It started so innocently...

I thought this project to have my students get to know someone different from themselves was going to be such an engaging project after they had read Steve Lopez's The Soloist and W. A. Mathieu's The Musical Life, but it has utterly bombed. The students were in an uproar last week, most not handing in the essay due on how Lopez and Mathieu depict music in their books, and all complaining that they didn't understand anything, that I wasn't fair, and whatever difficulties they were having were somehow my fault. I've never had a class like this. The students wander in late, hop up whenever they please, drag in mounds of food after break, and their concentration levels are so low that I can go over something 17 times and STILL they cannot get it right on their essays.



I'm at a complete loss. One student said in anger, "Is it true that nobody doesn't never pass your class?" To be speaking so incorrectly in a college level English class is indicative of the sense of urgency and drive these students don't seem to have. I have told them that I cannot help them if they cannot explain what questions they have, and I cannot move them forward if they refuse to do the writing. It staggers me that students can be so unmotivated.

You HAVE to get wet before you swim...

Only five students came to class today with rough drafts even though that was the ONE thing they had to prepare for today's class. Each of the other students began to yammer about not understanding the assignment, hating one of the books, not knowing what to do. I very quietly wrote on the board in my biggest handwriting WHAT ARE YOU GOING TO DO ABOUT IT? Then I gave them a talk about how they will never learn to do anything if they simply balk in fear and confusion and refuse to try. At the break I spoke with one errant student who seemed to be coming around. He had no quotations from the Lopez book but had good ones from Mathieu's book. I explained that I could not help him if he had not even done the preliminary job of finding the quotations.

While the five who had their rough drafts worked on their peer reviews, I worked with the other empty handed students. The one without the Lopez quotations said he realized that he had to get his feet wet and just begin to write it. I urged him to get completely into the water before he complained about anything. We laughed and I reminded the group that I had this blog and that I'd put up a photo of myself riding a tricycle to try to make the point that even if they felt they were riding tricycles, they HAD TO RIDE in order to get anywhere.

Two students continue to leave class early for doctor's appointments; needless to say, neither of them spoke up during class or brought rough drafts. I wonder - really wonder - how students can come to class unprepared and expect anything but failure. Have they never learned accountability? Where have we failed our citizens?

Steve Lopez is going to be at school on Thursday, and I am hoping that as many students who can possibly come from this class will come; it would be so useful for them to meet and hear the writer of one of their books.

Small group essay return...

This is a small girl I met in a cafe in Stung Treng, Cambodia, and I thought it was funny that even when I'm traveling I spend time with people over paper and pen.

Today I brought in to class four quotations from both the Steve Lopez and the W. A. Mathieu books and asked the students in groups of two or three to decide what one point that quotation could prove about the way the author depicts music in his book and then give the context of the quotation and then explanation of how the quotation actually proves the point. It was a whopper of an exercise on close reading because they had to rely on the language of the quotations to prove their points. They took turns putting all this information down for their group, and so we had the language of the point and the language of the quotation right up there to mull over while we "worried the words," as my great teacher, Cheryl Wall at Penn used to urge us to do.
Then I gave back their last essays but decided to give back only 6 or 7, excusing the rest of the class. We sat in a wee circle, desks jammed against one another, and it was a real time of questions and answers; we could all look at each other's papers, and the space felt intimate and not as full of the usual snarls the students have when they receive an evaluation that is less than stellar. Let's face it; we all think our writing is convincing and clever! As another teacher at Penn said to me when I was going to revise an essay to submit to a journal, "Revision is like pressing on a bruise." That was Vicky Mahaffey who didn't make tenure, as far as the grapevine claims - a sadness and definite loss for the University of Pennsylvania!

Bach's Cello Suites' Prelude

On Tuesday I brought my cello in and played for a very negative class, but having driven in and lugged the thing up to my office and then down and up again to my class, I was damned if I wasn't going to play for the students, no matter how surly. Actually, I noticed as I played in our windowless, beige-walled, cruddily linoleumed-floored classroom, the students settled and slowed into a surprising silence that made the resonance of my notes sound fairly convincing. When I finished, feeling rushed because the class was meant to go to the career counseling during half of our time together, I was startled when my students, all of whom had just expressed frustration that bordered on anger over their grades, burst into applause. I asked if anyone would like to play my instrument and was surprised that two students took a stab at it, surprising themselves at how awkward it felt and how difficult it was to get a sound from the cello. It may not have been the most ideal circumstances, but I was happy that I'd done it and exposed the students to at the very least one classical music piece. They seemed to loosen up when I exposed myself in front of them and made some obvious mistakes, grimacing at what felt like bad intonation. They saw that I worked at it and wasn't perfect, and I think that may have been the best thing I could have shown them. And I didn't die when I made the mistakes!

