Results tagged “poetry” from PEDABLOGUE

As a creativity challenge, I recently signed up for THE FICTION PROJECT, sponsored by The Art House Co-op. Registrants (before Feb) will be mailed a Moleskine sketchbook in which to tell and show a story using words and art, based on a surprise random theme. Most participants scan and share their work-in-progress, with commenting available much like a weblog. The deadline is in April, when sketchbooks are returned to be put on permanent display in the Brooklyn Art Library.

The length of the experience nicely fits into a college semester-length calendar for the coming Spring, so I thought I would recommend it to others who are considering a creative class project for their art or writing courses. The "rules" are flexible enough to allow collaborative creations for the class as a whole, or to allow individual entries. The site offers an educational discount for groups over 10.

Visit my profile and feel free to friend me if you sign up. I don't know what I'll be doing for this project, or if I'll even succeed, but I know it will be very weird.

Thanks to the twitterverse, I was turned on to this video by author John Irving when asked about the future of the book:

The anxieties presently circulating about the marketplace for fiction certainly are causing a lot of changes in the publishing industry lately. In October, price wars among booksellers splashed on the headlines, causing many -- including the New York Times -- to worry about the economics of publishing and the resultant devaluation of the printed book itself. Some speculate that this is all due to the mainstream attention and interest that ebook hardware is finally getting, especially the Amazon Kindle.

Updike speaks to the impact of all this on young writers. I am starting to wonder how the role of creative writing programs and the teaching of creative writing professors will change as a result, since young writers are who we serve. Here are my thoughts -- a rapid fire of brainstorming, more than fully-composed thoughts -- about what, perhaps, creative writing teachers should be considering.

For one thing, we should neither give up on the book, nor hide from the realities of the trade by squatting behind a library shelf or the literary canon. We need to be engaged with the present AND the past, with a toe dipped into the future of our students, as well.

We should adapt to paradigm shifts not by teaching to the marketplace but by teaching to the long-view and by persistently putting publishing into historical context. Students need to be aware of current industry realities, and we need to be engaged in it to understand it completely as teachers. But there is wisdom in our experience and we need to share that experience, in order for students to recognize that publishing as an ever-changing process, and is never "stable" in any fixed way. It has always been historically-contingent, and always been in a state of flux across time. The "book" has always been an artifact of the marketplace of ideas -- a trace artifact of a cultural movement always in-process. This is as true of business trends as it is of artistic movements, and often one change is simply responding and/or adapting to the other.

We should discuss electronic publishing not as the "new" or the "best" but simply one medium for messaging which is as equally valid for expression as any other. When it comes to publishing contracts, ebooks are just one license among many that a writer can act on, and while one license may be more economically viable at any given time than another, all are equally legitimate ways to transfer intellectual property to an audience.

We should inform students about intellectual property law, and advise them to protect their property -- or to know what rights they're donating to the public domain when they unleash it free online or in free ebook giveaways.

We should encourage experimentation with format just as we encourage experimentation with the blank page to poets.

Too often writers glom on to one format or medium or genre and fixate on it (usually because they derived some success within it) -- and this includes everything from the Kindle of today to the illustrated manuscript in days of old. We need to engage new technologies while also understanding the book as a technology itself. But more than that, the key point for new writers to understand -- after they've learned the art of writing and become interested in pre-professional, career trajectories -- is that the products of their imagination and craftsmanship are also ultimately social texts once they become published. Writing, when all is said and done (and revised and marketed) is a form of property that can be traded, and graduates of writing programs rarely learn enough about this stage of the process.

Publishing needs to be considered a stage of the writing process. It is the end stage, but not necessarily the terminus of the process. Books get printed, but the life of the book does not end when the ink dries. There are dialogues that open up (such as in reviews) and books are often updated and revised, serialized and sequelized...and one book experience always informs the next book experience, for writers who survive it.

It is good to teach students "the book life." To think of writing as a way of life in a culture that is not inherently friendly to that way of living. Texts like Jeff Vandermeer's recent title, Booklife: Strategies and Survival Tips for the 21st Century Writer are movements in the right direction. Courses like our own "Publication Workshop" at Seton Hill U, are others.

Sharing the end results of work produced in a classroom -- in end-of-term class readings, in class-generated anthologies, in online literary magazines -- are all forms of publication. Many teachers neglect to exploit this as an arena for learning the way. Because it's the messiest part of the process, and the part where "rejection" (beyond grading systems) looms. Bridging the conventional forms of classroom publishing (such as a reading of revised work to the classroom at the end of the term) with emergent formats (such as video recordings to be uploaded for public comments from youtube) will engage writing students with the marketplace of ideas today.

In addition to the "book life" and being aware of the status and reality of the economy of writing, there is also something simply called the "reader's life." We should remain role models for engaged readers as much as writers, with an interest in the output of the publishing world. We should advise students to take literature courses and spend time in the library. We should buy books, and practice what we preach by investing in the world that invests in us as authors. We should share and explore new technologies and trends in publishing and talk about these formats with our students. We should show that we are readers as much as writers -- we are bookish. Students need to see us reading, hear us reciting published works, spot us in the faculty break room reading a kindle, recognize us in the audience at a public poetry reading, see us browsing the shelves at the local Barnes and Noble, sit across from us at a table in the library. When they do so, they will see themselves reflected in the world of books as a real, lived experience.

Last week I bought a Kindle. I carried my ebook device around all week not to show off some new gaget, but to say Look...this might be what our future looks like. I'm interested in where this is heading...are you? I opened up a dialogue with readers on my horror writing weblog, about the ebook watershed. I uploaded documents for a Dean's Council meeting to my Kindle and brought it to the meeting instead of printing them out or using a laptop. I showed my Kindle to almost every student who came to my office for advising this past week, for both the "wow" factor and to say "hey, you might be getting your textbooks this way someday." Down the hall, my colleague ordered a Kindle DX for his journalism courses, and posted an interesting blog about the kindle's impact on academics. Teachers and writers open up conversations about books; books are portals into conversations about culture. Writers shouldn't be worried, but engaged and thoughtful; we need to be steeled up against the fluctuations inherent to the industry, but also willing and able to transcend it. That's the skill of the creative writer -- telling a good story transcends the medium and the economics of the exchange. But we also have to be creative in finding ways for getting our stories heard.

And we need to keep publishing our own writing, creative or not, as well. That's the only way to truly learn what it's like out there. To accumulate knowledge of the book world and bring it back to our classrooms, whether explicitly or obliquely. The skills and knowledge that we've always taught will never go out of fashion, but we need to recognize what is at stake in our students' lives when changes are on the horizon.

It seems almost criminal to advise a student to become a novelist without also arming them with some sort of knowledge and wisdom about the marketplace for fiction. The power of an educated writer is not simply to write well, but to join a community of like-minded thinkers and to participate smartly in the world in which they hope to operate, economically as well as discursively. We can react to changes in the industry with optimism or skepticism, but we should never abandon the one certain thing we have to give writers of the future: hope, balanced by wisdom and intelligence.

This morning I was pointed to an article on "The Five Mental Habits of Innovative People" that I found interesting, because it identifies the skillsets I would want to foster in my students, especially in a course related to creativity (like writing).

Drawing from research by Jeff Dyer and Hal Gregersen at BYU, called "How Do Innovators Think?" [available at Harvard Business Publishing's neat "Creativity at Work" page, which is worth a look-see], Jessica Stillman isolates (and explains) these five "mental habits":

* Associating * Questioning * Observing * Experimenting * Networking

The researches suggest 'questioning' is really the engine that drives all of the above, yet "questioning on its own doesn’t have a direct effect without the others."

In my classes, I have been a big advocate for question-generation -- it is the trigger behind all "inquiry" -- creative and scholarly -- and it protects the teacher from doing all the thinking for the student (without thinking, no learning!). I run students through an activity I call 'question-storming'; I often give them prompts for writing that encourage them to raise their own questions-at-issue; I'll play devil's advocate to challenge them to question their own assumptions; etc.

When a writer approaches the blank page "questioning" rather than feeling as though they need to be the "authority" they are open to making discoveries through writing...and they never have block.

What would I add to the list? LISTENING.

By which I mean "Active Listening".

Although 'listening' (like 'reading') is related to 'observing', I don't think people think of 'listening' as a skill that leads to innovation and creativity. They think of it as a passive act, which it is not. Part of this assumption of passivity comes from the education system: we sit in desks our whole lives, listening, listening, listening...more than doing, creating, innovating. The invisible work of learning happens in our heads, if we are self-disciplined enough to pay attention and listen actively. But that skill is rarely cultivated or directly taught.

