Personal: January 2008 Archive Page

While walking an introductory class through a close reading of "The Defense of Fort McHenry" (better known as "The Star-Spangled Banner,") I noted that a student had wondered whether the appearance of "In God We Trust" on US currency had anything to do with the inclusion of a similar phrase, "In God is our Trust," in the poem that became the U.S. national anthem.

I confessed to the student that I didn't know the answer, and suggested that the next time a thought like that occurs to her, I'd love to have her share her findings with the class.

An hour or so later, that student showed up outside my office, with a printout from the U.S. Department of Treasury website, having found (and highlighted) the answer. 

That wasn't the only reason she wanted to see me, but I was still happy that she had taken the initiative to follow up on a class discussion, and that she wanted to share with me what she had found.

The other poem I chose for the day was Jabberwocky, which I've known by heart since high school, so it was a lot of fun to do the oral interpretation while supporting a quick-and-dirty reading of Carroll's famous nonsense poem as a version the hero's quest, and Alice's discussion with Humpty Dumpty as a spoof of the scholastic tendency to consult an authority (Humpty Dumpty, who "can explain all the poems that ever were in­ vented -- and a good many that haven't been invented just yet"), rather than encouraging Alice's instinctive reaction: "Somehow it seems to fill my head with ideas -- only I don't exactly know what they are!"

Michael Bracken offers practical tips to new writers. Later this week I'll begin teaching Seton Hill's "Intro to Literary Study" class again... it's often the first class in which the English majors get a taste of what it means to write fiction for a college-level class. That means I emphasize basic stuff such as how to punctuate quoted speech, and the difference between "correcting the mistakes your teacher has circled for you" and "improving a draft through revision."  But Bracken offers an even more basic set of gripes.

New writers often ask questions about how to format manuscripts, and established writers and editors provide a variety of opinions about the "right" way and the "wrong" way to do it. I happen to prefer the format established post-typewriter/pre-personal computer, but I realize time, technology, and training changes everything.

I'm no Luddite. I worked for a large book and periodical publisher that was accepting electronic manuscripts back in the 1980s before Macintoshes existed and when electronic manuscripts arrived on 8" Wang disks that truly were floppy! I worked with and taught GenCode, a precursor to today's generic mark-up languages (HTML, SGML, etc.)., and today I write, edit, and design printed and electronic publications using a variety of word processing and page layout programs on both Macintoshes and Windows-based PCs.

So allow me a moment to play crabby editor while I bitch about a few of the most common mistakes I see writers make when preparing electronic manuscripts, and my complaints have nothing to do with font or typesize.

I've got a pounding headache and I'm typing this while stretched out on my sickbed in the basement (where my wife banishes me every time I get ill).  I'm sure this isn't a relapse of the pneumonia that laid me low last term, but I'm not at all happy that this is hitting me on the last weekend before the spring term starts.  When I'm sick, the part of my brain that does objective evaluation shuts down, so I'm no good at grading papers or figuring out whether this assignment should be worth 5% or 10% of the course grade.  But I can philosophize and ruminate.  I suppose this will help me deal with the anxiety I feel over getting sick (again).

After students have had the chance to revise a few essays, I ask for a show of hands as I ask a series of questions...

1. "How many of you find it easy to fix all the mistakes I mark?"
2. "How many of you find it easy identify and fix errors in the passages that I haven't marked?"
3. "How many of you prefer to have someone else catch the mistakes for you?"
4. "Now imagine you are the editor of a magazine, and you have two submissions on your desk. Both are about the same quality. One has typos in almost every line, and you'll have to spend hours getting it ready for publication. The other submission has no glaring technical errors, and looks like it would be ready to go almost immediately. Which one would you publish?"

I've done that in the past, as part of my attempt to get students to pay attention to, and take advantage of the opportunity when their professor gives them the opportunity to revise a paper. I first thought I should blog Bracken's essay because I wanted my students to be able to read it, but now I'm not so sure. 

