It's Not Your Grandma's Writing

Who knew Kanye West could represent the messy writing process? He writes a new album— The Life of Pablo— and kind of releases it at Madison Square Garden early this month, picking and choosing which songs to debut, dubious about the song titles, and apparently just as dubious about the lyrics. Two days prior, he had played his album, which had different lyrics, for his friends. And few weeks after the MSG show, West released the album on Tidal, Jay Z’s streaming service, with even more lyrical changes, elongating some songs and truncating others. He’s changed the album cover at least once, and from the time he announced its title last year, he’s changed it three times: So Help Me God, and then Swish, then Waves, now The Life of Pablo. The album has not been released as a physical entity — who knows when or if that will happen? The Life of Pablo exists only in the digital ether, so why not change it on a whim or many whims? 

Whether West’s changes are capricious or calculated is up for argument. But he does seem to be extending a new template for the twenty-first-century writer. In this digital age, revision is constant; drafts are practically infinite. Crowdsourcing is becoming increasingly popular with writers who enjoy immediate and consistent feedback from their audience. Writing is interactive, a new type of call and response, a new negotiation of power. Are our classrooms embracing this? Is my classroom embracing this? No, because I haven’t fully embraced it. 

Marisol's Discovery Draft - Brief Idea

As many of you may be familiar with the rhetorical triangular concepts, I will introduce part of my thoughts, which I intend to use as the “where” scene, which is part of my lit autobiography.  This is a conflating of ideas where the elements: ethos, logos, and pathos are meshed in a brief narrative of the events that somehow become part of who I am now.  The narrative starts back in 2003 at Los Angeles Harbor College, where I was taking my first steps to a four-year institution.   I will describe as fairly as possible one of the most important scenes that have shaped my writing process as an inevitable effect of the situations I experienced as a freshmen student.  My experience may not be as unique as your own experience, however; I believe it is worth of telling it.  Since it might touch and uncover some of the fears that we as ESL students experience during our first year in college.  During my first years at the junior college, Los Angeles Harbor College, I was advised by my academic counselors to take science courses such as anatomy, physiology, and microbiology, as complex as they might sound, I was completely resolute to face them with enthusiasm.  I wasn’t aware, however; of the tremendous impact that being sitting in a classroom full of Native speakers of English would add to my writing experience.  The first semester I sat at the top raw where I was basically not seeing well from such a distance, and obviously; couldn’t hear what the instructor was saying.  I used to end up with truncated sentences, and incomplete words as a result of being sitting at a far distance.  Since I was sitting at the very back raw I was a sort of out of the scene, or not forming part of the classroom, indeed.  I have learned from my English composition readings, and my other linguistic courses that learning is a process that doesn’t take place in isolation, and that through the sharing of knowledge our understanding of the world is developed.  Well, it wasn’t happening to me since I was out of the group.  There was a compelling force pushing me away from the crowd, which made me feel inferior in a sense.  Not being able to speak the language in a fairly manner yet, was a sort of humiliation that I wasn’t able to deal with.  If we cross mountains and oceans to pursue a better life, then; what else could be such powerful that prevents us from learning?  Let’s re-write a plan of action.  To my understanding unveiling of things only happen when we take an active role to do so.  The following semester I was sitting at the front raw armed with mind and heart disposition for learning.  I would write every single word the professor said, and also I asked permission to use an electronic recorder, so at home I would easily go over lectures and look for missed information such as wrong words that I might have wrote and so on.  In subsequent courses I would do the same process all over again, but in a more refine way, since I was becoming more aware of the ESL environment, but most important; of my abilities and desires to succeed, not only of the writing process by itself, but in the whole construction of the holistic skills I needed to be admitted to a four-year university, Cal State Dominguez Hills.  At Dominguez Hills I was admitted into the health science program, and I graduated with the magna cum laude honor in 2010.  This is not the end of the road, it is just the beginning.  I am currently working toward my master degree in TESOL, and by fall 2016; I expect to be working toward my second master in Spanish, but this process and such small achievements haven’t happened exclusively as an effect of hard work, but also; is has been the result of my professors who have believe in my dreams, and my dedication of shaping my life into a different one, a life were freedom belongs to those who allows their souls to be free through the process of writing.                         

