A soundtrack for comma splices

Yes, my freshman composition students arrived in class to find a Pink Floyd video on the screen and music blaring on the classroom speakers. So sue me already.  It had to be done.

Every semester when I distribute the infamous comma splice handout with the words "Another Brick in the Wall" emblazoned across the top--the handout that compares sentences to bricks, fragments to crumbling bricks, and comma splices to toothpaste squeezed in where the mortar ought to be--I hear a soundtrack furnished by Pink Floyd in the back of my mind, but many students don't hear it because they don't know the song and don't get the allusion.

So I showed the video with its brutal schoolmaster beating all the creativity out of his charges and inspiring them to burn down the school, and then I told my own little charges that I'm happy to flog them into understanding of comma splices because, clearly, oppression produces poetry and spurs students to creative action. And then I distributed the infamous handout: Another Brick in the Wall.

In my defense, I did suggest that burning down the building might be a bad idea, no matter how much they hate semicolons.

Cinnamon is a synonym

As the colorful autumn leaves fall and crackle underfoot, we approach the boring time of year when nature is clothed in shades of brown.

But who says brown is boring? Yesterday I hiked in a dry wetland that outstripped my wordhorde of brown color words: auburn, beige, burnt siena, chocolate, henna, mahogany--I don't know about you, but I need a bigger box of crayons!

 

Insecure audience analysis

I thought I was doing my freshman writing students a favor by making them write their persuasive essays as letters to an actual living breathing human being, someone whose official positions are public and easily accessible--namely, the President of the United States. I hoped to head off the tendency to aim essays toward some vague, nebulous "you" eager to absorb a litany of vague generalizations.

So you can imagine my response when a student started his letter to the President with the dictionary definition of the word bioterrorism. I picture the President of the United States, the most powerful person in the free world, pacing the Situation Room in the middle of an international crisis and racking his brains: "Bioterrorism! Bioterrorism! What can it mean!?! I wish I had a freshman composition student here to explain!"

Forgive me for stating the obvious, but if President Obama needs a freshman to tell him what bioterrorism is, we're all in big trouble.

Audience analysis, people! You're not writing in or to a vacuum! The President is a busy guy, so don't waste his time! You definitely don't want to assault him with masses of cliches and vague warnings--those Secret Service dudes might get alarmed!

I was a bit alarmed myself until a colleague pointed out the silver lining in my bioterrorism-shaped cloud: as long as students need to learn audience analysis, we'll still have a job. 

Do I hear the dictionary definition of job security?
 



 

The annotation contraption (not another Bourne movie!)

Reading and responding to a pile of research proposals and annotated bibliographies is like trying to decode a Rube Goldberg contraption: locate all the moving parts (topic, working thesis, the current state of research, sources, annotations, citations) and evaluate their effectiveness: Viable topic? Original thesis? Sufficient awareness of current research? Credible sources? Effective annotations? Correctly formatted citations? The wheels spin--and so does my head.

But soon I stumble upon the proposal that can, with a little tweaking, serve as the introduction to the final essay, with a working thesis that makes me think about a familiar literary work in a new way and annotations that reveal the cogs and wheels of the argument ready to be assembled into a smoothly-running machine. For students who know how to wield the proposal-and-bibliography tools, the final paper will practically write itself.

This is why I keep assigning research proposals and annotated bibliographies even though they spark more student complaints than any other type of assignment. In upper-level literature classes, I require a formal proposal and annotated bibliography at least two weeks before the paper draft is due; if nothing else, this assures that students will locate relevant sources before the last minute, and it gives them time to consult further sources I might suggest. In the worst cases, I can guide students away from certain lines of research and toward others, which prevents the student from devoting unnecessary time to a non-starter.

In the best cases (and I saw many of them yesterday!), the proposal and annotated bibliography allow the students to articulate a thesis and begin assembling the parts of the argument, which brings them that much closer to that exciting moment when they flip the switch to see how the machine runs. Hear that engine purr! 

And if it clinks or groans or breaks down entirely, we still have time to make it work.

  

Cry "havocking!"

