WRT 101 Fall 2014 Research

So we’re trying research blogs as the format for research logs.

I did the freewriting tonight on research topics and came up with the following list: renewable energy, almost anything to do with the environment, women’s rights, multiracial families, social media, digital books, food & nutrition, writing as healing, space, time, nano-computing, Palestinian apartheid, the wall there and on our border — Walls through history (like the Berlin Wall) and how (in)effective they are.

But I already know my topic. I’ve been working on an article on using Google Docs for response groups, and I need to read the recent scholarship and also write the thing. That’s my project.

WRT 101 writing practice

a time when I lost trust in someone — OK, so the moment that is the most egregious, I think, was when an advisor in grad school slept with my boyfriend. Sounds so melodramatic and soap-opera-ish, but it happened. Rather than talk about that event — and it happened a long time ago — I want to talk about the effect. Only recently did I understand better why that event hit me so hard.

My editing on Major General Boles’ book, 4-3-2-1 Leadership, taught me a lot about leadership. And General Boles says that the one critical component for leadership is trust. Those who are led must be able to trust their leader, and the leader has to build that trust and maintain it. General Boles lists reasons that teams don’t trust leaders, and one reason is if someone has been burned early on in his or her career, that person is scarred significantly by that breech of trust.

That describes my experience. New to grad school, find a mentor I trusted, and kapowie — huge knock to my gut. So how does one heal from that kind of experience?

WRT 101 writing practice #5

OK, so I’m doing exactly what I asked writers NOT to do, which is to do two writing practices in one day. I asked that writers do writing practices each day, but I’m behind, and I leave tomorrow morning at 7 for classes, and I know I won’t do a writing practice tomorrow morning before that.

I’m going to choose “solitude” for my last prompt of the week.

Solitude feeds my soul. I need time every day to be still, to meditate, to slow everything down. I don’t always take that time. Since I moved to Tucson two months ago, I’ve had less solitude. I now live next door to my youngest sister, and we share a lot of time together — coffee in the morning, dinner. I’m glad that I can do this now. But I also notice that I need to be sure to take alone time, so I can use solitude to keep my heart, head, and soul on straight.

Solitude in nature — when things were tough growing up, I used to take off and find an empty field, plop myself down in the grass, and watch the birds. Seemed to put all the family drama in perspective. At least for a little while.

WRT 101 writing practice #4

leaving — I’ve written on this prompt before, and I’ve written recently about my mom’s leaving — hard to write about this because I’m not sure who or what is leaving. That is — my mom has dementia, probably Alzheimer’s, although we’ve never gotten a firm diagnosis because my mom refused to finish the testing. She doesn’t believe anything is wrong. Huge denial.

So my mom is leaving. We’re all leaving life as soon as we’re born, eh? But dementia is a particular kind of leaving — is the person leaving his or her brain or is that person’s brain leaving him or her?

I’m not even sure that’s a helpful question. All I know is that my mom’s brain does not process information the way it used to. So how does that have anything to do with leaving? I guess because my mom has left the familiar — so much in her world is no longer recognizable. And so much language has left her.

She no longer likes rain, clouds, or lizards — all things she used to like.

How else does my mom’s illness relate to leaving?

WRT 101 writing practice #3

best and worst writing experience — One of my best writing experiences is a recent one. I started working with someone last fall — a person who was writing a book and was maybe one-third done. This person hired me to edit the book. I’ve done a good bit of editing over the years, but I’ve been working the last year to build an editing business. From last October until this June, I worked with this writer so that he could finish his book, and it was published this past June. I am really proud of the work we did together, and I like the book — I like the ideas this person presents, I like his voice and his humor. I worked hard on this project, and I learned a lot. Working with a writer to the finish line has been an immensely satisfying experience.

Worst experience — The one that sticks in my memory is when I showed an early draft of a short story to someone who then ripped the story to shreds. Ouch. Another experience that just popped into my head was from graduate school. I wrote a paper for a theory course and was creative with the paper. The professor told me that using that kind of creativity was really not the kind of graduate work needed. OK — I’m not explaining this really well. Academic writing requires a certain style, and unfortunately, I’ve found a lot of academic writing that isn’t all that clear — or that interesting. Hmmm. I think that’s five minutes.

