Writing Maternity

Happy Halloween

The candy riot is over and the young ladies tucked snug in their beds.  The Towhead-Wiggle clan came to our house for trick-or-treating, and so three of the parents trailed the big girls (towing the little girls in a wagon until they realized that they were missing out on the fun) around the neighborhood.  For most of the houses, we stood at the foot of the driveways while the impossibly mature four-year-olds went up to the doors and called out "Trick or Treat!" themselves.  For those with particularly "spooooky" decorations -- or particularly shady walkways, which the girls deemed interchangeable -- at least one parent went along.  Otherwise, we called out reminders to say thank you, and tried to keep the younger ones from actually entering the homes of the friendly candy-givers.

Towhead was Tinkerbell and Squiss was Sleeping Beauty.  While none of the parents were delighted with the princess-basis of the costumes, I think that all four of us were quite happy to have the Halloween costumes emerge out of the dress-up boxes with no additional financial outlay.  Similarly, The Wiggle and Tricksy were the only  members of the toddler class this morning not wearing Halloween costumes.  They in fact complemented one another precisely: Tricksy's black pants had pumpkins all over them, while The Wiggle had on a black t-shirt with a pumpkin in the center. 

The highlight, however, occurred after we'd returned to our house for pizza, juice boxes, and wine.  After eating their one piece of candy apiece for dessert, Towhead and Squiss discovered a couple of candy rings (you know the kind) that Squiss had been given at school yesterday.  They immediately went forward, ripped open the packages and put them on.  A few minutes later, they repaired to Squiss's room to "play," averring that the rings were "just toys."

When Towhead's mom went in shortly thereafter to give Towhead a five-minutes-till-departure warning, she discovered the girls hiding their hands behind their backs and looking -- as they say -- as though butter wouldn't melt in their mouths.  "Were you lickin' those rings?" she asked.  "No," explained Towhead, "We were just pretending to lick them."

Yeah, sure you were.  And we didn't stop them, although I did make sure that Squiss gave me her sticky candy ring before she went to bed -- we still have ants, and I didn't want her to wake up in the morning to find her room and treasure, ahem, overrun.

I leave you with Dean Dad's musings about Halloween from last year, in part because he captures much of how I felt tonight, wandering around a quiet suburban cul-de-sac and watching my impossibly old and impossibly young older daughter trick-or-treat:

They had a blast, and so did we. I don't know how much longer trick-or-treating will survive as a tradition – there's something almost alarmingly archaic about allowing your children to ask strangers for candy – but I really hope we can get at least one more generation through. The world is your candy store when you're five, the street stretches out before you, and you're leading a parade of friends (and parents) on a mission of such innocent debauchery. Every kid should know what that feels like.

where did the whimsy go?

I'm currently reading Keir Hardie's "Jack Clearhead" for my first-year seminar.  It was serialized in his Labour Leader from 3 September through 22 October 1894, and is a retelling of the story "Jack the Giant-Killer."  In it, Jack Clearhead gets a sword from the fairy "Common Sense" that will only work if he chants "Sword, sword, fight for me, / I belong to the I.L.P."  He uses the sword to defeat the evil giants, Mon-o-Poly and Com-pe-Tition, and is rewarded (in part) by marriage with the beautiful and beleaguered heroine, Social-Ism.

This is all quite delightfully satisfying, but it gets better.  This is a world of (gasp) two classes: the Dullards and the Sharpheads.

Now the affairs of this people were managed by a committee which they called the Great Pow-Wow, and those who were members of the Great Pow-Wow were called Chin Chinners.  The Great Pow-Wow, like everything else, belonged to the Sharpheads, but there was one difference.  Every five years the Chin Chinners had to come out from the Great Pow-Wow, and wait outside till they got a number of Dullards to hoist them on their shoulders and carry them back in.  The Dullards could carry anyone in they pleased, either one of themselves or one of the Sharpheads, and if they had carried Dullards in then all all the land, the the machinery, and the food, and the fine houses, would have been theirs, since whichever tribe sat in the Pow-Wow was master of the other.  But the Sharpheads had guarded themselves against being turned out -- or thought they had, by dividing themselves into two divisions one of which was named Plumduff, because it was thought to be very dull and stupid , whilst the other was  named Piecrust, because it made promises intending to break them when necessary.

And then, from the end of the story, when punishments are being meted out . . .

