Results tagged “quotations” from PEDABLOGUE

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.

"More than any other profession...teaching is a confluence of opposites. Teaching draws on instinct, and it draws on acquired skills. Teaching involves routine, and it involves improvisation. Teaching is prose surprised by moments of poetry. Teaching is applied pedagogy, tested by trial and error. There is no better way to learn something than to teach it, and teaching itself is a continual learning process -- a methodology that changes every time new students walk in the door and sit down at their desks." -- Tim Lemire, I'm an English Major -- Now What?

This semester, my "Introduction to Literary Studies" course read Lemire's book as a way for students to start thinking realistically about their future careers. There was a great interest in teaching as a potential profession, which is common among English majors. In fact, it's sort of a "default" for many of them. Even if they don't know what they're getting into, it is still our job to provide them with models they might draw on in the future, when they scramble to understand what it really means to be responsible to both the field and their students' future.

I do always try to model good teaching practice, even when I'm only playing the goofball in the front of the room. But now that the term is almost over, I'm wondering: do I employ my own teaching in a way that not only models what it is that teachers actually do in a classroom, but also how they navigate this "confluence of opposites" that Lemire describes? Do they learn to intellectually and performatively cope with and manage the oppositions? Do they know how to synthesize the oppositions or how to separate them when required? Are they learning instincts as much as acquired skills. Improv as well routine? Poetry as much prose? Application and experiment? Flexibility to learn continually?

This quote above really spoke to me as a poetic truism about the impulses of the profession -- which often moves in opposite directions simultaneously. Even here in this blog, the two primary categories -- theory and praxis -- are at once separate in their purpose and yet brought together in any act of writing. But is such a "bringing together" going on in my classroom when I host a discussion or mark up a paper? How 'dialectical' is my teaching, really? I'll keep musing over it, but for now, I just liked that quotation so much that I wanted to share it... and encourage other English professionals to consider using Lemire's book in their classroom or in their advising. It is quite a practical and thoughtful guide to the various options our major affords.

Just file this one under "thought of the day."

"Writing is less a profession than a professing -- a way of stimulating, organizing and affirming thoughts to give meaning to some slice of life." -- William Safire

I culled this quote from the introduction to a book of quotations called Good Advice on Writing, edited by William Safire and Leonard Safir, (Simon and Schuster, 1992). At first I just liked the way Safire framed the act of writing as something akin to teaching, construing writers as professors, of a sort. But looking over it again, I think those functions he lists are precisely what defines the professorial role:

• stimulating


• organizing


• affirming


• interpreting ["giving meaning to"]

This list (perhaps incomplete) still functions as something of a "writing teacher's taxonomy." We stimulate students to think and act in the world -- a stimulus that produces a written response. We organize our curriculum and our syllabi content and our daily class periods, and we arm students with organizational strategies for their own ideas. We affirm what students do right in our comments and we reaffirm the wisdom of the textbooks and literature in our discussions and reinforcement of them. We interpret the world and its culture -- and by employing and modeling the methods of our discipline, or by having students interpret one another's work in peer groups, we help students develop these skills on their own.

The better writer you are, perhaps, the better teacher you can be. I see this all the time in our Writing Popular Fiction program, which on top of having a rock solid full time faculty base of PhDs who write fiction, also brings in professional writers as adjuncts to mentor novelists and teach courses in the craft. I see the transference of good writing to good teaching in the Freshman Comp courses taught by people who enjoy the craft and employ it as part of their career both in the English major and throughout the disciplines; and it is self-evident in the student tutors who work in our writing center, hired because of their strong writing skills. I see it in the writers who have taught me much in their non-fiction instructional books about the art and craft and methods of teaching, learning, writing, reading.

This evening I jazzed up the site a bit by adding a small handful of pithy quotes to the ever-present sidebar of various pages in the archives. In my hunt for pith, I came across many more aphorisms than I could ever hope to use on Pedablogue, so I thought I'd share a few more here, along with links to a few major websites that collect famous sayings on education, pedagogy, and learning:

Good sites:

• Illinois Loop
  
• The Really Big List of Education Quotes
  
• NEA's list for National Education Week
  
• NSWPPA Principle's Inspiration
  
• Eric Wearne's List of Education Quotes
  
• Hoagie's Gifted Education Quotes
  

Some favorites:

• "Curiosity is the very basis of education and if you tell me that curiosity killed the cat, I say only that the cat died nobly." -- Arnold Edinborough
  
• "The illiterate of the 21st century will not be those who cannot read and write, but those who cannot learn, unlearn, and relearn." -- Alvin Toffler
  
• "Learning from a teacher who has stopped learning is like drinking from a stagnant pond." -- Indonesian Proverb
  
• “Instead of the difficult task of educating a child, I now undertake the easier task of writing about it.” -- Rousseau
  
• "A teacher is one who makes himself progressively unnecessary." -- Thomas Carruthers
  