Yesterday a student wrote about a problem currently havocking the environment, which drove me to consult the OED, which lists a handful of instances of havoc as a transitive verb, the most recent dating from 1884. More concise than wreaking havoc but lacking that wreaky-wrecky vibe, havocking is more likely to show up in my vocabulary than another unusual verbification I encountered in a student paper this morning: biograph as a transitive verb, which, the OED tells me, has a pedigree stretching back to 1776 and including this 2004 reference in Commonweal: "William Faulkner is now an institution, first biographed thirty years ago by Joseph Blotner in two massive volumes."

If Blotner biographed Faulkner, then I suppose I can allow my student to use biograph as a transitive verb, as long as he's aware that sometimes verbification uglifies nouns, havocking the aesthetic environment.  

Long road to election

I arrived at my  polling place in the middle of nowhere at 6:30 this morning and found 15 people in line--with temperatures in the mid-20s. What will the lines look like when my husband shows up to vote around 5 p.m.? At least the temperature ought to warm up by then.

Dropped my car off for some front-end work at 7 and my mechanic had kindly already warmed up a loaner car for me--not the bulky green van he usually provides but a beige Buick with 240,000 miles on it. (Anyone who can keep a Buick going that long gets my vote!) I'm happy to have a car to drive but here's the thing: I'm not a beige Buick kind of person. I sit in that big beige American car and suddenly I feel as if I'm sneaking out for a spin in my father's car, and I keep waiting for him to come barreling out yelling.

Last Saturday I saw a car lose a tire in the middle of the busiest intersection in town. This van suddenly went screeching past on three tires while the axle scored the pavement, but all eyes were on the loose tire suddenly bouncing and rolling through the middle of the intersection. It rolled this way, veered that way, tilted and bounced until a brave soul finally stepped in the middle of traffic and led the tire over toward the curb.

That's how this election season feels: a whole bunch of loud, noisy, hazardous machines veering through ordinary people's everyday lives, with the American voter stepping out into the melee to curb the chaos. But who will repair the deep grooves in the body politic? 

 

Giants in the sandbox

A colleague from the big city recalls the first time she drove down I-77 to Marietta and saw, out in the middle of nowhere, a big brown tourist information sign conveying the enigmatic message "Big Muskie Bucket." 

That was the point when she knew she had arrived in Appalachia. What sort of savage, uncivilized people would enshrine as a tourist attraction a Big Muskie Bucket?

If she had taken that turn, she would have found out. 

During the height of the strip-mining era in southeastern Ohio, Big Muskie was the world's largest dragline digging machine (read about it here). What do you do with a machine that size when it's no longer needed? Sell it for scrap metal--except for its bucket,  which now perches on a pile of rocks on a hilltop in Noble County, Ohio.

The bucket looks like like a broken toy dropped by a giant baby, but moving the bulky bucket to its hilltop perch required a great deal of organizational and engineering knowhow. It serves as the centerpiece of Miners' Memorial Park, dedicated to the memory of the workers who died in service to coal, and it overlooks miles and miles of reclaimed strip-mined land now devoted to camping and recreation.


Savage and uncivilized? Tool-making, cooperation in service of community goals, and the desire to memorialize the dead are prime markers of civilization, but even more telling is the reclamation of the ruined land. It's as if the voice of authority told the giant baby, "You made your mess--now go clean it up," and the baby dropped the bucket and got to work, leaving behind a 230-ton steel toy as an artifact of a lost civilization.

Friday Poetry Challenge: Dog Bites Doohickey

In my previous incarnation as a journalist, I was known for creating inventive and effective headlines, and I like to display a lovely blown-glass trophy declaring that I produced the Best Newspaper Headline submitted to the Press Club of Toledo's newspaper contest in 1996. However, in a long career of headline-writing that started in the eighth grade, I never found a good reason to write anything quite like this:

What, pray tell, is a "muffin-crystal-thingie assault"? It's exactly what it sounds like, as you will see if you click here. Vandals "assaulted" a Native American effigy mound by burying thingies--"small muffinlike resin objects"--in order to "realign the energy" of the mound. Orgonites is what they're called, but put "orgonites" in a headline and your readership will expect something about aliens, origami, or orgies.

The originators of the orgonites have irked the curators of the effigy mound, who will now have to devote all kinds of time and energy to finding and digging up perhaps as many as 100 muffin-crystal-thingies. When you're trying to cope with an outbreak of orgonites, who ya gonna call? 