          

   

Mellix's "Code Switching"

I used Mellix's "From Outside, In" with a pre-college class last week to get students to think about the various "Englishes" and to help them distinguish between the features of academic English and their own dialects. I have been using this concept, approaching academic English as a different "English," for a while, and I have had positive results. Some groups are more wary of the process than others. This group was very suspicious of the first assignment in the progression: they have to write in one of the dialects/"Englishes" that they presently use or know well. They can write in Pig Latin, Spanglish, AAE, Southern Twang, Text Language, Valley Talk, or even Snoop Doggy Dogg's "izzles." The point is to make writing safe by showing them that I value the Englishes they speak. I discourage the term "broken English" and encourage them to value their ability to code-switch. It's always difficult when I get students who insist that they use academic English, especially in developmental classes, where this is less likely to be true. It has been so ingrained in students' minds that "proper" English is the only one that is valuable. The problem is, of course, that most of them don't even know what "proper" English is, which lends to the irony of the insistent student who refuses to use anything other than Standard AE. There's a self-denial process for them as if they imagine that they speak as eloquently as Condoleeza Rice, but the reality is substantially different. I don't want to hurt their feelings by delivering a reality check, so I just tell these students to write in Text Language. Realistically, however, I would prefer that they value themselves and their acculturation.

SHAPING DISCOURSE: The Five-Paragraph Essay

SHAPING DISCOURSE

SHOULD I WRITE A FIVE-PARAGRAPH ESSAY?

I was facing with the five-paragraph essay, recently; it happened that I was running out of time while debating about whether to write five or more paragraph for the ELM examination.  This is the college English placement, however; I am at a higher academic level.  Anyway, I needed it for the credential program at Dominguez Hills, since I can decide between taking the CBEST or ELM, I chose the ELM test.  I am trying to make a point out here; throughout my college experience I’ve been taught about how effective communication involves the application of the writing-by-formula rules.  In most instances, following this formula implies limiting written discourse to a five paragraphs.  It is perfectly fine for me since I speak English as a second language, I don’t need to force myself to write six paragraphs.  Well, it was not the case this time, because the topic we were assigned was such a complex one, beside that; it involved topics about government, politics, and social issues, so how could someone write just five paragraphs about such complicated matters?  Lindemann on chapter eight discusses several possibilities for organizing writing, through which students can use self-expressive writing and responses to assignments.  This was the type of formula I used to develop my essay about the topic being asked.  I started developing small paragraphs, which were connected one another.  I completely abandoned the prescribed form that Lindeman discusses in chapter eight, I was just following my own thoughts, but also applying the concepts I’ve learned in the teaching composition course.  I’ve found that I do much better without a predetermined plan of actions.  However, I did support my assumptions with reasons.  William Irmscher writes, “is not to prescribe it, but to help students realize how they can perceive and create the patterns of their own thoughts.”  “Students need to learn more about linking the ‘inner parts’ than designing the outer shape.”  This quote makes me feel more comfortable about the fact that, it is easier for me to develop my ideas, without paying attention to the outer part of the discourse.  

Father Time, Please Bless Me

I love the idea of cumulative sentences; I love the different paragraph shapes we read about in chapter three, and I would like to teach some of these strategies in my classes. But do I have the time? I feel like my classes are so far behind where we should be. This year we adopted a new curriculum called Springboard, which is an excellent program. It’s just so much stuff to teach. We’re still in unit one!

I feel like I don’t have time to talk about student writing in depth or to assign sentence combining exercises. If I were teaching a writing course and not an English Language Arts course, I’d have all the time in the world to teach the cool stuff. I could focus on writing.

The more I learn this semester, the more frustrated I feel that I can’t use the tools in my expanding toolbox. 

Venting

            The prewriting/invention strategies discussed in Chapter 7 of Lindemann have been around for some time, I’m guessing – from the 70s at least, with some dating back to Aristotle.  Why was I not given any of these tools in Freshman Comp??  It’s not like I attended college back when dinosaurs roamed the earth; I just received my BA in winter of 2014!  To think of all the time wasted staring at an empty page or a blank document, when I could have had the means to generate ideas and build meaningful content, instead of well worded b.s.  I’m a bit miffed.

More importantly, why aren’t more Freshman Comp professors teaching their students these techniques?  I’ve read several journal articles recently that recommend as much as 85% of one’s writing time be spent in prewriting.  That’s yuuuge, as The Donald would say, and it is information that is not being communicated to undergrads.  In four semesters as a SIL, only one professor has emphasized invention as an important step in the writing process.  As teachers and SILs, we need to become proselytes of prewriting and preach it!

Power To The People...Which People Exactly?

So, I’m writing this without our textbook in front of me because I’m watching the Grammys, which is rarely ever all that good. But every year I watch it in hopes that it will rock. And I have to say that Kendrick Lamar just killed it! Talk about a politically charged performance —  double wow. One big step forward for the Grammys.