    Going up to the giants, [Good Will] [Social-Ism's cousin] addressed Igno-Ramus and Super-Stition.  "You two," she said, "must die.  You need not howl so, as you can't escape.  However, I will not onl make your end painless, but I will bring you life again in a new form.  Drink this," she said, "It is a mixture called Edu-Cation."  The two poor giants took the potion with trembling hands and drank it as a draught, whereupon tongues of flame broke out all over them and consumed them.  But in another two moments they began to grow  again, and when they had assumed their full shape, they were no  longer the hideous things they had formerly been, but strong, healthy and clean-limbed, and clad in bright garments.
    "In future," said Good Will, "you will be known as Know-Ledge and Sci-Ence." . . .
    "And now," said Good Will [Social-Ism's cousin], waving her fairy wand over Com-pe-Tition and Mon-o-Poly, "I command you to change from cruel giants into genial fairies.  "You, Com-pe-Tition, shall in future be called Emu-Lation, and you, Mon-o-Poly, shall become Collec-Tivism." . . .

Hardie has essentially no reputation as an author, and I'm not going to try to make a case for literary merit here.  But there's a lovely playfulness to these names, not to mention the playful logic by which monopoly and competition become, through good will, collectivism and emulation, respectively.  (Not to mention the fact that Liberals and Conservatives are two different kinds of dessert -- they taste good, in other words, but have little nutritive value.  And I love the fact that superstition plus education equals science.)  I suppose we manage to offer similarly whimsical takes on contemporary U.S. politics, but Hardie's set of images weren't actually those that saturated 1890s media, and I'd love to see something new.

What type of dessert, for example, might the Democrats be?

several things I learned this morning . . .

. . . on a conference call that encompassed the most boring two hours I've had in a long time.

1. It really is turtles all the way down, or rather, all the way up.  Through a kind of institutional chain of command, the group oppressing you is actually only doing so because someone's oppressing them, and so on.  I knew about three levels of this in a particular arena before this morning; I learned today that it goes one (very significant) step higher.  This sounds obvious, but as we get caught up in various institutionally-specific crises and resentments, it can be hard to see.  The very oppressive things from the group just above you may well be a result of trying to mitigate the even worse tendencies of the next group higher up.  Most interesting, everyone seems to be well-intentioned, which makes it all the more complicated.  This is important because it throws light on how things that look local are actually systemic problems -- and therefore need to be engaged at the macro level as well as the micro. 
2. The word "impactful" seems to exist.  I heard it for the first time this morning, but then G wrote back that it's actually common in that there world out there -- corporate, fund-raising, development.  The sentence I heard -- "You have no idea how impactful your input can be ..." -- could easily have substituted either "influential" or "important" without any loss of meaning.  Oy.  Sigh.
3. Why do I have to listen to someone go through a binder of materials I have in front of me for two hours?  Can't I just read through the thing and consider myself "trained"?  (That's actually a rhetorical question -- I know the answer.)  But it makes me really glad that I didn't go to the 7-hour in-person version.  That might have been a bit more participatory, but I'm betting it wouldn't've been more interesting.
4. Conference calls shouldn't be longer than an hour and a half (just like classes), unless they include a break.  Nature calls, people.

all right, perhaps I've found my hook

After class this afternoon (yes, pity me, I teach a Friday afternoon seminar), I read Margot Soven's "Curriculum-Based Peer Tutoring Programs," which appeared in WPA in 1993 and finally arrived through inter-library loan.  She reports the directors of such programs reporting that both faculty and students report (oy) that the quality of student writing, students' awareness of having a writing process, and their level of engagement with the course material increase in CBPT courses.  In other words, my data are right on target. 

This is good.  Soven's survey is still one of the most-often-cited pieces about CBPT programs.  (There's an issue of Across the Disciplines due out soon that will complicate this, since it's a special issue focusing on these kinds of programs.  I'm sort of just behind that curve, but the issue will give me more fodder for the conversation I want to enter.)

Soven's article is based on a survey of the directors of CBPT programs, so there's no analysis of student writing.  That means that there is important to room to genuinely ask my question.  I'm not able to answer the question at the level of draft to revision (although I could probably do a follow-up study on the basis of one of the CBPT courses).  So the hook in general is actually what it was for me: this programs seem great, but what can we claim that they actually do?