LISTENING is crucial to mastering the art of concentration, but it also factors into creativity. As a creative writer, I could never write dialogue if I didn't listen closely to how people actually speak -- and not just listening to the words, but also to the musicality of it. If I did not listen intensely I could not know what it means to be a reader, who mentally 'listens' to the author's voice as they read. Listening enables emulation and imitative learning, as well: when we listen, we see how others raise questions and discover the pathways available to us in an attempt to answer them. When we listen to an audience, we can test our own answers to questions by getting responses. So listening is a feedback loop into questioning. Listening fuels creativity. Not all creativity springs out from within us; sometimes it pools and settles in, before feeding into the outward flow.

If your teaching is in a rut, or if you want to try to do something innovative in your classroom to solve problems or enable excitement in the room, try listening to your students. You might learn something.

My quest for finding good books on creative writing pedagogy continues. A week or two ago, I decided to drop a chunk of my paycheck on titles I found on the cheap at half.com, and I've begun reading them with great abandon, as I prepare to teach a new online class on the teaching of writing for graduate students in our MFA program in Writing Popular Fiction.

This weekend I've been reading the late Wendy Bishop's book, Released Into Language: Options for Teaching Creative Writing (NCTE, 1990) -- a book that is, astonishingly, available digitally via ERIC, the wonderful Education Resources Information Center. Though a bit dated by this point in time, Bishop's text remains a quite solid study of the different ways that creative writing can be taught well in the undergraduate curriculum, arguing for a transactional and reflective approach that addresses where students really are, and how students really think, striking a pitch-perfect balance between praxis and theory.

While the classroom activities and approaches in the book are not necessarily new to me, what I'm enjoying most about reading this book is the way it articulates how the assumptions of graduate programs in creative writing don't always translate well into the teaching of undergraduate programs in the same field. This is helping me rethink my own assumptions, as someone who often teaches similar material in both venues...and as I read it, I'm recalling just how often I have drawn upon my teaching of composition in the creative writing classroom, and vice-versa. I recommend all writing teachers take a look, if only for inspiration.

The title comes from a passage by Adrienne Rich (from her classic, On Lies, Secrets and Silence), which I like so much I wanted to post it here so I can return to it again later:

At the bedrock level of my thinking about this is the sense that language is power, and that, as Simone Weil says, those who suffer from injustice most are the least able to articulate their suffering; and that the silent majority, if released into language, would not be content with a perpetuation of the conditions which have betrayed them. But this notion hangs on a special conception of what it means to be released into language: not simply learning the jargon of an elite, fitting unexceptionably into the status quo, but learning that language can be used as a means of changing reality. What interests me in teaching is less the emergence of the occasional genius than the overall finding of language by those who did not have it.... -- Adrienne Rich (emphasis added)

Empowerment. Social justice. Transformation. Discovery. It's all encapsulated here, in this brief passage about teaching and writing.

On the topic of the cross-overs between composition and creative writing pedagogy, I'm eager to study another book that I've ordered: (Re)Writing Craft by Timothy Mayers. I think it will prove quite useful to us at SHU, since we are presently considering "(re)writing" our undergraduate curriculum a little bit in the year ahead.

I'm teaching an Introduction to Literary Studies course this term, and one of the early assignments in the class asked students to create a "collage that reflects your perspective on literary study". To explain the assignment, I developed a handout that explained what collage artists think they're doing and other requirements for the task. When I passed that around the room, I projected a graphic of a collage I'd made once on the No Child Left Behind Act, and explained my creative process...reporting how I discovered the theme along the way, and suggesting that the collage still meant more than what I intended it to mean.

I was thoroughly impressed by what the students came up with for this homework assignment. Many of the students went far beyond my expectations, and I asked a few if I could share their work here.

I liked Melissa Kaufold's collage entitled "How Do You See Me?" (above), because it interestingly represented the identity of an English student, with competing voices (mostly negative) surrounding the figure -- who herself is a multifaceted construct (the four-fold face) ostensibly holding an armload of books that obscure the rest of her body. A very colorful thought balloon reveals the value in her thoughts about literature, impervious to the onslaught of negativity espoused in the "external" world; the strength of these thoughts is reinforced by the thick black boundaries lines that protect these "thoughts" from interference and keep them relatively cohesive.

The collages of the class as a whole seemed to inherently lean toward conflicts like these. In her collage, "Transcendence" (below), Julia Leksell took an artful approach to semiotics, employing negative/white space in an intriguing way that differed from many of the other collages the students created. Here, she took control over the bricolage of symbols to add her own imagery to the piece, where she portrays a dove-like ascent or emergence from what seems like a pile of abandoned and contradictory signs and symbols:

The diagonal lines in Leksell's postmodernist piece make me imagine that the pictured bird is hefting a weighty net of language, struggling but succeeding to rise. I like the positive message here.

Attempts like these to come to some cogent "perspective" on literary studies opened up the floodgates of discussion in class, and allowed everyone -- whether creative writer, journalist, or literary scholar-in-training, to participate on a fairly equal plane.

I followed up the assignment by having students swap collages and write up analyses of them. We discussed this process as one inherent to both artistic production (crafting sense out of found language and fragments) and criticism (analyzing the whole by breaking down the structure into its parts). This two-pronged approach to the assignment created a dialogue between creativity and criticism in a really successful way, I think. It both raised the question, "What is literature?" and unveiled that it is, if anything, a conversation that meaning-making demands.

[POSTSCRIPT: After posting this entry, Dr. Davis from Teaching College English asked if I'd share the guidelines. They're relatively specific to the context of my class syllabus, but I'll gladly share it here, if it helps in any way:

I have always believed in running some kind of "closure" activity on the last day of my classes, as a way of reflecting on learning from the term and thinking about its applicability and/or importance in the future. It's a lot more rewarding than just collecting papers or tests (though they're usually doing that on their way out the door). For a closure activity, I typically just ask questions or host a dialogue of some kind. Sometimes I'll go over the learning objectives on the syllabus, or return to some topic/activity/text we did on the first day of the class. But this year I planned something new, and I think it was successful.

I had the students write haiku about the class.

I gave a quick mini-lesson in the haiku. Nothing too complicated. Using the overhead document projector, I showed the class a few samples (which I had stealthily written while they were doing their in class work at the beginning of the hour), counted out the syllable structure (three lines; 5-7-5) and then asked them to write their own haiku which encapsulated a lesson or experience from the course in a "pithy" way. I gave them about ten minutes, asking them to write as many as they possibly could in that time. "Counting on your fingers allowed and encouraged!"

Then, one by one, they each went to the front of the room and read their haiku -- or "STWaiku" as I called it, poorly punning on the acronym for the course (Seminar in Thinking and Writing) -- to the room. In retrospect, I probably should have called it "CompKu" or something of that ilk.

Here are two quick examples from my own (if I do this again, I'm going to collect them, because I don't have any student samples handy!):

A thesis statement:
Rereading America
needs to be re-read.

Peer critique helps me
to make a good enthymeme --
because, just because.

Those aren't very good (made 'em up off the cuff shortly before we did the exercise). But the activity itself was a blast. Lots of laughter, punctuated by "oh yeah" moments. Students enjoyed the chance to be creative; lots took the opportunity to make jokes about me ("Dr. Arnzen's Beard" -- yes a recurring theme!) or the content of the class. It was a good way to tie things up: a writing activity, almost entirely student-driven, and fun.

[postscript: Any students from the class reading this: please delurk and post your haiku in a comment, if you have it handy!]

The forums over at Teacher Magazine have a great conversation going on right now about the advantages and disadvantages of reading text aloud to students in the classroom. Apparently a high school teacher was given a hard time by his administrators, who overheard him and felt he was talking down to the students by treating them like they were in elementary school.

This surprised me, because every literature professor I ever had when I was an English major would recite passages of text to the class and myself have been doing if for years. I had never considered that it might be a "bad" way to teach, because utterance brings a printed text to life in a way that silence usually does not. Some students may very well be "aural" learners. And in my experience students seem to respond well when I read text aloud to the class, because I am -- to be unabashedly cocky -- probably the best reader in the room. All teachers probably are. Why be shy? We usually know the text we're reading to the class inside-and-out, so we can probably do a good job it. As an English prof, I am an experienced reader who has been visited by many fictional voices across a lifetime, and I know how to inflect and read prose and poetry with a dramatic cadence. I even have the audacity to read my own writing to the class sometimes, because this is what creative writers do professionally. I'm not saying I'm the best oral interpreter on the planet, but in my classroom, chances are very good that I am the most qualified person in the room to do it. And so is any teacher.

