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!

Writing About Another Person

On Tuesday I had my students write one paragraph about the person whom they are getting to know. They must have one meeting/encounter with the person each week, and he/she must be different from the student in some racial, cultural, socio-economic, academic way. They all wrote focused paragraphs but tended to use general terms rather than concrete details; for example, this person "always" does such and such or "would" do something instead of giving a specific event which helped to support the topic sentence.

I keep promising to bring in my cello to let them pick at it and play with it so they can understand some of the aesthetics of holding and playing an instrument as physical as the cello, an instrument that is held between the legs and is cradled in some way by the chest and upper body.

Most students were getting the grammar and thesis statements, but several were sick or late. These will inevitably be the students who won't be able to make it through a two course link that meets only twice a week for three hours.

Office Hours

One student happened to pass my office on his way to math class and said, "Oh, so THIS is where your office is!" as though it came as a complete surprise to him. Now he intentionally passes by and assures me that he's "not giving up" and "you'll see."

On the one minute essay last Thursday, one of the responses was, "I learned not to write a better essay," which is enigmatic but could have something to do with my telling them that is no perfect writing; there are merely deadlines. Then there were several that asked "Why does every seem like it's getting harder" or "Why is writing so stressful?" For the students who ask if there is "Xtra credit if your doing bad" and the one who said, "You are not giving us some break. Some of us work and take two other subjects," I will repeat that this is a double course and that perhaps they have taken on too much. The requests for breaks and extra credit amaze me, but my colleagues say that I am naive. I wonder.

Then there is the blessed student who keeps hoping to "be patient about learning." For all their angst and complaints, several of them aced the partnered vocabulary quiz and a brief review of parts of speech. I think they will all be surprised at some of their successes even though the essays were still in the 50- 78 range; they are getting things - slowly but surely.

It will come if they will stick with it; that is always my biggest challenge.

Riding that Bicycle...

One of the older students in class raised his hand in frustration on Tuesday and said that he felt as though he were riding on a rickety, old, slow bicycle in this class, and I was whizzing past him so fast that he couldn't keep up. I like the metaphor and sent the class an email to urge them ALL to get on whatever bike they have and begin to pedal. I am hoping that that this student's feeling of lagging behind will disappear once he really begins to work that bicycle and hands in all his work. Many students believe they can and must work full time and attend school full time, and I try to suggest to them that trying to live two lives makes it impossible to succeed at either.

I am hoping to get these students spinning so their legs will move more competently and they can pick up the pace on that old bike!

Fully Equipped

This is a copy of an essay I gave students who were writing descriptions of the person they have chosen to make their Independent Project this term; they had to choose someone from a different culture, racial, educational, or economic background from their own. I have written about a homeless man whom I have befriended over the past few years.
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I remember racing to catch the train after a day of teaching as an adjunct all over the city, and as I was trying to skid across Callowhill and 17th Street, a very dark skinned man hollered for me to watch out; a monstrous SUV was careening around the corner, just about to hit me. I waved to the bedraggled man who stood over the warm vent and realized that he must be one of those roving homeless men. I decided to pay closer attention to this specter who haunted that particular vent; he was alert, well-equipped and jittery.
I realized he was alert the next time I walked from the train when he recognized my hat and called out to me, “Hey, I like that hat,” he yelled as I came closer to him. It was a knit hat of bright colors and patterns and a tassel on the top. He waved to other people as they walked past his vent. I thanked him for looking after me when I was racing across the street, and he began to yammer about the traffic and the location. His grin was big but cavernous because his front teeth were missing, and his jaw flapped when he spoke too quickly, which he did when he began to talk about his bicycle that he’d propped up against the wall.
He was fully equipped at that vent. The bicycle gave him quick transportation, the extra blankets helped warm him in the bitter, cold nights, and the vent served as a quasi oven to heat the food that he’d strewn all over the pavement. He had hung extra clothing on the wall to dry in the brilliant high noon sun, and a plastic milk carton propped again the wall served as his bureau.
Although he was alert and well-equipped in his little corner, he was jittery and jumpy as he babbled about his having been set on fire by some other homeless guys. His thin legs and arms dangled and shook as he explained why he was here instead of in one of the many shelters in the city. His face twitched several times, and the energy of his conversational endeavor sent spit spiraling into my face. He said he didn’t drink or “do no drugs,” but he got hungry out here, which surprised me when I noticed the vent loaded with half-eaten sandwiches and containers of food. I told him I’d bring him a sandwich the next day and began packing extra peanut butter sandwiches that I’d drop by the vent as he snoozed into the late mornings.
That was two years ago, and I realized that since then I’d seen him rarely. The corner of 17th and Callowhill had been cleaned up, his bicycle was missing, and the vent was free of blankets and food. Where was he? When I volunteered down at the Ministry 300 to serve meals to the homeless, I kept an eye out for him, but did not see him. When I walked to and from the train to school, I never saw him on his perch until last week when I saw him standing up, jumping up and down in the cold, mismatched mittens flapping from his hands, and I asked where he had been. His twitch was worse, and he moved incessantly. “They” had stolen his bicycle, he said, and things were bad, real bad. Even though I had my sandwich with me, I promised him one tomorrow and left, feeling guilty and glum.
The next day he wasn’t there.

