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Playing Into Their Hands

Saturday, August 21st, 2010

Sitting in a circle, fourteen teachers speak our names in rhythm with quarter notes: Lau-ra. Blue. James. Blue.  There is nervousness, laughing; one tries to show off and flops, another gains confidence after a timid first attempt.  We are teachers, so playing the student’s role forces them out of our element.

This week I was privileged to be able to assist Michiko Yurko at a workshop of Music Mind Games, the cooperative theory games I use in my piano lessons with great success.  During our orientation, I took great interest in this list of answers to the common question, “Why games?”

  1. It’s easy to hold students’ attention with a game; everyone loves them.
  2. Students relax and learn faster.  As Michiko said, “When their minds are open, you can stuff all kinds of things in.”
  3. Memory training happens naturally.  As a musician, you need to have an excellent memory, one that serves you even in a chaotic situation.
  4. Students learn to work together cooperatively.  There are lots of implications here for careers, religion, and even personal relationships!
  5. Students feel progress and a sense of accomplishment, whether or not they win.
  6. Students are empowered to learn rather than to be taught.
  7. Students are happy to repeat games, which is fundamental to learning.  Every teacher would love to phasing herself out, looking on while students work on their own; playing games enables her to do that.
  8. Games engage multiple learning strengths; visual, oral, kinesthetic.
  9. Games are adaptable to different ages as well as different subjects.
  10. Games create a manageable sequence of skills.
  11. Games allow teachers to personally relate to each student – instead of thinking about a class, you’re thinking about a person.
  12. Games allow teachers to evaluate comprehension and track progress without testing.  Students learn from each other, and teachers learn from their students.
  13. Games are fun for teachers, too!

As I took notes and listened to her talk, I realized these were all things I was aiming for in classroom teaching, too.  Why can’t I play grammar games with my literature classes, or brainstorming games with the budding authors in Creative Writing?  I suppose because it would take a lot more work than the traditional methods.  Maybe I can come up with just a few for this year.  Any ideas?

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Posted in Literature, Methods, Music, Virtues | 1 Comment »

An Encouraging Word

Thursday, August 19th, 2010

From the late John Updike:

[The rookie writer] may feel, as the gray-haired scribes of the day continue to take up space and consume oxugen in the increasingly small room of the print world, that the elderly have the edge, with their established names and already secured honors.  How we did adore and envy them . . . we imagined them aswim in a heavenly refulgence, as joyful and immutable in their exalted condition as angels forever singing.

Now that I am their age — indeed, older than a number of them got to be — I can appreciate the advantages, for a writer, of youth and obscurity.  You are not yet typecast. You can take a distant, cold view of the entire literary scene.  You are full of your material — your family, your friends, your region of the country, your generation — when it is fresh and seems urgently worth communicating to readers. No amount of learned skills can substitute for the feeling of having a lot to say, of bringing news.

He goes on to talk about what it’s like to be an old writer, and about aging in general — he knew whereof he spake, as he died just a few months after this article was published.  The golden years are as fascinating as they are unknown to me, but I can only hope and pray that I can someday write with half the gravity and elegance he seems to command at the drop of a hat.  I suppose, to use a clumsily mixed metaphor, that the grass is always greener on the other side of the generation gap.

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Posted in Literature, Virtues, Writing | No Comments »

Plagiarism is Understandable?

Sunday, August 15th, 2010

Stanley Fish says yes (my emphasis added:)

If you’re a student, plagiarism will seem to be an annoying guild imposition without a persuasive rationale  (who cares?); for students, learning the rules of plagiarism is worse than learning the irregular conjugations of a foreign language. It takes years, and while a knowledge of irregular verbs might conceivably come in handy if you travel, knowledge of what is and is not plagiarism in this or that professional practice is not something that will be of very much use to you unless  you end up becoming a member of the profession yourself.  It follows that students who never quite get the concept right are by and large not committing a crime; they are just failing to become acclimated to the conventions of the little insular world they have, often through no choice of their own, wandered into. It’s no big moral deal; which doesn’t mean, I hasten to add, that plagiarism shouldn’t be punished — if you’re in our house, you’ve got to play by our rules — just that what you’re punishing is a breach of disciplinary decorum, not a breach of the moral universe.

Perhaps.  But there’s a big difference between incorrectly citing a quotation or idea and brazenly appropriating whole passages, as in the shocking anecdote that opens the article.  Besides, isn’t the very act of hanging out in someone’s house, without knowing their rules, a moral problem?  If you waltz right by the pile of shoes in the entryway and keep yours on because you think you should be able to do what you’re used to doing in your own house, you’re probably the same kind of person who asks to see a friend’s paper and lifts a few paragraphs because you would be willing to do the same for her.  That’s not the right way to live, and boy, does it complicate the life of an English teacher!

