This post originally appeared on April 16, 2014. Lately, I’ve noticed that my tolerance for wait time—those moments of silence during a classroom discussion– is getting bad.  Really bad.  And perhaps, more importantly, my conviction that class is going horribly if my students aren’t talking nonstop has gotten stronger.  I want my students to be talking, and I want them talking now. But that doesn’t work. That’s why I’ve been trying to be more conscious of (and patient with) wait time, which is something that has always been part of my struggle in the classroom.  And I’ve recently discovered that giving students time to look for answers before expecting a response has actually done wonders. Take a class where I taught Naguib Mahfouz’s short story “Zaabalawi.”  The story is a quest narrative where the narrator, in search of fulfillment and a transcendent experience, seeks out a mystic.  Critics argue that below the surface of Mahfouz’s tale lies a great deal of political critique.  To get to that, I wanted students to talk about the various characters that the narrator meets in his search – and particularly how, in the story, different members of Egyptian society treat the seeker along his quest. I realized that if I wanted students to respond meaningfully to Mahfouz’s story, I needed to pose clear questions and give them a chance to process them. I needed to give my students time to look at the story for the answers and (most importantly) to point to direct quotations that would illustrate and support their answers.  I gave students 5 minutes and 3 questions: 1. Who is the character? 2. What profession is he in? 3. How does her respond to the narrator’s quest? By doing so, I provided students with a way in to the text and an opportunity for them to process their ideas before responding. I simply stopped in the middle of class and asked students to look at the text and apply the above questions to the characters they encountered. When we resumed discussion we were able to chart out on the board the various characters – and point to Mahfouz’s criticism of the figures of social authority in the text (for example, the saintly Zaabalawi is mostly like to be found with the drunkard, and not with the lawyer). It’s so simple, and yet so hard sometimes to remember that in our classrooms, our students need time to process our questions and to re-read literary texts with our questions in mind. They need us to take off the pressure of answering questions immediately. To let this happen, I’ve learned that it’s a good practice to wait out a long silence. ... View more

This post originally appeared on March 25, 2014. I am both very organized and a complete organizational nightmare.  I am thankful that computers can easily and quickly search documents for key words.  I would never find old teaching material otherwise, because I am both a hoarder of the old stuff and a person who dallies with organizing systems, then tosses them aside.  (I did finally purge a large portion of my paper files last year, but I’ve still got a box of teaching files that I want to keep on hand.) Now that I have about a decade’s worth of teaching files – some paper, but mostly now digital – I am terrified by this fact.  While I don’t want to be that straw man version of a professor pulling out the yellowed old lecture notes, I also know that I like to refer to my old notes as I plan to re-teach texts.  I want to look back at what I’ve done before and figure out what worked well, or even what didn’t work the last time I taught a particular work of literature. This came back to me with some force as I’ve been preparing to teach Tartuffe to my world lit students.  I’ve taught the play a few times, but it’s been more than 5 years since I’ve done so.  I realized that I wanted to look at what I did last time I taught the course, even though I really won’t use many of those ideas.  I mostly just wanted to see what types of discussion questions I had asked last time around, to see if anything inspired me this time around.  Fortunately, I could find these by that search function, because I surely wouldn’t have found them just looking through the files on my laptop or my external hard drive. But that really doesn’t get at the heart of the problem, which is that as college professors we tend to acquire a lot of stuff.  And we have to do something with that stuff.  I’ve got decent organizational patterns in place for my own scholarship and for any campus service that I do, but that’s mostly because I don’t repeat the same things over and over again – and because those files don’t serve the multiple purposes that my teaching files have to serve.  So I’ve been thinking about how to manage the files this semester from the get-go, something especially important to me because I’ve got four separate preps this semester (3 literature courses, 1 composition course). As I’ve been thinking about organizing the materials, I’ve realized that I need to think about the multiple purposes of keeping teaching files and planning charts.  The first purpose is the more immediate one: I need to know what I’m doing class-to-class, and what I’ve done in previous classes.  The second purpose is to hang on to records over the long term, mostly for the possibility of future reference (something that digital storage makes much more possible, as I seem to occasionally move across the country for work). In the past, I’ve had a tendency to just name things for the date that I did them in class, with the hope that I’ll go back and resort them later.  This means that I have a lot of files titled things like “February 20” – but with no reference to the course or to the material in them.  There’s also the problem of working on both my home computer and my office computer.  I use Dropbox for a lot of things, but that requires installation on a computer not my own, so this semester I’m trying Google Drive, which allows me to work at home and in the office on documents.  