Sunday, October 28, 2012

My Journal Problem

I'm a board member and liaison for Rockhurst's Advanced College Credit Program (ACCP). If you're reading this blog and are among its target audience--prospective RU students--there's a chance you've heard of ACCP. It's a program wherein RU courses get taught in local high schools. If you're lucky, you've taken one such course. If you're really lucky, you've taken College Composition at Liberty North High School with Mrs. Kimberly Brownlee.
(go Eagles!)
I visited Mrs. Brownlee's class the day her students had just finished a unit on the college application essay and were moving on into a unit on "Culture and Ethnicity."

If you ask me, such units are hard to start, especially in a classroom of mostly white, suburban Midwesterners. Growing up more or less all three of those things, I always assumed I had no "culture," that culture was the very thing that got left behind when the various people who became my grandparents and great-grandparents passed through Ellis Island. The soundtrack of my daily life was not cultural but consumer, not the tin-whistled and bodráned but bleached and Muzaked®.
To dispel that myth of culturelessness, Mrs. Brownlee had her students (and me!) journal about "culture."

Now, I have to admit that, as shocking as it may sound to hear an English prof say it, I dislike journal writing. I don't keep a journal myself and cannot, with a straight face, use the word "journal" as a verb. I have no problem, on the other hand, using the word "workshop" as a verb and here's why:

When one "journals," one removes herself from the public sphere. She interacts in private with her impressions about a topic. When one "workshops," on the other hand, she confers with peers. She doesn't retreat from public interaction. My journal aversion stems from my commitment to the idea that the most valuable kind of academic writing is that which anticipates exchange with a reader--that which interacts with a complexly-conceived audience. In short, good writing is a palpable kind of social engagement, not a substitution or replacement for such engagement. With such a philosophy, it's been easy for me to (over the years) demote journal writing, to do away with it altogether. Journaling, I came to believe, consigns an already alarmingly self-centered demographic (teenagers) to the clammy cellar of egocentrism.

And I was wrong. When Mrs. Brownlee had us journal about culture, our knee-jerk reactions to the topic--reactions along the "white-people-don't-have-culture" lines--slowly melted away. By the third cycle of responding to prompts like "What do you say when you greet people?," "What customs do you follow when you eat meals?," "Did your family inherit its customs or make them up?," "Do any of these customs cause problems?," "Does anyone make fun of your family customs?," students had real purchase on the topic. They understood its weight and consequences. Stuff got real. One student talked about how the structurelessness of his home life was becoming a problem now that he wanted to bring a girlfriend home to dinner, another talked about the ripple effects of her family's no-coddling sensibility.

Journaling did not invite students into a private relationship with the topic. It did not endorse the "no one understands me" ethos of young people's self-perception. It compelled students into very real, very public conversations about issues central to both to their personal lives and to American life in general.

It converted me.

Now, to some of my students' horror, I've started applying this conversion to my own teaching. When I explained to my Literature and Cinema class that, owing to my conversion on journaling, we would conclude each film screening with a journaling exercise, Kenshasha rolled her eyes and said, "You shouldn't be allowed to go back to high school."

"Journal about it," I said.

Quicksanded

How does one backdate a blog post?

If I knew the answer to that question, I would live in less daily fear that I will receive an angry email from someone in Admissions (or is it PR/Marketing?) at Rockhurst reminding me of the dereliction of my blogging duties. Such a colossal chunk of time has passed since my last post that I may have to forfeit my blog stipend for this semester.

Why ain't I been posting? Swamped! Actually, "quicksanded" is the more accurate metaphor for my relationship to the surrounding conditions of my professional life this semester.

Ok, and I've been carving pumpkins.

That's mine on the right. Its "mouth" is the letters "S" and "J"
(My wife and my first initials, as printed on our wedding invitations.) 

Wednesday, October 3, 2012

Time Mgmt

This week, in my First-Year Seminar, I taught a subject I've never taught before: Time Management. 

I am fairly incapable of faking expertise in a subject (I'm downright hostile to the idea), and time management is a proficiency that I have definitely not mastered. I'm not bad. I'm never late (chronically early, actually) and I don't miss deadlines. But I have no coherent system for time management. What's worse, I tend to wax poetic about stuff, especially banal stuff like keeping to-do lists and writing in planners. I probably spent too much time marveling over the good time management strategies my students shared and not enough time offering any of my own wisdom about time management. 

But students do some smart stuff. Claire keeps all her academic deadlines/appointments in a planner and all her social reminders on her phone. Nice compartmentalization tactic. Ariana texts herself to remind herself of important, pending deadlines. Chelse is all about the Outlook reminders. 

Me, I put my pocket planner under the document camera to demonstrate the pleasure I take in crossing things off my daily to-do list. I also had to explain my unorthodox phonetic spelling of the word "students" (as "stoontz"). It's a spelling a friend of mine used once a long time ago in an email and it made me laugh. 

It's always important to make yourself laugh, I said. (Here's the great wisdom I offered.) The best thing you can do for the version of yourself who is going to read whatever note-to-self you write is to make sure that that future you knows that the past you, the one who wrote the note, had a sense of humor and that that past you loves the future you and knows that everything will be ok, despite the fact that that future you has to actually do the thing that the past you wrote down.

I also shared this: 

After class, I couldn't help but ask myself: Does the fact that I showed students that instead of teaching them how to make an Excel spreadsheet about their daily routines make me a good teacher or an awful teacher?

I posted this very question to my facebook profile and got nine "likes." We're all so crunched for time that all we can do for a "friend" experiencing self-doubt is offer a virtual thumb-up. 

Next week's FYS topic: Emotional Intelligence, wherein I probably fail to resist the urge to show this litmus test of late-adolescent angst.