Interesting factoid from Soven's article: shockingly enough, my institution participated in the survey.  My predecessor-but-one apparently attended at least one of the conferences or workshops from which Soven drew her pool.  That's a much greater degree of participation in the national conversation than anyone -- including the WPA herself -- had led me to believe had been the case.  Also interesting is that this institution appears in the article as being in the process of implementing a CBPT program in the first-year seminar program.  And I'm hear to say that that never quite got off the ground, although it still exists in a kind of limping fashion.  Fixing that particular problem is on my to-do list, but it's looking increasingly as though it's going to have to wait until, oh, 2012.

several thoughts

First, I've switched over to a larger font, for a whole variety of reasons.  I'm finding myself deeply irritated by certain stylistic constraints with typepad at the moment, although I haven't had time to really investigate whether they're real or a product of my own ineptitude.  The larger "normal" font lets me set off quotations and the like more clearly (in the "small" font), so that's how it will be until January or so, when I can really assess my options.

Second, I'm finding it both curious and interesting that I'm wanting to write as many of my thoughts about this project here as I do.  I can't bear the thought of just sticking them into a word document.  Perhaps I've had too many false starts of that kind over the course of the last several years, and so the fact of an audience makes the writing seem real and important -- even if pretty tentative.  It's as though it commits me to it more fully.  Frankly, the looming deadlines do that very well, too.  (I've been doing other writing about this and my other Big Looming Thing, and so it's also interesting to chart when I want to do it here and when I don't.  It seems to have something to do with the immediacy of an audience in the other fora.)

Third, as I get farther into this project, this is going to raise a variety of problems for me.  Perhaps it's time to put a Creative Commons license on this blog, if I'm working out to-be-published ideas in this forum.  Perhaps it's also time to come out in full, since blogging in detail about things that I'm actually publishing and presenting at conferences is only going to out me silently and in (for me) strange ways.

more on revision and writing tutors

I'm pasting in here a couple of bits that I wrote last spring, doing a cursory assessment of the a pilot program of CBPT (curriculum-based peer tutors) that I'm now revisiting for a couple of different projects:

[The participating faculty] all reported that the student writing in their classes was significantly stronger than they normally see; . . . they reported that they could “see specific improvements” and felt that the writing improved “more substantially” over the course of the semester than was typical; interestingly enough, they also reported that they could see the most improvement in the writing of students who had worked with the same [peer tutor] on all three papers. . .

[S]tudents reported that the [peer tutors] "are incredibly helpful.”  In many cases, students commented specifically at how well the [peer tutors] addressed – and even anticipated – their concerns: “[tutor] usually brought up topics that I was most concerned about before I even asked them”; “I think I am an effective writer, but I often struggle to pick an appropriate scope for papers.  My [PT] did a fantastic job of helping me, through a two-way conversation, sort through my various observations and synthesize an exciting, focused thesis and approach.”

Students also reported that the experience changed their attitudes toward the writing process: “Made me take revising more seriously,” noted one.  Another observed, “I felt my papers improved as did my ability to formulate rigorous critical arguments.”  A third student claimed that the benefit of working with the [PT] wasn’t simply to her writing: “I feel like I understand the material that I wrote on better for having talked to the [PT]s because they made me really think through my claims.”  Perhaps most movingly, several students felt that their performance in the course was directly indebted to the support of the [tutors]: “I would not have done as well in this class without the writing [tutor]”; “I felt much more confident handing papers in.” 

My current writing task(s) is to essentially write the frame of a paper in which I'll present and analyze data from the actual student papers.  I'm in the process of analyzing "time-sequenced" portfolios of student writing, so that we can see whether or not (and, to my mind most interestingly, how) the students' writing changes over the course of the semester.  This is why I've been reading the stuff I alluded to yesterday about revision, and also why I'm rapidly becoming an expert on the advent of CBPT (also called "writing fellow") programs in the US.  As I noted yesterday, it seems that there's little evidence that simply requiring revision as a step makes a big difference.  (There's a great article by Muriel Harris about "one-draft" versus "multi-draft" writers, in which she points out that many non-revisers do enormous intellectual work before really starting to draft the paper.  She then ends up sort of insisting that it's better to find a mean between the two extremes -- the one-draft writers she observes tend to cut some promising avenues off too early, and the multi-draft writers can spend so much time generating generative mess that they find themselves smack up against the deadline without a finished product.)