I’m also trying to keep titles descriptive, or at least numeric – a document titled 206Sept5 is the plan I’ve made for my world literature course for September 5, and I’m trying to do the same with titling any presentations (so a presentation titled 206Sept5 is a presentation relevant to that particular class period).  This doesn’t solve the long-term storage problem, but it does at least start me with a consistent system for titling things, something that has become a problem in the past with mini-lessons that I’ve used in PowerPoint or other presentation software. On top of that, before the semester began, I spent a good chunk of time creating charts for each class that included the reading assignment, the relevant writing assignment, the relevant course objectives, and/or potential lecture topics (it totally depends on the course, but you get the general idea).  It’s something that I think will help me keep on track, and, perhaps most importantly, help me stay in control as I undertake this complex semester of learning the ropes of a new institution, teaching 4 preps (2 completely new, one  a course I’ve taught before with a textbook I taught in a very, very early version). This is, I suppose, the lament of every person who teaches.  So I suppose I’d like to hear from you, dear readers: How do you keep yourself organized when it comes to teaching materials?  And should I just give up on the old stuff and simply create things anew and hope for the best? ... View more

This post originally appeared on April 23, 2014. When I was in my twenties, I worked as a freelance editor and adjunct instructor in the Boston area, piecing together paychecks from one job to the next. As any freelancer knows, there’s always a point in the late afternoon when you lose your steam and wonder what to do with yourself in the hours before everyone else gets home from their office jobs. One place where I spent some of those lonely afternoon hours was the Woodberry Poetry Room (WPR) at Harvard University. I would show my reader’s pass to the security guard (anyone, even someone without any connection to the university, could apply for a reader’s card to access this special room), slip on some old chunky headphones, and listen to cassette tapes of my favorite poets reading their best lines. Now, thanks to the WRP’s online “Listening Booth,” anyone can listen to a selection of these poems from anywhere on the planet. This digitized collection includes over 5,000 audio recordings of great American poets from the past one hundred years, including T.S. Eliot, W.H. Auden, Sylvia Plath, and Anne Sexton, as well as newer voices such as Terrance Hayes, Julianna Spahr, Jeffrey Yang, and Jen Bervin. The WPR offers these recordings as part of a huge initiative to preserve their entire collection, which is a kind of scrapbook of all the great poets who have read their poems at Harvard over the years. Elsewhere on this blog, I’ve emphasized the importance of recitation to students as they learn to appreciate poetry’s provocations. The Woodberry Poetry Room’s Listening Booth can be used in a variety of ways in the classroom. Here are a couple of examples: In a literature course, the students might discuss how to read Ezra Pound’s wonderfully Anglo-Saxon inflected lines in “The Seafarer.” Once students have considered Pound’s cues—his lineation, the stresses in his lines, his diction, the dramatic situation of the speaker, and so on—you might share his reading of the poem from the WPR, which is full of the song-like inflections of many poets from the early twenty-first century. Students will be surprised by Pound’s gradual crescendo, and even the way he raises the pitch of his voice, which might spur an interesting discussion. In a poetry workshop, have students listen to a more contemporary poet read his or her work. Students might be surprised to hear Sharon Olds read “The Woman: First Night” in a low-key, matter-of-fact tone. Students might discuss the juxtaposition between Olds’s visceral imagery and this quiet delivery of the lines, and why she uses that strategy. These conversations reinforce poetry’s value as a spoken as well as written art, and they energize students to listen more actively to the hills and dales of any given poetic line. Who knows? Maybe they’ll enjoy the WPR enough to wile away a few afternoons of their own on this wonderful site. You can follow the WPR on Twitter at @WPRHarvard to get updates on additions to the Listening Booth and related news. ... View more

This post first appeared on March 31, 2014. Sometimes, as a creative writing professor you just want to put your foot down.  My colleague, Kate Schmitt, told one workshop if any of them used the word flow again, they’d have to go stand in the corner.  One of my beloved professors, Ron Carlson, told us we weren’t allowed to put clowns in our stories.  Or twins.  Or rain.  Naturally, one of my friends wrote a story about twin clowns in the rain.  Once I banned a student from using colons.  What had started out as a unique grammatical touch had spread throughout her work and then throughout her classmates’ work like head-lice in the second grade. Over the years I’ve noticed that beginning writers gravitate toward certain things—things I would call writing mistakes (melodrama, sentimentality, clichéd descriptions, familiar language)—and sometimes as a teacher, you want so much not to read another story in which a single tear drop runs down the face of the heartbroken that you put your foot down.  But is this teaching?  I have often said about beginning writers that you have to let them make their mistakes.  But do I believe it?  And even if I believe it, do I practice it? As an undergraduate I wrote a story that was all a dream, I wrote a story about an abused woman who was keeping her pregnancy secret, I wrote a story about not being able to get my homework done.  And my teachers were Russell Banks and Joyce Carol Oates.  Can you imagine?  Joyce Carol Oates could probably have written a whole ‘nother novel in the time she had to read the dreck I was writing.  