I hope you had a restful and interesting winter break.
Links to your class can be found at the top of this page or you can go to QCounty.com, where the link path is a bit shorter.
Browsing Posts in English
I hope you had a restful, engaging, creative and memorable summer and that you’re now ready to get back to the wonderful world of English.
For information concerning your class, follow My Teaching Links at the right, or at the top right, to my Solano classes, Fall 2010 and your English class, either 1, 2 or 370.
While I've labeled this from the point of view of the reader who over time becomes more or less engaged, the POV can be that of a narrator or character. Indeed, once you understand the concept, you may find yourself applying it in the most inappropriate situations.
Key to my approach to teaching reading and writing to my English students, no matter the level or the focus — expository writing, short stories, narrative poetry, drama — is the checkmark story structure that I came across in Janet Burroway’s Writing Fiction: A Guide to Narrative Craft when I was trying to understand my fiction and MFA creative writing workshops at Mills College. While most English texts and English professors seem to prefer a narrative approach to plot — we English teachers are, after all, comfortable with words — this graph, which has evolved some since Burroway, appealed to my physicist’s need to see everything mathematically — except, of course, true love.
And so I introduce this graph each semester and have my students apply it to what they read and what they write since the idea also works well if one changes some of the terms, introduction for exposition, thesis for conflict, and so on.
Fundamentally, the graph displays in emotional space-time that if you (or a character) need to get from point A to D, there will be a bump in your road at B that will make you question your ability to get to your destination until you reach C, when all will become clear.
One might say, if one were sitting in one of my classes, reviewing my approach, that I take this checkmark story structure stuff rather seriously. Too seriously, some might say, in that I sometimes apply it in conversation as well, telling someone who just bared his soul that his conflict was in search of a turning point and moral resolution. As you might imagine, this can be a rather abrupt conversation stopper.
Kurt Vonnegut seems to have had a more whimsical view of this versatile structure as evidenced by an article in the Spring 2010 edition of Lapham’s Quarterly. On his abscissa, time starts with the beginning and ends with the end, which seems appropriate. Instead of the ordinate measuring engagement, his axis goes from ill fortune to
good fortune. Indeed, if one shifts the structure to the POV of a character, fortune seems like the right measure. I especially liked his depiction of a boy meeting a girl, which might be true love. And then there’s Kafka’s Metamorphosis, in which a despondent young man turns into a bug. Less understandable is Vonnegut’s take on Hamlet and truth. For this he decides that it’s impossible to know when fortune is ill or good, so the play has nothing about fortune, ill or good. To attempt to understand Vonnegut’s humorous point, you’ll have to read the article.
I hope you had a great winter break and am looking forward to working with each of you.
Look to the right for links to my Solano classes ==>
In my English classes I’m at that point in the semester when we discuss the three fundamental elements necessary to think and write critically about a thesis: description, compare-contrast, and effect-cause. (Until yesterday I would have said cause-effect, but then one of my students pointed out that actually we should say effect-cause since we notice the effect before we look for the cause. Go students!)
To make clear how these three fundamental elements work, consider the current health care debate which has as its thesis something like the following:
Because so many Americans do not have insurance or can’t afford the insurance they have or are surprised to find that the insurance they have doesn’t cover their illnesses or discover when they become ill that they are no longer covered, and because private insurance companies can deny coverage based on pre-existing conditions and because there is too often too little competition between insurers and because medical care has devolved into a profession in which doctors and their patients are no longer the primary focus of health care and because these intolerable conditions obtain right here in these United States of America, the only industrialized nation without universal health care, we, the American people, have decided to reform health care in such a way that all will be covered and that will enable doctors and their patients to focus on staying and getting well.
This is a mouthful I know, which probably, even at this length, has left some important concerns out. It certainly leaves out President Obama’s paramount point in his speech on health care reform that fixing health care is a moral imperative: we need to fix health care because the moral character of our country must extend beyond me to you; each of us is to a degree our brothers’ and sisters’ keeper because we care about others, not just about ourselves.
Ideally, we and our government representatives should critically examine this thesis using the three fundamental elements of critical thinking:
Description: We need to describe in detail each element of the thesis, using evidence as necessary as well as examples and illustrations. We can quote statistics, and certainly we want to hear the horror stories about those who weren’t properly served and about those who died or were injured for life.
Compare-Contrast: We then need to compare and contrast our health care system with others that seem to work better and worse than ours, looking in detail at the moving parts in and design of each.
Effect-Cause: And in each case we need to examine the why of our system as well as of the others. Why does a particular system produce better or worse health care? Why does a particular system cost more or less? (Actually, it seems that there is no system that costs more than ours.) Why do doctors and patients prefer one system over another?
Sadly, much of our “discussion” of health care here in the US is about as far from critical thinking as is possible for a people who have putatively evolved beyond throwing stones at one another. Shrill cries from some that we are creating death panels, are enabling government to take over medicine, and are constructing a public-option Trojan horse that will lead inevitably to “socialized” medicine in which all will wear gray suits and speak without humor are hardly signs of a rational, critical discussion.
For an antidote to this sad state of affairs and to celebrate critical thinking, see T. R. Reid’s The Healing of America, reviewed by Dr. Abigail Zuger in The New York Times, in which Reid describes health care in the world, compares health care systems, looks carefully at why they work, and examines possible effect-cause solutions to what ails us in the US.
The following Michael Donaghy poem is from The Times Literary Supplement 14 August 2009, a review by Graeme Richardson of two Donaghy books:
………………Meridian…………….