I remember my first and most traumatic plagiarism experience as if it were yesterday.  In my first year of teaching, I read two papers that were almost exactly the same (especially absurd for an opinion paper) with only a word changed here and there.  We summoned both students to the vice-principal’s office and questioned them separately.  Each broke down in tears.  I felt sorry for them, but still angry, mostly out of pride: how dumb did they think I was?!

Maybe Fish’s argument is over my head (it wouldn’t be the first time.)  But I have always agreed with Baba, of the Kite Runner, who says:

“There is only one sin, only one. And that is theft. Every other sin is a variation of theft . . . When you kill a man, you steal a life. You steal a wife’s right to a husband, rob his children of a father. When you tell a lie, you steal someone’s right to the truth. When you cheat, you steal the right to fairness . . . There is no act more wretched than stealing.”

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Posted in Literature, Media, School policies, Vices | No Comments »

An Uncanny Coincidence

Sunday, May 23rd, 2010

Eliot may not be American in the technical sense, but I snuck him into the curriculum this year because Prufrock is such an interesting foil for Gatsby.  We read it in class the other day; much to my surprise and delight, the students were almost as taken with him as I am.

So I spontaneously assigned them a biography for homework.  Who was Prufrock?  Why was he so filled with malaise and uncertainty?  What had made him so “deferential, glad to be of use / politic, cautious and meticulous / full of high sentence, but a bit obtuse”?

Students love to make up stories (see “Why don’t you have your homework?”), so their assignments came back amusing, depressing and surprisingly intuitive.  Two students (not friends) reached the exact same conclusion: Poor J.’s sister had died in a tragic accident when he was a boy.  He was never the same, they wrote; he always blamed himself and bitterly mourned the untimely loss.

The names they chose for this fictional, ill-fated younger sibling?  Emily and Abigail.

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Posted in Literature | 6 Comments »

Breaking the Waves

Saturday, February 27th, 2010

I spent one blessedly-short summer in the retail industry, selling high-end clothing on commission in SoHo.  I hated it.  Having to constantly think about numbers, and using formulae for everything from accessories to jokes, was not my natural style.

Halfway through the summer I had lunch with a high-school friend and his mother who were in town.  Carole was unlike any other friend’s mother I’d ever met: “young at heart” sounds cliche, but she really was dreamy in the way of an adolescent girl, constantly perched on the edge of some alternate reality.

We all sipped our juices. (Well, I barely touched mine; I’d watched the barista make it, with three apples and a huge hunk of fresh ginger, and it made my head want to explode.)  She asked me how work was going, and I told her truthfully that I didn’t like the job.

“Humanity is so strange,” she mused. “People come in . . . waves.”

I thought this was probably over my head, philosophically speaking, so I didn’t think much about it until my next shift.  Then I started to notice how right she was.  There were long, nearly unbearable periods of boredom, pacing the marble floors and obsessively spacing hangers and tucking in tags.  And suddenly, my hands were so full I wasn’t even sure I was getting credit for every sale; I didn’t have time to walk each client to the register, as I had to be in the dressing rooms assisting the next one.  This happened even at the oddest times: not just during the lunch rush, or on weekends, but smack in the middle of a weekday morning, when the crowd consisted of separate parties of one and two each.

I’m no sociologist, but you must have had the experience of getting in a short line only to see six people behind you a moment later (or, more unhappily, to be one of the six who simultaneously decide to bring their shopping to a close.)  I suppose, at heart, we are more group-oriented than we realize.

For a teacher, the Sheep Effect can be frustrating.  The first year I taught Creative Writing, the class was capped at 12 with a waiting list.  The second year, it reached 12, but several students dropped it in the first week; I finished the year with 8.  The third year, four signed up, and one dropped it halfway through.  This year, no one signed up at all.

If anything, I promoted the class more eagerly as I saw the numbers start to dwindle, but my efforts seemed to have an adverse effect.  My greatest fear happened this year: there was no class at all, no pool from which to choose work for the school’s literary magazine.  I’m running it as an after-school club instead, and given the overextended schedules of our students, you can guess how successful that’s been.

But the students’ course selection forms are due this week, and suddenly the wave is cresting again: half a dozen have dropped by to ask me excitedly about the course, and as many teachers have remarked that they’ve been signing off left and right (it’s an honors course, so requires the consent of their current English teacher.)  I can only hypothesize that since so few have taken it in recent years, the aura of mysterious enticement is back up.  Perhaps it will break in a year or two, and we’ll be right back where we started.

Why do people work this way?  Jack Handey was right.  Mankind is a mystery.

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