Russell Banks was writing Cloudsplitter, one of my favorite novels of all time, at the time.  Certain of my stories must have been an agony to them.  And yet neither of them banned me from doing anything.  I wouldn’t say they praised me either, but they did let me make my mistakes.  And one of the best stories I wrote as an undergraduate—which became the first story I ever published—was about a couple with a dying baby.  Exactly the kind of story I might now discourage an intro student from writing for fear of sentimentality and melodrama. Those of us who teach creative writing often get asked if creative writing can be taught.  And one of the common responses is: a good teacher can get you further faster.  Things you’d have to determine on your own, you learn more speedily in class.  But what happens if you don’t make your own mistakes?  I feel sometimes like I am asking my intro students to learn from the mistakes of intro students past—and that runs the risk of their writing a certain way because I have told them to, as opposed to deciding for themselves what is good writing. And that might well discourage innovation. MFA programs get accused of this a lot—an absence of innovation, a wealth of mediocrity.  But MFA students in this day and age have often been through several years of workshops by the time they get to graduate school.  A fear of taking risks can be taught or encouraged very early on. I’m about to start a new semester of Introduction to Creative Writing.  It’s my tenth year at my university.  And all this time I’ve stated as one of my goals, on every creative writing syllabus that I’ve ever created, that I want students “to start developing your own aesthetic as a reader and a writer.” I try to encourage this by choosing a range of readings from writers of different backgrounds, writing in different styles.  But like many faculty, I’ve fallen into teaching the same stories year after year—especially in the intro class.  The ten-year mark seems like a good time to take stock of my own aesthetic, and how I might be over-selling it to students.  I know some of my prejudices—I’m wary of overly large plot points, I’m a sucker for a little magic, I worship at the altar of voice—so I think as I finalize my syllabus for the semester, I better look for a story with a big plot, a realist tone, and a near absence of style.  Maybe I’ll even try to write a story like that—after all, it’s been awhile since I allowed myself to make such a mistake. ... View more

On Tuesday, September 1, 2015, Google introduced a new logo: I noticed the change the minute I booted up my laptop, which has Google set as its home page. Well, not exactly. I didn’t notice the change; I noticed something different, something not quite what I’d been looking at since 1999.  (You can see changes to the logo across time on Google’s official blog). Since then, the web—and Twitter particularly—has been abuzz with response, with some loving the move, some hating it, and a lot of folks in between. The new typeface is clean, simple, sans serif. Dubbed Product Sans, it’s reported to have been inspired by schoolbook lettering, yet there’s no old-time feel to it, at least to me. Moreover, in Margaret Rhodes’s take on the changes (in WIRED), Google has also “introduced a suite of sub-logos, like a four-color ‘G’ icon that’ll dot the Google app on phone homescreens, and a microphone icon that guides you through voice search. It’s a self-described “simple, friendly, and approachable” design.” Overall, the new design set aims to come across not as an “all-knowing, all-powerful entity, but as a benevolent guide to this new world—one that considers humans, not machines, the most important thing.” This in spite of the fact that Google exercises enormous power over us and knows more about us than we would like to think. If there were ever any need for proof that style matters, this would be it. Google—with 70% of the search engine market share—is working overtime to create and recreate its brand image, knowing that there’s a strong relationship between that image and the company’s continued success. We could say the same for Apple, Microsoft, Walmart—or the 2016 presidential candidates, most of whom are struggling to get name—let alone face—recognition in a very crowded field. What Richard Lanham argued in The Economics of Attention (2007) is even more true today: in an age of instant and constant information, what can get and hold our attention wins the day. And that’s all about style. What this means for teachers of writing has been clear for some time: students need to be able not only to recognize and analyze the stylistic moves others make (such as Google’s change of logo) but to create messages that can gain attention and to build credible ethos for those messages. For me, this means spending more time on rhetorical stance—really interrogating the personae that students create in their digital lives—and on the nitty gritty details of style, including sentence structure, word choice, rhythm, and image. It seems clear that one of the fallouts of the process movement—which made such a productive turn from an obsessive focus on the final, absolutely correct, written product—was a loss of attention to style. We focused so much on gaining fluency and on nurturing the processes of student writers that there was little time for attending to style. But that was then. Today, teachers of writing are inviting students to join them in considering questions of style, of just what elements can attract reader and viewer attention. One good way to start might well be with analyzing Google’s changing logos over the years and what those changes say about the values and image the company wants to project. ... View more