The counter-argument, of course, is based on the assumption that students who are already literate don't want to be "talked down" to. It harkens back to the parent-child relationship, infantalizing students. It reduces the adult classroom to something akin to a preschool-level children's library, and participates in what critics call "the crayola curriculum," contributing to the "dumbing down" of American students. It impedes the flow of speedy learning that people who can read for themselves might experience. And if a teacher is a boring, turgid reader, it risks killing the class dynamic -- or can lead to student mockery, disappointment or other tomfoolery.

But all things considered, it depends on how you do it, and what your motives really are. Sometimes the "Crayola Curriculum" can be employed in productive, reflective, or simply tension-relieving ways (as my SHU colleague Dennis Jerz attempts to do when he reads a children's book to his English majors at the end of a stressful term). I would say that, on balance, reading aloud is a good strategy. As Candy Blessing points out in "Reading to Students Who Are Old Enough to Shave", research supports the argument that "reading to kids boosts their reading comprehension, increases their vocabularies, and helps them become better writers. In fact, students who are read to are more motivated to read themselves—increasing the likelihood that they will one day become independent, lifelong readers." Clearly knowing how printed words and sentences and poetic lines and so forth should "sound" in our heads when we read them can only help us comprehend them, and teachers can and should model these sounds for students. This is something that Language teachers have employed forever.

Moreover, we're not just modeling how to read that particular text. We're modeling how to read in public, how to recite in general, and also teaching communication and listening skills. Listening to a teacher recite has its analogue in many civic functions: hearing politicans speak, or priests and preachers, and so forth. Students can learn what we might call "audience literacy": how to be a good, attentive, ethical listener.

I would toss in, however, that the method can create a teacher-centered environment in the classroom, and that one shouldn't dominate the class or treat it as their own private rehersal hall. A lector's reading aloud should be counter-balanced by having the students read -- in fact, they should read more often than the teacher. Having students read aloud is often better because not only does everyone get to practice, but everyone also gets the "stage" for a moment. Everyone has a voice and students always benefit from participating fully in the class. When they listen to each other, they engage with one another. (I have even seen students correct each other and offer advice to each other, workshopping their recitation without any input from me!). You can see it in their eyes. Reading is not just absorbing through the eyes or ears -- it is reacting, responding, voicing, and more.

I would also add that not only should teachers be wary of producing a teacher-centered environment, but also that the textbook-dominated one. Even in a literature course, it might be good to have students read aloud from their own writing. Or, optionally, to have the teacher read student writing to the class. I do this quite often. In classes where I collect daily journals, I will often begin the hour by reading one of my favorite entries. It not only rewards the students who put their energy into the journal writing, but it also provides a great transition from the previous class into the next one.

Another trick, of course, is to bring in an audio CD or DVD, or to bring in the writer as a guest, so that students can hear authors read their own work aloud. They're often surprised by how the author sounds -- how different they sound than they expected -- and sometimes even how much better it sounded in their own heads when they read it off the page themselves.

I suppose all of these tactics are relatively obvious, and that there are myriad other strategies for employing oral recitiation in the classroom. I've really only scratched the surface. But I think just hearing that some administrators think this is a bad idea makes me realize that we need to talk about these things we take for granted more often...so that others won't take their own assumptions -- usually ones that originate in their own experiences in the classroom as a kid and carried forward into adulthood -- for granted, too.

Visit the forum at Teacher Magazine to find more methods, arguments, and research about this topic.

Are we bending under the oppressive rule of children? Do kids have too much power?

There are days, I think, when every teacher wonders this, even at the college level.

Dennis Jerz posts a good response to this idea, particularly in terms of catholic teaching, as raised by Joseph Epstein in his recent lament about the Millenial generation in the conservative journal, Weekly Standard. It's given me a lot to think about, because I often have mixed emotions about inappropriate student behavior and obvious expressions of immaturity, which sometimes conflicts with my drive to treat all students as adult thinkers and learners.

Epstein grossly broadens this idea to suggest that we're living under a "Kindergarchy." [That's a neologism; as Michael Gilleland points out, the correct term is "paedarchy"]. Epstein has used this term before -- in a Wall St. Journal article celebrating Thanksgiving (because, of course, it is the least kid-centered holiday) -- so I think it's safe to say his suspicion of children is something of a leitmotif for him, if not a future book topic.

He's not alone: Time magazine even did a fascinating cover story on the topic a few years ago, "Do Kids Have Too Much Power?"

And it's an interesting question, though when it comes to college teaching (which both Jerz and Epstein mention in exempla), I think we need to be careful not to fall for such widespread generalizations about "kids today." Kids today are just like kids yesterday, but they have different cultural frames of reference, different ways of reading the world. And even while parents seem to be playing a larger role in the academic life of their offspring, I refuse to think of my students as "children" let alone "kids." (No one old enough to wear a military uniform is a child. A better word would be "initiate"...students are "uninitiated" into our learning communities and undergoing a transformation to join them.)

The adult/child divide is not only an issue of parenting, but -- particularly when pushed into abstractions such as "generation" gaps -- also a power relationship, complicated by fears of aging and the desire for eternally youthful vim. Often what seems to be a "grumpy old teacher" engaging a "hostile youth" is really a status game of some kind. In some classrooms, the assumed power position of wisdom (only earned by years of disciplined brain training) butts heads against the assumed power of the youthful physique (usually unearned, though it can be earned through disciplined body training); the classroom is a bastion of the mind, so I can understand why it makes instructors angry when, say, a student-athlete cops an attitude of superiority and refuses to "play along" with a teacher's classroom work. Yet how many teachers channel and project their hostility about their own aging out on the youthful students they have to contend and spar with? How many dream of eternal youth, aligning themselves with their students rather than owning up to their own aged wisdom and experience? To what degree do such psychological hang-ups and unconscious wishes get in the way of teaching and learning?

While it may be true, as many of my colleagues note, that today's students have a strong sense of unearned "privilege" that earlier generations did not, this does not mean that these students are tyrants who rule us. Unfortunately, however, we've all probably heard of -- or personally dealt with -- students who act like they "pay our salaries" and therefore should not have to follow our rules but in fact can direct us to do their bidding (when most of the time, it's their parents or the government's loans and/or scholarships that are "paying" us). The marketing of college campuses as commodities may very well have something to do with this attitude (as Jerz also obliquely suggests). And this, perhaps, is at the root of the problem: students are still "children" in the eyes of their parents and thus they become so to those who market to those parents. To us, on the front lines in the classroom, students need to be treated as adults. Or in the very least, adults-in-progress.

But I always believe it's a good idea to talk about these things openly; if there is a "power struggle" in the classroom, even when it's between me and a student, I'm all for calling attention to it. People at a particular stage of development -- say, 18-24 year olds -- will almost universally be coming "of age" about the world, and will have the same sorts of quirks, assumptions, hostilities, resistences, curiosities, presumptions, and drives. Good college teachers probably recognize or intuit the ways that people of this age group process the world, and can tap into it in order to generate learning. Often this requires dismantling the assumptions that a person of this age group has unwisely settled upon too soon in life, while also remaining skeptical of one's own assumptions about that age group. This is why I always enjoy teaching "education" as an outright topic when I am running a freshmen level course. It is a good way to get these assumptions about "privilege" out into the air, to be tested and challenged in a collaborative open discussion. Once students see that not everyone has the same economic background and different motivations for attending college, they usually modify and reflect on their own background and motivation and, ideally, how these are influenced by outside forces beyond their own organic will.

In Epstein's "Kindergarchy," he slips into a reflection about teaching literature that reveals his persistent struggle against the idealism of the young in his classroom:

...often in my literature classes students told me what they "felt" about a novel, or a particular character in a novel. I tried, ever so gently, to tell them that no one cared what they felt; the trick was to discover not one's feelings but what the author had put into the book, its moral weight and its resultant power. In essay courses, many of these same students turned in papers upon which I wished to -- but did not -- write: "D-, Too much love in the home."

Call me a softie, but there's no such thing as too much love, anywhere. This is a primary example of the "power struggle" I was talking about above. Epstein's secret desire to punish students for being loved as children by their parents sounds awfully sadistic to me, but I have to admit that I have felt a similar twinge of frustration before. (Especially when teaching film, which students are trained to think of as "entertainment" not "art").

While it is true that an affective response to literature is not wholly relevant to a conversation in a literature classroom, and that literary professionals truck with reason not emotion, these feelings still exist in any reader response and a skilled teacher can -- and often must -- train students to see how those emotions are constructed by the text, manipulated by the book and its packaging, their own assumptions, etc. Our very job, I think, is to wean students in lower division classes away from "settling" for emotional reactions as a telos for judgment. Yet this emotion is a stepping stone into criticism, and our job is to point to the river and say: look there, a stone that can help you cross over to my side. But of course, sometimes the teacher too must be willing to cross over toward the students side once in awhile too... but there are many rivers to cross.

