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!