One of the biggest frustrations about being a writing teacher is that many students don't take full advantage of the opportunity to revise.  If a student's draft is patchy and full of typos, then instead of spending my time engaging with the student's ideas, I spend it circling typographical errors and noting missing words, and I never get to spend that deep time talking about a student's ideas. (Yes, I can add a few lines after the final draft comes in, but I know students are most motivated to learn from detailed comments when they are working on a final draft. If they have, in their minds, "finished" a paper, I have to shift into a much more general "Next time, try doing more of this and less of that," rather than actually carrying on a conversation with them about the ideas they have raised.

But I worry that perhaps my desire to get students to value the revision process has instead come across as an attempt to tear them down. 

Making the shift to college can be shocking.  Many who have a talent for language have coasted through high school English -- where teachers rewarded students for using fancy vocabulary words, for being able to summarize the plot of the literary works they read and for demonstrating an ability to apply the stories to their own lives.  For many students who are just starting out college, only the dumb or lazy students have to work hard to earn good grades; the ones who are "bright" and "smart" get those good grades naturally. So they can be shocked to find out that being "bright" doesn't earn you many points, and even "smart" kids have to work to earn a B.

This lesson is not a particularly pleasant one to teach. Professional editors have every right to be frustrated by newbie authors whose simple mistakes waste time.  As a teacher, it's my job to help get those newbies ready for the real world, where crabby editors don't always have time to be nice when they say "no."  One of my teaching personas is the crabby editor, though I try to reserve that for the upper-level students who should know better.

I thought initially that Bracken's blog entry would permit me to say, "See, it's not just me being crabby, here's a successful author and influential editor saying the same things I'm trying to tell you."  But instead, I think I'll try to bring this idea out of the class via a discussion, where students call out ideas and I write them on the board.

Since it's a spring class, the students will already have had a chance to notice what their first semester was like, though they may not have had the chance to reflect on what their experiences mean. It would be faster to start with a list of dos and dont's, but rather than giving them a list of orders that they are compelled to follow, it would be much better if they could think of me as a resource for how to solve a problem.  

This kind of self-criticism is particularly challenging to students who haven't yet taken a creative writing class, and therefore haven't really experienced what a solid, meaty critique can do for their writing (once they get over the initial blow to their egos). But if I try to force this lesson on them before they're ready to hear it, they might get disillusioned, and they may not give me their best work thereafter (for fear that I'll respond too harshly).

Finding the right balance between crushing realism and uncritical praise is important enough that it's worth taking the time to do it carefully. So this year I will try drawing some collective wisdom out of the students' shared experiences.

When I went to grad school, I imagined that I would teach much the same way as I was taught -- via lectures.  But students today are far more connected with each other than students were 20 years ago.  My students are skilled at interacting with each other, and they regularly draw on their group communication skills to get all sorts of personal and social tasks done.

I feel like I'm doing my best work as a teacher when I find that the knowledge is already there, in bits and pieces, distributed across the student network.  The students may have never tried to connect the dots on their own, though they may have generated some tentative conclusions based on the parts of the big picture that they can see.

And the big picture that I need to see is that I've got to face the reality that I'm sick again, and that until I get better, I won't be able to make any meaningful progress on all the obligations I've put on hold.

Okay... now for some rest.

Leigh Alexander tries to quit gaming for a week.  How long does she last?

What I did learn - and this was the primary aim - was just a little bit more about why I play, and what gaming means to me, does for me. I thought that without games, the world might open up just a little; that I'd divert that gaming energy into learning new things, visiting new places, developing more relationships. But, even given only a few days to experiment, I realized I felt then, at least for that moment, content with the size of my world and the people in it as they are.

On the other hand, the absence of games left a distinct sense of feeling stranded, as if bridges I had made from my imagination into worlds made by others had been closed for repairs. I didn't have a bad couple of days; more ordinary than I would have expected, and neither more nor less fulfilling.

