When I think back on all of the little class activities I’ve developed in my time as a teacher I don’t think any have spread or persisted as much as the Super Secret Formula.  It’s on my mind because one of our former teachers (now in Georgia pursuing her PhD) mentioned using it with success in a recent e-mail.  That same week the waiter at my favorite breakfast place (who also happens to be a freshman at school) also mentioned loving it.

So what is the Super Secret Formula?  Well, simply, it’s

C_l > I > Q₁ > E > T > Q₂ > C_e

Students start their paragraphs with “Cl,” a sentence that states the claim of the paragraph.  Then with “I,” they introduce a quotation from the first author, adding a sentenced that explains it (”E”).  The next sentence makes a transition (”T”) to a quotation from a different author, “Q2.”  Finally, students take a sentence or two to explain the connection between the two quotations (”Ce”) and how it supports the argument they’re making in the paper.

The concrete structure of a “formula” provides a good scaffolding for students to build a solid paragraph that works with quotation use but the risk is, of course, that all their paragraphs will becomes (literally) formulaic.  When using this exercise, I start by having groups use the formula to make a sample paragraph.  Then I challenge groups to come up with other formulas for working with quotations.

This is my Golden Tool of my Lore Bag—it always seems to work and students love it.  I think of course they love having a concrete pattern and set of instructions to learn how to think connectively and thus to synthesize while working with quotations.  But I always find that taking the writing class out of the writing classroom has some near magic effect.  There’s something about a scientific-looking formula that taps into some other region of students’ brains and bypasses any anxiety they may have about writing.

So, still super if not so secret.

(If you’d like to see more ideas for working with quotations, read my older post “5 ways I help students to work with quotations.“)

Over the past couple months of doctoral work, I have been absorbed in theory and research in technical communication. Every now and then composition comes up, but my attention has centered on other topics. Slowly but surely, I started to forget my experiences in composition, the joy that teaching brought me, and the meaningful relationships I had with colleagues and students. As these memories faded, composition’s importance waned in my mind. I began to regard it as not really relevant or meaningful to me. The inundation of new people, new ideas, and a new environment was overwhelming, and I forgot my intellectual, pedagogical, and professional roots. Fortunately, not everyone is willing to let me forget my past.  Last weekend, my parents came to visit. While we were chatting, I was dismissive of composition. Then my mom asked a basic question: “You were happy teaching composition, weren’t you?”

Sitting there, I realized that I have been uttering many of the same sentiments about composition which used to frustrate and enrage me when I heard others speak them. Unfortunately, in a matter of a few months I lost a lot of the real-world perspective of what teaching composition is about and how important it is in the learning and living process for many college students. I was in the process of becoming a person who was “too good” for composition.

This is not a charming position to be in, but it is honest. I had not realized how easy it is to forget who I am, what I did, and what made me happy. I was not fully aware of who and what I was becoming. My mom’s question, fortunately, came at the perfect time. It reminded me that nothing before or since has had the same emotional, professional, or ethical impact upon me that teaching composition offered. Teaching FYC was a gift, and I am glad she reminded me of that.

There’s no need for me to dismiss or deny composition as part of my heritage or future practice. For some reason, I felt the need to be free of it. No more. Instead, I know that I want composition as part of my professional practice and development; I want to remain engaged with it, in and out of the classroom, because I know that it is an ethical, joyous, and rigorous practice which benefits students and me.

I am just grateful that it only took a few months, not years, for someone to remind me of how important my roots are to my identity and lived experience.

Teaching and learning are exciting ways of life and wonderful stages in personal and professional development. Just like anything else in life, maintaining excitement and energy for school can be challenging. Tight finances, lack of job stability, problematic relations with supervisors and bumpy relationships can drag us down. Crests and valleys are nothing new: they’re just part of the human condition. Still, when feeling sluggish, down, or just not excited about teaching, it’s easy to bring that same resistance to class. Personal entropy can slow down an otherwise exciting course or bring a hard teaching environment to a screeching halt. I’ve unintentionally done it enough times so I do what I can to avoid impacting my class.

