Why Write?: Knowing When and How

In a previous blog, Pyramid of Needs, we considered Abraham Maslow’s hierarchy of why we do as we do in our lives. According to Maslow, these are our priorities: (1) Survival, (2) Security, (3) Power, (4) Love, (5) Communication, (6) Self-Esteem, (7) Self-fulfillment.  If our first priorities are not satisfied, even minimally, then we can’t get to the higher levels of self-esteem and self-fulfillment.  Where we are on the pyramid shows up right away when we are challenged, as for example when we read or write for a class.

In my textbook, The Flexible Writer, I discuss  three main purposes for writing, which I adapted from James Britton’s insights in “Notes on a Working Hypothesis about Writing”: Self-expressive, Interpersonal, Aesthetic.  A given piece of writing may serve some or all of these.  Practicing writers know how to gauge what is appropriate and don’t, for example, write a mostly self-expressive piece when an interpersonal one might be more effective.

Self-expressive

Self-expressive writing satisfies the need for asserting our survival and security needs.  It satisfies the need to be heard and recognized as an individual, despite social pressures.  Through it, we might vent our anger, complain, grieve; exalt, dream, wonder.  This purpose is often fulfilled by the very act of writing, itself, whether or not someone else reads what we’ve written.  Self-expressive writing often takes the form of first-draft diary entries, letters, autobiographies, lyric poems, songs—rants on Facebook, dashed off Tweets and GIFs. Here is a self-expressive draft written by student Samantha Renner:

I am terrified of the idea of war.  All I can think of are those films of houses gutted by bombs, children lying half-naked and dead in the streets, and blood everywhere.  Sometimes at night, I wake up to the sirens from the fire station down the block, and I panic: What if they are not signaling for a fire? What if, somehow, there are planes coming to bomb our town?  This must be just a little of what people must feel who are actually in a war zone.  It’s terrible.

In this paragraph, Samantha expresses her feelings about war.  The self-expressive purpose is fulfilled by the very act of writing. Samantha doesn’t anticipate a reader, and no one has to have read what she has written or respond to it.

            If you find yourself resenting, defending against, or arguing with others when they respond to your writing, it may be because your intention was only self-expressive.  Know when to show your writing to others.  Read the blog post Writer's Wrodeo: Whoas and Wonders to help you to discern where you are with a particular piece of writing.

            Interpersonal

            Interpersonal writing satisfies not only the needs for survival and security, but also those of power, love, and communication.  Through interpersonal writing, we connect, break, or negotiate with a reader, an audience (a word that literally means “those who listen”).  Our anticipated audience may be as far away as a reader in another country or century, whom we may never meet; or as close as ourselves.  Our anticipated audience may be as specific as an instructor or as general as a U.S. citizen.  Our task is to determine our primary audience and how to reach it.

            In interpersonal writing, we try to convince someone else to recognize us, to do something for or with us, to agree with us, or to change her or his ways.  It may take the form of letters, proposals, editorials, business and legal memos, recipes, instructions—or chat threads.  Submissions to teachers are meant to embody what you have learned and to earn a grade. (We will consider specific educational purposes for writing in an upcoming post.)

            The following is an excerpt from an essay Samantha wrote with a predominantly interpersonal purpose: to persuade her audience of her position.

            Before our country declares war on another country, I believe several things should take place:

     (1) There should be an open debate on media between those who are for and those who are against the war.  Debaters should include the parents of draftable people, military personnel, lawmakers, conscientious objectors, and ambassadors from those on whom we might declare the war.

     (2) There should be films of war played on television, the internet, and social media showing the ravages of war, especially on non-military persons.

     (3) There should be a vote taken from the general population.

     (4) There should be an active campaign to ensure that at least 50% of the population votes.

            Samantha’s interpersonal writing invites debate, action, and results.  She uses rhetorical devices (persuasion techniques) such as bulleted points and clear appeals to emotions (as in her evocation of war images).  In a workshop, fellow writers can help her anticipate how others might disagree with her, so that she can head readers off before they can.

