Writing Maternity

Status Update

In 6 days, M. l'Oignon, Squiss, Tricksy, and I will leave for three weeks in Europe.  We'll start out with a week in the south of France with les grands-parents l'Oignon, and we'll then head up to Paris for a week with la famille fantastique, good friends from M. l'O's graduate school days.  (Les garcons fantastiques are known in our house as The Boys Who Only Speak French, so that Squiss is braced for trying to play with kids who, well, don't speak English.  It's been a fairly successful incentive scheme, actually.)  We'll then conclude with a week that is really more about work than about play, but which I'm secretly sort of looking forward to the most: a week in London, covering 2 days of Trustees' meetings and other work-related events for M. l'O and 4 days in the British Library for me.

(We've done a good bit of research on kid-friendly activities in both Paris and London -- and Squiss is so excited about it all that she can rattle off the full list from her perspective to anyone who asks -- but we're wide open to suggestions, as well.  Especially if there are secret pockets of things that would be good for or with a two-year-old.)

I haven't been to Europe since Squiss was 1.  I haven't been to London -- really, my favorite city ever -- since 2002.  It's going to be really good.

But first I have to get there.  Hence, the countdown.  I have slightly over a day-and-a-half until the Faculty Development Extravaganza begins, and we leave on our travels two days after it's over.  So, it's time to spend 15 minutes I don't really have making lists:

Travel-to-do

• all four passports and other travel documents up-to-date and in known locations
• new-for-the-plane-ride books, toys, and DVDs purchased * packed
• final laundry
• packing: planned * started * done (M. l'O and I spent a good, productive half-hour making the list to end all lists last night)
• materials to get a new reader's card for the BL: located & packed
• pre-research trip prep: started * completed
• other work materials (I'm only taking two books, I swear!): decided-upon * packed
• friend to take over weekly CSA boxes
• friend to water baby trees & bring in any packages
• stop mail

Work-to-do

• finalize and prep for 11 5 2! faculty development workshop sessions (I'm sorry, I can't break that down any more; it's too depressing)*
  • I'm now in the final rehearsal stage; the big show starts tomorrow!  sigh.
  • the first day went well -- and now I'm almost halfway done.
• lead a 20-minute workshop on writing for a terribly-named "Developing Student Skills" session for the New Faculty Workshop

* I've typically described doing this workshop to other faculty as the equivalent of preparing for and then teaching half a semester's worth of a course in 2.5 days.  Whenever I actually pause and look at the numbers, that feeling is reinforced.  On the up side, this Extravaganza is my biggest and most important bully pulpit of the year; and when it goes well, it's a pretty great high.  I can remember thinking at about this point last year that I'd have to be sure that take sabbatical in the spring, so that I could get a break from this particular tyranny.  But about halfway through the actual *doing* of the workshop last year, I realized that I couldn't possibly let the opportunity go by.  When else do I get roughly 25 faculty of all ranks and from across the college in a single room to talk about teaching and writing for several days in a row?

voting rights

On the way to school this morning, Squiss had a series of questions about presidents.  ("Who was the first president of our country?" etc.)  Then, she reverted to something that had last come up months ago, I think: children's right to vote and the lack thereof.  By the time we got to school she was almost in tears over the injustice of it.  The thought of writing letters -- to the president, to our representatives -- seems to have gotten her over the hump, but I was struck by it, nonetheless.

In tears, because she doesn't have the right to vote.  At not-quite-five.

meme: passion quilt

Aspazia tagged me for this one, and I'm doing in part to welcome her back to the blogosphere.  (Welcome back, Aspazia!)

The rules . . .

• Post a picture or make/take/create your own that captures what YOU are most passionate for students to learn about.
• Give your picture a short title.
• Title your blog post "Meme: Passion Quilt."
• Link back to this blog entry.

 

Tolerate the mess.

My experience of teaching -- and of life, frankly, but that's another story -- is that things become not only easier but at once clearer and smarter if I tolerate the messiness that is real complexity.  Complex ideas, full engagement with the ideas of others, a genuine willingness to revisit your own ideas and change them -- these are the things that I try to teach in my classes, to my children, and perhaps most of all to myself.  I don't quite know if it's my passion as an educator, but it is, without question, what I think is most important and also my greatest challenge.  Students often enter college wanting answers; I do my best to teach them how to ask questions whose answers produce more questions.

I've chosen this image because it isn't, in fact, messy.  Crossed letters were standard for a long time, and people knew how to read them.  I learned, one summer while working on my dissertation, while reading the endless letters home of British women in South Asia in the early nineteenth century -- endless, obsessive accounts of children's health and illness, all too often ending with the child's death.  What you learn when you read such letters is that you have to focus properly, and one only one direction of writing at a time.  Then, the writing at 90 deg. becomes background; when you turn the paper 90 deg., background becomes figure and figure, ground.  That's what I can offer as a way to tolerate the mess: focus.