I always remind myself of how lucky I am to be teaching. Sure, I know that many administrators use our joy and passion for teaching as an excuse to give adjuncts relatively low pay. Still, that shouldn’t dampen our energy. All I usually had to do to keep my spirits up was remember all of the other jobs I held, the other bosses I had, and the difference between the customers I served and the students in my classes. We also too often forget the importance of teaching; teaching is a privilege and responsibility. And as a full-time student, I miss being able to teach. Teaching was challenging, but having that challenge and working with great students was a blessing. Recalling in detail just how important teaching is to our students, our culture and to our own lives can help bring some juice back into the process.

When self-motivation about the merits of the job does not work, and it often fails, I turn outside of teaching. I intentionally shut down everything school-related and look for art, music, books, TV, YouTube videos, or anything that offers complete and total escape. If we never break from teaching, thinking, studying, and learning, we will wear ourselves out. Finding a form of art or media which excites you and moves you outside of your academic specialty not only offers non-academic entertainment, thinking, and perspectives, but provides a chance to connect with the world and yourself. Gifted teachers and bright students know this, but they forget to act. We claim that the deadline is too pressing, the work is too important. Deadlines are important, but if your work is sloppy, exhausted, or off-target because you were so burned out, then what is the point? Taking a ten or fifteen minute break, if not an hour or two, may not only reenergize you to finish up a class or paper, it may help you make it through the day. Similarly, it’s important to schedule time off. I have heard colleagues agree with this, and then I’ve watched them work weeks without a real break. Down time is necessary, whether you fill it with something constructive or a bit self-indulgent.

As a person who loves patterns, I dislike changing routines, but I’ve discovered that if I keep the same routine for too long, I start to slow down. Simply shifting where I get my coffee, when I exercise, the route I take to school, or the order that I review papers forces me to pay attention to new details things in the environment. By choosing to change small aspects of your environment and daily experience, you may notice new people, things or places you can use in your classes, or even something that you want to do that is not school-related. Altering routines is a great way to force yourself to start paying more attention to your environment and living less in your head. Even if it is only for ten or thirty seconds, the changes can potentially reinvigorate or inspire you to alter a lesson, to take a new approach towards explaining comparison contrast or meet another adjunct from another department. Developing the pattern of changing patterns while hard can be very rewarding.

These may not be new ideas, but they are the advice that friends–academic and otherwise–have given me when I lost pep, became less engaged, or just was not feeling like the real me. None of them works all of the time, but all three have been reliable.  As we near the middle of the semester, it’s important to remember that while we are almost half-way done, we still have half-way to go. Whether student or teacher, we owe it to ourselves as professionals and to our learning communities to be the best we can be so that all of the participants get the best from us as colleagues, mentors, and students.

Holidays can be hard to write about. The “what you did on your summer vacation” prompt probably tops the pile, but tired sentiments about gratitude and world peace might not be far behind.

With Thanksgiving coming up, the Teaching Poetry blog wants to know how you approach this holiday with your students. Do you assign elegant odes or SPAMku? Do you avoid the topic altogether?

• How do you get around clichés and get your students thinking for themselves?
• What models do you use?
• If you teach creative writing, what assignments work best for generating original turkey-day themed verse?

Send in your thoughts, your favorite assignments–or stories of classroom disasters. We’ll be collecting your insights over the next couple of weeks and posting your responses on November 16th, just in time for the holiday. Then, we’ll ask you to vote for the coolest activity!

E-mail assignments to: aflynn (at) bedfordstmartins (dot) com

Deadline: anytime before Friday, November 13
Vote on all submissions: November 16
Favorites go live: November 17

Stay tuned!

The upcoming 2010 College Composition and Communication Conference theme is “The Remix: Revisit, Rethink, Revise, Renew” (the conference will be held March 17-20, in Louisville, Kentucky). As Gwendolyn Pough explains in the call for papers for the conference, “Whether it’s taking the old and making it fresh and new or taking the current and giving it a different spin, to remix a thing is to try and make it better.”

In this post, I want to suggest ways that we can remix student perspectives on research.  I want to talk about student research strategies, specifically online strategies—and share some ideas for how students can use unconventional research techniques to end up with excellent search results.

Steering Through Wikipedia, Instead of Steering Clear

Generally, if we don’t tell students to avoid Wikipedia as a research source, this is the first place they will go.  They may gather research that is much too general or that is not reliable.  Worse, they might plagiarize directly from Wikipedia, or write an essay that sounds like one long paraphrase of a Wikipedia article.  One way to address this is to lie down right in the lion’s den—to actually start research with Wikipedia.