This post originally appeared March 19, 2014. I was a little nervous to tell my father my plans to major in English with a creative writing emphasis.  Though my parents had always emphasized the importance of literature—my mom was a high school English teacher, and my dad would read us Mark Twain and John Steinbeck when we were kids—I felt like my choice would strike him as being completely impractical. My dad was a newspaper publisher—essentially, he oversaw all aspects of the business, from the newsroom to the pressroom.  And he was a pretty conservative guy, too—education was important to him, but he also made sure I knew that success and financial security were the results of hard work and smart decisions.  And deciding to focus my academic career on writing screenplays and personal essays would, I feared, strike him as frivolous, a less-than-smart decision. If I knew then what I know now, I imagine I might have gone into the conversation with more confidence.  Contrary to common misperceptions, English majors do not tend to spend their careers toiling away in coffee houses or bars, serving espresso or martinis to the former business majors who are actually using their more “practical” degrees to make money.  Some do, I suppose, but not the majority.  Most surveys that measure salary by college major indicate that English majors tend to make comfortable middle-class salaries—not as much as some, but considerably more than others.  Furthermore, English majors, on average, tend to report a high degree of job satisfaction.  This is important, I think.  I realize that I might have chosen a different career (or major) that might have resulted in more money in my checking account, but would I love that career as much as I love the one I have, teaching creative writing and literature?  And if not, would I love my life as much as I do?  I suspect the answer is no. So, in hindsight, I’m glad I made the decisions I made.  Still, back then—sophomore year, 1995, I was a little nervous about what my dad would say.  It turns out I needn’t have worried. My dad was responsible for hiring people in all sorts of capacities—reporters, editors, advertising sales representatives, circulation managers, press foremen, accountants… you name it.  He had been doing this for quite a long time, and he told me that as long as I was majoring in a discipline considered part of the traditional liberal arts, he was confident I was going to be fine. “As an employer, I can teach an employee the job,” he said.  “What I can’t do is teach someone how to learn.” That’s what we do, in the liberal arts—we learn how to learn.  We analyze texts.  We hone our communication skills.  We learn about cause and effect—whether it’s how the Treaty of Versailles ended the first World War but unintentionally laid the groundwork for World War II, or the role sunlight plays in a plant’s ability to survive, or how a myopic sense of materialism ultimately leads to Ivan Ilych’s death.  The liberal arts demand that the student think both carefully and deeply about any given subject, and these habits that become second-nature to the English or History major turn out to be the very skills that employers are looking for. I’ve focused my argument supporting a liberal arts major (and an English major, specifically) on the utility of the degree on the job market, because I feel like in 2014, as students are still feeling the burden of the Great Recession, this is a huge concern.  But let’s be clear—the goal of an education isn’t just to land the perfect job (my high school U.S. History teacher once lamented to my class, “Why is it we never argue that education is worthwhile because it’s neat to know stuff?”).  My education in literature and creative writing has made me a more thoughtful, reflective person, which makes me a more responsible citizen (I’m not going to vote for a candidate whose public statements are entirely vapid or meaningless, like “Freedom isn’t free” or “We can do better” or “If [x] happens, the terrorists win”).  This education has compelled me to make sure I waste as little of my time on earth as possible (I defy you to study literature for a few years and not walk away with a knowledge of your own mortality and the ever-forward march of time).  Perhaps most importantly, I feel like my background in English has helped me become a better husband and friend.  Studying literature prevents solipsism—you can’t read “Sonny’s Blues” or “Diving into the Wreck” without considering the unique consciousness and point-of-view of another person.  I am convinced that this ability to see through someone else’s eyes, inhabit some else’s shoes, is a vital skill to have if you want to enjoy a happy life.  If I couldn’t understand where my wife is coming from in those rare moments when I do something to frustrate or anger her… well, I’d be divorced by now. The most important thing is to make sure that you study a variety of subjects, and that you pick the subject that interests and excites you most for your major.  Some people speak of college and the “real world” as if they were entirely separate things—as if college students inhabit some strange parallel dimension where they are completely shielded from responsibility and repercussions from their decisions.  This is nonsense, and it’s harmful nonsense at that.  College is, in fact, the traditional student’s entry into the real world—the decisions one makes as a student will have ramifications for the rest of her life.  She may choose the road less travelled by, or she may choose the road that others have trod before her.  It’s the act of deciding that makes all the difference. ... View more