Anyway, back on topic. I took a sneak peek at my students next assignment in their textbook and instantly recognized what I had just read in Lindemann. The task instructs the students to rewrite Luis Rodriguez’s Always Running from a different character’s perspective. Before they dive into writing the story, they have to fill out a graphic organizer, brainstorming as many narrators, audiences, forms, and topics that they can.

I forget exactly what chapter, but Lindemann talks about the different components of a written piece: the narrator, audience, form, content, and topic. (I may be conflating these with terms in my student’s textbook.) I had never seen writing broken down like this before, and it made me think about how influential an audience is. It seems like audience dictates everything. Now that I think about it, before I write anything, I unconsciously consider my audience — a lot. Who will read this? How can I write this in a way that will please them/peeve them/inspire them/impress them/tickle them/comfort them? My audience dictates my diction, my syntax, my tone — my voice.

So when it comes to writing, who really has the power? The audience or the writer?

Now back to the Grammy’s where Alice Cooper, garbed in a blood stained, white ruffle shirt is fronting a band with a maniacal looking Johnny Depp. One step forward, two steps back.

WITHOUT WORDS

WITHOUT WORDS

Literally I was without words this weekend when I was trying to write about a personal statement of goals for my grad admission application to Cal State Fullerton and Cal State Long Beach.  I happen to be applying at this time for the MA in Spanish at Fullerton, which will be my second master I hope so, and for the MA in education, option social and cultural analysis at Long Beach State.  Anyway, as most of you may know such process involves a great deal of stress, and issues of language usage as well, which the second being as the most stressful for second language students.  Whether you are applying for a master in Spanish or a master in mathematics, you really need to be familiar with the English language basic composition structures.  Regardless of the type of grad program you intend to apply, there are some common features that most grad programs include.  A predominant feature includes the writing of a personal statement of goals, and some of the questions involve very individualize responses.  Hence; I suddenly had gone out of words when I was trying to answer questions about my views of education when apply to my personal experience.  Also, how the grad program will help me to achieve my future goals in the education field.  Personally, this weekend makes me sick adding to the approximately six-hour test I took on Saturday at Dominguez Hills, well that is another story.

I was trying also to keep up with my teaching of composition course readings, and on Lindemann, chapter eight about shaping discourse; I found something particularly interesting about blocking.  She talks about blocking, and formal outlines.  It happened that I was trying to create an outline that would allow me to write a well-developed statement, but I wasn’t able to follow it.  I found that the outline imposes limitations on what I intend to say, it was very frustrating because I got to a point where I had no words to continue with my statement.  At first, I didn’t want to sound too personal, so I spent hours trying to develop a neat outline which at the end was worthless.  Lindemann argues that formal outlines don’t allow spontaneity.  Since I wanted to sound “me,” my outline was not suitable to fulfill the message I was trying to convey.  I ended up creating what she calls blocking.  I sketched a few geometric shapes, which each of them containing one idea only, so at the end I was able to just develop that idea, and that was the solution to my frustration.  I really dislike outlines!  My mind thinks differently, organized mi thoughts in a more abstract way.  Most of the time I just seat in front of my word processor and start writing what it’s coming directly from my mind. I even don’t write on a separate piece of paper, I just do that to write notes as reminders.  Well, mind works intrinsically as an individualized system of thoughts that there is no key for writing, just be you!       

Stealing the Good Stuff

            I’m inspired by all I’m learning in my Rhet/Comp classes about voice and process, yet I’m frustrated by the difficulty of communicating their importance to my English 109 students.  The perception of writing as a product manufactured (often at the eleventh hour) for a grade is deeply ingrained in many college freshmen.  As a SIL, I can only be minimally effective, so long as students come to have me “look over” a finished product.  I think there needs to be more emphasis on process vs. product in Summer Bridge, so students begin their first year with an attitude more conducive toward writing improvement.

            My students tend to write multiple drafts using Write Lab, which does not address higher order concerns such as focus and development.  Often, the result is a grammatically correct paper that says nothing.  I’ve been encouraging (nagging?) students to see me earlier in the process and trying various ways to convince them of the need.  Last week’s reading may have provided an answer.  Dr. Cauthen always encourages us to look for what we can “steal” from our readings, and I stole from Donald Murray for this week’s SIL Workshop (Lindemann 115).