[Besides, I challenge Epstein's assumptions about the goal of teaching literature generally: When Epstein says that the focus should be "what the author had put into the book" I would ask how one could possibly know that intention and why not just focus on the "book" not the author's effort; when he refers to "its moral weight" I would question how he "weighs" morals and if they are really as pertinent as he suggests; and when he mentions "resultant power" I would ask if he does not here mean the very emotion he was hoping to quash in the first place, albeit an informed one?

[And I wonder if in the memory he recounts, they were responding to a Dickens novel? Muhahah.]

Another way to get into this matter is to discuss the very notions of "childhood" and "adulthood" in the classroom and to unpack how the meanings of these terms are socially-constructed. A child in one country is not a child in another (just think of the drinking age or legal marriage age in some countries, and you know what I mean). Some are afraid that childhood no longer even exists. I teach an advanced lit course -- when I'm lucky -- called "Childhood in Literature" in which we discuss cultural issues like these, while surveying the representation of the child historically and culturally, across a wide range of fiction and poetry (yes, including Oliver Twist!). The course begins with theory by having the class analyze and discuss Neil Postman's excellent book, The Disappearance of Childhood. Postman argues that childhood is a social construct that operates only in relation to what we think it means to be an adult. For Postman, to be a child is not just an organic age bracket -- it means not yet having literacy -- which gives one "access" to adult "secrets." For Postman, the mass media of TV has erased the need for literacy to have this access, producing adultified children and child-like adults. When we teach literacy, we are teaching adulthood.

In another article on aging, Epstein himself seems to recognize the cultural paedomorphism -- that is, the extension of juvenile tendencies into adulthood -- that Postman has lamented when he writes:

I also grew up at a time when the goal was to be adult as soon as possible, while today--the late 1960s is the watershed moment here--the goal has become to stay as young as possible for as long as possible. The consequences of this for the culture are enormous. That people live longer only means that they feel they can remain kids longer: uncommitted to marriage, serious work, life itself. Adolescence has been stretched out, at least, into one's 30s, perhaps one's early 40s.

Many -- if not the majority -- of the college teachers I know are in their 30s and 40s. Many don't have "kids." You might leap to the assumption that these young teachers are perpetual adolescents who are so much "still in school" that it's become their entire career. (And anyone who wants to be quick to judgment can summon examples easily enough of some teacher they've met who dresses too young, or acts too juvenile, or goes out drinking and dating with students beneath their age bracket, or still loves comix, or plays games, or writes horror stories, or relishes stuffed animals in their offic, or watches Disney cartoons, or plays with coloring books and action figures, or does any number of activities that one might associate with youth culture. Does this make them perpetually juvenile, or simply interesting people who actively know where their pleasures lie?)

We as teachers need to be conscious of our outward expression of "age affiliation" as well as our students, but it should not control us or fill us with shame. The psychology of identity behind age affiliation is intriguing but very complicated, and the distinctions between childhood and adulthood are often false binaries. What Epstein might fail to recognize is that the "serious work" of academia is neither to "become adult as soon as possible" nor to "stay as young as possible for as long as possible" but rather to have a more consciously realized life, period. That's how I prefer to think of it. Shine light on behavior, perhaps even share one's own feelings, but ultimately let students judge it for themselves. To lash out at students with poor grades for "too much love in the home" is probably fighting childishness with childish behavior. It is not always what we do, but how we do it, that separates children from adults. Thus, we need to treat college-aged students like adults, perhaps most of all when they are acting like children.

First up...

Neha Bawa, Seton Hill U class of 2006

Start with a brief bio that tells us first where you are now, then what your status was in college (e.g. "Creative Writing major, Volleyball player, Tetris fan, whatever.) Let your personality show.

I am an eternal English major who keeps moving from one aspect of dissecting the language to another. I’ve completed my undergrad as an English Literature major, and currently, I am teaching English writing to college freshmen and I’m about to begin graduate classes in Communications.

Tell us where you thought you'd be now, back when you were a college freshman.

As a college freshman, my worldview was very convoluted, and I had no idea of how to picture myself in the future. When I first took Introduction to Literature in sophomore year, I knew I wanted to teach college students, so I’m exactly where I thought I would be.

Describe your college experience in one word. Then elaborate in no more than five sentences.

Eclectic. My college experiences have shaped my life and my thinking tremendously and have made a hard core liberal out of me. From the good to the bad and the ugly, the only year I would relive would be my Senior year, for both, academic and personal reasons.

Describe one very specific lesson from the college classroom that you'll never forget. Give us concrete details. Tell us not only what it taught you, but also how and why it worked.

It was a class with you, in fact, that taught me a very valuable lesson in classroom management. I remember, I had started explaining something to a classmate about poetry, and you stopped teaching and asked me if I had started teaching the class at some point. It’s always stayed with me because I use it in my own classroom every time my students start talking in the middle of my sentences. Sometimes, respect has to be commanded.

What do you know now that you wish someone would have taught you in school? How might that lesson best be taught?

I have always wished that, beginning with freshman year, universities made it mandatory for students to learn about post-college savings and retirement options. Terms like “Tax Deferred Annuities” and “Individual Retirement Accounts” hold no meaning for college students and new college grads, which means that the time they spend with philandering away their earnings could have been spent building a nest egg. Also, I’ve always wanted universities to spend more time and resources on career advice and counseling, especially at Seton Hill, where the resources exist, but are not advertised well enough for the students to be completely aware of them.

What teaching method(s) were you subjected to that never made a dent on your learning?

Reading responses based on emotions, instead of literary techniques used in a text. Being inundated with homework doesn’t necessarily mean that the class work is being understood. That just means that there’s more on the plate as “busy” work.

What college experience did you find most displeasing at the time, but now recognize as an important contribution to your learning?

Writing research papers. I have never had the patience to sit in a library for hours and research a subject into the wee hours of the morning, but now that I’m teaching, I realize the importance of understanding research methods, especially when time management is involved.

What habits -- good and bad -- did you pick up in school, that you still continue to apply?

Constant reading. Constant. Whether I read fiction or non-fiction, a newspaper article, or even the back of a tube of toothpaste, I make it a point to read something new every day.

What do you miss about the college classroom, if anything?

The personal and social touches to teaching and learning.

If there was one suggestion you would make to college teachers everywhere, what would it be?

Please don’t ever let yourselves forget, that at the end of the day, after the tenure has been earned, after the papers have been published, after the book deals have been signed, that our profession is about making a difference in our students’ lives and not always our own.

THANK YOU, Neha!

***
Read more "Student Outcomes"!

...one question we might ask is: "Do we always know when we are teaching?" I do not think we do. The single most important thing I learned as an undergraduate may have been that I was capable of graduate study. I learned this from a professor who had no idea he taught it to me. Brief remarks that seem innocuous to us may have a lasting impact on our students. Hopefully, the influence is positive. I do not mean to give us more importance or power as teachers than we actually possess. However, a different but equally significant error may be to ignore the potential impact we can have at moments when we are least aware of what we are saying. -- Peter J. Giordano, Teaching and Learning When We Least Expect It

I had a similar experience, when an American Literature teacher named Beth Ann Bassein answered one of my annoying questions by saying, "Oh, you'll learn all about that when you get your Masters." It floored me. She just continued on in her lectures, not missing a beat. I barely even knew what graduate school was, let alone felt I'd be able to get into one, and here this professor was, assuming I would get my master's degree...heck, she didn't even bother trying to talk me into it! Beth Ann Bassein taught me many things when I took her classes, especially her poetry writing courses (because she's a knockout poet herself), but she was one of the toughest teachers on campus and that one passing comment -- with all its unexpected acceptance and faith in my ability -- alone gave me courage to try. (I had another moment like this when, during my Masters, a Medieval lit professor wrote in the margins of a critical essay: "Oh, shut up and go get your PhD already!") These little para-educational things mean nothing -- and yet they mean everything.

So what a wonderful essay Giordano's "Teaching and Learning When We Least Expect It" is. He reminds us that we are not always in control, that learning often happens between the cracks of the syllabus, and that what we say and do informally with (or around) our students can often teach them far more than we realize.