            Aesthetic

            At its best, aesthetic writing satisfies the highest levels of needs that Maslow identifies: self-esteem and self-fulfillment.  It assumes that self-expressive and interpersonal needs have been met and attention can be turned toward writing for the sake of elegance, compression, beauty, overall memorability.  If only aesthetics are managed in a particular piece of writing, then it can be superficially entertaining, but it will lack depth. When, for example, your instructor insists on grammatical correctness, but ignores the self-expressive and interpersonal aspects of writing, writing might be more like a Styrofoam cup instead of one made of fine porcelain.

            Aesthetic writing has action, imagery, and dialog.  The diction (choice of words) is compelling.  Aesthetic writing is based in imagery—to reach deeply into the reader’s consciousness.  It is specific.  It is something new. It incorporates the poetic and lyrical techniques, as Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. does in his “I have a Dream” speech, or William Shakespeare does in Hamlet’s “To be or not to be” soliloquy.

            Here’s is Samantha’s poem, focused with aesthetic strategies:

            When will We Awaken?

     The sirens shriek,

     3:30 in the morning, again.

     Somewhere nearby there is a fire.

     This one will be cooled by ready water.

     The children will be carried

     by people in wet rubber coats.

     What of the shrieking in another place

     where no one will carry the children to safety—

     away from bombs bursting in air

     giving proof through the night    

     that a flag may wave?

     Not only has Samantha expressed her outrage at war, but, in focusing on specific imagery and strategically invoking the “National Anthem,” she’s argued against war.  She fulfills all three major modes of writing: Self-expressive, Interpersonal, and Aesthetic.

            Combinations

            Samantha successfully combined all three modes of writing to satisfy a hierarchy of needs.  Sometimes, it can be hard to separate the aesthetic from the self-expressive and the interpersonal in some work.  And that is devoutly to be wished for—to have all three integrated.

            Ask yourself when you are writing, what need or needs you are predominantly satisfying.  And when it comes to writing workshop, be honest with yourself:

If your purpose is mainly self-expressive, then you will not want anything but approval.  Your purpose will be mainly focused on your own experience.  Ask your readers to refrain from suggestions for revision.

If your purpose is interpersonal, writing workshop will provide you an opportunity to test-run your ideas and to strengthen your chances at better results. Be open, listen, thank your readers for their support and commitment to your writing.

If your purpose is predominantly aesthetic, you might, again, only want approval. You might welcome readers to offer their appreciation for different aspects of your writing style as they manifest in your work.

But if you can combine all three purposes, you will afford yourself a lively and supportive atmosphere for becoming the liveliest writer you can be. 

Works Cited

Cover Art: http://thewriteconversation.blogspot.com/2016/06/why-write.html

“Pyramid of Needs.” becauseicanteach.blogspot.com http://becauseicanteach.blogspot.com/2018/03/

“Writer’s Wrodeo: Whoas and Wonders” http://becauseicanteach.blogspot.com/2019/03/writers-wrodeo-workshop-woes-and-wonders.html

Britton, James. “Notes on a Working Hypothesis about Writing.” Prospect and Retrospect: Selected

Essays of James Britton.  Ed. Gordon M. Pradl.  Montclair: Boynton/Cook, 1982.)

https://www.albany.edu/cela/publication/article/writing.htm

Rich, Susanna. The Flexible Writer. Fourth edition. Boston: Allyn/Bacon, 2003.

Writers' Wrodeo: Workshop Whoas and Wonders

 

I know what it’s like to be the bronco.  I was four years old. The child of Hungarian immigrants.  Poor. My parents were separated. I was unable to speak or understand English.  Lonely. Unbelonging.  Helpless.  Defended.

            The kindergarten nun—I didn’t have a way of remembering an English name—had handed out flash cards for us to identify pictures with a word.  Of course, I didn’t, at the time, follow what this game was.  I had just come from being wrestled out of the protection of my coat.  I was hungry.  Why was I being subjected to this?

            All the other children were happily calling out words.  When it came my turn, I crossed my arms over my chest.  Pouted.  And shoved the flashcard away with the back of my hand.  I burst into tears.

            What happened next, I don’t know.  But I learned to speak, write, and read in English.  I have been teaching English, now, for over 40 years. My Hungarian father often bragged that a Hungarian girl was teaching the English English. But I feel helplessness and frustration in some students when I introduce new writing strategies in workshops.  The first round is always the toughest: “It’s my writing!” a student will often say, implying that I am violating her privacy.  “That’s the way I like it,” another will say (implying “hands-off!”).  Or, “You just want me to write the way you want me to write.”  The worst part of that is the implication that I’m being just as arbitrary as teachers who insist on the five-paragraph essay, or simply regurgitations of teacher’s opinions.