            Murray’s sequence of freewritings is a miniature model of the process of writing and revision.  I gave students the “Ethos Statement” prompt (stolen from Cauthen), and had them write, receive feedback, and revise three times.  This was preceded by a popcorn reading of Anne Lamott’s “Shitty First Drafts,” which also emphasizes the value of revision.  Results were mixed.  Students whose first drafts were vague created rewrites with more specific details.  Those with little on the page found the feedback useful for adding content.  One young man whose first draft was wildly off-prompt got back on track (sort of).  Overall, I believe the class understood that there was improvement with each draft, however incremental.  I hope they’ll come see me in my frozen 5^th floor lair well before the next due date.

"Multiculturalism" as an Oppressive Construct

Whenever I am presented with narratives, I always look for a relationship to my own. I never find a true connection, but I find some similarities, some window through which I may look as a fascinated outsider. Eventually, the amusing becomes mundane. Is there anything else? Is this all the academy has, or is this merely all it is willing to offer? I posit that the academy perpetuates stereotypes by limiting the "minority" experience to what it wants our experiences to be. The "other" is not three-dimensional as the majority is. The "other" is exclusively viewed as a one-dimensional monolith. What about the rest of us? What about black people who don't speak "black English" or minorities who don't code-switch as a means of survival, like Rodriguez? What about women who don't feel disenfranchised by men, women who (gasp) actually like men and who celebrate masculinity? In some ways, I'm more concerned about teachers who encounter the classroom with a skewered perspective of the narrative du jour than I am the ones who are openly naive. "You're not like the rest of 'them'" is not a compliment to me.

Years ago, my father, an educated black man who comfortably speaks the 70s street jive of his South Bronx hometown as well as standard English, presented the best case yet against modifying the curriculum to teach AAE. He reminded me that every black American (and I'd add every American) had watched enough television to know what standard English sounded like, to acquire its patterns and voice. In fact, when prompted, most black people can speak in what is dubbed a "white voice." Black English is a choice, a matter of defiance then, so it should come as no amazing shock that, after watching countless hours of "Friends" and "Seinfeld" among other shows in rotation, standard English is quite standard for most black Americans as well. When someone presumes that I'm a code-switcher simply because of what he/she perceives as my identity, the burn of that spanking I received for saying the word "ain't" when I was eight-years-old increases. A speech and language pathologist, my mother beat the "ain't" out of me. There was no way that I would defy her teachings and standards by speaking like "one of them" in her household. And I'm even more weary of people thinking that I do speak like "one of them." It comes along with a host of other presumptions. Are you poor? Did you just escape the ghetto? Meanwhile, my mother's family has been middle class for generations. On my father's side, all but one of my grandmother's six children earned college degrees and work as professionals.

I have this deep-seated desire to take all of these labels and hand them back to the powers that be. They can start by taking back their books, filled with so-called multicultural readings that refuse to present any view other than the accepted narrative.

Don't Bother Me. I'm Processing.

One of the most difficult things for me to do as a writer is write. The process of producing an essay or article or any narrative is quite stressful. After reading several pieces for this class and Discourse Analysis, I realize that I’ve never really thought of writing as a process made up of several stages. For the most part, I’ve viewed writing as sitting down, writing a piece, and turning it in. No pre-writing, no drafting, no revising. I regularly edit while I’m writing, and it drives me crazy. When Weathers listed all those stages he goes through to produce a piece, I gawked at his neuroticism. And my jaw nearly hit the floor when he said, “In draft writing, I try not to think; rather I let my mind, unimpeded by too much conscious decision-making, do the work” (26). So his draft is a free write? That would mean that he would need to write several more drafts to untangle the first. !!

I tried free writing as my first draft for this blog post. I set my timer for ten minutes and let my fingers loose across the keyboard. Then I quickly began my old habit of editing: delete, retype, delete, retype. The timer was counting down, and my blood pressure was counting up. I rotated my head so that I couldn’t see the computer screen. My face reflected a painful wince as I kept telling myself to keep going; don’t look at the screen. Finally, when my alarm erupted in the sound of fire truck siren, I looked at the screen to assess the casualties. Bloody, squiggly lines were everywhere. Upon closer investigation, I realized why. Here is a sample of what I wrote:

s mpt am ossie/ Bit tje doscl[;ome tp wrote everudau os oam ossie/ jpw O cam toe om ,u ptjer ;ass wotj tjos/ O tjml tje [rpb;e, jas beem tjat O mever rea;;u voewed wrotomg as a [reacess/ O pm;u voew3d as a pme to,e sjpt lomd pf tjomg/ :ole wjem O wpm tje cpmtest om kirmopr jogj scjpp; O wpm wotj pme draft/ Tjat was ot/ amd fdrp, tjem pm tje [resssdire was tp wrote eaward woommomg ,ateroa; pm tje fsors5 sjpt @pw/  rea;oze tjat imto; mpw/ Bit Orf e,brace wroromt ats a [rcess tp p ;oberate ,ua cpmscopis amd tp a,ele lee[ gpomg/ Tp ,ale ,e fee; ,pre fpfmfodemt. tjem wdrotmomg cam amd wo;; be a ga,e cjamgomger  fpr  ,e fpr ,e/ P,ogpsj/ O lmpw o

My fingers weren’t even on the keyboard properly. Ugh.