Advice from a musician...

Tomorrow I shall bring my cello to my 101 class and then two more members of my quartet will come to my afternoon class to play some Beethoven. I will try to pump out Prelude to the Bach Suites for solo cello for my 101 students who couldn't be less interested; maybe if they can feel the sensation of the instrument in their own hands, against their own bodies might they understand the inordinately physical sensation of making sound from such a sensuously shaped and textured instrument.

Here's Mathieu on the difference between music and language:
"Music is entirely specific: what you hear is what you get. Language is rich and various and inexact. You have to keep saying what is, a thousand ways, until someone jumps" (33). And then he goes further by saying, "The challenge for both listener and reader is to willfully seek balance between sound and sense, to sedulously insist on mind in music and euphony in language" (35).

Squeezing the beauty...

Tuesday, February 17, 2009

"We have to squeeze and press the beauty from the world"

I have assigned W. A. Mathieu's The Musical Life: Reflections on What it is and How to Live It to my 101-108 course, and as I was reading pieces of it on the train going into class this morning, I pondered this notion of squeezing and pressing beauty from the world. I took this photograph from my seat to see if within the frame of a photographic image there was beauty in the lines, the light or the aesthetic of the inside of my morning train. The compartmentalization of each set of seats, the lines of lights and the metal racks above our heads create a decidedly cold environment, and yet when it's cold and dark outside, it isn't the worst place to be in the early mornings. The woman's hair and patchy furred hood on her jacket make for the only spots of softness in the photo, and those spots are ratty and ragged instead of cozy and soft. Beauty? I think I shall hold my judgment until I can get my hands on beautiful fabrics and quilt tonight.

My students did little of the reading in Mathieu's book because they said it was difficult; as one student put it, "What does this book have to do with English and how are you presenting this to teach English?" I think my goal is to hand my students ownership so that they can settle with the materials in any course and tackle those materials with confidence and fearlessness.

One student wrote, "Can you be more explisive whenever your are giving assignment so that we can understand?" and another asks, "What is the def. of implication," a word I have gone over, as I always do, in probably every class so that they can ultimately write conclusions that move logically from their own texts and then ponder the implications...

Still one student worries about learning "how to remain calm when feeling frustrated," and I wonder if any teachers have ever challenged this student or expected anything of her or him. And yet, for all their grousing, 2 or 3 students got sturdy Cs on their last essay, which seems promising at this point in the term because I do get them to write complete essays with quoted evidence from the very start. They are doing it, and I will watch in awe as more and more of them find their way into writing contextually, clearly and accurately. It is a journey.

Meanwhile, my students in the lower level are engaging in passionate conversations about the text, slamming quoted evidence at each other and discusssing the role of race in The Soloist with the kind of authority and vehemence that close reading academics use! I got goosebumps when they go at it like this, and I have high hopes for them all. When I told them that my quartet was going to come play for them, one student was so enthusiastic that I thought she was being facetious! This is why I teach - to share with my students the love I feel for beauty in the world, in them.

Finishing a Book

For today my students finished reading Steve Lopez's The Soloist, but there were many absent and late due to trains. I gave them a quiz in which they had to give the complete context of ten quotations taken from the chapters read for today. One student answered none and them slept for the rest of the class; another student was given to sleep-like sluggishness, but as soon as I handed back an A on a short in-class identification of topic sentences from a given thesis, he perked right up!

Before they wrote the one minute essay, I read some of the questions from last time, one being, "Can you tell the difference between someone who is really trying and a slacker?" I merely quipped, "Yup." Several students said variations on the "I'd better buckle down and get to work" theme, for which I was pleased.

Today's responses ranged from "Finding hard to understand how the eassys is be structure or how it's supporse to be structure" to "did we get graded on the presentations?" to "the work load on us is too much." Some days I'm just not sure what to do next. I have urged students to make appointments to see me, but not one has done so; instead, their need to interrupt the class to make a fuss about their personal issues seems fully appropriate to them.

It will come, I know, but it is so frustrating until it does!