            In other blog posts, among them, “Reasons for Writing” and “Damning with Praise,” I offer ways in which to understand workshop dynamics. But the most difficult experience is the defensiveness and ego-attachment we are considering here.  And it often comes from experiences that have little to do with writing, per se, and everything to do with the vulnerabilities that come from the kinds of childhood trauma I described above.  If you are peripheralized in any way, especially because of things that you cannot help—nationality, gender, race, age, sexual-orientation, family, ability, or class—any suggestion that you can grow as a writer might feel like just another personal rejection—“Don’t be you. Be like me.”  If, in addition, you have only had single opportunities to hand in papers for a grade—which would make anyone feel anxious and helpless—then any recommendation for redrafting will raise a feeling of despair.

            I regularly meet now with my own colleagues to workshop my own writing—this post, too, has been vetted by my husband, for example. I’ve made many changes from my first draft, calling on the voices of my fellow writers in my head. My editors offer me suggestions, which  almost always help me to make significant breakthroughs in my work. But in the past, in the hands of workshop leaders that were writers but not teachers, I have walked away in tears.  Especially corrosive are those men who use workshops to court women.  (But that’s for another post.)  Then there are workshops where the leader assumes and maintains power by how she metes out attention and praise.  Cliques form. And we’re right back to feeling like the child who doesn’t belong.

So, if you feel, as I did, like pushing away from the desk and sulking, ask yourself these questions.  Is my teacher a writer? Is my teacher a teacher (as opposed to a writer who needs a job)?  Does this teacher have experience and writers’ skills to offer me? Do I want to learn them? Do I feel like I can grow as a writer?  Do I want to reach more readers?  Or is this about my feeling bad about myself, for other reasons?

If I didn’t watch others around me walk, I might have crawled all my life.  If I didn’t have those tall people holding my hands as I stood for the first time, I wouldn’t have walked.  If I didn’t have other dancers show me the steps and model for me how to make the moves—I wouldn’t be the dancer I am.  So, too, with writing.

And if you can’t learn from what is said directly about your work, learn from what is said about others’ writing.  Learn from the insights that arise in you and that you share.  Trust the process. Always express gratitude for others' care and attention. 

Your ego and fears and anger will be like that bronco bucking, kicking, struggling.  But stay with it.  In time, you will tame your fears and recover from the real insults to your integrity that come from xenophobia (fear of strangers) and prejudice.  And then, oh the places your writing will ride you!

How’s your bronco-bustin’ going?

Works cited:

Cover art: http://www.distinctlymontana.com/rodeo-women

End art: http://worldartsme.com/happy-trails-clipart.html#gal_post_64416_happy-trails-clipart-1.jpg

Evaluating Teachers: What's Important

                           


                               Theorems: If it can be assessed, it's not important.

             If it's important, it can't be assessed.

When I think back on my own teachers, it’s rarely their words and never their tests that I value—it’s who they were as human beings—how they treated us and how passionate they were with their subjects. If the teacher was cruel—like Sister Whatever in eighth grade—making us put our hands on our shoulders until our elbows felt like they were going to explode—well, that’s what I remember—not her name, or subject, or her teachings.  If the teacher was inspiring, like Mrs. Catanzaro, I still carry in me her enthusiasm for reading plays, for hearing what we had to say, for her love of words. I still remember her name and hunted her down to Friend on Facebook.  It’s no surprise that I have made a career of teaching, writing, and performing literature.

But when did it become clear to me that what’s important can’t be assessed or quantified?  As a new appointee to the Kean College English Department, I wrote and taught a course on College Writing: Theory and Research—attended by the then and former chairs, and a number of senior faculty. I asked them at the end of the semester what they most valued.  I was fishing, of course, for praise, vulnerable as I felt as untenured faculty.  I had hoped they would mention my Punctuation routine (see posts…); or how I used Composition research to launch my dissertation; or the writing workshops strategies we successfully explored together. But, over and over, the response was that they remembered best my enthusiasm for teaching and writing.  Years later, one of my chairs told me how much her own writing transformed because of our class together. Well then.  That taught me what my responsibilities as a teacher are.  And they are neither recordable or tabulatable in current Student Evaluation of Teachers forms.