One idea of Weathers that I totally dig is jotting down ideas and thoughts on index cards before you begin to formally write your paper. I like to think of this as composing on the go. If from the minute am I assigned a paper, I begin to note ideas and then organize them before I sit down to write, this might reduce my stress. Weather’s view is echoed in the Wyche piece when she says that the problem with waiting until the last minute to write is that ideas don’t usually magically appear at the last the minute. “Instead, they come when listening to others, while reading or dreaming, or in the middle of other activities” (44). I guess I just found myself a new ritual.

WRITING AS AN ACT OF FREEDOM

Course:  The Teaching of Composition

Here is my first blog participation, so excited, since I am not a writer at all; I will just follow the flow of my ideas without a particular order of lexical and syntactical elements.

I will talk about how writing helps on the developing of ideas, also; how as we write we can make connection between logical and allogical ones.  Writing helps escaping from a planet of an absolute anarchistic system of silent, where the rules of staying in a mute sort of state are the only ones dictated.  An indomitably desire of escaping from that little planet, the planet of imagination, where dreaming was possible; but impossible to realize; imprisoned my spirit.  

When I was growing up back in El Salvador, I used to hear very frequently that “letters,” were for “the rich.”  Dreaming about reading and writing was beyond our possibilities. Hard philosophy to understand for a little girl, who used to spend hours of her daily life routine dreaming about writing stories, about fantastic adventures like the ones of the “Little Prince,” although those ones told in this book are not the kind for children, but are probably more appropriate for adults, anyway I would dream about climbing up to the tops of the Baobabs trees.  After all, I was allowed to dream, a poor little girl looking herself escalating the giant trees!  Ironically, I spent a great deal of time lying down up on the tree tops, where I freely let my imagination goes beyond endlessly and abstract ideas full of colors and untouchable images that vanished in vibrant motions, like shooting starts.  Sometimes, as a ghost showing up from nowhere, I would found ripped off and blurred pieces of paper with letters on it, as if the wind has dragged them from a far distant place, as if my dreams about writing had been heard by a fairy, or by a High Divinity.  To my amusement and curiosity, I was holding a piece of paper coming from an “unknown world,” from which I was far away and which only exists in my unacceptable dreams, because letters were just for those who inhabitated the forbidden paradise.  I couldn’t understand by then that my “hallucination,”  about transforming those colorful dreams into something touchable, something without the abstractedness and the impossibility that my reality placed upon, would in a distant future; become just as real as I am now typing up all sorts of silliness that probably no body would be interested in reading, but; as boring as it may be, those blurred, dirt, and ripped off pieces of paper, which in my mind were sent by fairies; triggered my natural way of learning, in a sense; there were no physical tools resembling books and  pencils.  Well, it happened that instead of real pencils and paper, I used bricks, pieces of woods, and twigs.  So boring, but think about it, ancient civilizations were writing before paper and the printing press was invented.  I hardly can believe now that in an innocent way I kept a few pieces of a book that I said I would be able to read it in the future, ironically that book was not even close to that of the “Little Prince,” it was the book of Mormon, yes, hard to believe.  It was only when I immigrated to the States that I found out what was the book about it.  Regardless of the type of text I read it, since that was one of my findings, the ones that the wind brought to me, anyway I am Christian.  Back then I was building up the fundamentals of my identity, since identity is shaped by the social environment.  From our teaching of composition course we have been learning about writing, and how we are able to build upon, or at least modify our identity when we get to be exposed to the system of writing.  I grew up as a rural girl with a natural mind, and a distinct imagination.  Then, another battle started between my natural identity, the one I believe has prevailed over all the possible ones, present or future identities that may appear, and that of civilization.  The forbidden paradise that people used to mention when I was a little girl was just right on my face, as a gigantic spider web hugging me so tightly, hence; leaving me zero possibilities for escaping.  Shen argues that humans face the need to reconcile their own identity to that of the dominant culture, our system values, which are part of our ideological identity; which in most instances; are trapped in that “gigantic spider web.”  Contrary, the logical identity is seen as the natural way one expresses thoughts in writing.  Then, should we be subjugated by the developing of a new identity?  Why?  I blame myself for not knowing how to write, indeed; I probably will never be a true writer for one simple reason, I haven’t developed yet an English identity, as the one suggested by Shen.  One’s identity can only be reshaped or modified, I have adapted to the English identity, which does not necessarily mean that I have built a third identity.  