Hum, Bark, Clip-Clop

My students' first in-class essay was on how they experience music everyday, and I wrote and gave them this essay as a model.

Listen to the whir of the humidifier, the bark of the dog, the clip-clop of the horses. Everyday music surrounds me even before I begin to practice my cello or go to rehearsal. I hear music from the minute I wake up and hear the British accent of the man on the BBC news to the time I click out the light and hear the soft snuffle as I snuggle beneath my down comforter. Each day I experience music that other people make, that machines and objects make and that I make.

I experience the everyday music of other people, ranging from a peculiar accent as the English man on the radio’s to the chatter of my colleagues and students in the halls all the way to the literal music my colleagues make at orchestra rehearsals on Tuesday and Thursday nights. Voices are as distinguishable as timbres of instruments; the cello sounds more like that human voice, while a clarinet rolls and rises out of this realm. I hear people yelling, whispering and whining, giggling, crying and griping, and those sounds are as much music to me as are the delicate sounds of the high violins or the sturdy squawks of the bassoons.

Everyday hear the machine music of train wheels, bus gears, car horns and more domestic daily drones of dishwashers, dripping coffee makers, or the clicks of the gas stove lighting. When I get to school, I experience the pens bickering in and out as students mindlessly play during class; I experience the sounds of trays sliding on the rails in the cafeteria, the phones ringing in my office or the squeaks of the drawers on my desk.

But I don’t just experience music from the outside everyday because I experience the music that I make as well. I play or practice my cello, pulling my bow across the strings to create the vibrations and sounds – long, sustained notes, short, staccato notes, or even plucked pizzicato notes. I can hear the strings beneath my fingers on the black, firm fingerboard as I position my hand for intonation and accuracy. Sometimes my bow disobeys me, and the sound I make is incompatible with the note on the page. I play out of tune, or I play out of rhythm, and I must go back and play again and again until I am right, until I am confident.

Sometimes I wonder if other people feel the sound the way I do. Perhaps musicians have more sensitive ears, taking in the things that other people experience as mere buzz or static. Sometimes I hear a voice or an accent that makes me cringe because it is not musical, but nobody else seems to be bothered by it. Maybe there are disadvantages to experiencing music in sounds; there are simply too many in a day to make a beautiful symphony. When the sounds stop being music and become cacophony, I return home where the humidifier hums, the dog gives a welcoming bark, and the horses clip-clop back into the barn for the night.

Will English Load Become More Lighter...?

My students have already handed in their first formal essay, a summary and had three quizzes. I think I understood why this student was holding his head in his hands; it IS overwhelming to new students or students who have been away from the classroom!

After a vocabulary and grammar quiz (I'm grading them, but they aren't looking too sturdy - a few grades lower than 10...), we discussed their summaries, the last essay and the next one. I went over the 5 paragraph structure on the board, and then put students in groups to find quotations to support their positions for the next essay on what motivates Steve Lopez, author of The Soloist and Nathaniel Ayers, the homeless, schizophrenic musician about whom he writes. Those who had annotated carefully the readings were able to locate excellent quotations, and I heard all sorts of conversations, quibbling over which quotations proved what points. Good stuff.

Based upon one group's quotations, we put up a model thesis and plotted an essay on the board. Most seemed to get it and there was a great deal of back and forth about the best quotations to use, points to make. Finally, at the end of class, I gave the one minute essay. Groans were followed by silence as they wrote. Here are some of the best results:

"What do we do when we don't have a computer and we need to type our assignments, have to go to work after school especially on Tuesdays?" We discussed this earlier in the class, but the student seems to cling to the notion of no options rather than look at them; we are working on planning ahead, finding available resources, etc..

"Can we re-do essays and correct ehm and give them back?" I'd like to know where this student would like to "give them back" because my goal is to teach REVISION, not correction.

"I still want to know why we can't see the movie instead." This student is bound for glory especially in a course designed to enhance his close reading skills and formalize his academic writing skills.

"Why orange shoes with purple and green?" You know, we teachers wonder what students take in during class, and clearly this student was paying very close attention; I was wearing light brown boots, green tights and purple socks! I wonder if the colors were too much of a distraction and think I may opt for straight black in future.

And the final response from a student who came to class 30 minutes late follows:
"My question is will English load become a little more lighter by mid semester." It's a fine question, but this is a two course class that meets only twice a week; the homework is bound to be heavy. I love the idea of the course load being too demanding but still I get the request, "Will we be able to do extra credit?"

I will post over the weekend as I buckle down to read the first essays, albeit only summaries and descriptions, but the first writing is always full of lovely moments that I anticipate with relish. And mustard...

Bloom is off the rose

Yesterday we had another quiz because I like students to see what they may need to keep track of as they read; making annotations works differently for all readers, but I want the students to be able to locate relevant passages when they need to. One student said that "annotations bring back memories of what you read."

