Discouragement

I didn’t work on the article yesterday.  In the morning, I went for a 4 mile run with Rachel.  All day I worked on my syllabus and reading for ENG 495.  I could read all year and still feel unprepared.  The course covers EVERYTHING, it seems.

So this morning, I am reluctant to read the article again, reluctant to work on it.  I feel discouraged.  I feel like it must be no go, never going to get finished, embarrassing if anyone else reads it.  They would just tell me it isn’t finished yet; I have more thinking to do, more reading to do, more “analysis of my data” to do.  All of this makes me feel, why bother?

I know these feelings are normal.  I’ve read dozens of writers testify to the same.  I know the task is just to name them and move on, to even find joy in the writing, putting one’s critics on silence.  Telling them off even.  Anne Lamott recommends a visualization: dropping people saying critical things into a glass jar and screwing down the lid.  Maybe I’ll try that rather than believing these discouraging ideas and letting them keep me from writing.

 

Energy (!!)

Fall semester begins in less than a week.  The campus is busy with kick-off celebrations and faculty meetings.  This year, I’m up for it.  We had a lovely summer, even while I taught a lot.  Unlike the previous three years, this August I’m not longing for a vacation just as school gets underway.

I could say that it’s because I chose to vacation in Montana rather than attend the NWPM Portfolio Workshop, which I was sad to miss but duty to family called.  Maybe that did play a role in my feeling rested.  I think the real cause of my newfound energy is that my children are sleeping through the night AND I’m getting exercise on a daily basis.  Pregnant and/or nursing a baby wore me out for the last three summers.  Worth it, but exhausting.

I’ve made a commitment to try to wake early to write.  I thus went to bed at 9:45 with an alarm set for 5:45.  I couldn’t fall asleep for a while, wasn’t that tired.  I woke up at 1 am, not that tired.  Steve (lovingly) kicked me in his sleep at 5:00, and I wasn’t that tired, though I had been deep in the middle of a dream about a virgin wilderness and a gaggle of geese lowering themselves into a lake.  I got up.  Time for coffee, Cheerios, banana, and writing.

I feel some fear as I turn to writing this morning, but I hope that this time and space becomes a familiar friend to me.  Don Murray wrote of writing as a lover, always exciting, always teaching him things, always waiting for him.  I hope to get to know my own writing with so much familiarity over this next year, as my life as a mother has changed and given me this early morning hour.

 

What can I accomplish in 20 minutes?

As a writer, it’s tempting to yearn for a large span of time and to delay writing until one appears–which is infrequently.  Research on productivity suggests writing in shorter sessions every day.  How short is short?  I don’t rightly know yet.  This weekend I had success with 90 and 40 minute sessions.  I accomplished tasks I had projected would take much longer, which is rare for me.  Today I have only 20 minutes until I want to head home to see my children, achingly cute as they are.  Here I go.  I’ll let you know what I got done in 20 minutes…

Well, I wrote an insightful, but very messy, couple of paragraphs on the effect of standardization on democratic pedagogies.  The thinking and drafting felt very rich.  It does seem possible to “get into” the ideas of my project sufficiently in 20 minutes to take it one small step forward.  20 minutes.  I can find that on the busiest of days sometime between 8:30 and 4:30, no?

 

Success leads to motivation

I had an excellent writing session yesterday.  I’m a house guest at a lovely cottage on Lake Michigan for the weekend, which might have helped.  The children are playing with other children, running and laughing outside.  I can hear them enjoying the unstructured free time that child development experts say is vital (and diminishing) for kids.  This feels like summer.  I worked for 90 minutes, made two outlines, and began reorganizing my prior draft into these two outlines.  I saw the path forward from here to completed draft.  I felt motivated to continue.

In his teacher research work last year, Jeff Large discovered the power of success as a motivator for students’ persistence.  If students didn’t believe that they could be successful at a school task, they didn’t try.  If they had a taste of success–working a math problem through to the correct answer–then they did persist in trying.

Yesterday was a good writing day.  Here I am, back at my computer again for more.