Writing lets my imagination traveling beyond imaginary horizons and touch the untouchable abstract ideas, is the act that does not discriminate among social classes, that allows not only to my mind to escalate high pedestals, but also to keep me dreaming about becoming a better logical and illogical writer, and a more critical reader. Writing unlocks our ideas and nourishes one’s spirit!

Individual and Collective Culture

To begin, let me say that writing the first sentence of this blog post was extremely difficult.  There!  I feel better now that I’ve gotten that off my chest.

Our readings on the impact of one’s culture on composition have been challenging for me.  As a relatively privileged white old-school feminist, you would think I’d find Elizabeth Flynn’s article the most relatable, but you’d be wrong.  I find some of her views narrow and antiquated, particularly in her assigning stereotypically feminine attributes to female writers.  Women tell stories of “interaction” and “connection” while men write of “achievement.” (Flynn 428)  She does not credit male writers with the ability to connect with other men due to their need to “differentiate” themselves.  Her 1988 article holds no hint of the current understanding of gender as a social construct, that quaint notions of static masculine and feminine traits are obsolete.  However, Flynn is on point when she discusses how women are marginalized in the classroom (425).  If you doubt this, observe what happens during open discussions.  How often are women cut off in mid-sentence?  How often are they intimidated into silence by an aggressive stance?  Might this not be doubly true for women who are English-language learners?

I am intrigued by the disagreement between Fan Shen and Richard Rodriguez on the ability to maintain their cultural identities in academia.  Shen states that she will “never lose” her Chinese identity, and writing in English is like “slipping into a new ‘skin’” (465).  Her position may have much to do with recognizing that each language carries with it an essential worldview through which language is filtered:  “In China, ‘I’ is always subordinated to ‘We’” (460).  I wonder if the same ideological shift occurs between English and Spanish.  Rodriguez feels sadness at his loss of cultural identity, even as he considers alienation the price of his advanced degree.  His loss of spoken Spanish results in a loss of intimacy with his family.  I would like to understand why the two experiences are so different.  If English values are individualism, idealism, and logic (according to Shen), what are Spanish values?  Does becoming an anthropologist of your own culture necessarily mean you remain an outsider?

Given that the majority of my students are non-white, I’m concerned about their success in the larger culture.  I don’t mean financial success; perhaps, it would be more accurate to say that I want them to be equipped to navigate the larger culture.  June Jordan’s piece challenged me for just that reason.  I don’t question that Black English (BE) is a distinct language with unique syntax (We offer a course here at CSUDH!); I question Jordan’s contention that mastering Standard English (SE) is unnecessary.  There is no question that the student’s messages to the police are emotionally powerful, and the translated scene from Ibsen’s 1879 play makes it more accessible to Jordan’s class.  Writing in BE could be an appropriate mode for essays in Dr. Chin’s African American Prose class (which you absolutely should take).  My concern is that fluency in BE will not prepare African American students to communicate with others outside their culture.  Many regional American dialects and idioms are impenetrable to outsiders, not just BE.  How will my Hispanic, Black, and Asian students communicate their ideas clearly without a common language?  Will they, like Rodriguez, loose their identities if they write in entirely in SE?  Consider the impact of Willie Jordan’s writing compared to that of the other students.  He assumes an audience outside his community, and his statements about the injustice of his brother’s death demand attention.  Like it or not, the dominant culture in this country is English-speaking, and access to power is granted in SE, at least for now.

Paper #1: Untitled

Imagine my total surprise when, while casually perusing the sample autobiographical narratives assigned to us in Dr. Cauthen’s English 575 The Teaching of Composition course, I read an anonymous student essay that was actually about me! My initial surprise turned to shock and then horror when the essay seemed to portray the student as emotionally scarred because the teacher returned a paper that was replete with so many corrections scrawled on it that the student “thought it fell in a pool of red paint.” Had I unknowingly inflicted irreparable damage? I envisioned a bird with a broken wing flapping about, unable to fly. To have deeply wounded a student’s soul goes against everything I stand for; after all, like doctors who invoke the Hippocratic Oath, the first rule for teachers is “Do no harm.” A dark cloud of guilt hovered over me; I was shrouded in shame.