This post originally appeared on February 25, 2014. One of the great challenges in teaching a survey course full of non-majors is making sure everyone knows how to write about literature.  This past semester, I faced that challenge in my world literature course – I had a room full of students, ranging from high school students taking college-level courses to senior English majors working on their capstone papers.  I didn’t want to lose my seniors, but I also know that when a sophomore psychology major sits down to write an interpretive paper in my class, that student might feel lost. I decided that a bit of group writing in class might help.  I built the following exercise around the analysis of symbol and setting in Anton Chekhov’s The Cherry Orchard, but you could easily adapt it to work with any narrative text. 1. First I divided the class into 8 groups – 2 groups for each act of the play – and gave students topics to work on for their particular act.  Some groups analyzed Chekhov’s use of setting; others worked on the symbols within their given act. (So, basically, the questions were:  “How does setting operate in Act 1?” or “What do the symbols of Act 1 tell the audience about the theme of the play?” and so on for each act). 2. Once the groups had gathered their information – and by this, I mean direct quotations from Chekhov’s play that supported students’ claims– I had them work together to write paragraphs, using in part a model (PIE or Point, Illustrate, Explain) that I learned when I worked for Barclay Barrios at Florida Atlantic University. Basically, my directions were this: Make a claim about the topic (i.e. write a topic sentence that explains your main idea about setting or symbols in the play; in the model I learned from Barclay, this is the “Point” part). Introduce the context for the quotation. Give the quotation (this is the “Illustrate” part). Explain the meaning of the quotation. Explain how all of this works together to support your topic sentence (this is the “Explain” part). 3. Next, students swapped paragraphs with another group for review.  After they looked at each others' work, making notes for what needed clarification and elaboration, groups went back to work to revise their paragraphs. 4. When they finished revising, groups read their paragraphs aloud to the whole class. This exercise succeeded in helping my students with their analytical skills – both in terms of reading a literary text and in reading and responding to their peers’ writing.  While not every student quite got the message that the exercise provided a model for how to write an analytical or interpretive paper, it did give me something to refer back to as I encouraged them to rethink and revise. ... View more

Another year and I’m once again humbled by our new TAs—how intuitive WAW work is for them, the ideas they contribute to our program for teaching WAW approaches, the possibilities they see for it. Concurrently, our second-year TAs have come back to their third semester of teaching with tweaks, new assignments, and ideas for how to better teach existing assignments. Last spring, a group of our senior adjunct faculty held an 8-week salon series on developing WAW pedagogy. Everyone’s ideas for where to take their courses were different. On other fronts, I’ve been peer-reviewing a number of journal submissions, as well as drafts for an edited collection, that in one way or another focus on WAW. It’s both wonderful and amazing to see some of the emerging scholarship making its way to print, especially the breadth of approaches to WAW being described. Elizabeth and I have also begun developing the third edition of Writing about Writing. Amongst all this intellectual fecundity, occasionally—both in my own program and in the literature on WAW—a troublesome question arises: “Is what you’re describing really ‘writing about writing’?” These moments make me squirm, for two reasons. First, the question gestures toward a “core” of principles underlying the purposes and configurations of WAW approaches. Having to ask if an approach is “really” WAW suggests those deep values are somehow being confounded. Second, and more uncomfortable, the “really WAW” question foregrounds ownership: who gets to call what WAW? If an approach is inconsistent with the core that most instructors of writing-about-writing would recognize, do we really have grounds to say “this isn’t that”? Does it matter? Does having a name risk creating a diversity-crushing monolith? What distinguishes writing-about-writing, across the hundreds of programs and instructors using some version of it, seems to be Purpose: teaching declarative knowledge about writing in order to enhance metacognition, vocabulary, and writing processes and behaviors—for the purposes of shifting conceptions of writing to more accurate and effective ones, strengthening learning transfer to future writing scenes, and shifting epistemologies (particularly in relation to sources and contingency). Methods: reading scholarship in writing, rhetoric, and literacy studies; creating writing projects whose themes interrogate various aspects of the same subjects; intensive, iterative reflection on students’ own literacy and writing experiences ; and, frequently, conducting primary research projects on questions related to writing, literacy, and rhetoric. This is a quite small set of limits on what “counts” as writing-about-writing; these scripts are what making a given instructional approach recognizable as writing-about-writing. It seems to me that the only reason this name—or any other for these approaches—matters is because of the function of names as shorthand, a “handle on a briefcase,” for identifying the underlying philosophy of instruction. In the moments where it occurs to anyone to ask “You’re calling this approach writing-about-writing, but is it really?” part of the concern is simply, if someone looks at what you’re calling writing-about-writing, will they think that WAW is something other than these purposes and methods?  Is what your students are writing actually about writing? And if not—why bother to call the approach something it’s literally not? Ultimately, though, the name simply offers a reminder to ask what the focus and purpose of a given course truly is. What is truly neat to see is the wealth of ways people are expanding on those very basic scripts to do WAW. ... View more