In his essay, he raises a very pithy question: "Do we always know when we are teaching?" And the answer is, of course not. All we really have is faith and speculation and a whole lot of intuition. Sure, good teaching is mentored, learned, and practiced, grounded in deep, lifelong study and professional development. It's based in what people call "best practices"...but I think we often draw on our unconscious well when we are teaching -- modeling our strategies and challenges off of how we ourselves learned best, and refining our techniques and personal style in a series of never-ending encores of successful teaching strategies we've employed in the past. New teachers really do make it up as they go along -- and might be surprised to learn that older teachers (usually the ones who are still engaged and excited about teaching) are making it up even still.

One of the joys of teaching, for me, is coming up with a really good discussion question off the cuff, or dreaming up an impromptu writing prompt, and watching what happens when students get inspired by it. It's magic. I'll sometimes run back to my office and make sure I write down what I did, so I'll remember to do it again in the future. But sometimes we'll run a really great exercise or discussion prompt one year and it'll come as a surprise to us just how good it can be, but when we repeat it the following year, it doesn't click and we wonder what we did wrong. The idea is only half of it; it's the fuel -- but the classroom dynamic provide the fire.

Giordano mulls over metaphors for teaching, and how none of them are quite right, though "midwife" comes closest. I like his idea that teachers need to be "good company" to students. We have to let go of control fantasies for that to happen. Giordano's essay reminded me of the basic principle of learning: it can happen any time. The best thing a teacher can do is try to create an environment where there's lots of flint that might spark fire. But it's up to the student -- and an infinite number of variables beyond anyone's control -- to strike it.

I think it's crucially important to remember these lessons during times of (what Carolyn Segal has termed) Assessmentdelirium.

***
I found this article on a site I often mention here on Pedablogue: the Tomorrow's Professor mailing list run by Rick Reis out of the Standford CTL program. Their mailing list is worth subscribing to. I'm currently researching "Transormation Theory" for a pedagogy paper I'm delivering next weekend at the International Conference for the Fantastic in the Arts, and I found Giordano's essay very useful.

I am going on sabbatical for the full 2006-7 academic year, in order to secure time to develop my next novel.

While I intend to keep researching and reflecting on teaching during that time, I've decided to put Pedablogue on hiatus until August 2007, when I return to full-time teaching. If I write about teaching before then, I will likely do it for traditional publication, and if anything appears in print I will alert you through a comment appended to this post.

If you're a regular viewer of this site, or if you want to be alerted when it relaunches (because, believe me, you will forget), please enter your e-mail address in the "subscribe" box on your right. This will add you to an announcement list, which will automatically send you a message whenever a new post is made to Pedablogue. Alternately, you could simply add the site as an RSS feed to your aggregrator, if you have one (if not, I recommend FeedDemon).

I want to thank everyone for visiting, reading, and referencing Pedablogue since 2003. I don't consider this page a dead site by any means -- I've simply "gone fishing" at the Isle of Sabbitcus for a year -- and I look forward to returning to this place to exchange ideas. Since I'll be focusing mostly on creative writing for the year to come, I will continue to post regularly to my other blog dedicated to horror writing, The Goreletter. If you like offbeat humor or bizarre horror, please subscribe!

It's been a great year for me: my second novel was published, tenure was approved, my classes were wonderful experiences, sabbatical was awarded, and I've got a poetry book presently on the final ballot for the the Bram Stoker Award (decided in June). I've also learned a LOT about teaching by maintaining this site and reading pedagogy and edublogs across the net. I will still be out there, reading along with you. As a final post, I will simply share some good links about sabbatical (which is often misconstrued as simply a "paid vacation")....

• "And on the Seventh Year..." by Mark Shainblum is an excellent explanation of what taking a sabbatical really means.
  
• My colleague at Seton Hill University, Lee Tobin-McClain, has written a fantastic series of "first person advice" columns for the Chronicle of Higher Education on the sabbatical experience.
  
• The Teaching and Learning Center at Truman State University offers a good compilation of Tips for Writing a Sabbatical Proposal
  
• Inside Higher Ed's running column on What They Don't Teach You in Graduate School by David E. Drew and Paul Gray is chock full of hard-knocks advice that you could probably use, generally; they offer a few tips on taking sabbatical, as well.
  
• Sabbitcal Overview Basics at Hays Recruitment
  

Keep teaching well. No matter how hard it might seem, or how little you feel you're accomplishing, remember that it always matters. -- Mike Arnzen

At Seton Hill University, our "smart classrooms" are equipped with these wonderful document projectors, called ELMOs. "ELMO" is the name of the company that makes these "visual presenters," but on our campus we use the term affectionately as a pet name for these two armed wonders. They work by using a digital camera instead of a mirrored lens like the usual overhead projector -- ELMO projects anything a camera would: documents, book pages, photographs, and even 3D objects that you place under the lens onto the big screen. They're GREAT!

Like most of the faculty on my campus, I typically just use the ELMO as an overhead projector to show handouts, but without having to go through the trouble of making a transparency, since it will project anything you put on it. In my mind, it's even easier to operate than a PowerPoint presentation, and I'll sometimes print out a quick outline for any lecture or class plan (in large font) and just project it, moving as we go through the class outline, keeping the hour organized. But I also like to experiment with the ELMO and see what other things it is capable of doing. After all, people's eyes are naturally drawn to a big screen spectacle and there is a way to tap into this for educational purposes and to reach out to visual learners. These devices are fantastic for visual aids, but I haven't seen professors using them very creatively, let alone with much expertise. It's something worth taking advantage of to not only project information, but to put into action to keep a class' attention (without, of course, using it as a DISTRACTION).

The ELMO (and I really should be calling it the HV-5000XG, since that's the model we're using) can zoom in, zoom out, auto-focus, and more, by pressing buttons on the "stage" at the base. The "stage" can be backlit from underneath or use the two large arms to cast light on the front of the page. But tonight I decided -- after four years of using it -- to actually read the technical manual (online pdf). And though there are some buttons on the machine that I've never used, I was surprised to learn it can do even more than I imagined.

For example, there's apparently a remote control for adjusting the focus and so forth, hidden in a compartment on the stage. So I can walk around the room and zoom in on something if I need to (though the infrared sensor might be shielded by the lecturn). I notice quite often that lecturers will neglect to "enlarge" whatever it is they're projecting, but one should remember to zoom in so that one line of text on the handout will occupy the entire width of the screen and make it easier to read. Students really appreciate this, even though you sacrifice height for width (i.e., you won't be able to see the whole paragraph or passage of text -- or the whole outline...but paper can be slid up and down to accommodate this as you need it). I like to try to use the frame of the screen to both focus and block out things as I go; sometimes the mystery of what's still to come as we make our way through an overhead keeps students alert and taking notes.

I also learned that the lens on the camera can pop off and reveal another lens inside the camera. That means that what we're using as the default lens is actually a secondary "close-up" lens! I had no idea. But I have often played around with the camera by swiveling the camera head around to project the class itself up on the screen (among other things), and now I know how to make the image less fuzzy. There's also an "iris" function on the remote, which might be useful for my film class, when I teach the idea of the "iris" and also might make for some interesting transitions (since we have a switch to turn from the ELMO to a computer monitor and back again). The ELMO has an option to include a small LCD monitor (which we don't have equipped on ours and I wish we did...so I wouldn't have to turn to look at the screen behind me everytime I use it)...perhaps I could use a laptop or the computer monitor in its stay?

The fact is, because the ELMO is a digital capturing device, with enough ingenuity (and the right cables), one could use it as a camcorder or still capture camera for a variety of pedagogical reasons. One could point it at huge maps on the wall and thereby project them onto the screen to make them even larger, or one could zoom in to, say, one region to expand it so everyone can see it from a distance. Or lectures and student speeches in large lecture halls could be simultaneously "shot" and projected onto the larger theater screen, concert style. Student exhibits, speeches, and more could possibly even be recorded using the ELMO and a cable routed back to the computer or a laptop. I'm wondering if my PDA could work with it somehow. Indeed, now that I've read the manual, I see that there are numerous types of connections that could be made on the fly.

I do like to tickle the ELMO. I will often, as I said above, twist the camera head to point at the students en masse, showing them what the class looks like from my perspective. When I'm not directly talking about a handout, but want to keep the ELMO warmed up for when I will, I put objects that are interesting to look at on the stage. A bottle of water, shot from above, makes an interesting spiral pattern. An extreme closeup of a small element of the textbook cover reveals a nuance previously ignored. It's handy to have artwork or a comic at the ready for filler. But anything will do. If I'm showing a film later in class, I project the DVD cover on the wall, or a still from the movie (or image from the textbook) that I want to analyze. Sometimes I'll put objects in motion, lifting them off the stage and bringing them closer to the camera lens, creating my own zoom effect without relying on the awkward push-button technology.

