Getting meta on finals week

It's the last week of classes, which means that I've spent a lot of time standing or sitting in the midst of young people and telling them that everything is going to be ok, that no stressful final exam ever actually killed anyone. Of course, no one seems relieved.

Yesterday, in my freshman comp class, I (more or less) said this:

"I know you've been doing nothing for the past two days but revising your final paper, because, clearly, you don't have anything else to do. You have no other classes. No ginormously daunting precalculus or biology or western civilization exams looming like metal-teethed Molochs above the salt mines of your daily lives. I know you've been sleeping eight hours a night, soundly, drinking 8 oz of orange juice every morning. I know that there is no way that stress has taken its tole on you physically, that it's zapped your will to even comb your hair in the morning."

Most students giggle; they get that I'm being sarcastic. I don't need to introduce metacommentary to explain that what I'm doing is sympathizing with them, that I'm satirizing the short-sighted, authoritarian college professor.

Even though I'm pretty sure they know that's what I'm doing, I follow the satire with metacommentary. I say: "That was me sympathizing with you in a playful manner, trying to inject levity into your otherwise stressful week."

I am addicted to metacommentary. What is metacommentary, you ask?

It's a fancy word for sentences that (in Gerald Graff's words) “tell readers how—and how not—to think about” assertions you make as you write (or talk). In other words, metacommentary keeps you from provoking reactions that you don't intend. It lets you clarify and elaborate on crazy claims before readers get the wrong idea.

I tell students that the day I discovered metacommentary was the day I began to love writing. 


I loved it because it allowed me to say things that sounded like I was saying something illogical and then demonstrate how I wasn't being illogical at all. It's a fun rhetorical gymnastic. 

It allows you to be both playful and professional at the same time. Graff uses the analogy of the conjoined twin: When you're writing, you are two people, one who just wants to be heard and another who wants to be careful. Kind of like Greg Kinnear and Matt Damon in Stuck on You.  

One of you gets to say something that gets people's attention; the other gets to clarify and elaborate immediately after attention is grabbed. 

This works well in intro paragraphs. For instance, my freshman writers are working on proposals to solve problems that face some profession of their choice. I'm also writing such a proposal. (Why shoudl students have all the fun.) The profession I chose was trim carpentry (my brother and dad's profession). The problem they're facing is the fact that suburban homes (which is what they trim) are less popular than they used to be. My solution is for my brother to convert his basement utility room into a workshop and to build cabinets for a new market. 

The first sentence of my proposal is this: 

"Throw your elliptical machine out the window." 

By starting with a jolting, crazy command, I force myself to explain immediately what I mean and what I don't mean: 

"It's not that your cardiovascular health is unimportant but that you could use your home as a business resource. Here's how:" 

The fun part is saying the outlandish thing. The hard part is dialing it back--making sure readers get prompted to alertness without also getting the wrong idea. A good writer, and a good speaker, does both.

Because, you know what they say: "It's all fun and games until you don't follow up your outlandish assertion with clarifying metacommentary." (That's what they say, right?)

Motorcycle Diaries Diary

Last week, an RA at a Rockhurst dorm asked me to come talk to his residents about "leadership." He was starting a new extracurricular program that featured movies about leadership, and he'd heard that I taught film.

I liked the idea and agreed to come by and introduce a movie. I suggested Walter Salles's The Motorcycle Diaries.

I warned the RA that the movie is in Spanish. I asked for assurances that students wouldn't hate me for invading their lobby with a movie that forced them to read subtitles. The RA assured me that, as far as he knew, there were no illiterate residents of Xavier-Loyola Hall.

I felt bad asking about the subtitles, but I've been burnt on that point before. At a previous school, I taught a summer course on "Road Movies," in which I showed The Motorcycle Diaries. After the movie was over, I turned the house lights up, tears of inspiration still in my eyes, and was met with this question: "Do we have to watch any more movies that aren't in English?" That one still hurts.

Armed with this past experience, a handout to accompany my introduction, and trepidation-bordering-on-paralysis about seeking entry to a dorm lobby at night, I walked to XL. It was cold and I couldn't put my right hand in my pocket because a knuckle was still bleeding from a recent ginger-peeling accident (I had to start marinading the chicken before I returned to school).

I was met at the door by the RA--a very cool guy. The screening was to happen in the lobby, on a TV that is way nicer than the one I own. There were two bags of tortilla chips and a big ol' box of fruit treats. "Who's going to lead the way into those chips?" I asked, breaking the ice and setting up the theme of leadership.

Most of the students already knew who Che Guevara was, so I didn't have to go into the whole thing about how he's a pivotal, controversial revolutionary leader in South America and beyond, with perhaps the most t-shirted face in all of the first world.

Instead of this thorny, ironically-consumerist legacy, I focused my introduction on the fact that The Motorcycle Diaries is a movie about the preliminary moments in the life of a leader; it's about the life experience that motivated one young man's extreme commitment to social justice. Ernesto ("Fuser") Guevara is a normal college student who, when exposed to the landscape of poverty and injustice that exists just beyond his sheltered middle-class life, responds to an impulse to redress this injustice.

I left before my favorite scene; had to get home and broil that chicken. It's probably best. I never quite make it through without getting a little choked up.