As I write this, Donald Trump is the frontrunner for the Republican nomination. He’s also a lightning rod for all kind of criticism across multiple fronts.  One thing is for sure: people are talking about Donald Trump, good and bad. Of all of his polarizing remarks, Trump’s statements about immigration seem to have provoked the strongest reactions. I thought I would offer some insights on how to teach Trump, with a focus on immigration. By Michael Vadon [CC BY-SA 2.0 (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/2.0)], via Wikimedia Commons Julia Alvarez, “Selections from Once Upon a Quinceañera.” Alvarez’s essay is a useful antidote to some of the notions about immigrants circulating out in the ether.  Her portrayal of the economic challenges of the quince offers a particular understanding of immigrants in relation to work and economics. Kwame Anthony Appiah, “Making Conversation and The Primacy of Practice.” Central to Appiah’s notion of cosmopolitanism is the idea that in a very crowded world we will need to find a way to get along.  Appiah reframes some of the challenges around immigration and, in particular, suggests that isolationist maneuvers (wall building, literally and figuratively) really are no longer realistic given how interconnected the world is today. Manuel Muñoz, “Leave Your Name at the Border.”  Muñoz is a great shorter piece for considering the forces of assimilation that face immigrants.  He helps students think about the costs and benefits of fitting in as an immigrant. Jennifer Pozner, “Ghetto Bitches, China Dolls, and Cha Cha Divas.”  Given Trump’s experience with reality TV, I think Pozner would be a particularly interesting choice since her work examines the intersection of reality TV and ethnic/racial stereotypes. Thomas Friedman, “The Dell Theory of Conflict Prevention.” Friedman’s essay is useful for thinking about global economic connections, which explains (for example) why the line of suits with Trump’s name on them is manufactured in Mexico. Friedman’s central point is that global economics and global politics are centrally linked; Trump is an interesting test case for further examining Friedman’s ideas. Want to offer feedback, comments, and suggestions on this post? Join the Macmillan Community to get involved (it’s free, quick, and easy)! ... View more

This post originally appeared on March 4, 2014. For the epigraph to the preface of the latest edition of Literature: The Human Experience, I chose a few sentences from an interview given by David Foster Wallace: “We all suffer alone in the real world; true empathy’s impossible. But if a piece of fiction can allow us imaginatively to identify with a character’s pain, we might then also more easily conceive of others identifying with our own. This is nourishing, redemptive; we become less alone inside. It might just be that simple.” It might just be that simple, but I’m not sure that it is. I do think it’s possible to feel less alone inside by living for a while inside someone else’s head; even better, it’s possible that this identification can help readers of literature not only to feel better but to act better, to treat others more empathetically, and to do so because they know not only how others feel but also how they live. Teaching literature, then, could be a way to help people learn from literature how to be better humans. But of course some historically awful humans are said to have read a lot of literature. And there is writing out there that one would be hard-pressed to describe as empathy-expanding (see Ayn Rand), yet it gets read and even taught. So it’s not that simple. What else? Helping students to appreciate beauty is a good reason to teach literature. So is teaching them to appreciate complexity, and ambiguity, and even contradiction. So is teaching them to communicate their own thoughts better in writing. There are many good reasons to teach literature. The one I reject is the one that those inside and outside of higher education who question the value of the humanities are most ready to hear: that it prepares students to join the workforce, maybe even better than the business degrees to which so many are inclined these days. I think it’s great if studying literature helps get my students jobs—saying otherwise in this economy would be outrageous—but it’s no reason to teach literature. As important as the economic and the political are, and as much as literature can say about them, maybe the greatest value of literature is that it stands apart from these things. It gets produced and consumed, and emerges out of a world where money and power shape everything, but I teach it as art, as something that can resist those forces. So, in a much shorter formulation, why teach literature? Because in some saving measure, literature stands apart from the world of getting and spending, a world that is way, way too much with us. Time spent reading it and thinking about it and talking about it and writing about it is time well-spent, period. ... View more

​This post originally appeared on February 14, 2014. I always enjoy the beginning of the semester: new students, new classes, and new school supplies (I still love those, all these many years past grade school).  This year, starting fresh, for me, also means a new university: I’ve recently started teaching at Heidelberg University in Ohio.  It means a change in student population, a change in curricular expectations, and a change in the number of freshmen that I teach. It also means that I’m able to take what I learned in my last job – including the critical thinking program that I coordinated for two years – and apply them in this new setting.  And I’ve been thinking a great deal about the critical thinking part of the work that I was doing, in the context of this new job.  My previous experience with critical thinking was in a program with a relatively set curriculum, or with at least a set paradigm of critical thinking that was to be applied to all disciplines.  Here, however, I am freed from those constraints: I can pick what works and discard what hasn’t worked for my own teaching.  