 

Hour-a-Day

This morning as I reached for the box of green tea up in the cabinet, I grabbed my One-a-Day vitamins as well.  There’s no use trying to remember to take one in the afternoon on a full stomach.  I won’t remember.  If I’m going to take one, it has to become an automatic action for my sleepy morning body.  I can put it on the counter until I’ve consumed a piece of toast and take it with my tea.  Done.  I can check “take vitamin” off of my list.

Writing isn’t quite like that because I can’t do it sleepily, but I do want to begin to do it automatically.  I want my body to naturally turn towards the chair, the way the taste of tea or coffee sometimes motivates me to roll out of bed and put my feet on the floor.

So here I am today.  I’ve got one hour until lunch with the girls–a quiet hour in my office.  I’ve got a clear goal and a clear set of instructions.  I simply need to revise my EngEd draft to fit the Extending the Conversation guidelines, taking the reviewers’ comments into consideration.  They asked for “less description and more analysis.”  This tells me that all of my work in the “Findings” section that chronicles the responses of the rest of my class should be another paper.  I only have ten pages to work with, and most of that should be A) summarizing “the conversation” and B) extending this conversation with my own analysis and discussion.  The “data” from my one student case study is the text to be read closely and discussed.  This is where qualitative research and literary analysis share some common ground.

Tasks:

• Reread drafts
• Freewrite important elements of “the conversation” to summarize
• Freewrite the unique contribution that I’m making to this conversation

Off I go…!

 

Inspired Intention | The Nature of Sankalpa

Inspired Intention | The Nature of Sankalpa.

 

As I think about continuing my writing practice beyond the ISI, the definition of Sankalpa–a word I learned in yoga class translated as “intention”–is a helpful lens for me.

 

Playful spider poem–inspired by Billy Collins

See the spider pull on her waffle trainers,

slide each leg into warm ups,

soft nap of brushed fiber jersey.

She straightens each joint, then bends it swift to keep

the pant from falling down while she attends to another of the eight.

She hopes that her appendages have not grown,

no one wants to see her ankles in

high water pants.

North, South, East, West,

the route from home hardly matters.

To see the the grey house under construction?

The river fat with rain?

The show house on the South Side,

open for tours Sunday afternoons from 12 to 4?

She knows to walk her muscles out,

Warm up her ligaments, her tendons taut from clinging.

Step to step to step step step step step step,

Eight legs untangled in rhythmic stride.  As soon as one

has got the beat another lags behind.

She clenches her chelicerae in concentration,

scans six eyes for cars crossing the street.

To leave a thread or not?

What is made is so satisfying.

But to run free, making herself, leaving no trace

But the tautness in her

legs, her abdomen.

the pen tell her:

let me run and leave no mark.

 

Janet Emig’s take on the 5 Paragraph Essay

Here’s what Emig had to say about the 5 paragraph essay back in 1971.  She calls it the Fifty-Star Theme because “it is so indigenously American”:

“Why is the Fifty-Star Theme so tightly lodged in the American composition curriculum?  The reason teachers often give is that this essentially redundant form, devoid, or duplicating, of content in at least two of its five parts, exists outside their classrooms, and invery high places–notably, freshman English classes; “business”; and in the “best practices” of the “best writers”–that, in other words, this theme somehow fulfills requirements somewhere in the real world.

This fantasy is easy to disprove.  If one takes a constellation of writers who current critical judgment would agree are among the best American writers…can one find a single example of any variation of the Fifty-Star Theme?”  (97)

Her answer is no, and she goes on to say that freshmen English is not monolithic, but creative according to instructor.  She argues that the responsibility for the persistance of the five paragraph essay is “partially attributable to teacher illiteracy,” to teachers’ lack of “direct experience of composing” and reading contemporary writing.  Without working as writers, teachers “underconceptualize and oversimplify the process of composing.  Planning degenerates into outlining; reformulating becomes the correction of minor infelicities.” (98)

Emig doesn’t tackle the crucial, vital work of effectively simplifying (or accurately isolating discrete skills within) the process of composing for teaching in minilessons across the life-span of a young writer.  She leaves that work up to us.

 

More on –Twelfth Graders

I was struck by a few of Janet Emig’s research findings in The Composing Processes of Twelfth Graders (1971).