Students learn how I am and do, not what I say—just as children learn more by do-as-I-do than do-what-I-say. If I find a reading assignment burdensome and boring, I can be certain that students will find it even more burdensome and boring. They learn this, Ipso facto: avoid these odious materials, and anything like them. I only assign those pieces of writing that excite me.  To this end, I’m constantly changing which Shakespeare works we read together in our required survey course.  And I do NOT overprepare, so that I can model what it means to encounter a challenging passage, be curious about it, look up words in the college dictionary I tote to every class, apply various critical approaches.  And the students are all part of the process.  Excitement and the application of skills can’t be feigned.  If I overprepare, I will be modeling control and they, in turn, will resist.  I do not want them to learn, Ipso facto, that literature=something to resist.  Most importantly, as I hope this blog shows, I am devoted to living and teaching as authentically as I can, and to being honest with myself and my students.

As universities become mere businesses—crunching retention numbers and low-balling faculty degrees and salaries—they levy digital student evaluations on teachers that are filled with leading questions meant to police teachers rather than to provide opportunities for support and improvement. And there is no space provided for comments and elaborations. Furthermore, these evaluations are forced on students during final grading time, and not during the next semester, year, or decade, when the lasting benefits of a class are most likely to emerge.  Don’t get me wrong, my digitalized evaluations consistently yield high scores.  But they are a distraction, source of stress, and waste of everyone’s time.  They don't give due credit and they mislead students.

To that end, here are proposed questions for a real (e)valuation, following, let’s say, a Shakespeare Survey class that asks how a teacher was, not the what they did or said—these would be distributed a year and then ten years after said class:

1)     Have I had a Shakespeare quote tattooed on my body?

2)     Have I become an attorney because I was so inspired by Portia in The Merchant of Venice?

3)     Do I attend performances of Shakespeare’s plays?

4)     Do I post Shakespeare quotes where they might inspire or comfort me?

5)     Do I daily Facebook chat with my teacher about teaching?

6)     Am I more proactive in my life, so I don’t get stuck like Hamlet?

7)     Do I reread passages of Shakespeare’s plays we discussed in class?

8)     Am I still in touch with classmates I worked with in my Shakespeare class?

9)     Do I write my own poetry, songs, plays, or essays because of our class?

10) Do I share Shakespeare quotes on social media?

11) Do I own/display Shakespeare tee shirts, mugs, or other souvenirs?

12) Do I teach Shakespeare?

13) What was my Shakespeare teacher’s name?

14) Has my passion for reading, in general, blossomed because of our class?

15) How else has my life been transformed because of Shakespeare class?

Add some more real-world questions that embody your take-away from a teacher you valued. Be creative and personal.

Works Cited:

Cover Art: https://patch.com/new-york/bed-stuy/teacher-evaluations-who-s-business-is-it-anyway

Martha and Mary in the Classroom: House vs. Home

                      

            As Luke tells the Biblical story, Martha invited Jesus Christ into her house; but while she was “distracted with much serving”—bustling to serve food and drink to their visitor, Martha’s sister, Mary, “sat at the Lord’s feet and listened to his teaching.”  This rankled Martha—she had invited Christ and was doing the hard work of being his hostess—but Mary was the one who could glow in his company.  Jealous of Mary, she went to Christ to complain: “Lord, do you not care that my sister has left me to serve alone?  Tell her then to help me.”  Clearly, Martha was not getting “it.”  Patiently, Christ answered her, “Martha, Martha, you are anxious and troubled about many things; one thing is needful.  Mary has chosen the good portion, which shall not be taken away from her” (Luke: 10:38-42).

            I was Martha on the night I invited a dear friend to speak to my Emily Dickinson class.  On the desk, I placed a vase full of white flowers as a gift to her, and as a way to brighten our classroom for her visit. For half an hour before she started her presentation, I distributed and coached my students through filling out 10-page sheaves of university release forms for a tour of Amherst on which I was hoping to take us. On collecting those, I distributed copies of former students’ Dickinson papers to inspire their own. Told them we would workshop next time and when their papers were due. I resented the bureaucrazies I had to orchestrate and having to play the disciplinarian mother.  My friend waited patiently.  At last she was able to start a presentation. 