As for tagging some educators, how about Oonae, jo(e), What Now?,  Tenured Radical, and New Kid?

good news from Elizabeth

(Although it certainly falls into the it's-bloody-well-about-time category.)

all my thoughts are being funnelled

into the Cs proposal I'm writing.  So I'm just going to direct you elsewhere:

• to Timothy Burke, to think about the difference(s) between disciplinarity and departmentalism;
• to blue milk, to think about why paid maternity leave and carers leave are important; and
• to IHE, for Bob Sommer's thoughts on the relationship of teaching and grading (specifically exam-giving and -grading).

(FWIW, I agree with the first two and disagree with the last.  Or rather, I think that he's right about the problem as exams and pedagogy are generally understood in relation to teaching, but I think that's a misapprehension.  Which isn't to say that I'm not deeply aware of and sympathetic to the problem of large, under-funded institutions.)

pfftt

Somehow, between last fall and now, certain chunks of knowledge seem to have dribbled out of my mind. Sources that we at my fingertips through January are gone, sitting on my shelves utterly impassive and unhelpful. I know that this is largely because I've been so immersed in various local crises -- not to mention the personal ones -- that I haven't been writing, or even keeping up with my scholarly reading, as much as I was in the fall, but still.

How does it dribble out so easily?

what is "college-level" writing?

That's the title of today's anthology.  Unlike yesterday's, it isn't doing quite what I'd hoped it would.  I thought I was reading it for the faculty development extravaganza I'm leading in a couple of weeks for the folks who will teach in our first-year seminar program in the fall.  It turns out that, instead, I'm reading it more for my fall course.

Specifically, I realized that in a unit in the course on "Readers (Expectations & Feedback)," I'm going to have the students read some of the essays and then write their own reflective piece in which they try to answer the titular question.  (I'm really interested to see their answers.)

As fodder and also models, I'll be sure to give them some of the student-authored piece that the anthology includes, particularly the one by Amanda Winalski, who graduated in 2004 from Temple.  After placing out of Temple's first-year writing requirement, Amanda found herself rewarded for the style of her writing until, in a linguistics class, the professor slammed her for not addressing the assignment. 

She was shocked and mortified; after reflecting on the experience, she offers her insights:

A college writer must anticipate the reader’s response.  Once the writer has conquered the grammar check and can confidently justify using the passive voice or splitting an infinitive, he or she begins to demonstrate a level of comprehension and application that I would consider characteristic of the college-level label.  Those who bow before the grammar check and heed every suggestion—whether because they doubt their abilities, overestimate the power of the computerized rulebook, or think the reader will use any grammatical error as evidence of ineptitude or justification for a grade reduction—can only improve their writing by first tending to their confidence.

There does not (yet) exist a checklist for the requirements that compose college-level writing.  The transition from high school to university writing is not as simple as the memorization of a few grammar handouts; rather, it consists of a student’s willingness to learn, understand, and modify the rules that govern language in order to communicate ideas.  One can easily write five pages of nothing that sounds lyrical or drainingly intellectual or fill five pages with brilliant thoughts that are presented in bullet statements.  To achieve a balance between the two is to be a successful college writer; it is a goal to which one must aspire every time he or she picks up a pen.  Thus, writing at this level is perhaps an ongoing process that necessitates a persistent willing-[end 307]-ness to try, fail, and try.  (307-08)

While I'm excited to simply get the students to write these and to see what they'll see, thinking this concretely about one of the assignments is making me realize how essential written dialogue is going to be for this course.  These need to be blog posts, dammit!  So that they can engage directly with one another's observations, building off of similar and different experiences.  I'd been thinking that I wouldn't do a blog next semester: many of these students will be working in the Writing Center or with students in first-year seminars; in the sections where we're talking about feedback, conferencing, and the like, I'll want them to be able to reflect on that work -- but I don't want to compromise anyone's confidentiality.  I'm thinking, then, that I'll have to learn how to do this within Sakai, our CMS.

Originality, Imitation, and Plagiarism

That's the title of the book that arrived yesterday, and that I'm now devouring.  It's an anthology edited by Caroline Eisner and Martha Vicinus, and it's proving a smart, varied, thoughtful collection.  Here's a great series of questions from Eisner and Vicinus' introduction:

• How do we conserve and inculcate a tradition of ethical research and writing standards, while acknowledging and taking full advantage of the opportunities provided by new technologies?
• How can students be taught to evaluate sources and then credit the authors appropriately?
• Why have so many experienced researchers been found guilty of stealing from others?
• How can we encourage the free and ethical exchange of ideas?
• How can we encourage students, so accustomed to digital sharing, to understand citation practices, free use, and the legitimate ownership of ideas?

Not a question, but I can't leave you without this, too: "All too often these queries [that writing centers face about plagiarism] are framed in narrow, judgmental terms that leave little room for either the teacher or the student to understand the complexities of permission, atttribution, and copyright.  Teachers find themselves placed in an adversarial position in relation to students, as if all writing assignments involved the risk of plagiarism. . . . Across disciplines and fields, we find that plagiarism is not a simple wrong; a full understanding of its role in contemporary intellectual life depends on a broad approach that includes notions of what is original and what role imitation plays in the creation of new texts" (1).