The Recycle Bin of History

As part of its effort to design a new academic building for Rockhurst (which we lovingly refer to as "NAB"), the architecture firm of Gould Evans came up with this idea: Hand out cameras to various profs and students and have them complete "photo surveys," wherein we took pictures of such things as "The place, space or thing that best describes Rockhurst to you," "A place, space or thing at Rockhurst you would show a new faculty member," "Your favorite place to work," and "The place you most often meet your colleagues." 

Under the category "Something you notice that you think others don’t notice," I placed this photo of a statue of a male youth resting behind a couple of recycle bins. 

This scene, which appears at the foot of the stairs in the main entry of Sedgwick Hall, both cracks me up and disturbs me. The statue (there are two actually--a discus thrower, not pictured) is such a part of the environment that it gets eclipsed by trash bins. 

I recently brought this quandary up to the students of my "Journeys, Voyages, Quests" class. We'd just finished reading two classic journey epics: Homer's The Odyssey and the Chinese folk novel Monkey (aka, Journey to the West). For their final papers, students will identify a key difference between these two classic conceptions of the journey motif (the first Western and the second Eastern) and then demonstrate how a modern novel synthesizes this difference.

For example, a student might focus on the way that The Odyssey represents physical strength and prowess as a virtue and how Monkey represents these same qualities as liabilities. Or, a student might (as many have) notice how important animal sacrifice is to the Greeks and how important rituals of nonviolence are to the pilgrims of Monkey. You'd never catch Tripitaka burning marrow bones (or anything bloodier than an incense stick) when giving props to Buddha. 

While discussing these differences, we got on the subject of the Greek fascination with the human body--the ritualized celebration of the body's potential in such Greek-engineered traditions as the Olympic games, which (in 2008) had been held in Beijing, and which had been advertised (in Europe) thusly: 

The animals (and the singing bodhisattva) of this TV ad are characters straight out of Monkey. It's not often that pop culture offers me such a perfect synergy of a world lit class's themes, which is why I reproduce it here. 

Anyway, while talking about the Greek fascination with the body and all the different things that this fascination has produced, like the Olympics, and the whole idea of the perfectibility of man from Da Vinci to Da Situation ... 

... I brought up the Sedgwick statues. Students didn't notice anything odd. 

So I asked: "What does the fact that we place recycling bins in front of statues of Greek men say about our values here at Rockhurst?" 

[crickets.] 

I tried again: "Does the arrangement of the foyer of this building say anything about what we value?"

Some students said stuff about how recycling is good. Then someone said that the bins represented a nonviolent effort to integrate contemporary ideals of conservation and environmental stewardship with the somewhat dusty Western ideals of beauty and perfection. The bins weren't replacing the statues. They were simply added to the scene. Peaceful coexistence at its best. 

However, just last week, some campus group inadvertently broke the peace when it placed a non-Student-Activities-Board-approved flier somewhere suspect. 

The fight for managerial control of public space never ends.

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.) 

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. 

The Whole Thing?

I'm currently directing a senior thesis on Herman Melville's novel Moby-Dick (1851). Have you read it? The whole thing?

My uncle Steve thinks that anyone who says she's read the whole thing is lying. He doesn’t even believe me, and I've read the it twice: once last summer and once--in a real welcome-to-graduate-school experience--during a two-week span of time that also included my reading of Dickens's 900-page novel Bleak House and most of Nietzsche's The Birth of Tragedy. Needless to say, I skipped a lot during those two weeks. 

In fact, it's during those two weeks that my friend Steve (yes, uncle Steve and now friend Steve) and I had a serious talk, at a place called the Rose and Crown (Omaha, Nebraska’s version of Melville's Spouter Inn) about whether it mattered if one read "the whole thing" or not. I was anxious about the habit I was developing of skipping while reading, a habit I developed as a response to the insane demands of grad school.

Though it's been twelve years since Steve and I had that conversation, I still remember what he said:

(1) "Reading the whole thing is overrated" and

(2) "So let's say you read all of Moby-Dick; hell, let's say you write Moby-Dick. Then what? There’s still Jupiter and it’s still bigger than anything you've got."

Now, Steve was likely three sheets to the wind when he said that second thing. (That’s right. I just used a euphemism for drunkenness that originates in nineteenth-century nautical terminology. That was for you, Melville.) I’ll translate. Here’s what Steve actually said:

(1) “The point of reading is not simply to consume a book. One must interact with it, respond to it. And one can genuinely respond to a book even if he hasn't read the whole thing. Furthermore, reading the whole thing does not automatically entitle one to claim that he has had a meaningful experience with a book.”

This first point prompted me to forward Steve this now classic bit of fake journalism.

(2) "What kind of accomplishment is it to have read (or even written) a great novel, when that accomplishment is placed in a context of creation that includes such unthinkable wonders as the planet Jupiter?" 

Now that question knocked me out. It still does.

In the intervening years, I’ve become an avid read-the-whole-thinger. I kind of always was one, but I also always knew that reading the whole thing is never enough, and that those who think it is enough are either smug or callow. They either think (a) reading is way more like bird watching than it actually is or (b) reading the whole thing is as valuable an activity as having a genuine interaction with the text.

Maybe what we call “literacy” is really just pre-literacy. Maybe reading a book is the least thing that we can do with the book, not the only thing. Maybe literate individuals read because they have to, because reading is the prerequisite to doing the thing that they really want to do, which is create, interact, comingle their ideas with those of the author.

For me, reading has always been means to an end, never an end in itself. Books are the things I go through to get to people.