Muffin-Crystal-Thingie Busters! 

Raiders of the Lost Muffin-Crystal-Thingies!

Moby Muffin-Crystal-Thingie!

What if every headline writer followed the example of the Columbus Dispatch? Here's what today's news would look like in Thingie-ese:

Doohickeys Still Down following Sandy's Something-or-Other

What's-His-Face Appeals to Voters to--Like, Whatever

Weird-Hair Guy Walloped by Falling Whatchamacallit

Bars-and-Numbers Thingie Offers Hope for Seekers of Earning-A-Living Opportunities

This is fun! You should try some: submit your best thingies, doo-dads, widgets, and whatchamacallits to the clicky-commenty-thingie below.

Survival under surveillance

"Do you mind if I record our meeting?"

My student pulled out her smartphone and awaited my reply. This student is sincerely struggling with a difficult assignment and wanted some specific guidance on how to proceed, and she thought it would be helpful to review my comments later on in case she ran into trouble. She asked nicely and clearly wasn't interested in making a secret "Gotcha" video, so I said yes.  

Knowing I was being recorded for posterity made me weigh my words a little more carefully than usual, but let's face it: when the topic is literary research methods, I'm not likely to say anything worthy of submission in the latest "Catch a Professor Acting Liberal" contest. When teaching a student how to refine search terms in the MLA International Bibliography becomes a controversial act, I'm outta here.

But what about students who don't ask permission? Last year a student surreptitiously recorded a colleague in an unguarded moment, which led to sleepless nights and serious repercussions. Even harmless comments can create controversies when taken out of context--I would hate to think, for instance, what would happen if my promises about the Comma Fairy got loose online and out of context. I would look mighty silly!

But then again, I'm accustomed to looking silly. By writing about embarrassing moments here, I defuse their power and limit their potential to cause harm.

I hope.

I've got sunshine (on a cloudy day)

Stuck in my dungeon office all day yesterday dealing with drafts and advisees and annoying computer glitches, I finally decided that I needed a mental health break, so I trudged upstairs desperately seeking a place that wasn't cold, dark, damp, and gloomy.

I haven't found it yet. 

A week ago we were surrounded by sunshine and warmth and trees bursting with fall color, but then on Saturday the rain started falling.

It hasn't stopped yet.

But we haven't lost power or had trees fall on our house and I bought new tires so my car is no longer trying to plunge into the river every morning, which ought to inspire me to quit bellyaching and make my own sunshine: take one yellow leaf, a pinch of departmental laughter, a heaping cup of good news from a colleague who officially Exceeds Expectations, a mess of drafts demonstrating significant improvement in analytical skills, one game of Scrabble I didn't even win, and one opportunity to wave the word "vicissitudes" like a banner in a freshman class; knead thoroughly to work out the frustrations and then bake until golden. 

Did I say that out loud?

Here is a sentence I was surprised to hear actually coming out of my mouth this morning: "The answers you need, gentlemen, are up here on the board, not in your lap."

That got their attention. So did a well-placed expletive, so much more effective when wielded by one who rarely utters anything more potent than "Rats!" So did the Voice of Doom with which I explained what will happen if they copy and paste information from the Internet into their analysis essays. 

Yes: it was Destiny Day, the moment when I try to convince my freshman students that their grades, their prospects, perhaps their very lives depend upon how competently they perform on the next assignment. Time to get serious! Shape up or ship out! (Perhaps literally, if the river keeps rising.)

Of course I offer carrots to temper the sticks. "Master these skills now," I tell them, "and you will earn rewards for the rest of your life," but then they want to know what kinds of rewards and suddenly I'm spinning tales about the Comma Fairy and one of my students, looking rather dubious, says, "You mean every time I use a comma right the Comma Fairy will leave a dollar under my pillow?"

The little literalists. No wonder they never believe a word I say. 


  

The syllabus switch

You know the nightmare: walk into class prepared to discuss a particular text--but it's the wrong one.

I thought I'd left that nightmare behind in grad school but today I lived it. Yes! I arrived in African-American Literature all set to discuss poems by Ntozake Shange and Nikki Giovanni, but the students were prepared to discuss August Wilson's play Joe Turner's Come and Gone. Because that's what the syllabus says. Right: they read the syllabus correctly but I goofed.