A Wikipedia entry is itself a remix of all of the general knowledge about an issue.  But each Wikipedia article also includes all of the material that has been used to make this remix.  For instance, at the bottom of most lengthy Wikipedia entries, you can find a list of “Notes and References” and resources for “Further Reading.”  For instance, the entry on “Global Warming,” as of October 2009, had 180 “Notes and References.”  Students can sort through these references and divide them according to their assumed reliability and authority, and you can help them see that some sources are more useful and acceptable than others—and you can show them why.  Many “Notes and References” and resources for “Further Reading” lead students directly to very reliable full-print texts that they can access to jump-start their own research.

CQ Researcher: Reliable Reports

CQ Researcher is like Wikipedia’s reliable cousin.  When writing a researched or argumentative paper, it is important to find a topic and then narrow this topic down so that you can create a manageable and unique focus or question. CQ Researcher is a great place to start this work.

You can access CQ Researcher online, and many libraries also have access to additional CQ Researcher content through subscription.  CQ creates elaborate reports about relevant topics like Wikipedia, except only the most reliable authorities are cited.  Information is also organized (or “remixed”) in a way that encourages students to move from the general to the specific.  Every CQ report has the following sections: Introduction; Overview; “The Issues” Subheadings; Background; Current Situation; Outlook; Pro / Con; Chronology; Short Features; Footnotes / Bibliography; Contacts; About the Author; Document Citation. The “Subheadings” on the issues surrounding the topic often make good focused research questions. The “Short Features” section usually discusses side issues to the topic at hand and can offer more potential research questions. The “Pro / Con” section presents two essays, each arguing one side of an issue.

Students can also use the “Bibliography and Footnotes” section to get started on research; many of the sources are linked to online full-text articles.

H2O Playlists

The Harvard Law School has created this site as a space where people can create and share a form of research remix, the “playlist.”  According to the site, an “H2O Playlist is a series of links to books, articles, and other materials that collectively explore an idea or set the stage for a course, discussion, or current event.”

Much like the list of references, footnotes, or the bibliography in an essay, or on a site like Wikipedia or CQ Researcher, a playlist gathers resources that can help an audience to better understand a topic.  But instead of using references in a secondary way—to support writing—the playlist puts the research first, acknowledging that we can gather links to a wide range of interesting materials, and that this gathering is itself a creative intellectual act.

Students can search through existing playlists on this site to do their own research for a paper.  For instance, a playlist on “Remix Culture” gathers key articles, but also video, music, applications, and other media.  Students might also be asked to generate their own playlists as part of a larger research assignment, or as a research assignment that stands alone.

by Carolyn Lengel

Poems can be fun, and sometimes they can even be funny. For proof, look no further than the haiku collected in the SPAMku archive.

Most of the poems on the site are really senryu, which is parodic, rather than haiku, which includes a seasonal reference—both types, however, require the same five-syllable/seven-syllable/five-syllable form.

Curated by John Nagamichi Cho of MIT, the SPAMku archive grew from a collection that filled a small paperback (SPAMku: Tranquil Reflections on Luncheon Loaf, Harper Perennial, 1998) into a gelatinous, porky giant with more than twenty thousand contributions.

Although the SPAMku archive no longer accepts new verses, the poems contributed by volunteers and enthusiasts are a revelation. Everyone, it seems, loves a poetry challenge—and what could be more challenging than crafting a poetic ode to a prosaic canned meat?

Here are some favorites among the archive’s many, many delights:

Roseate pork slab,
How you quiver on my spork!
Radiant light, gelled.

—L. Sheahen

Zen Buddhist SPAM quest:
“What are the ingredients?”
What do you desire?

—Alex Dunne

Activity:

Give your students the poetry challenge they crave. After a class discussion of the appeal of combining formal Japanese poetry with a not-very-dignified pork product, ask every student to write a SPAMku. (Vegetarian/vegan students can write Tofuku if they prefer.) Who knows—perhaps you’ll end up with a SPAMku archive of your own.

…………………………………………………………………………………………………….

Carolyn Lengel is a senior editor for English at Bedford/St. Martin’s, where she works mainly  on handbooks. She is not a poet (although she did write a YouTube sonnet about Bollywood star Amitabh Bachchan for the National Day on Writing), and she generally does not eat Spam, though she admires Spam both as a word and as an aesthetic object.