But it did feel like my world was a bit smaller; there were emotions, impulses and dreams that had nowhere to travel to, that languished amid the everyday. It's true that I learned perhaps gaming has cultivated in me a lack of long-term patience, a need for more regular stimulation, a poorer attention span. It's also very possible that I zone out with games to avoid dealing directly with things that cause me frustration or sadness. But I'm now certain there is a singular fashion in which games engage both mind and emotion - not only for the purpose of play, but for personal reasons both creative and therapeutic - that no other form of media approaches. It's a quality unique to gaming, it speaks to the power and responsibility game developers have assumed, and it makes sense out of the intense, often perplexing personalization we feel toward the games they make.

In the passage I quoted above she said her days without games were no less fulfilling than her days with games, but the crisis in her experiment comes when she is lying in bed, feeling sick, and cannot think of anything to do in order to make her happy again, other than give up her pledge to take a break from gaming. (She also apparently hangs around with gamers, watching them play.)

I'm lying sick on the couch in the basement (which is where my wife banishes me when I'm ill).  Playing a game won't make me happy. Regaining enough mental capacity so I can evaluate the homework students submitted Friday -- THAT will make me happy. Feeling well enough that I'm willing to crawl out of bed to find out which child is dragging something heavy across the kitchen floor (and why) -- THAT wouldn't exactly make me happy, but it would make me less anxious.

Every so often I wish I had access to the unbroken swaths of time -- 12, 16, 20 hours at a time -- when I could do whatever the heck I wanted. But then I read this article and I realize how fortunate I am to have a rich life (with the attendant responsibilities) that mean my life still has meaning even though I have to go through long game-less dry spells (and can only sip at the casual games, rather than delve into RPGs or figure out how the heck to get out of the canal where I've been stuck in Half-Life 2 since June 2005).

It's always hard for the kids to make the transition to "Daddy is working" when, from their perspective, it looks like I'm just tapping away at my computer, as I often do in my spare time.

When my wife interrupted me to ask me to get something down from a high shelf, I had just learned that I had accidentally deleted the directory that contained the entire database for the Seton Hill weblogs, as well as the last 7 or so years of this weblog.

I knew that my ISP backs up my whole site weekly, and I knew that I had added a nightly backup for those crucial files, but I knew that I'd have to put in a support ticket and I knew I'd lost the work I'd done since the last backup.  I have an RSS feed that sends me all the comments that get entered into any of the blogs, and I can recover any missing new blog entries from the HTML pages generated by the database.  I've been through this before, though not as a result of my own stupidity.

I was a bit cranky, but I got the thing from the shelf. Even though I knew I was poised for a couple of hours of copy-and-paste tedium, as I recreated a course website from the HTML files generated by the database, something penetrated my brain when my wife offered a very nice "thank you."

My wife is of the "I shouldn't-have-to-say-it-because-it-should-be-obvious" school of thought. That generally goes for saying "please" and "I'm sorry," too.

But a few days ago, when the kids were clamoring for attention and she was curled up in bed with the lights off, she said something like, "Your kids are so excited to be able to play with you."

So it seemed, for a moment, that maybe my wife was making a particular effort. I asked her whether maybe she had made a new year's resolution to be extra nice to me.

She had an instant reply. "No, I am not going to spend the year sucking up to you. That's not my idea of a new year's resolution. You can put that in your blog."

Oh, well. It was a nice thought there.

I'm putting the final touches on materials for my Video Game Culture and Theory course, which starts tomorrow. But earlier today I took a break so that the family could say goodbye to my Christmas break by catching a movie.

We saw The Water Horse, which is a great family film (in that the kids will enjoy the action, but the characters are deep enough that adults will be emotionally engaged).  I was a little distracted going into the film, since I knew a lot of work was waiting for me tonight. But the tipping point for me came when both my kids, seated on either side of me, perked up when they noticed something familiar.  Right when Crusoe comes up underneath the military boat, my kids poked me and said "That was the Wilhelm scream!"