            She was, as always, luminous.  Without a teacher’s agenda, she was able to share her personal connection to Dickinson and to open the discussion to whatever direction it wanted to take.  I loved her presentation—her passion, range of feeling, wisdom, and her own poetry.  I loved how freely the students engaged with her and with each other. And yes, I know that my being Mary with them most of the time, eased the way. But I am most grateful for her presentation because this time she inspired me to reflect on how administrative structures—pitched to assessment, filling out forms, student retention, and what I address as “the litterbox theory of education: coverage and control”—how these pressure me into being more of a Martha than I care to be.

            In my posts, I am fierce for helping students recover their love of reading, their innate capacities for original thought, their freedom from draconian educational practices.  I am devoted to teaching students, not subject—to focusing on awakening, not the stupor of the conventional pedagogical grind. But focused on them, I was not paying sufficient attention to what I have lost, in over 40 years of teaching in institutions. To liberate myself, I know, is to model that to students—the most potent do-as-I-do way of teaching.

            In my next class, a Shakespeare Survey the following morning, I went Mary—enjoying “the good portion.”  We chatted—not discussed—the school production of A Midsummer Night’s Dream, which we had all seen.  I did not steer how the conversation went, but occasionally participated in it.  I could feel the Martha coming up in me—remind them of Fallon’s aspects of staging; make sure to reference the text for changes in language…and stopped myself.  This was not about me. I also avoided responding to every comment a student made—the having the last word that co-opts most student comments in classes—stealing their proverbial thunder. I let myself enjoy their pleasure in the performances and in how well they remembered details and amplified each other’s insights.  I let them have themselves.

            Martha is about housekeeping.  If we riff on Velázquez’s painting “Christ in the House of Martha and Mary,” we can see that Martha, in the foreground, is literally grinding away at chores.  In front of her are fish and eggs—symbolic of the sperm and ova that represent conception and child-bearing. An old woman hovers over her, pointing a judgmental finger of gender.  Like the garlic and hot pepper, Martha’s life stinks and bites right now—and she’s scowling.  Her hair is covered, and her brows furrowed.  In a world that prefers right dominance, she is thrown to the left side of the canvas.

            The only exit from this prison is the pass-through (for it isn’t even a door through which Martha might walk).  We can see Mary, in the distance, her hair symbolically down.  She’s enjoying the presence of the treasured guest, who is not only paying attention to her, but blessing her. She is swaddled in a golden shawl. She is, literally, in the right.

            I’m rethinking the assignments for all my classes. Time to give Martha a break—enough housekeeping, coverage, and control.  I’m naming the Martha teacher game, first—vigilant moves such as scolding of any kind, micromanaging checklists for discussions and group work, quizzes, spoon-feeding students, emphasizing being right, having to have students agree—all those things that speak of STOP.

            I want to be in the living room to enjoy the good portion—to be homies, the favorite aunt who can spoil her nieces and nephews, instead. I’m kick-starting the assignments for my courses to foreground what matters—the less assessible the assignment, the better.  The less about testing whether students remember what they’re supposed to remember—the more about what they do find memorable.  Toss out the rubrics, bring in light and air—meaningful engagement with literature and writing. To riff on an adage—“Let go and let Good.”

            In The Nag Hammadi Library, the gospels that didn’t make the cut into the synoptic Bible, Christ says in “The Gospel of Thomas”: “Do not tell lies, and do not do what you hate” (6). Try being a part of an institution and live by that! Eek! But that’s a blog for another day.

            Just saying: We are fortunate that Dickinson left school before her Martha could take over.

            I had originally ended this post asking "How are your teachers more Martha than Mary?"  But Sara Faulkner, in her reply below, cogently argued that it was a leading question~very Martha, indeed.  So I am rephrasing the question, as Sara suggests, to this: Are your teachers Martha or Mary? (Make that an inclusive "or," which means that they can be both Martha and Mary.) In what specific ways? What’s the balance of Martha and Mary in you?  How do we recover?

Works Cited

Cover Art: Velázquez, Diego. “Kitchen scene with Christ in the house of Martha and

Mary,” 1618.