I caught a wonderful little feature on the New York Times last week: Michael Pollan’s “Food Rules.”  It’s an interesting collection of reader-submitted rules about food and eating with a mix of culture, history, and humor presented in an intriguing design. It got me thinking about the Pollan piece in Emerging and about how I would put together a food sequence for one of my classes. The following is one sequence I might use:

• Michael Pollan, “The Animals: Practicing Complexity”: I love this piece and students tend to like it, too.  It’s about a highly efficient organic farm that gets its efficiency through an ecological approach to farming, a true understanding of complex systems.  It would be a good starting point to discuss food and it also has elements of education and business, which could be teased out later. I’d use the NYT piece in the paper assignment, asking students to either deduce the food rules of Polyface Farms in Pollan’s essay or work more abstractly on function of rules in food ways.
• Julia Alvarez, Selections from Once Upon a Quinceañera: This selection about the Hispanic coming of age ritual, the quince, is one of my current favorites in Emerging because it does so much.  It’s not about food at all, but about culture, and it would be interesting to use it in an assignment with Pollan.  I’m particularly interested in the concept of retroculturation in the piece and thinking about how that works with food ways.  I would make an assignment about the role of food in culture or the culture of farming.
• Thomas Friedman, “The Dell Theory of Conflict Prevention”: On the surface this essay is about globalization in the flat world, but what I like about Friedman’s piece is that it also provides entry for discussions of economic and business systems.  And, like Pollan, it has a lot to do with complex and emergent systems. Bringing Friedman to this sequence foregrounds questions of economics and class that are buried just beneath the surface of Alvarez and Pollan.

One of the things I love about Emerging is that the readings are contemporary, so something’s always going on that inspires me or connects the class to the world, even if the connection is as simple as the food we eat.

Today, the NCTE asks us to recognize “the remarkable variety of writing we engage in” by celebrating the National Day on Writing. Congress proclaimed that October 20th, 2009 would

• celebrate the foundational place of writing in Americans’ personal, professional, and civic lives.
• point to the importance of writing instruction and practice at every grade level, for every student and in every subject area from preschool through university.
• emphasize the lifelong process of learning to write and composing for different audiences, purposes, and occasions.
• recognize the scope and range of writing done by the American people and others.
• honor the use of the full range of media for composing.
• encourage Americans to write and enjoy and learn from the writing of others. (see more at “About the National Day on Writing“)

To give life to this celebration, the National Gallery of Writing–a national, digital archive of composition–opens its virtual doors today. The NCTE and its partners have already collected and posted submissions in their galleries that writers can use as inspiration. The Bedford/St. Martin’s Writers’ Room features thoughtful (and fun!) responses to the questions: What’s in the room where you write, and what does it say about you?

Visit the Gallery today and in the coming months to add your voice and to see how important writing is nationwide, especially as technology makes tools for digital composition more widely available. Start a gallery with your students to encourage them to explore and discover how they compose every day—inside and outside of the classroom.

By Sage Cohen

One of the trickiest—and most liberating—aspects of poetry is that there is no Gold Standard against which we measure its worth. Without this standard, it can also be difficult to evaluate when a poem is finished. Because each poem is trying to accomplish something different, it is up to us to decide when the poem has arrived. This is not easy to do, even when one has been writing for decades, but it sure is satisfying to practice!

The important thing to remember about revision is that it is a process by which we become better acquainted with the poem and push it farther toward its own potential. In the revision stage, we revisit and may reinvent the choices we’ve already made with language, image, voice, music, line, rhythm, and rhyme.

The tricky balance involves wildly experimenting with what might be possible in a poem—beyond what we first laid down on the page—without losing the integrity of idea or emotion that brought us to the poem in the first place. This is a skill that develops over time, through experience and largely by feel. If it seems like you’re groping around in the dark when revising, welcome to the club!

The process of revising poems is unique for each poet; often, each poem has its own, unprecedented trajectory. I’ve had a few “whole cloth” poems arrive nearly perfectly complete in one contiguous swoosh of pen to paper. And I have other poems that have taken me more than fifteen years to finish. More typically, I work on a poem for a few weeks or months. Sometimes, I think a poem is finished, but years later, it proves me wrong, demanding a new final verse or line structure or title.