Any document editing can be shown well using an Elmo, so it's a great device for a writing classroom. I'll often have students walk the class through their writing intentions using these devices on their manuscripts -- or we'll workshop a piece as a class and collaboratively edit it by hand that way. It can be used for off-the-cuff show-and-tell, too -- in poetry class, for example, I'll often show "concrete poetry" that isn't in our book using the device, so students can analyze the shape in addition to the words themselves. I could imagine a biology teacher using it to show how to dissect a real frog live, or a sign language teacher using it to project images of hand signals.

When I project using the ELMO, I sometimes get self-conscious because my hands are projected as uncanny looking body parts onto the screen. I notice the dirt under a fingernail, the odd coloration of my skintone through the projector, the inkstains on my thumb. So I might use a pen or some other device as a pointer, or use a laser pointer on the screen.

For more tips on using the ELMO, I refer to Ray Moses' advice for lawyers on how to present evidence in the courtroom using a document camera... (he talks, for example, on how to use a ruler to show scale or what color marker works best for hilighting). More can be found using Google.

Hi Michael,
I found your website by putting the phrase "recommendation letter appreciation gift" into Google. After reading your blog on writing recommendation letters I felt compelled to email you and ask you my question. A former professor of mine wrote a recommendation letter on my behalf for a graduate scholarship application. I want to send a gift of appreciation with my thank you note. We are both members of the same financial association; would their logo on a mug be an appropriate gift? (Incidentally, it is not the organization giving the scholarship.)

Thanks for your help!
Warm regards, Jessica Smith, CFP

Hi Jessica!

Thanks for writing...and posing such an interesting question! I think the truth is that a former professor will be happy to receive almost any gift you send, because they rarely receive such things from their students (it's true!), and because the kindness of the gesture -- along that thank you letter you mentioned -- will often mean more to them than anything else. Teachers are often rewarded simply by teaching and having their students achieve success. But a personal touch in a gift is icing on the cake and you shouldn't hold back. The mug sounds fine; especially if you think it will bring a smile and a memory of you to the prof's face when they drink their morning coffee or while they're sitting in a boring staff meeting. Heck, if you are close with your prof, you could even buy matching mugs -- one for you, one for them -- to signify your newly forged professional bond as colleagues in that financial association you mentioned.

I've received some interesting gifts in my day, for a variety of reasons (graduation, rec letters, end-of-term goodbyes). The typical gift is a book or a pen, because I teach English. But I really treasure the creative gifts the most. I've had students give me paintings or other pieces of art they've made, and I display them proudly in my office. I've received DVDs from films I've mentioned in class, or actual music by the student, like a mix tape, of songs related to a piece of their writing. Office-based gifts are great choices, but they don't have to be so corporate or official as, say, a paperweight or picture frame. A student once got me a Xmas tree ornament that reminded her of a Leonard Trawick poem called "At the Flying School" that I taught in our class together. Another student gave me one of those glass mannequin heads that often display hats, just because they thought I would enjoy the weirdness of it. (I did). I've got lots of Halloween decorations (my favorite, a gargoyled door knocker that screams in pain when you knock it), stuffed animals in the shape of flesh-eating viruses (not joking!), and even action figures from horror movies, like The Thing. A pair of graduate students put their money together and bought me a lamp that realistically looks like a human skull. As a horror writer, I appreciate these offbeat tokens of affection and though you'll never see me playing with an action figure, I do enjoy the fact that the students gave me something personal (and my house is starting to look like an abattoir!)

I'm not big on decorating trees, but I put that Xmas ornament I mentioned on my tree every year and it reminds me that my teaching does matter in the world outside of the hallways of the school. And I use that glass head as a prop for a poetry writing exercise in my writing class ("Write an extended metaphor for this glass head, being as descriptive as possible."). I'm not sure if a corporate-styled mug (even if that logo is for the school itself) will inspire such creative uses, but I appreciated these personal touches a great deal. If a gift inspires me to be more creative in the classroom, or actually provides me with a prop I can use in a future class, I'm overjoyed. But I'm just as happy to just receive a handshake, thank you note, kind word on an evaluation, a recommendation letter for my files, or even just a knowing smile.

-- Mike Arnzen

p.s. for readers of Pedablogue....
Thank you cards are always a good idea when a prof does work for you that they aren't paid to do. Obviously, gifts should never be traded for grades or used to ply a prof for favoritism. They should usually be given only during sanctioned events (like, say a club Xmas party), a holiday, or a goodbye present after grades have been turned in. A good time to exchange gifts is immediately following a thesis defense or somewhere in the auditorium/grounds (or even at a graduation party) immediately following graduation.

Hot on the heels of my posting about how to make lectures more permeable and interactive, Richard Reis' wonderful resource, Tomorrow's Professor, has posted a very helpful essay advocating the use of "Activity Breaks" to enhance and increase class participation.

Since the attention span of almost all students is between 10 and 20 minutes, you can expect to lose most of your students if you lecture for 50 minutes straight. Even professionals fall victim to the "my eyes glaze over" syndrome. Not only do students tune out once that "dead" period is reached, the energy level of the class also flags. The solution might be to structure a 50-minute class something like this: a mini-lecture including an introduction, an activity break, a second mini-lecture, an activity break and finally a third mini-lecture, including a wrap-up. The mini-lectures contain an introduction, a body and a closing, similar to a straight lecture except they are shorter.

Great advice! Using mini-lecture methods to "bookend" an activity is a great way to think about how to structure a class. I often intuitively do this in writing classes, but I'm going to try to more actively apply this method to my content-based courses in literature, as well.

Breaks -- whether for activities or just to break up a multi-hour course -- are imperative, I think. Even plays have intermissions. Sometimes I'll ask students to do something clever during a break and give them a longer break to accomplish it (like in my poetry classes, I'll say -- "take your break outdoors today, and write down every smell you encounter" -- or "go write a poem that describes a 'secret place' you find on campus, but don't mention it by name; then come back to class and read your poem and we'll see if we can guess where it is"). Students really get a charge out of the change of pace and the moment of "escape" from not only the classroom but the monotony of routine.

And by a "charge" I don't just mean having fun. Let's call it a learning "recharge" instead.

I subscribe to the Tomorrow's Professor newsletter; now they are delivering in BLOG FORMAT! I highly recommend it.

I recently contributed a chapter to a forthcoming 2nd edition of a book called Writing Horror which could, ostensibly, become a textbook I assign some day. I've been thinking, too, about writing an outright writing instruction text in the near future. The longer I do this, the more closely aligned what I write and what I teach become.

This is what most scholars do: produce scholarship, in the form of books and other publications. The benefits to students of taking a course by the prof who "wrote the book" on the subject would seem self-evident. The author is an authority on the subject and knows the book so well that she'd be the best person to teach from it.

But is there a conflict of interest when a teacher assigns a text of their own authorship to a class, earning royalties from the sales?

The American Association of University Professors' statement "On Professors Assigning Their Own Texts to Students" provides a great overview of the ethical issues this matter raises. As they put it, there is a risk of abusing their "captive audience":

Because professors are encouraged to publish the results of their research, they should certainly be free to require their own students to read what they have written. At the same time, however, students in a classroom can be a captive audience if they must purchase an assigned text.... Because professors sometimes realize profits from sales to their students (although, more often than not, the profits are trivial or nonexistent), professors may seem to be inappropriately enriching themselves at the expense of their students.

The AAUP article goes on to show some model ways in which some campus policies have dealt with the issue: from requiring committee (or supervisory) approval of required course texts to the school picking up the tab to distribute a professor's texts for free. All good ideas, but, as the AAUP also reminds us, it is ultimitely best for faculty themselves to have the freedom to determine which texts are the best to teach a subject -- so long as they do not take advantage of students by the authority inherent in the instructional role.

Of course, this doesn't just pertain to assigning one's own titles in a class just to make a few dimes in royalties. I've seen (and had) profs who have required texts written by friends, colleagues, spouses, and advisors; I've seen them require books that can only be purchased at specific bookstores or copy services downtown; some have students buy them through their website, with a hidden referral fee (aka "kickback") built into the web code. While many probably have the best intentions, and probably teach these books well, there are probably alternative avenues of delivery that they should have considered.

In fact, faculty who do assign their own books can take the initiative and sometimes help students SAVE money. They could put extra copies on reserve in the library or make electronic editions of the manuscript available free of charge. Or they could buy books at their contracted author discounts and pass the savings on to the students. Another idea might be to have course fees or a departmental budget pay for buying enough texts to cover a section, and then loan them to the students each term the course is taught, retreiving them at the end. In the very least, they could encourage students to sell them as used editions at the end of the term. And when money-saving measures are unrealistic (say, with a brand new title), one could promise -- in the syllabus, in writing -- to donate the personal royalties earned from class purchases to a course-related charity.