In class a few days after my initial reading of the essay, I slumped lower and lower in my seat, squirming with embarrassment as the professor facilitated a discussion of Paper #1: Untitled. Thankfully, no one in the class poured salt in my wound by fixating on the teacher referenced in the essay and castigating him for what he’d done. I breathed a sigh of relief and once again sat upright when our attention shifted to other papers in the packet. As the discussion ensued, however, I resumed my detective work, revisiting several clues to the identity of the student who wrote Paper #1, clues dropped by the professor and clues in the essay itself. I had been torturing myself since I read the essay, wracking my brain in an effort to identify the student so that I could locate this person to make amends, and when I heard Dr. Cauthen’s last subtle clue, I was struck with an epiphany: I had found the proverbial needle in the haystack. Out of the thousands of students I have taught over the years, I suddenly knew who wrote the essay: Jason Bernard!

For several years, in between positions as a head high school varsity football coach (and English teacher), I worked for the USC Neighborhood Academic Initiative, a pre-college enrichment academy housed on the USC campus (but technically I was assigned to the faculty of Manual Arts High School, according to the Los Angeles Unified School District). Jason Bernard was a junior when I first arrived, and he was enrolled in my 11^th grade honors American Literature class. Now that I know exactly who wrote Paper #1: Untitled, I can better understand the writer’s intent , to which he alludes in this line from the opening paragraph: “I’ll be describing points in my life when from discovering that my writings weren’t great to my transition on improving my writing skills.” Unfortunately, Jason’s paper, as we received it in English 575, is truncated. The excerpt ends with the hurtful shock of his discovery that his writing was severely deficient, but that is not where his story ends.

Jason was, at the time, typical of the students that I regularly encounter as an inner-city high school English teacher. Immediately I found him likable, charismatic and engaging. And immediately I noticed a huge disparity between his stated goal (“I wanna go to SC!”), his academic proficiency – and his work ethic. His deficit was attributable to numerous factors. The following is not a comprehensive list, but it is representative of what high school teachers must contend with as we work to improve student literacy: He was playful and immature; he had not previously developed an ability to discipline and regulate himself, to focus and commit to sustained rigor. He was surrounded by other silly teenagers that distracted him and derailed any effort he made to concentrate. He had a simple, youthful world view and existed only in the narrow universe of South-Central L.A., and only in the here-and-now; he had few models of accomplished academic and professional adults in his life, and fun came first and foremost. Hard work and the concept of delayed gratification while preparing for the future were, to him, out of the question. He was the typically disaffected young man who wears a hoodie to hide the headphones blaring rap music in his ears as he sits in the back of the classroom pretending to participate, and who is secretly texting on the cell phone he hides under his desk. The attention span of this type of student, even when well-intentioned, easily shifts from class activities to outrageous YouTube videos, hip-hop reality TV shows, sports, and of course, girls (“shorties”). Their focus swings sharply from school to problems at home, rumors of imminent gang retaliations and assorted tales chronicling lurid acts of violence witnessed in the streets… There are times when, positioned alongside these distracting subjects, academics just can’t compete.

The list of factors working against students like Jason is not complete unless we also consider Jason’s experiences with various teachers in elementary school and middle school. Note that Paper #1: Untitled makes mention of several teachers who sent mixed messages, alternately telling him that “my writing were very good” and failing him. While in middle school, Jason points out: “I felt that my writing skills weren’t being challenged, since I never had a stable English teacher.” With this in mind, here is another list that describes typical inner-city students’ experiences with teachers (Once again, it is not an all-inclusive list, but it is representative): They are more likely to have a teacher who has been given an unsatisfactory evaluation and transferred to a hard-to-staff school (in the L.A. school district this is known as the “Dance of the Lemons”). They are more likely to have a teacher with a record of chronic absenteeism, and they are more likely to have a long-term substitute teach the class. In such instances, the long-term substitute is not likely to be a person credentialed in English. Students in inner-city schools are more likely to have a teacher who lives in a different community and views these students condescendingly. Some arrive carrying their biases, baggage filled with low expectations of students. Some are mercenaries; their entire day is spent with an eye on the clock and their feet pointed toward the door. Some view teaching as a temporary day job, something to keep them financially afloat while they study for the bar exam or write screenplays at night. Some are bleeding-hearts who make excuses, demand little, and view these students as victims. Some are more interested in being the students’ friend than in serving them best as a teacher. Some are not invested enough to dutifully correct student work, which must be done at home after school hours. Some are just basically lazy, coasting merrily along because they have not been held accountable by school administrators. Some have become jaded with cynicism after years of trying to stem the tide of underachievement and have simply given up, retiring on the job…

The result of the listed factors in the two previous paragraphs above is the typical student I see in 11^th grade English, and it is representative of what I encountered with Jason Bernard. He wasn’t used to the practices of proofreading and revising. He wasn’t accustomed to trying his best, and few teachers demanded it from him along the way. He was used to haphazardly scribbling an assignment and just getting by. In the past, getting by was good enough. But not for me!