Luke: 10:38-42

“The Gospel of Thomas.” The Nag Hammadi Library. New York: Harper, 1978.

The Love of Reading versus Studying: A Continuum

                           

            It used to be flashlights under the covers with comic books—now it’s phones, tablets, E-readers—there is something delicious about wanting to read so much that we sneak it.  I’m not talking about social media, compulsive scrolling, online shopping, gaming, or texting—that doesn’t count as reading—but being eager to return to a book does.

            It would seem that school should inspire the love of learning, as libraries do with clubs and book fairs—but, unfortunately, school ruins reading for most of us.  In this blog post, I want to address this problem and to offer a model to help us recapture our passion for reading, so much so, that we abandon our Netflix, YouTube, and whatever new distractions and addictions have emerged since I posted this essay—because we can’t wait to indulge our love of books.

            On one end of the continuum is self-motivated, indulgent, glorious wanna reading—the kind we talk about with your friends and never seem to see in a class; the kind where we fall in love with an author and scramble to find everything she or he has written. On the other end of the continuum is studying boring gotta textbooks in anticipation of quizzes for get-it-over-with courses and grades.

            But there are some truly fascinating works presented in classes that belong on the love side of the continuum—that are ruined by how they are “taught.”  So, it’s not even so much what is included in classes as how we are harassed into, literally, confronting them.  It is truly tragic to me that, when I ask my students in their senior capstone courses what they love to read, they look at me like deer stunned by high beams in the middle of the night.  It has been so long that anyone cared about their experience of reading—since they felt any passion for reading themselves—that they don’t know how to answer.  Teachers placed themselves between them and books, co-opting, mediating, and grade-quantifying their experience.

First, it’s such a ridiculous expression: “I’m teaching Shakespeare.”  Under one interpretation of the expression, that’s ludicrous.  Can’t teach Shakespeare anything—he’s totally gone.  And teaching conjures in all of us the fear of metaphorically being the dunce shamed in a corner, having our knuckles rapped with a ruler, or having to suffering detention.  I reject the prevailing pedagogical model that favors learning standard information over learning how to appreciate, that favors assessment models over learning. Teaching should be about inspiring, modeling for, and empowering students to create meaningful, and intellectually and emotionally satisfying lives.

Reading was ruined for me, too.  That’s why I can write this. It has taken me years to actually read through a book without taking notes, highlighting, annotating the margins, and memorizing “key” ideas.  It has taken me years to question whether a book is worth reading through, just because it is a published work that someone else required me to read.  It has taken me years to think of books as treasured friends to turn to for relaxation, adventure, illumination. It’s only now that I’ve stopped, as a teacher, thinking of the works I assign to classes as reading chores for myself.

To rehabilitate us all, I don’t give quizzes to police whether students have read our texts.  We develop an atmosphere of commitment and engagement early on and most students come prepared—that is not negotiable. And I certainly don’t give multiple choice tests.  Horrendously, there are some teachers who actually administer quizzes and multiple-choice tests in Creative Writing courses.  Really?!  I have discoursed on this in other posts, but my focus in our classes is not what I want, but what students actually get from their readings. 

I ask first, a show of hands, of those who have read the portions of texts we will be considering that meeting.  Most students are honest, and they know the rest of us will know—given the nature of our discussions—whether they showed up that week.  That’s usually enough embarrassment for them to come prepared. After that, it’s all about making the reading belong to THEM not to me as the arbiter of grades. And my hope is that they will be able to recover from studying and learn how to enjoy the readings.

One of the following questions will often catapult us into our discussions: Did you like reading this?  Why or why not? What caught your attention?  What did it mean to you?  Is this good, engaging writing?  Why or why not?  What questions arose for you? 

Just as a docent will show visitors how to view new, experimental art in a museum, our class is a place where I can model different doorways by which to enter a piece of writing, such as imagery, theme, characterization, structure—but not everyone thinks alike, and not all strategies will resonate with all students.  I don’t require all students to equally engage with all our strategies. 

Even more than discussion with the whole class, my students discuss readings in small groups—that’s nothing new.  But I don’t micromanage the direction these discussions will take with checklists of questions tending toward “approved” responses. We come together after group readings to benefit from the often unique and inspiring insights that emerge from the reading pods.