WRT 101 writing practice #2

Stars. Stars. Stars. Maybe the coolest thing I learned  about stars was at the Smithsonian Museum, the Air and Space Museum. I remember being in Washington D.C. by myself, and I visited the Air and Space Museum and watched an IMAX movie back when the technology was new. I remember feeling vertigo during a good bit of the film. But what stuck with me was this: we are all made of stars.

Sounds poetic. And there’s science behind it. I was struck by the poetry. Reminds me of a quote by Ada Byron Lovelace, who helped birth the first computer. A lover of math, Ada complained to her exacting mom, “”You will not concede me philosophical poetry. Invert the order! Will you give me poetical philosophy, poetical science?” I love how science and art combine.

I’ve strayed from the stars. I admit it — I googled this question: “Are we made of stars?” Lots of hits. Here’s a cool one from Physics Central.

I’ve cheated on this writing practice because I keep wandering over to the web and checking things out. Also, I’m very conscious that writers in my classes might read my writing practice. Hmmmm. And now I haven’t even written about stars.

writing practice #1 WRT 101

OK, so I don’t really want to do this writing this morning. I’ve only had one cup of coffee. And now I realize I can spend this five minutes complaining and making excuses or I can write. I choose the latter. Which prompt? The one about reading.

My earliest memory about reading — or at least about wanting to read — is sitting on my mom’s lap as she reads a book to me. I am focused on the page. I’m probably about four years old. I remember looking at a letter — maybe an “R” — and tracing my finger around each part of the letter and saying a word for each movement. I was trying to figure out how my mom made those shapes say words that told me a story.

I wanted so badly to unlock that mystery. My mom had the key to a super power: reading. I wanted that key.

Probably the next clearest memory is from third grade, when we used the SRA reading program. I don’t remember the stories. I remember the different colors — magenta, brown, turquoise — that signified different reading levels. The readings were on laminated cards with the bright color on top. We read at our own pace, at our own level — took out the cards from the boxes, returned the cards. I remember the sights and the touch more than the stories. Also, I was extremely competitive academically, so I remember racing through those readings.

OK. That’s time. This practice doesn’t really talk about the joy I find in reading. Maybe another time…

2012 in review

The WordPress.com stats helper monkeys prepared a 2012 annual report for this blog.

Here’s an excerpt:

4,329 films were submitted to the 2012 Cannes Film Festival. This blog had 16,000 views in 2012. If each view were a film, this blog would power 4 Film Festivals

Click here to see the complete report.

the doomed Hummingbird

I’m on chapter 3 of Midnight’s Children, “Hit-the-Spittoon.” This is a good chapter to discuss why I read this novel so much more slowly than I’d like.