There are two kinds of people in the world.
Roughly. First there are the kind who say
“There are two kinds of people in the world”
And then there’s those who don’t.Me, I live on the borderline,
Where the road ends with towers and
searchlights,
And we’re kept awake all night by the creak
of the barrier
Rising and falling like Occam’s razor.
A meridian is longitude’s great circle arcing through Earth’s north and south poles, separating, at any given instant, day from night, or it’s the apex of development that lasts for an instant before decline begins, or it’s noon, when the sun reaches its zenith, passing after an instant to a later time, though this meaning is hardly used by anyone anymore. But you may remember it as Michael Schwerner’s civil rights base, Meridian, Mississippi, the place where he was returning with James Chaney and Andy Goodman the night he was murdered in 1964, in an instant, by the Klan.
For Donaghy, a meridian is a “borderline, / Where the road ends with towers and searchlights,” a place where judgments are cut by those who know the difference between those who know what they know and those who don’t, manning the towers, searching the borderline for shadows cast by those burdened by complexity.
I hope you had a great summer and am looking forward to working with each of you.
Look to the right for links to my Solano classes ==>
I admit to being less than enthusiastic about grading papers. I assign the due date, making sure that I avoid having multiple classes hand in papers on the same Thursday, which is always the due date because then I have the weekend to get through them.
But this weekend I failed miserably because I have two classes to grade. There are my English 2 poetry first drafts, which are always the hardest because of the errors, and English 1 rewrites, which are easier, but still, I’m staring at a lot of papers right now. And though I don’t have a ruler with me, each pile seems to be a couple feet high. Or is that deep?
And because the first drafts are harder, I start in on the English 2 papers at Rrags, a local coffee house I like to go to so that I remain focused, unable to walk around the house finding other things I could be doing like cleaning out the garage. And I also tell myself to be efficient. If I can take just 15 minutes on each paper, I encourage myself, coach to player, picking up the first essay, it will only take me about eight hours to get through this first stack.
Eight hours!
I try to think neither of the time nor the pay. You see I’m an adjunct instructor of English, which means that I only get paid for the time I appear before the class. The preparation and grading parts are for free — for the college, not for me.
So I begin reading the first paper — the assignment was to write four pages explicating a poem — about the impact of abortion in Gwendolyn Brooks’ “The Mother,” and I find myself more than an hour later still writing and thinking about the compassionate, ethical way my student analyzed this poem and the art of Brooks’ poem itself:
Abortions will not let you forget. You remember the children you got that you did not get, The damp small pulps with a little or with no hair, The singers and workers that never handled the air. You will never neglect or beat Them, or silence or buy with a sweet. You will never wind up the sucking-thumb Or scuttle off ghosts that come. You will never leave them, controlling your luscious sigh, Return for a snack of them, with gobbling mother-eye. I have heard in the voices of the wind the voices of my dim killed children. I have contracted. I have eased My dim dears at the breasts they could never suck. I have said, Sweets, if I sinned, if I seized Your luck And your lives from your unfinished reach, If I stole your births and your names, Your straight baby tears and your games, Your stilted or lovely loves, your tumults, your marriages, aches, and your deaths, If I poisoned the beginnings of your breaths, Believe that even in my deliberateness I was not deliberate. Though why should I whine, Whine that the crime was other than mine?-- Since anyhow you are dead. Or rather, or instead, You were never made. But that too, I am afraid, Is faulty: oh, what shall I say, how is the truth to be said? You were born, you had body, you died. It is just that you never giggled or planned or cried. Believe me, I loved you all. Believe me, I knew you, though faintly, and I loved, I loved you All.
At this rate it’ll only take me two more days, if I don’t eat or sleep, to finish just these literature papers. But somehow the stacks of essays seem less high and the pay less important.
In this link there is some introductory material on the civil rights movement followed by Maya Angelou commenting on Obama’s victory.
Links to the inaugural address:
Obama taking the oath and delivering his inaugural address. During the oath Obama started off too soon, so he and Chief Justice Roberts got off on the wrong foot, and then Roberts munged the words just a tad — faithfully was the problem– but Obama smiled and remained cool, and today Roberts dropped by the White House to re-administer the oath just so everything was on the up and up, don’t you know, between these two Constitutional scholars.
- Steven Pinker suggests in today’s NYTimes that the issue is split infinitives. Roberts is a grammar tyrant, even changing quotations in his written decisions to match his sense of grammatical rightness, which makes sense since he seems to be doing the same with the Constitution, though how he sleeps given the grammatical problems presented by the Second Amendment I don’t know. Some have suggested that Obama did the right thing by following Roberts’ bungled lead. But Pinker hopes that Obama will be more forceful in the future, leading us in a new direction even when it comes to grammar. Of course Obama’s smart and seems to know how to pick his fights, grammar being important, I would imagine, only when it’s a question of life and death, not just because the world is watching.
Text of Obama’s inaugural address.
Links to Elizabeth Alexander’s “Praise Song for the Day: A Poem for Barack Obama’s Inauguration”:
The YouTube video of her reading the poem.
Text of her poem.
Links to Dr. Joseph Lowery’s benediction:
The YouTube video.
Text of his benediction.
Link to performance of John Williams’ “Air and Simple Gifts” by Yo-Yo Ma on cello, Itzhak Perlman on violin, Gabriela Montero on piano and Anthony McGill on clarinet:
The YouTube video.
And a few laughs.