And here's the worst part: I've never taught Joe Turner's Come and Gone. Never even read it. But I will--by Wednesday. Today my students came through in a pinch and did some group work on poems by Shange and Giovanni after I did a little spontaneous syllabus-shuffling song and dance. Free entertainment! What else is that Ph.D. good for?

Our storm mascot

On the eve of FrankenStorm, our garden presents: FrankenTater! 


(I think we'll call him Sandy.)

Friday poetry challenge: metapoetry

A colleague away at a conference e-mailed to ask me to send him a poem ASAP--a short, serious poem about the importance of writing. What am I, Insta-Poet? I sent him links to "Theme for English B" by Langston Hughes and "Writing" by Howard Nemerov, but this nagging sensation at the back of my mind insists that I'm missing some essential, seminal poem that perfectly nails the reasons we do what we do.

But my drivel-drenched brain can't disgorge the title of that poem, so maybe it's time to write my own:

Letters crawl across the page
whispering secrets, screaming rage,
marshaling arguments, construct-
ing edifices, passing bucks, 
singing joyfully of romance,
boldly calling folks to foment
revolution, seeking peace,
carefully describing geese,
playing games that no one wins,
changing rules, confessing sins,
rattling, rumbling, stuttering badly,
sotto-voce muttering madly, 
counting blessings, courting sleep, 
mourning madness, digging deep
caverns seething with the de-
mons of our nightmares, mining seams
of meaning--letters romp and rage,
crawling, crawling 'cross the page.  

Writing about writing: let's get meta! Submit verse in any form in the comments, as long as you're writing about writing.

 

Noteworthy

One of my Sports Literature students used a green highlighter to take notes in class this morning and all I could think was this: at least he's taking notes! I have students in there who haven't written a word down all semester except on exams--and not much there either. I'll be explaining some brilliant concept that will help them understand the literature and I'll notice that only one or two students have pens in their hands so I'll write a word on the board and say, "This is important! Write it down!" And they'll all immediately pick up a pen, write down that one word, and put the pen down.

I'm trying to help them move toward a more analytical approach to literature. So far, most of their written responses to literature take the form of review or reminiscence: "I can relate to Fences because my dad is mean to me too!" Today we started The Natural, and so far no one has called it "relatable," which is a good thing, but on the other hand, many of them simply didn't do the assigned reading because they didn't think it would be "relatable."

At this point I really don't care whether students can "relate" to the literature; I want to know whether they can read and understand and analyze it. Today I drove them crazy with an in-class writing assignment: choose one page from the first section of The Natural--any page at all--and write a one-paragraph summary of what's happening on that page--easy enough so far--except the summary should not include any evaluative comments ("Malamud did a lousy job making the story relatable...") or indicate any personal feelings about the material.

It was difficult but they did it. And they'll do more next week and the following week until eventually we'll be ready to make the big switch from writing objective summaries to writing effective analyses. I don't even care if they write them in green highlighter, as long as they're writing more about the text than about themselves!

I don't know about you, but I can relate to that.   
 

Why O why?

Why I purchased a print of Nathan O. Marsh's illustration of the letter O from his Alphabet Apocrypha:

Nathan O. Marsh, Alphabet Apocrypha

1. Everyone loves an ornery orphan--especially one with outrageous organizational skills.
2. Okra--so often in the garden, so rarely on the wall.
3. Oligarchsburg, Ohio, of course.
4. An offal and onion offering. 
5. Obstructionist oafs--so often in committee meetings, so rarely on the wall.

6. The word with which I conclude almost all of my e-mails: Onward!
 

Flight plan

I wouldn't call this morning a total disaster. Information was imparted. Learning occurred. Birds were sighted. Other things were sighted as well, but let's not go there. 

My plan, I thought, was pretty good, but flaws appeared in the execution. Yesterday I heard that cedar waxwings have been hanging around a local wetland and I really wanted to stop by and see them before they move on, but I wasn't wearing appropriate shoes for tromping around a wetland. So early this morning I put on jeans and a T-shirt and hiking shoes and went straight to the wetland, taking along the camera and a change of clothes. My plan was simple: spend an hour or so stalking cedar waxwings at the wetland and then drive two blocks to the best coffee shop in town, where I would change clothes in the bathroom while awaiting my medium vanilla latte.