One that was remarkable is a pilot study she did of how effective the practice of writing outlines is in improving the organization of an essay.  Reviewing the literature, she begins, one might conclude that writing an outline would lead to having a more organized draft.  To test whether there is a correlation between outline-making and organization, she examined 109 expository themes and all “written actions that preceded the final drafts” from 25 eleventh grade students.  She found that students had made some sort of plan before the final draft in 37% of the essays, and that students had made formal outlines for 8% of the themes.   When independent scorers were given a sample of twenty essays (9 of which had been accompanied by outlines and 11 that had not, with this information withheld) and asked to score them solely on the merits of their organization, the scorers did not find that making an outline first led to more organized writing.  Emig states, “covariant analysis revealed no correlation between the presence of absence of any outline and the grade a student receives evaluating how well organized the theme is” (27).  And this is just about organization.  I think here of the novel that Ralph Fletcher remembers trying to write from an outline that he planned in advance.  The language was flat and lifeless and he abandoned the project before publication.  I wonder if the essays were scored according to voice and/or style, if the outline might negatively affect the writing.  Or not.  Maybe each different writer requires his or her own process, which is the message that Emig forwards from this study.  It’s not that outlines are useless.  They are useful to  some students, so we should teach them as one tool in the toolbox.

Emig’s close study of the writing process of eight 12 graders (that’s her sample size) shows that they write more and revise more when they are writing to an audience of their peers than to their teacher.  They also write more when they are writing “reflexively,” thinking about their thinking, as in diaries and journals.  Emig thus concludes that writing teachers would be wise to try to get out of the way of students’ writing for the most significant audiences in their lives, and to assign more writing that is reflexive in nature–writing to discover, rather than merely writing to display knowledge for evaluation by a single teacher.

 

The Composing Processes of Twelfth Graders

I’ve had this book on my to-read list for years.  The title is so authoritative.  Wow, I think as I read it, I will learn all that there is to know about the composing processes of twelfth graders–finally!  Then I stop and think.  I begin to wonder what Emig’s research methods will be.  How many twelfth graders will she study?  In what detail will she study them.  Will her study have lots of participants, and look at survey data across many of them?  Will her study look closely at a few twelfth graders?  From what backgrounds will these students be?  What kind of data will she collect?  How will she analyze it?  What prior research will she summarize at the outset in order to frame her own questions?  Then I circle ’round to my initial question:  what will she say about how twelfth graders compose?

The book is more approachable than it looks.  At least it was for me.  It’s exactly 100 pages, which I appreciated.  This is truly what they call a “research monograph.”  Ah, that’s what a “research monograph” looks like.  I’ve heard about them, but rarely held such a short, focused one in my hand.

The book opens with a survey of research on composing processes in general.  Janet Emig sorts what she has read into three categories:  1) accounts of the composing processes of established writers, 2) accounts of the composing process written in text books or handbooks intended for classroom use, and 3) research on the creative process of various kinds.  The category (accounts of the composition of established writers) she further divides into three subcategories: a)  first hand accounts from established writers [writers writing about how they write], 2) interviews of writers about how they write, and 3) analysis of established writers’ drafts to discern their composing process.  I noticed two things as I read this section as a writer:  first, she took a large body of diverse texts and came up with a system of categorization to make sense of it, and two, she doesn’t go into much depth about any of it.  Her bottom line “claim” during the section is that the advice given to student writers in textbooks is wildly, drastically different than the way that established writers say they compose.  She also admits that since creative writers “lie” for a living, that maybe they aren’t the best source of information about their craft.  Also, those who write fluidly often don’t know what they are doing at each step along the way, just like a piano player will get confused if he or she starts thinking too hard about a piece that he or she is playing.  She offers the most stark of possible contrasts to make her point about the advice given to young writers.  She compares advice on organizing ideas and moving through a sequence of steps from Warriner’s textbook to Gertrude Stein writing about her composing process (“It will come if it is there and if you will let it come”).  I thought this choice of author to quote was a bit like stacking the deck, but her point is probably borne out by other more maintstream examples as well.