• "Research is what I do when I don't know what I'm doing." -- Wernher Von Braun
  
• "The philosophy of the school room in one generation will be the philosophy of government in the next." -- Abraham Lincoln
  
• "That is what learning is. You suddenly understand something you've understood all your life, but in a new way." -- Doris Lessing
  
• "It is the mark of an educated mind to be able to entertain a thought without accepting it." -- Aristotle
  
• "Most teachers waste their time by asking questions which are intended to discover what a pupil does not know whereas the true art of questioning has for its purpose to discover what the pupil knows or is capable of knowing." -- Albert Einstein
  
• "The larger the island of knowledge, the longer the shoreline of wonder."
  -- Ralph M. Sockman
  

"Teaching is truth mediated by personality." -- Phyllis Brooks

In related news: I've added an "About" page to Pedablogue.

• "The sure mark of an A paper is that you will find yourself telling someone else about it." -- Derek Bok Center for Teaching and Learning

  
  

• "...an A+ is a touchdown that got the crowd to its feet -- a forty-yard pass play or a seventy-yard run from scrimmage. As color commentators like to put it, so and so 'took it to the house.'" -- Sanford Pinsker, Irascible Professor

  
  

• "An A paper is written with verve and clarity. It displays a curiosity, a control of knowledge beyond what was covered in class, an original insight or an extrapolation beyond class work." -- John Lye, Brock Univeristy CPCF Handbook

  
  

• "An "A" essay is excellent work that a student should be proud of." -- Elvira Casal, MTSU

  
  

• "All it takes is a well written introduction, body and conclusion. These steps are a lot easier than most people make them out to be." -- "How to Write an A Essay" reproduced at the following plagiarism sites: NetEssays.com, MegaEssays.com, RadEssays.com, VirtualEssays.com, NeedFreeEssays.com, FindFreeEssays.com, etc.

  
  

---

Student: "Do you grade on a curve?"
Professor: "No, a flat surface. Usually my desk." -- Dr. Spence, WSU, cited on ProfQuotes.com

---

"...the fixation on grades so prevalent in our times might have to do with a paradigm shift. Perhaps the ideal of the sage or expert instructing the receptive student/apprentice has been replaced subtly by a new model: the paid coach and his/her trainees. In the latter relationship, the older coach is hired to make sure that the younger competitor brings home "the medals." By analogy, it becomes the job of the professor to make sure that the students bring home the "A's" -- Ronda Chervin, Idol worship of the 'A'

USA Today recently reported that a stand up comic/"laughologist" is on the lecture circuit, advocating that teachers make their students laugh as a form of stress relief. It's called "Laughter Therapy."

Although this "Patch Adams" approach to learning gives me pause, I agree that humor is very important in the classroom: it can keep students' attention, it can diffuse tense situations, it can encourage creativity, and it can call attention to absurdity (and sometimes absurdity deserves it, whether its a social phenomena or inherent to a student comment). I even make a number of wisecracks or sarcastic comments, which sometimes -- when I hear what I just said -- make me laugh out loud during lectures (this actually happened in my poetry class today...and the students kept laughing, which made me laugh even longer... you know how that goes). Laughter is contagious.

Beyond lightening up the stressful classroom environment, what does humor teach us? Is laughter the best education, as well as the best medicine? Perhaps it is, if handled smartly. It takes a certain objective distance to see the absurdity of things; it takes a very open mind to laugh at ourselves; it takes a degree of humanity to laugh at our human faults and move right along. Humor can hurt, of course: especially the kind that relies on stereotypes or heterosocial bonding. Insults in a classroom, through mockery or name-calling, even in jest, can only lead to hostility. But humor warms the classroom in a way that almost nothing else can. It communicates the idea that "Anything can happen" and it's okay, it's permitted, the barriers and fronts are down...go ahead and make a fool out of yourself in your quest to seek the truth, try on a new habit, or make an audacious claim. There's something revolutionary about humor; for all its transgression of the authority and sobriety, it's communal.

I like this advice on the "Funny Teacher Myth" from English Teaching Forum:

Teachers who naturally have a good sense of humor should use it, but that is not at all a requirement to be a funny teacher. You may not consider yourself a funny person, and still be classified as a "funny teacher." In other words, it is more important that the class itself be fun than the teacher be funny, since it is never a good idea to try to change one's personality traits.-- A.L. Tosta

Enough pontificating. You can visit Tufts University's page on Humor in the Classroom if you're interested in this. Otherwise, here are a small sampling of websites about the lighter side of education:

• Teacherzine: Funny Classroom Anecdotes
  
• Profquotes: Funny Professorisms
  
• Funnies for Teachers and Parents
  
• Education Jokes at About.Com
  

I'm sure there are lots of others... if you know of other humor and education sites, please add to this list by clicking on "comment" below. Or feel free to just post a joke...it's that time of year.