And I think that my teaching is the stronger for it all, both from working within a particular program that forced me to reconsider my course objectives and the objectives of the various assignments in my classes, and from now having a bit more room to play around with other frameworks of critical thinking. What I’ve noticed in my classes so far (and there have only been a few meetings up to this point) is how much of the critical thinking vocabulary has become normal for me.  And more importantly, how many of the techniques I began to practice while working within – and eventually running – that critical thinking program emerged as I spoke with students this week.  In running a brief class discussion, I found myself asking students to clarify their thoughts with more precise language (clarity and precision were two standards for evaluating thought that we worked with a great deal in our program); I found myself asking students to paraphrase what other students had said, to ensure engaged listening – and engaged thinking, another technique that I began to practice in earnest under the past program. (Also, I should note that it’s always pleasing, at the beginning of a semester and the end of a long summer of writing and relaxing, to realize that you actually remember how to do the thing that pays the bills.) All of this – the critical thinking experience, the new students, the movement out of a specific critical thinking curriculum – is enabling me to develop a more specific paradigm of critical thinking for my literature students, particularly the students in my survey courses.  This semester, I’m teaching a survey of world literature, and I’m going to try to implement some of the ideas I’m working on in terms of deliberately cultivating critical thinking skills in a literature class. It’s all a big adventure.  I hope to continue to chronicle it here and elsewhere, and I hope you’ll follow along. ... View more

This post originally appeared on February 11, 2014. The final assignment I give my MFA students is one they often hate, to write a “Why I Write” essay.  Lately it seems the “Why I Write” has become a genre onto itself, a rite of passage for amateur and professional alike. And even a cursory reading in the genre suggests many of us write for many of the same reasons: To learn To leave the world better than we found it To be heard To give voice to the voiceless To love language To be preserved past death Because we can (a variation of which is Flannery O’Connor’s famous retort, “Because I’m good at it”) It may seem like I’m criticizing the form, but I love these essays, including versions by Jim Harrison, Orhan Pamuk, Susan Orlean , Barry Hannah, Rick Moody; the most famous examples, by George Orwell and Joan Didion; and my personal favorite, by my former student, Kathrine Wright. I love how these essays share the process of creation with readers, and I think at least once in their writing life, every writer should consider the question. But I suspect the reason my students are so against the assignment is they are afraid they won’t come up with a good answer.  They get defensive.  And this, it seems, is how I feel upon being asked, “Why do I teach writing.” Why? Why shouldn’t I! Sometimes my students get famous! (see: “Teacher’s Pet” ). Sometimes my students get jobs! (see: “From Grad Student to Assistant Professor”). Sometimes they give much unto others! (see: “How to Make a Planet”) . And yet periodically there is a lot of hate aimed at those of us who teach creative writing (see: “Get a Real Degree”), like we are the snake oil salesfolk of the post-modern age. And I suppose if we actually promised our students fame and riches, we would be.  But the truth is I teach writing for the same reasons I write: To learn To leave the world better than I found it To be heard To give voice to the voiceless To love language To be preserved past death Because I can (and because I’m good at it) The creative writing classroom is a place where students learn to give and receive critical feedback, to think past the first thought, to find language for emotion, to communicate their thoughts and beliefs and ideas to others, to really reach each other.  Who wouldn’t want to be a part of that? ... View more

This post originally appeared on February 5, 2014. In my world literature course, I’m using The Bedford Anthology of World Literature, which has – among other features – some nice chapters on context.  For my class today, I had students read the section called “Society and its Discontents,” which includes selections from Zola, Nietzsche, Maupassant and Nitobe.  We’ve also recently read Dostoevsky’s “The Grand Inquisitor,” Tolstoy’s “The Death of Ivan Ilych,” and selections of Baudelaire’s poetry (and if you’ve never read “Carrion,” you really ought to. Just probably not while eating). We’ve been at this for a while now, and I’ve been the one making connections across the pieces of literature (primarily, I’ve been letting the students off the hook and not allowing for quite enough wait time during class discussion, something I’ve addressed in a separate post).  It occurred to me that my students might see connections that I don’t see – or at least that they’d reach their own conclusions about the ennui and general discomfort with the Industrial Revolution and scientific materialism of the nineteenth century. To do this, I had students divide into groups to discuss the readings and make connections. 1. Each group selected three readings: one of the contextual readings; one of Baudelaire’s poems; and either Tolstoy or Dostoevsky’s short story.  The major question that students worked towards answering was “How does the selection you’ve chosen from today’s reading illuminate the Baudelaire poem and the Russian short story?”  It’s a purposefully broad question, in part because I wanted to see what students might do with it. 2. Each group also considered a handful of questions about the contextual selection from “Society and its Discontents”: What does this reading say about modern society? About the middle class? About urbanization/industrialization? What does the reading have in common with the poem and the short story? How does the reading differ? Really, these are simple questions. They focus on the themes that we’ve been covering (and some fundamental concepts for the working definition of “modernity” that we’ve been using), and they simply ask the students to compare and contrast. As a result of this structure and degree of freedom, students chose and discussed the pieces that they felt worked best together – and they came up with a varied list, of course.  Students were able to discuss the literature in conversation with contextual materials, and identify, for example, the theme of the oppressiveness of middle class life expressed in all of these works. And so it also happened, perhaps most sneakily on my part, that I got my students to review a pretty good chunk of material for the midterm exam which is next week. ... View more