I have received their first essays - descriptive essays, and the students are very nervous about how they will do on them. At the end of class a concerned student wrote, "I will would like to know if things will get easier for us." At this point I cannot say and continue to encourage them while holding them to a high standard so they will come out of the course with confidence that they can read any text, respond to any clearly written assignment. I have to keep reminding them that the only way to advance as writers is to keep writing, revising and getting feed back.

The student who asked how to identify a thesis statement is right on it. When we write these 5 paragraph essays, structured and formulaic, it is easy to discern the thesis statement, but when we read the opinions in the New York Times, it is much more difficult to find anything that smeels like "the thesis statement." This we need to address; learning and teaching nuances are tricky, and I have already been asked if I ever change my method of teaching - I, who always considered myself a facile teacher who used different styles to accommodate learning types! I learn something everyday from my students.

Finally, one student asked, "How can we make this class more interesting?" Where do I go with THAT in a college reading and writing course where I thought I'd assigned two good texts? I thought I'd gotten it all figured out with the Independent Project to get the students out of their comfort zones, learning about another human being and about themselves. It just shows how we need to stay in close, close touch with our students. I don't believe in making the class and entertainment session, but I don't want to lose the very minds I hope to feed and flower!

Second Class - big thrills

This seemed to be the effect of the first quiz on one disciplined student who didn't even flinch when the flash went off from my camera. After the quiz (are we guessing how well this student did?), we had a fairly lively discussion about the people students have chosen to get to know; one Vietnamese woman selected a radiantly smiling African American male who works in the cafeteria, and as she gave his physical characteristics, another young woman jumped in saying, "Hey, I know him. He's the guy with the long braids in his hair, right?" Another African American woman chose her white step mother to study, and a tall, lanky older African American male has chosen a young Cambodian man at his work place. I think they all seem to be on board and getting the scope of the project. In the spirit of the project, I told them that I'd seen my homeless friend at the corner of 17th and Callowhill this morning, jumping up and down on the vent to keep himself warm, grinning his big toothless grin and babbling a mile a minute about how times were tough for him. He was hungry, and I knew I had my peanut butter and banana sandwich in my bag, but told him that I'd bring him a sandwich on Tuesday instead of giving him mine. I felt selfish and told my students how I felt.

After class, a quiet young woman came up to me and said, "You didn't have to give him your sandwich. You could have bought him one from one of the trucks down there." I was grateful but shamed. It was the obvious solution, a lesson I learned from a more humane, compassionate soul.

At the end of class, I ask students to write the "one minute essay" in which they identify the most important thing they learned in class and ask one question. Here are some of the results:

"The most important thing in class I learned today was the worked I missed and the work that's due." Ah, this is an aha moment if ever there was one!
"The most important thing I learn in class today was when you talk about the things we did wrong in are essays." I can tell by the specificity of this response that the student was not quite all there.
"The important thing that I learned today is grammar and the one about excess." I love the one about excess...
And the best one, "Today in class I learned about being able to have a heart and thinking about people's feelings." One wonders.

Questions? Those that follow are best:
"My question is how long have you been a professor?" Oops, was it something I said?
"Will we ever read together in class?" I love this and promise I will follow up on it.
"Will we have trips to any banned book libraries?" I mentioned a Vietnamese author who was banned in her country, and I suppose this student believes that because WE live in a free country, we must have a special place to house all our banned books.
"I would love to learn how to write a perfect paper?" I love the statement followed by a question mark, but more than that, I love the whole concept of "a perfect paper." HA!
Finally, in our environment of give it to me now, I received the following:
"One question I would like to know is, will I be able to apply myself can I pass." Hmmm, this raises some real possibilities.

The first formal description essays come in next week. Stay tuned.

First Day

After giving my students their Independent Project assignment of meeting and getting to know a person from a different background from theirs, I was surprised at their resistance. One young woman said, "You gotta be kiddin'. We could get ourselfs kilt. You 'spec up to go up to some stranger and say, 'Hey, man, you don know me, but I wants to be yo fren.' You crazy." As I kept explaining that they should develop a relationship with someone they see every week at the bus stop, the coffee shop, the newspaper stand, the cafeteria, the resistance began to recede, and some students were beginning to smile. One older woman raised her hand and said, "This is great. I always wanted to have a white friend, but I never knew how to make one." I almost wept and lept for joy.

But this comment was topped when a diamond earringed young man raised his hand and asked, "If I give you the money, could you buy the books for me?" I was started but realized that he was asking out of genuine concern; he worked all day and figured that his teacher must have loads of time on her hands. Plus, if I wanted him to succeed, as I had insisted, I must be willing to provide for him the necessary materials. I mean, he was going to give me the money! It all made sense to him.

And then there was watching the inauguration in the college auditorium, more packed than I've ever seen it, and anybody who attended received a small bag containing 4 small pieces of candy. We were given pins, wee American flags and "stress balls" with the flag painted on them, all brought to us by the Student Activities Office. When I got to my class, most of the students were sitting in their seats, chatting on cell phones or text messaging. Those there hadn't bothered going to see the inauguration on the big screen in the auditorium, and the rest wandered in half an hour late.

This is "Developmental English" in Philadelphia.