For the purposes of establishing a revising practice, I recommend that you divide writing and editing into two completely separate acts that happen at two different sittings, preferably on different days. The goal of this checks-and-balances system is to give yourself the space to let it rip when you’re writing without fearing interference from your inner editor. Don’t worry: If it’s bad now, it will still be bad next week; you can fix it then.

Once you feel you’ve exhausted every last drop of poetic possibility in the writing of the first draft, or any time you get stuck and don’t know where to go next, put your poem aside for a while. The next time you return to it, you’ll be wearing your editor hat.

In my experience, time is the greatest of editors. The longer a poem sits untouched, the more likely you are to have a sense of how to proceed when you sit down to revise.

Activity:

Don’t know where to start with your revisions? Try asking yourself the following questions:

• What is most alive in your poem? Underline the line(s), word(s), phrase(s), stanza(s) that seem to be the kindling feeding the fire of this poem so you can easily reference what’s working throughout the revision process.

• Is there introductory information at the beginning or summary information at the end that could be trimmed?

• Who is speaking? What would the poem be like if told from a different perspective? (For example, if a poem is about an experience shared by a mother and daughter, and told from the daughter’s point of view, try telling it from the mother’s point of view.)

• Where is language weak and flabby? How can you give it more energy and muscle? Can passive verbs become active? Can modifiers be cut? Should “dropped” be changed to “plummeted”?

• Verb tense: What would your poem be like in a different tense than it was written? Even if it happened in the past, try the present, and vice versa. See what gives it the most power and energy.

• Does the shape of the poem (line length, stanza breaks, white space) mirror the emotion and rhythm of its content? Should it?

• Are punctuation and capitalization consistent?

• Is there good music of repeating sounds throughout the poem?

• Does each line break create the desired interest, pause, movement, and focus on key moments or words?

• Does the title serve the poem? How can the title take the poem further?

Remember that only you know the best way to craft your poem. Have fun, be willing to experiment, and you’ll learn a little more about revision each time you try.

…………………………………………………………………………………………………….

Sage Cohen

Sage Cohen is the author of Writing the Life Poetic: An Invitation to Read and Write Poetry (Writers Digest Books, 2009) and the poetry collection Like the Heart, the World. An award-winning poet, she writes three monthly columns about the craft and business of writing, publishes the Writing the Life Poetic Zine and serves as Poetry Editor for VoiceCatcher 4. Sage has won first prize in the Ghost Road Press poetry contest and been nominated for a Pushcart Prize. She curates a monthly reading series at Barnes & Noble and teaches the online class Poetry for the People. To learn more, visit www.sagesaidso.com. Join the conversation about living and writing a poetic life at www.writingthelifepoetic.typepad.com!

A few years ago, as I began working with colleagues to revise the curriculum for writing courses at my own institution, I did a small research project to find out what was being taught at other schools across North America. Specifically, I wanted to know what the major writing assignments looked like in courses similar to my own, and what the sequence of assignments was.  Admittedly, looking only at assignments doesn’t paint the whole picture of a writing course—it only offers a vague outline.  But I learned a lot from the research, and I hope that it is worth sharing.

The programs from which I retrieved this data have vastly different roles within departments, colleges, and curricular sequences.  They also have vastly different goals and pedagogical approaches.  That said, within my sample, similarities vastly overwhelmed differences. What I collected—results from about 60 schools—was not really a representative sample. But instead, it was a stack of snapshots.  I could get the impression of a few writing program scenes.

What I recognized when I began to organize this data was that the sequence of assignments in writing courses is alarmingly uniform.  Most courses begin with a personal writing assignment, and then move on to an analytical assignment, and then a primary research assignment, and then a secondary research (and/or argumentative) writing assignment.  Here are a few example sequences:

The sequence seems to make sense—it assumes that we should begin by writing about ourselves, and then we should analyze primary texts, and then we should move slowly into research and argumentation.  But the fact that nearly all classes move through a similar sequence also should raise some questions: Does this pathway cut off the possibility for overlap and inter-animation between modes of inquiry?  Have our habits become too predictable?  Have we subordinated some forms of writing to others?

I’ll offer some of my results here, organized into the four types of assignments I found in most sequences.  If you have questions about any of these specific assignments, let me know and I’ll be glad to send you more information.  I’d also be glad to send you a lengthier report on the research if you are interested.

[read more]