Today, I was reading parts of Joe Harris' A Teaching Subject, a kind of history of composition studies that's also Joe's chance to respond to a series of the central texts in the field.  In a chapter on "Process" he essentially argues that the 1970s/80s process movement got sort of stuck in valuing (and hence teaching) process as its own good.  He convincingly shows how, in several of the key texts, that these teacher-scholars seem relatively uninterested in the ideas the students are developing in their drafts.  That investment and interest in students' ideas -- and the notion that an emphasis on process and revision has to be about them developing those ideas if it's going to work -- is at the heart of the work Nancy Sommers has done on "Responding to Student Writing."  In her (again, early 1980s) work on that and on revision, Sommers essentially develops the argument -- now largely taken as self-evident truth -- that the task of professors in giving feedback is to genuinely engage with the student's ideas, so that s/he can develop them further, and thereby learn what revision really is and can do.  In other words -- although Sommers doesn't really say this, I think that Joe Harris would -- the point is helping students engage with and develop the ideas they have in the context of the course.

This is great and exciting, but it also presents all kinds of problems, when you think about it.  If requiring students to revise doesn't necessarily produce better papers (or get them to engage more deeply and thoroughly with the ideas of the course), and if you, as a busy teacher, can't realistically respond thoughtfully to complete drafts of everything the students write, what do you do?  Particularly given the connection -- that the student in my study, quoted above, proclaims, but that other people have also observed -- between writing and critical thinking?  It's pretty clear from all kinds of studies -- including Harvard's longitudinal study -- that students feel more engaged by classes that assign more writing.  And I suppose that CBPT programs developed in response to this need, as well as (frankly) the sense that non-writing teachers needed extra support if they were going to not simply assign more writing but take it more seriously.  (CBPT programs are largely WAC programs, after all.)

So, in this scenario, the peer tutor takes on the role that Sommers advocates for the responding professor: seriously engaging with the student writer's ideas in order to help him or her develop them and giving the student writer realistic feedback about more formal problems.  The CBPT model assumes that the peer tutor can do this without course-specific knowledge: without necessarily having had the course, done the readings, or sat in on class discussions.  And many -- Muriel Harris among them -- would argue that peer tutors can do this in some ways more effectively than professors, precisely because of the "peer" aspect of things.  That's an ultimately unanswerable question, to my mind.

In my study, we're looking at what happens over the course of a full semester when students have to revise on the basis of peer tutor feedback three times.  If the professors' and students' impressions are borne out, we'll have some interesting fodder for conversation, both at the institution and in the field.  (Well, I feel pretty tentative about the latter, but I'm hoping so.)  This could make a case for a kind of radical expansion of CBPT programs.  It could also make an interesting basis for training the peer tutors, although I can't quite wrap my mind yet around how that might change. 

of cats and the professoriate

from the Little Professor ...

revision and writing tutors

I've just slogged through a lot of the scholarly work done on revision (most of it in the early '80s).  I've learned a few interesting things: First, there's actually no strong evidence that writing more than one draft produces a better final product. Second, that's only true if we're assuming a no-feedback zone for those pre-final drafts.  In other words: there's no evidence that drafting and revision without feedback produce a better final product.  Third, no one seems to have done much work on the question of whether or not revising with feedback tends to produce a better product, in the estimation of someone other than the initial feedback-giver.  (Am I wrong about that?  I'd love to be corrected, but I don't think that enough compositionists read this blog for that to happen.)

Unfortunately, my study isn't set up to answer question #3.  I'm trying to answer a version of it, in a sense, which is whether or not students who are required to revise every paper over the course of a semester (with feedback from a peer writing tutor) improve as writers more than students who are not required to get feedback and revise.

I'm reading this stuff because I'm trying to figure out how to position my project in the literature.  Who, exactly, am I talking to?

hackery

This morning at 7:00 am, we got a phone call from our credit card company to let us know that a vendor's database had been hacked and that ours was one of the compromised credit card numbers.  They had it all sewn up -- we're being issued a new number and a new card, they checked to make sure we hadn't used any of those [utterly insane and manipulative] checks that come every month with the paper statement, and so on.  And we had to set up a password for calling into the account, one that is also the answer to some suitably arcane-but-easy-to-remember question.  I momentarily toyed with something along the lines of "Who was my first best friend?" but decided against it; I am proud to report, however, that the question I did use garnered surprise from the person on the phone: "I've never heard that one before!"  I hadn't thought it was so original.