• cultural references and language – at the end of paragraph one, the narrator says that “I shall eventually crumble into (approximately) six hundred and thirty million particles of anonymous, and necessarily oblivious, dust” (36). The number can’t be random, can it? And I wonder what the population of India is at the time this narrator speaks because the introduction tells me the narrator and India are twin characters. On page 37, the narrator tells us that he makes chutneys and pickles condiments. He addresses the reader: “But now, ‘A cook?’ you gasp in horror, ‘A khansama merely? How is it possible?'” And although Rushdie gives us the translation of khansama as “cook,” I still want to look it up. Why does he use Hindi words some times and not at other times? This passage is also a bit surrealist — a writer-pickler? And here comes the literariness: “…I spend my time at the great work of preserving. Memory, as well as fruit, is being saved from the corruption of the clocks” (37).
• surrealism – in the example above, the narrator has just asked us to accept that he is disintegrating. The surrealism throws me off a bit. Not sure why it’s inserted when it is. I suppose I keep reading with the expectation of a more traditional novel, especially since Rushdie has cited Austen and Dickens in his introduction. Here’s another example: “…And certainly Padma is leaking into me. As history pours out of my fissured body, my lotus is quietly dripping in…” (37). This is an example of surrealism and literariness combined because the narrator asks us to accept that his body is disintegrating (surrealism) while he gives us the beautiful image of history leaking out of him and the influence of Padma, whose character is not too clear.
• new words – Rushdie loves to play with language, but his neologisms always make me stop and wonder. Example from page 38: “what-happened-nextism” and from pages 37-38: “down to earth earthery.” I like the playfulness, the newness, and the craft, but all of these things compel me to slow down so I can admire and ponder.
• uncertainty – for instance, who is Padma? She is a lover, a servant, a wife? Still unclear.
• chronological jumpiness — shouldn’t be a problem in a novel, but I get a bit lost with the long digressions. So, for instance, on page 37, I read, “–so it’s appropriate that I’m about to tell the story of the death of Mian Abdullah. The doomed Hummingbird: a legend of our times.” But we don’t get to the story for another page and half, and the intervening paragraphs seem disconnected. The paragraph after the one that ends with the promise of Mian Abdullah’s story discusses the narrator’s impotence. Hunh? Yes, it’s done in a very clever and funny way. But I’m still left with disconnection and wondering about Mian Abdullah.

So now I’ve located and even categorized some of the reasons I’m frustrated in this first reading. Not sure if I’ve applied any of the strategies in Tovani’s book.

purposeful thinking while reading

I’m reading Cris Tovani’s Do I Really Have to Teach Reading and wondering how to apply it to Salman Rushdie’s Midnight’s Children, a novel I’m also reading. I’ve taught two of Rushdie’s short stories — “The Courter” and “Chekhov and Zulu.” I like Rushdie’s short stories. But I have yet to get through one novel. I’m reading Midnight’s Children because one of my sisters has just picked it up, and we’ve decided to have a book discussion club of two.

It’s slow reading. Why? I know some of the context. For instance, when the narrator gets to Amritsar in 1919, I know we’ll hear about the Amritsar massacre. But even as I read the fictional rendering, my finger is itching to hit Google and find out more. I resist. I need to keep reading. I haven’t even read forty pages yet, and I tend to read novels fast.

What slows me down? The thickness of the prose. That’s about the only way to put it. Rushdie nods to Austen and Dickens in his introduction to the 25th anniversary edition of Midnight’s Children, and his writing feels more like a combination of 19th century tomes and myth. Thick narrative. Rushdie has written elsewhere about the central importance of A Thousand and One Nights, and the narrator in this novel compares himself to Sheherazade. I’m still not sure what slows me down. And I’m not sure what strategies I’ll be able to employ from Tovani’s book, but I like that I have a text I’m resisting. I can experiment.

I like the start of Tovani’s book — she hooks us with her stories, and we’re with her on the plane as she’s off to lead a workshop, as she wonders how to make a science textbook on viruses relevant even as that reading bores her, as she encounters a bored and rude student.

A few things struck me. This point: “One critical concept embraced by both researchers and literacy specialists is that learning to read doesn’t end in the elementary grades” (5). Seems obvious, eh? But the quote got me thinking that much of what I do is teaching students how to read — in 101, 102, all the 200-level literature classes. I also like the last section of the introduction: No Easy Answers. I like that Tovani acknowledges the complexities and difficulties. Here’s the last sentence of this chapter: “Meaning arrives because we are purposefully engaged in thinking while we read.” I think this is what I need as I read Rushdie’s novel. And it’s the most difficult thing to teach my students, no matter if they’re reading a 17th-century poem by Anne Bradstreet or their peer’s first draft of an argumentative essay. Getting readers to trust their own minds is perhaps my biggest challenge. It’s OK to say, “I don’t understand this,” or “This passage is written in a really confusing way,” or “I really like the way you end your paper.” Getting students to acknowledge that their ideas count, that the most important place for them to start is precisely with their own ideas, their own confusion, their own pleasure — well, this seems to be the biggest challenge. The payoff is that once students know their ideas and their voices count, it’s hard to shut them up.