I'd already been pretty sure that this anthology would give me material for the cornerstone of a unit on these issues for my fall course on theories of writing and pedagogy; now I'm certain.

reunion season

Driving me back up to campus Thursday afternoon during our near-daily car swap*, M. l'Oignon looked around at the various white tents and other party paraphernalia in place for the college's reunion weekend and observed that it made him all the sadder that we won't be going to our 15th reunion this Memorial Day.

(Instead, thanks to his employer's semi-annual trustees' meeting and a research grant from my institution, we're going to Europe for three weeks, specifically [and in this order] to the south of France, Paris, and London.  I know, it's rough.)

I'd looked forward in the abstract more to this coming reunion than to previous ones.  I felt lukewarm about the 5th, whose chief value, to my mind, had been that it would be a kind of coming-out party for M. l'Oignon and myself: we'd gotten involved the previous fall, but hadn't been involved during college, and so outing ourselves to people who knew the pre-history was something to look forward to.  (It was, indeed, quite satisfying.)  And I felt downright negatively towards the 10th, as though I'd simply be hanging out with a bunch of people who'd been his friends but not mine, as though my college friendships had withered, and so on.  I was also seven months pregnant at the time, so part of my crankiness may have been the sense that I'd be hanging out with a lot of drunk people when I couldn't drink myself.

The 10th turned out to be a blast, not least because of the pleasure of really connecting with people who *hadn't* been my or our closest friends in college, the people who felt like missed opportunities.  And I may have felt less alienated 10 years out than I had five years earlier.  At the 5th, I was in the midst of dissertating and was possibly at the height of my graduate school disdain for non-academic professions.  At the reunion, I was reading "The Death of Ivan Ilyich" for a summer seminar on narrative, and so hearing about my classmates' plans to enter business school or to work for this or that law firm felt deeply ironic.  ("I really like M[ergers] & A[cquisitions]" I remember one woman saying.  After making partner at a big firm, she left and, last I heard, had gone to cooking school.  That seems to be the great escapist fantasy of our generation.)

At the 10th, by contrast, people in those careers were less enamored of them, more able to see them as, well, careers.  And I, having -- frankly -- grown up a good bit, could also see that my choice of the academy was also simply the choice of a *career*, rather than some morally superior state of being.  (I'm probably being a bit harsh to my younger self, but I do think that one of the unfortunate and necessary elements of graduate school is a kind of conviction that your world is better and more satisfying than any other.  This may be true of any incredibly time-intensive career during its apprenticeship period.  I'm deeply torn when I hear about smart, interesting students who plan to go to graduate school: while I'm excited for them, I worry that they don't realize just how impossible it is to get the perfect job.)

The 15th feels in the abstract as though it would be more like the 10th than the 5th, with the added pleasure of the fact that there are sure to be lots of kids running around Squiss and Tricksy's ages.  In addition, I think that it's easiest to see people from your past when you're happy with your present; the current unbloggable firestorm aside, I'm deeply happy with where my career has taken me and most days I like my life enormously.  I don't have much to prove to my college classmates, and can even look forward with humor untouched by bitterness to seeing Famous Poet.**  In addition, I've corresponded more in the last year with my undergraduate mentors than I have since my first couple of years out, and so the thought of seeing them seems more natural and less random than it has in the past. 

I don't feel much nostalgia for college itself.  I never quite found the intellectual and social community I craved there, and if there's a period that feels as though it was, in retrospect, quite nearly perfect in that regard, it was probably my first two or three years of graduate school.  But as I write that I realize that my current situation goes that one better.  The one great thing about the firestorm is that it's made me all the more aware of my extraordinarily supportive community here, and the ways that it actually one-ups that grad school life because it's more varied (in discipline and field) and outward-looking. 

* We live close enough to campus to walk, but I drop both girls at school in the morning, which requires enough travel in a variety of directions that I take the car.  In the interests of fairness, as well as for a variety of other reasons M. l'O picks them up.  This means that at some point during the day I drive the car back down to him, either walking up or (more often) catching a ride.
** Famous Poet and I managed to be English majors at the same small college, graduating the same year, without ever taking a class with one another. That's largely because he gravitated toward Famous Old-School Critic and others of the senior faculty, while I gravitated toward several professors who (honestly) seemed both younger and More Hip.  There was always seem slight antipathy to our awareness of one another, I think, but I've never been able to pinpoint its origins or reasons.  When he came to Big Nearby City to start graduate school at Big Old Rich U (I went to Small New Poor U, in the same town), he then acted -- when we ran into each other at mutual friends' parties -- as though we'd been best friends and had some kind of shared history.  That pattern continued for some time as we crossed paths at reunions, and it always struck me as vaguely bizarre. He'd been or seemed to impressed with himself to talk to me while we were in college, and yet 2 or 5 or 10 years later always seemed delighted to see me.

I seem

to have lost my attention span. 

If you see it wandering about, send it home, would you?