According to testimony in an article at Yale Daily News on this issue, students are often more comfortable buying a professor-authored book for a class than the professor is selling them. Often, having the author of the book in the classroom is a bonus and it can enhance the learning. One problem the article mentions, however, is that sometimes the professor risks repeating the book verbetim, and the use of the book creates much redundancy.

It may be better, in fact, to have a class help with the creation of a textbook rather than deliver the material to them post-facto. This issue of "illuminating the process" is the best way, I believe, to think about it. This is why it might actually make more sense to bring students into the inside of a work-in-progress rather sharing the end results of a work of scholarship in the shape of an already-finished and published book. I once had a sociology teacher who assigned a few of the books he had read as a precursor to the book he was currently working on, and he shared his book outline with the class in the form of lectures, soliciting feedback, questions, and inviting us to share our own ideas. Although it was a little too teacher-centered for my tastes, I found this collaborative process very enriching. If he would have published the book (he sadly died before he could), I'm sure he would have credited our class in the acknowledgments.

If a professor-authored book is assigned (or even an article, poem, or play, for that matter), then the teacher should be open to criticism and even invite suggestions for expansion and revision. As a teacher, I have assigned both my own creative writing and my own criticism in my courses. While I've never put my books in the bookstore as mandatory buys, I have freely shared my writing in oral form (performing a fiction/poetry reading to my classes), in handouts I pass around (having students critique my own short-short fiction and poetry), and in assigned readings put on reserve in the library (articles I've written on books or films we've studied in the class). The only disadvantage I see with doing this is that sometimes students are reluctant to critique me honestly; but I do a lot of self-critique so they can see that I am open to it, and I do actively solicit feedback and ideas.

Creative writing books are a bit different than, say, a biology textbook. I read an article in a student paper online (Southern Nevada's Coyote Press), where the student writer felt profs shouldn't assign novels at all. She smartly reminds us that "writing THE book" and "writing A book" are two very different things. And with creative works, ego is often involved. It's bad enough that the students might perceive the assigned book as a sort of highway robbery -- they might even consider it professorial narcissism.

Personally, when I share my own creative writing with students, one of my purposes is to model what it's like to be an "artist as thinker" -- that is, someone who is thoughtful about what they are doing and not just writing blindly under the auspices of "entertainment." And as a literary critic, I am trying to practice what I preach about writing for a "discourse community"...because, in my opinion, good writing always raises issues for discussion. Ultimately, when I assign my own texts for a class I do so not because I am "the authority" but because it gives me an opportunity to show what it means for a writer/scholar to be open to criticism. When I put one of my own texts on the table, I solicit the same sort of critical probing and editorial inquiry I would like to see happening when they discuss any text, particularly in their own writing workshops and peer editing sessions (which are usually mandatory in my classes, particularly for end-of-term papers).

What I'm suggesting is that the teacher who assigns his or her own books has to be a particular kind of teacher and a particular kind of author. At bottom, they have to be a very humble or courageous one, I would imagine. One who doesn't limit interpretation of the book to "what he intended." One who is extremely receptive to criticism from students and not afraid to admit errors. One who is as open to hearing about the flaws of the text as he should be skeptical when told about the strengths. In other words, a writer who models how writers learn from listening to their readers rather than a writer who weilds the text like a cop might flash his shiny new badge -- as some sort of evidence of authority over the students. Being teacher is already authority -- and ego-boo -- enough.

[I will be in attendance as respondent to this panel, so I thought I'd help Dr. Sandner get the word out by posting his Call for Papers here...]

Call for Papers:
Paper Session: “Michael Arnzen: New Directions in Horror”
The 27th International Conference on the Fantastic in the Arts, Ft. Lauderdale, FL, March 15-19, 2006.

Responding to the conference’s focus on “the fantastic in other media,” “Michael Arnzen: New Directions in Horror” attempts to define the impact of new media on popular literature by exploring multiple award-winning author Dr. Arnzen’s literary experiments producing horror for such media as palm pilots, email, electronic texts and his Stoker award winning website, The Goreletter (as well as traditional print forms). Dr. Arnzen has already agreed to act as a respondent.

Deadline: Nov 15 for paper abstracts to dsandner@fullerton.edu. ICFA deadline: Nov 30. Presenters must be members of IAFA at the time of the conference.

On Dr. David Sandner:
My paper, “Meat Shots, Gorelets, Severed Hands and the Uncanny in your Inbox: Michael Arnzen’s New Directions in Horror,” will interrogate the intersection of theory, new media and the traditions of the horror field in Dr. Arnzen’s texts. I am a Assistant Professor of English at California State University, Fullerton. I recently edited Fantastic Literature: A Critical Reader, currently available from Praeger. I also wrote The Fantastic Sublime and co-edited The Treasury of the Fantastic. My fantastic fiction and poetry appear in Realms of Fantasy, Asimov's, the collections Mammoth Book of Sorcerers and Baseball Fantastic, Weird Tales, and elsewhere.

On Dr. Michael Arnzen:
The Bram Stoker Award is the horror field’s highest honor: Dr. Arnzen has won for Best First Novel (Grave Markings, 1994) and Best Alternative Forms (2003) for his website; he has been nominated four other times for Fiction Collection (100 Jolts, 2004), Poetry Collection (Paratabloids, 2001 and Gorelets: Unpleasant Poems, 2003) and Alternative Forms (The Goreletter, 2004). As an Associate Professor of English at Seton Hill University, Dr. Arnzen has also brought to his work an extraordinary theoretical grounding for his experiments in form.

Take a look at one of the course objectives from my syllabus for Literary Criticism (a 300-level course in theory and analysis):

"To become comfortable reading academic criticism and applying critical methods in your writing"

Seems like a good objective, no? At a recent faculty workshop on Bloom's taxonomy, I discovered that this seemingly innocent -- and to me, important -- objective may be more problematic than I realized. And by revising this objective I've come up with some strategies for strengthening my course.

I think most teachers would agree that reducing student anxiety about a course's content is a prime objective, because anxiety and fear can impede learning. Everyone knows that motivation plays a role in student learning. And what teacher of English doesn't harbor some desire to inculcate students with some awareness and appreciation of the "pleasure of the text"? But the problem my objective raises is quite simple. How does one objectively evaluate whether or not a student has become more "comfortable"? Is comfort-level really a measurable skill? Without utilizing biofeedback technology, it's probably difficult to assess (let alone grade) in an objective manner.

When I teach lit crit, I always encounter a latent fear and anxiety among students about the level of discourse encountered in literary theory. The reactions to the writing of critics like Jacques Derrida range from jaw-dropping bafflement to outrageous hostility. Literary criticism can read like a foreign language to a college student. The attitudes one develops early in relation to criticism can become a sort of baggage one carries throughout their academic life -- and many advanced learners carry chips on their shoulders (or, alternatively, a defensive arrogance) in regards to theory. So one of my missions in teaching the class is to encourage students to bracket off their emotional responses to (and alienation from) the Otherness of writing and to "run with it" even if they don't completely understand what a critical text is saying. It takes several reads and much learning to comprehend a difficult piece of theory, and I dare say only a fool would pretend to entirely understand what the critic means in some cases. Indeed, since theory is often philosophically abstract, the complicated syntax and the poetics of the writing are often required to encapsulate a thought, and it often approaches creative writing -- and therefore it requires a great deal of interpretive flexibility on the part of the reader.

Beyond the matter of "difficulty," I also try to encourage students to become comfortable forwarding their ideas and making risky interpretive moves that will advance their theoretical arguments beyond basic (and often "vulgar" -- meaning common and oversimplified, not grotesque) socio-historical interpretations. Undergraduate students who are finally "coming of age" as English majors aren't entirely comfortable having the legs they have recently mastered pulled out from under them. But too often they rely on habitual forms of interpretation that have worked in their other classes. When pressed to try something new, students will too often "consult the oracle" in their research and parrot the arguments of others, sometimes avoiding the advancement of authentic or original claims in the process. Trying to raise a student's comfort level with literary discourse invites them to participate more effectively in that discourse as an active critic, and to learn more about the value of alternative approaches to literature.

There are even more reasons why I would list "becoming comfortable" as a course objective, but the problem is assessment. It is nearly impossible to judge whether a student has met such an outcome using Bloom's cognitive taxonomy (although the objective on my syllabus does indeed use the term "applying," the phrase "to become comfortable" is the operative phrase).

