my unlined printer paper, the back of which contains the final page of an essay by my mother on Falstaff’s character in Henry IV, Part II, I find the following list leading up to phylogeny: cognomen, opalescent, lambency, lambent, antinomy. After phylogeny come: neoteny, numinous, affinal, consanguineal. I wonder, was this list not drawn from the theory I read for a course on sociology and anthropology? Certainly cognomen, phylogeny, affinal, and consanguineal could slide unnoticed into any text on cultural exploration and family relationships. But opalescent? Numinous?

Now there is a word which I am glad to have learned. Whenever I discover it in new places, I feel the thrill of discovering an old friend’s good fortune in unexpected circumstances. I have used the word in poems and love letters, as a one-word description of my favorite person, to explain the strange choices that have led me here, to a singular moment in a particular place, where I never expected to find myself, or to find myself writing, describing the way words demand to be written, as a sort of birth certificate marking their entry into my intellectual life.

An amalgamation of inconsequential circumstances led me to once again take up my dictionary and its loose-leaf additions while reading Speak, Memory. A lucky amalgamation, that is, as Nabokov is far too erudite for the internet dictionary to be of more help than hindrance. To search online after every unfamiliar word in Speak, Memory would be to invite a distracting systole of attention, drawing me away from the slightly faded pages and directing me to the screen’s eclat, then pulling back again, only to rush in towards the broken sentence abandoned for semiotic insight, my eyes searching for the syntagma where I left off.

How awful to be so torn. Instead, with the dictionary resting open on my lap, it becomes a table on which Speak, Memory can spread itself out, the halves flapping open like Nabokov’s beautiful winged butterflies. The dictionary is a foundation, whose material being reflects the other’s hard covers and gum smell. The two can relate to each other, and I can travel, back and forth, along the path established between them by the mutual experience of simply being a book. No division of attention here, but rather the creation of a conversation, in which one asks and the other answers, all--it feels like--for my benefit.

I wish that, like Nabokov, I could confirm my memories. If only there was a witness to my linguistic ramblings, who could remind me gently, Oh, no. “Antinomy” was definitely in Infinite Jest. Remember? When the boys play Eschaton? Or, “opprobrious”? That’s one of Matthew Arnold’s, back when he was on his religious kick. But then, I retract my wish.

For isn’t one of the most startling qualities of words their ability to shed associations and be seen in a new light? This is how poetry can so affect the senses, shocking us into a vision of a dead crab shell as a little traveling case with such lavish lining! Or slowly, carefully reversing our expectations to reveal shepherds’ feeding their lambs with teapots rather than teats. Just knowing what a word means and where it comes from does not make me its master. If such were the case, every time I wrote down a new definition and placed it back into my dictionary, I would have merely added another static datum to the database in my head. I refuse to treat words as static. I would rather not remember where they all came from, if it reminds me to treat each one as an unlimited province of possibility, overlapping with some other provinces, and coterminous with the rest, as far as the mind’s eye can see. As the user, not the master, of this language, I do not own my words, but usufruct allows me to enjoy their lambent fruits.

This is just to say

I have read
the dreams
that Freud dreamt
and studied

and which
I have probably
now overthought
for myself

Forgive me
my fascinating dreams
so sweet
and so cold