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!
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