The leader of our syllabus workshop suggested that I look into the "affective domain" of Bloom's Taxonomy, rather than the cognitive domain. He later turned me on to a very useful document that gives an overview of them, and I've begun looking into this material more deeply. The "Affective" taxonomy examines a student's growth in feelings or emotional areas -- it is an attitudinal form of assessment. Looking over the affective domain, I believe my objective ("to become comfortable") is most in line with this category:

Responding to Phenomena: Active participation on the part of the learners. Attends and reacts to a particular phenomenon. Learning outcomes may emphasize compliance in responding, willingness to respond, or satisfaction in responding (motivation).

Examples: Participates in class discussions. Gives a presentation. Questions new ideals, concepts, models, etc. in order to fully understand them. Know the safety rules and practices them.

Key Words: answers, assists, aids, complies, conforms, discusses, greets, helps, labels, performs, practices, presents, reads, recites, reports, selects, tells, writes.

And indeed, all of those examples and keywords are methods I employ in Literary Criticism to raise the students' comfort with the texts. Students not only write and participate in discussions, but even read a difficult essay outside of class and give a presentation to class about it. I am trying to raise the students' "willingness to respond" to criticism by asking them to respond with their own advanced critical thinking.

Here's how I might revise my objective:
FROM: "To become comfortable reading academic criticism and applying critical methods in your writing"
TO: "To apply critical methodology in response to criticism, through writing, presentation, and discussion."

Although that revision robs the objective of my drive to reduce student anxiety and increase comfort, it is easier for me to assess their application of criticism, than it is to determine their feelings about it. But as a creative writing instructor, I suspect that I am particularly attentive to student affects and attitudes and have some skill in helping students express themselves. I might consider mobilizing some of the techniques I apply in the creative writing classroom in the literary criticism classroom. This might enable students to move toward a higher level on the "affective" skill taxonomy, such as "integrating and organizing values" in relation to schools of critical thought. One technique I might adopt in the class is to ask students to keep a journal that invites them to share their feelings, gut reactions, and personal investment in the theories we are discussing, so that they might better integrate them into their own value system and career plans. Or I might ask them to express the attitudes inherent to (or, alternatively their own attitudes about) a particular school of thought through their own poetry, for example. In the past, I've assigned a paper that allows the student to write about their own "experience of feminism" and perhaps I can get them to do more personal writing in addition to the critical writing they perform.

I've only scratched the surface of this topic, but I've found a few useful essays on assessing the affective domain. Yeap Lay Leng's piece on "Learner Analysis in Instructional Design: The Affective Domain" offers an overview of ways in which affect is "taught and caught". Mary Miller's article, "Learning and Teaching in the Affective Domain" addresses how pervasive attitudinal assessment is in education, and offers good strategies for teaching in the affective domain.

Don't ask me how I stumbled upon this website for training cellists in mastering their instruments, but stumble I did...and my mind began to wander. Wouldn't it be fun to teach a class using activities like these?

The Puppet: Pretend to pull a student's head up with an imaginary string.

Cello Song: While hugging their instruments and swaying back and forth, the students sing "I love my cello very much. I play it every day. I love to watch the spinning strings, as my hands fly away." At this point the students extend their arms away plucking the strings.

Charlie Brown's Teacher: By sliding the hand up and down the fingerboard, have the students carry on a conversation with each other.

Hide The Keys: A student is asked to leave the room while another student hides a set of keys. When the first student returns, the class plays a piece, playing louder as the student nears the hidden keys.

Creative activities from courses outside of my discipline (or even those that target age groups other than the traditional college-aged student) always inspire me to borrow and steal and try something unique in my own classes.

Here's how I process it. Once I see the pleasure attached to an activity from another discipline, I start to think about the subtle ways that the course content might intersect. Training students to "sound out" in a music class must be a lot like teaching sound-sensitivity in poetry, for example. So I could get my poetry writing students to have non-sensical conversations using sound alone, like the "Charlie Brown's Teacher" exercise above. Another approach might be to reframe the very exercises themselves through the lens of my discipline. I could, for example, invent a creative writing prompt that asks students to set a story in an imaginary but amusing posture training class. Or sometimes the applicability of outside activities lies in their unique technique. Could I create a "hide the keys" sort of game, asking students to hum louder and louder as I move a pointer around on a projected map or other image, I wonder?

This is why it's great to sit in on other people's classes, too. Teaching is just one of those arts where you unconsciously adapt and borrow structures from other teachers, but there's nothing stopping a teacher from doing it consciously and creatively, too.

I'll have to ponder that "puppet" trick for awhile.

I read a news article at Inside Higher Ed today, called "Holding Out for Tenure," which talks about how some schools are dealing with instructors who are employed full-time or nearly so, but not given the opportunity for tenure. Roughly 34% of all full-time faculty are not tenured or tenure-track. There's a new trend afoot in terming the more highly valued professionals off the tenure track "Professors of Practice" -- a model which gives long-term, talented teachers more benefits than they'd get for part-time adjunct pay, but without the other benefits of tenure. The AAUP has issued a statement against this model, arguing that such a practice "endangers the academic freedom" of these teachers, erodes their power in faculty governance, and "demeans instruction." It also calls tenure itself into question, since the differences between a tenured prof and a "prof of practice" are hazy.

I know of a number of adjunct teachers who are good instructors and "regulars" in the faculty pool and while they do get raises based on their education and seniority, I like the idea of giving them something a little better that recognizes their value. Adjuncts and part-timers don't get enough credit for what they contribute to a college and anything that can help them achieve more status (or more equity, in comparison to their colleagues) is meaningful and appropriate. But I have to say I agree with the AAUP's response: this model probably isn't the best way to do it.

"Professors of Practice" is a fancy way of saying "teacher whose research isn't important to us." This does demean teaching, because it turns a blind eye to the scholarship of teaching. Moreover, "Professors of Practice" is really just another way of saying "scholar-practitioner" and I see no reason why "scholar-practitioners" can't be afforded tenure for all the work they do. In fact, I'd call myself a scholar-practitioner, since I not only teach creative writing, I write and publish my work professionally in the fiction/poetry marketplace. All professors should be professors of practice to some degree, anyway. They don't just profess; they publish and present and more. Would research scholars be offended if they were given the rank of "Researcher of Practice" or "Scholar of Practice" instead of, "Tenured Professor"?

I'm actually up for tenure this semester, and reading articles like this one make me appreciate my opportunity and status all the more.

I don't subscribe to the Wall St. Journal, but one of the mailing lists I'm on (for the Science Fiction Poetry Association) is discussing an article that appeared in a recent edition about a high school teacher who clips out articles from the business pages and has students compose love poems based on words they pull out, using the given headline as their title. I think this is a great idea!

Revisionism like this is a great way to shake us out of our habitual ways of writing and testing something new. When I wrote the poems in one of my chapbooks, Paratabloids (now out of print, but the ebook is also available), I appropriated headlines from the Weekly World News and wrote poems based on the characters in the stories (or invented stories to match the headlines). So I can understand the form of inquiry that one engages in when retooling a business news story through poetic technique. The novelty of the exercise itself says something about the business world, and how rare it is to see poetry about business, or news stories about love, in the trade. I would imagine it humanizes the industry for the students, and gives them a sense of ownership over a discourse that -- for high school students, especially -- is relatively alienating and full of the jargon of economics. Indeed, as one corporate site on Poetry & Business puts it, "Poetry, for sure, is the best way we've got of banishing euphemism and the world of words without meaning."

When I teach poetry, I often have students use similar "cut up" techniques to generate ideas and experimental forms -- a practice famously advocated by beat poet, William Burroughs. They usually relish the power and violence of wielding the scissors. I use a "perforated poetry" exercise from Robin Behn's useful book, The Practice of Poetry: Writing Exercises From Poets Who Teach, that requires taking a given poem and leaving out many words and phrases and asking students to fill them in with their own ideas. (The poem from Behn's book is "Childhood is the Kingdom Where Nobody Dies" by Edna St. Vincent Millay...I've used it, as well as others). I also like to have students cut up lines from the school paper, magazines, and even their own early drafts and rearrange them as poetry, sometimes swapping their favorite clippings in round robin fashion collaboratively. But something about subversively using the Wall St. Journal -- and perhaps other business and entrepreneurial magazines -- really appeals to me. Heck, there are all sorts of lifeless documents (like contracts, real estate listings, and so forth) that I could have them retool and reinject "life" into. I'm definitely going to try this in the future. Maybe I'll even pull a Dead Poet's Society routine, and have 'em cut up (preselected) pages from the class textbook!