Two years ago, I began the Multimodal Mondays series on this blog as a way of suggesting practical classroom activities and course assignments that engage the many tools and strategies available for multimodal writing. One of the most exciting things about the series is the guest bloggers, who are doing fascinating work and contributing wonderful multimodal compositions from their students. Well done! Multimodal Mondays is meant to be activity-driven: an in-class activity and/or homework assignment (with opportunities/questions for student reflection) that you can easily grab and incorporate into your lesson plan or use to develop into a longer assignment down the road. Here is our basic format: A clear learning objective applicable to a general writing or composition course The assignment idea Any specific instructions for students necessary to complete the assignment Any specific in-class guidelines for instructors; these may include examples and/or questions for discussion Examples of student work (provided the student has granted permission to share the work and the institution allows instructors to do so) As we move into our third year of the series, I want to know: Are you using the activities and assignments suggested? Should the guest bloggers and I present our methods differently? What would you like to see more of? Please write in and let me know what works and what you suggest for improvement. One easy way to share your thoughts is to Join the Macmillan Community (it’s free, quick, and easy) to comment directly on this post, or take this quick survey. ... View more

This post originally appeared on August 19, 2013. I want to encourage my students to find something in literature that resonates with them— and so I encourage them to make connections between their reading and their lived experiences. But I’ve been thinking a great deal about the limits of identifying with characters, particularly where that identification leads to a misunderstanding or a misinterpretation of the text at hand. My experience of late has been that a number of my students will latch onto some aspect of a character or the character’s story that is recognizable to their own experiences. They make a personal connection, but often ignore other details of the work—even the ones that negate that identification—which of course gets in the way of thoughtful interpretation. [Photo Credit: Langston  Hughes, 1942. Photo by Jack Delano, courtesy of the Library of Congress] I run into this quite frequently when I teach Langston Hughes’ “Salvation,” because I teach a lot of students from Protestant denominations that engage in revival services.  This is a useful opener: We can start with a discussion of what a revival service involves—and students can invoke their own experiences as children trying to understand the figurative language of adults.  However, for many of my students who are born again Christians, this becomes the stopping point: they bring their own experience of giving themselves to Jesus to the discussion, project that onto the text, and totally miss Langston’s own crisis in faith. I was surprised, recently, when I ran into this problem when discussing Kafka’s “A Hunger Artist” in class.  While talking about the motivation of artists—and their need to create—I worked to draw my artistic students into the conversation.  Several of them spoke of the urge or the need to draw, to paint, to play an instrument, to write, but one student pointed out (quite rightly, actually), that we can’t entirely know why artists are artists.  And I suspect that she took exception to my suggestion of the artist’s alienation.  It simply doesn’t match her own feelings or experience. On the one hand, I want to say that Kafka is profoundly correct about the alienation of the artist.  But on the other, I need to remember that this is not necessarily an experience that all19-year-olds can identify with or articulate.  Especially 19-year-olds who haven’t dyed their hair weird colors and painted their fingernails black.  (Ahem, guilty.) What both of these instances—discussing the work of Hughes and Kafka—remind me is that while it’s useful to allow a certain degree of personal identification with a text—it’s a way in, no doubt—we have to continually work to refocus the attention of the class back onto the text itself. As I discussed in my earlier post about Melville’s “Bartleby,” part of our work in teaching literature is about reframing the conversation. There’s a constant need to remind ourselves and our students that we have to go back to the text itself to support our interpretations.  When we look for the themes of a literary work or try to define the concepts at its center, we need to look solely at what the author presents to us. We might agree with what the author presents, or not. Either way, it’s still the author’s point of view—or at least the point of view put forth in the text that matters. Connecting with a text should not get in the way of interpreting it. In the end, then, it’s all about the words. And we have to help our students remember to go back to them. ... View more