In Paper #1: Untitled, he writes: “He made us write an essay on a prompt he wrote on the blackboard…” This suggests that the assignment probably was a practice SAT essay, or perhaps it was a writing task replicating the AP Open Question on Literature essay based on a novel or play we were studying. In either case, I can assure readers that, while I marked Jason’s paper extensively, his description of it as looking like “it fell in a pool of red paint” is hyperbole.  I can also be certain that I reviewed the essay requirements beforehand and conducted a whole-group discussion about possible approaches, organization, and content necessary to satisfy the demands of the prompt. Jason doesn’t indicate – and I can’t remember -whether this was a timed-writing on-demand response, or a take-home assignment (we did both on a regular basis).

After I returned papers, I most certainly would have bestowed general praise on the class as a whole for aspects of the essay written well, and I would have briefly consulted with Jason individually both to praise him and to redirect his focus when revising. In an SAT essay, for example, I would have had Jason focus on one element of the essay at a time, making corrections on his paper. First, I would have had him revisit how well he identified the nuances of the topic and issue, and how clearly he took a definitive stance on that issue. Usually this involves the introductory paragraph and the thesis statement. In our next consultation, we would have reviewed the organization and development in his essay. We would have discussed his use of appropriate evidence and the analysis he presented in connection with that evidence. In our last consultation, we would have reviewed the most glaring errors in usage and mechanics. After that, Jason would have been assigned to revise his work, incorporating corrections in all three general areas when rewriting. (By the way, the SAT essay has been completely revised as of March, 2016. It is now much different than what it used to be, and requires different teaching strategies in preparing students.)

While Jason may have been initially hurt when he received his paper, I can assure readers that I was sensitive to his feelings and did not disparage or belittle him. More importantly, however, I must also emphasize that Jason’s feelings were not of top priority to me, nor should they be. I accurately showed him where he was, and carefully guided him to where he needed to be in terms of writing proficiency. If Jason had been more serious about school and more personally accountable during his formative years, and if his teachers had been more academically helpful to him in elementary and middle school, he might have avoided the shock he received in his junior year of high school. I told him that I would not be his last English teacher; I would help him the best I could during our time together, and he should consider himself a work-in-progress as he continued on in college. I emphasized that I believed in him and knew he could improve with sustained effort over time.

One gratifying thing about my job is that I hear from former students regularly and can see the progress they are making in their literacy and in life. As examples, recently I received phone calls or emails from an ex-student who now is an FBI agent, another who is a doctor at Kaiser, one who has a Ph.D and teaches English at Northwestern University, one who is an assistant to rapper Kendrick Lamar, and another who two weeks ago was named head coach of the Cleveland Browns. All of them tell me how they’re doing, and discuss what they’re currently reading. And, a few months ago, while making photocopies (at the Kinko’s near USC) for a presentation in my Victorian Literature seminar, I felt a light tap on my shoulder. I turned around in the crowded shop and spotted a guy standing behind me smiling. Something about him was vaguely familiar, and yet I couldn’t exactly be sure who it was. He toyed with me, begging me to guess. It was Jason Bernard, who now had dreadlocks and a goatee – radical changes since I knew him in high school. He told me he graduated from CSUDH and had worked as a history teacher at Hamilton High School, but now was involved in a business venture with a friend. Overall, he was happy. He thanked me for guiding him, not only in his writing, but toward maturity.

This is quite a different story from what Paper #1 may lead readers to presume, isn't it? The essay stops abruptly, but that is not where Jason's story ends...

And so it is. The bird I envisioned earlier does not have a broken wing after all. True, it may not have reached ultimate heights, but it is testing itself, adjusting its flight pattern, alighting here and there while deciding where it will venture next. In my mind, it is just a matter of time before it takes flight again and truly begins to soar.

               

                David Williams

                (I apologize for the length of this blog, and I won’t be so long-winded in the future. Perhaps you can understand my particular need to elaborate in this instance. Once I started to write, I simply couldn’t stop. Thanks for reading, and I welcome your comments.)