We'll be scrutinizing our statements carefully for the next few months -- in part because I'm pretty skeptical about the whole give-us-a-password-so-that-no-one-can-call-in-and-change-your-info thing.  Around 2003, G was mugged while walking home with brand new, unactivated cell phones.  We immediately called Verizon T-Mobile and set up a password, but the guys who stole the phone apparently called moments later, weren't asked for the password, and activated the phone.  It took a few months of G's best angry lawyer mode to sort that one out.

a highly bloggable day

On an experimental mindset  . . .
My mother sent us a pair of Pipsqueaks shoes for Tricksy a month or so ago.  At first glance, they seemed just great: bright red mary janes with a few flowers, with soles that are stiffer than Robeez but much more flexible than "real" shoes.  They were too big when they arrived, so we put them on for the first time on Sunday.

And then we understood the name.  Every time she puts her foot down (and Trix is a fairly emphatic young lady, not to mention one who dances and twists at the slightest bit of music), the shoes let out a pretty loud squeak.  It's cute for about five seconds.  Since Trix insisted on wearing them this morning, I took a pair of sneakers to school as well, figuring that the teachers needed an out.  (And, in fact, she was barefoot when I picked her up this afternoon.)

On Sunday, she was passionately excited about the Pipsqueaks for about five minutes, and then insisted on being changed into a pair of sandals.  Then, she walked all over the house stomping her feet as though to figure out whether or not this new shoe-squeakiness was a general trend or simply shoe specific.

On Riffing . . .
This evening before dinner, Squiss told us with delight about a game she'd been playing with Gemstone at school today: "You know what I say when Gemstone says, 'me, either'?  I say, 'meether'!!"  (Parental reply: "Really, so she says 'me, either' and then you say 'meether' and then you both giggle?  Is that the game?"  Squiss's delighted response: "Yes!")

Over dinner, she totally riffed off of that game.  "Meether" went from a nonsense word (as in the game with Gemstone) to a noun first, then it became a somewhat magical object with mystery and only somewhat consistent properties: apparently, you can't see a meether unless there's water nearby.  If there's water nearby, it gets "rilly big" and (we learned later) has "spickly-leaves" all over it.

Furthermore, once a year at 2:00 in the afternoon, men come to make the meether.  (Precisely what this invovles we can't tell.)  Squiss herself doesn't make the meether, she simply watches them -- she studies meethers, she explained.  (As G then riffed, she's a meether-ologist.  She thought that was really cool.)  The men are so interesting, in fact, that even though they come at 2:00, she keeps talking to them to learn about meethers until nine o'clock.

On sharing . . .
The girls are often both ravenous when we pick them up in the afternoon, despite various afternoon and late afternoon snacks.  As we got in the car today, Squiss announced that she was hungry and asked if there was anything leftover from her lunch.  I looked, and there was some chicken and broccoli left from her "main meal."  "Do you want some?" I asked.  "Yes, I do," she replied in a fairly urgent tone.  Tricksy was looking over at us longingly, not yet shrieking in jealousy.  "Do you think you could share some with Tricksy?"  "Oh, yes," Squiss replied, "I would be delighted to do that."

And, finally, on play, free play, and parental (maternal) guilt . . .
A couple of weeks ago, Emily Bazelon had a piece in Slate on parental guilt about not always wanting to play with your children.  This resonates with various folks' posts over the last several months.  (See herehere, if you're interested in the conversation.  Bazelon is thinking in part about a recent book by Howard P. Chudacoff called Children at Play [1]).  I've offered my fairly unfocused thoughts here.

What struck me this evening about Bazelon's piece -- and about the conversation more generally -- is the central narrative of guilt.  It's another instance of being trapped in the affective narrative itself: should we feel guilty for sometimes wanting to read a book/talk to our spouse or friends/take a nap/check email/whatever rather than playing with our children?  should we feel guilty for thinking, deep down, that often playing with children -- even our own -- can be boring?  I'm less interested in these questions than the cultural and psychological work these narratives seem to do.  They're a version of the anxiety narratives that I've talked about here, and I think that I'm coming to see both sets of narratives as operating in pretty complex ways to constrain our visions of what parenting can and should be.

[1] Karen Sanchez-Eppler argues in Dependent States that it wasn't until relatively late in the nineteenth century that play became a marker of class status for American children; earlier than that, literacy separated the classes.  By the final quarter of the century, though, literacy was widespread enough that leisure became the salient difference.