What went wrong? Just about everything. I saw and heard cedar waxwings (along with kingfishers, cardinals, woodpeckers, and some other birds I couldn't identify), but the cloud cover was so thick and the light so dim that I kept waiting and hoping for more light. My few photos look like gray blurs--and that was before the rain started falling.

I tried to stick it out but it occurred to me that while I could change out of wet clothes, I had neglected to pack a hair-dryer. So I packed up and went to the coffee shop, where I executed half of my plan without a glitch. The other half of the plan--the changing-clothes-in-the-bathroom part--was thwarted by the presence in the bathroom of a total stranger who had, sadly, neglected to lock the door. I wasn't interested in seeing any more of that particular gentlemen, so I took my vanilla latte and my bag of clothes and fled.

Arrived on campus with just enough time to change into dry teaching clothes (but not dry hair) and dash off to class insufficiently caffeinated, only to discover, in the middle of class, that the handout I needed for the second half of class was missing. There's nothing quite like standing in front of a room full of freshmen and realizing that you have no idea how you're going to fill the next 30 minutes.

But I survived that class and the next one, and now I'm looking at my blurry gray photos and trying not to think about my damp, dirty hiking clothes sitting in a bag next to my desk. The sky has cleared. The rain has stopped. Are the birds still there? 

There's only one way to find out.

Pruning the syllabus

Painful as it may be, the time has come to chop something wonderful off the syllabus.

Yes, the syllabus for my African-American Literature class is a little ambitious, but I keep reminding students that this is an upper-level class and therefore my expectations are high. 

Maybe too high.

Okay, definitely too high. If even I am having trouble keeping up with the reading, it's too much--and with that huge writing assignment coming due soon, it's time to do a little pruning. I can't chop off the deadwood because there isn't any, so instead I'm trying to distinguish between different types of wonderful.

Students adore Alice Walker and Maya Angelou but tend to be stymied by Rita Dove, while I'd love to devote more time to Dove and let the others slide. Shall I cut off the authors students find less familiar or those they're likely to encounter elsewhere? 

I could cut the ones I teach in other classes, but that would mean saying goodbye to Toni Cade Bambara and Amiri Baraka. Maybe I should choose a totally random method, like drawing names from a hat or deleting every author whose name begins with W--but there goes Colson Whitehead!

If it must be done, let it be done quickly. Chop! Chop! Chop! (Why do I get the feeling I'm cutting off my own arms?)

  

Heigh ho, the wind and the rain

Hamlet encounters his father's ghost on the castle walls while a cold wind batters the audience with rain right on cue, and we feel in the bleak dark dampness that something is rotten in the state of Denmark.

This time, though, it's real wind, real rain, real bleak dark dampness. Our theater department's production of Hamlet took place outdoors under the trees between two brick buildings, one serving as backdrop and castle. We sat huddled on folding chairs, clutching blankets close around our cold bodies and putting up our hoods when the rain came. Last week I asked a theater professor what would happen if it rained during a performance. "The play will go on," he said. "That's the risk you take with environmental theater."

The play did go on--and very well indeed. Players projected their voices above the rushing wind and in the end the bodies hugged the ground as if unaware of the cold and damp. Corpselike, in fact. Then we in the audience, cold and stiff, rose and dispersed to our warm homes, carrying in our cold bodies the memory of the bleak dark dampness of Hamlet's Denmark.

Friday poetry challenge: herds, hordes, huddles

Ever since I observed a murmuration of starlings, I've been puzzling over those odd words we use to describe groups of things. I can see how the term  murmuration might arise from the murmuring sound of the starlings settling in at night, but in that case we should call a group of cell phones a twitter and a group of bureaucrats an obfuscation. Why do we have a herd of cows, caribou, buffalo, and bison but a pack of wolves, a flock of geese, a pod of whales, or an army of caterpillars? Caterpillars are too soft and cuddly to merit military language!

And then someone tossed out the phrase binders full of women.

Well! It's about time to coin some new terms:



a huddle of Sports Literature students

a derrida of literary theorists

a cleese of British comics

a serving of spoonerisms

a burquet of veiled women

a gaga of rock-star wannabes

a babel of linguists

a frisk of police officers



It's not quite poetry, but it's fun with words. Now you come out and play!