Here are strategies to remember if we are to pull our readings away from the study end of the continuum back to the love-of-reading end:

Less is more.  Good books deserve rereading and rereading.  What’s my take away this time from these pages?

Don’t be thorough—be deep.  If I try to memorize and retain everything I read in that limited corridor which is my left brain—I’ll drop it all. Best to carry away one idea that matters, and to integrate it.  Otherwise I’ll drop it all after the test and it won’t be available to me after.

Take what you like, and leave the rest. Most teachers would balk at this. My devotion is to inspire—not terrify.

Consider the continuum.  Are you reading or are you studying?  Ask yourself these questions as antidotes: Do I love this reading?  Why or why not?  How is this reading about me, and not about the teacher or the test?  How can I use this reading to find deeper and more satisfying meaning in my life?  How can I integrate this reading into what I already know?  What else could I read along these lines that might be more inspiring?

I invite you, as well, to read the blog post on TRUST—learn to trust yourself, as a reader, despite the environment of distrust that standard education fosters. Will it be on the Test?: Trust and Joy in the Classroom. The love of reading and your passion for literature will return if you make it your own.

I look forward to hearing about your experience of how studying can ruin reading for you. How can and do you nourish your love of reading?

            

                          

Works Cited

Cover Art: https://www.theodysseyonline.com/30-thoughts-college-students-have-while-studying

End Art: https://www.naeyc.org/our-work/families/read-together-support-early-literacy

Left Brain/Right Brain

  

In 1976, Julian Jaynes coined the term “bicameral mind” in his eponymous book The Origin of Consciousness in the Breakdown of the Bicameral Mind.  According to this model, the brain is divided into two rooms—“bi” meaning ‘two,’ and “camera” meaning ‘room.’  (We call our cameras “cameras” because the first camera was a large room, much reduced now to the thin room which is an iPhone connected to the doorless room which is the digital ether.) According to this early research, the left brain was in charge of language and the right of imagery. In his landmark, 2009 book, The Master and His Emissary: The Divided Brain and the Making of the Wester World, author Ian McGilchrist offers a much refined theory, informed by extensive research since 1976, to show that both sides of the brain coordinate in the creation of experience.  With that proviso, we can consider how the predominant aspects of our divided brains function in the learning process.

In general, someone who functions predominantly from the left brain, as illustrated above, tends to construct experience as

Linear—one thing following the other in order

             Analytical and Mental

             Product oriented
             Closed
             Staid

Digital—favoring polar binary opposites, as, for example right or wrong, good or bad.

Numerical—clear, quantifiable order, favoring monetary and business systems

Conventional—according to tradition and popularly accepted values

Rule-bound and Prescriptive

Proscriptive—experience and action outside the parameter of accepted rules prohibited

Limiting—at best, the left brain can work four things in consciousness at a time

Rigid and strict

Dividing and Selective

External

Exclusive

“No”

Denotative—words mean discretely, without nuance

Ego and Superego—a will to power

Conscious

Prose

Boxed in

Guarantees
Fear based and inspired

We cannot live socially or in civilized cultures without these functions.  Some of the benefits of the Left Brain include a sense of security and constancy; organization and focus; and social and familial foundations.  The Left Brain identifies goals and marshals them to completion. Language, itself, functions because of Left Brain tendencies.

The problem comes when it presumes to take control of all the brains functions.  McGilchrist argues that, historically, the Left Brain was the emissary from the larger, the contrasting functions of the Right Brain, whose qualities include these:

Global

Contextual

Intuitive and epiphanic

Body and image based

Process oriented
      Open
      Fluid

Analog—favoring paradox and interweaving

Experimental and creative

Evolutionary and revolutionary

Descriptive

Expansive

Patient and flexible

Coordinating

Internal

Inclusive

“Yes”

Connotative

Id

Subconscious incubation

Dreams

Poetry

Out of the box

Possibility
Love based and inspired

The Right Brain is the repository of all of our history as a species—spatially and temporally.  It connects us in what sometimes feels magical ways. It offers us insight, joy, warning, possibility.

            Here’s an example of the difference between Left-Braining and Right-Braining.  I am an international folkdancer.  Every Wednesday night and on long vacations devoted to this art, we get together—women and men ranging in age from 20 to 100, and sometimes with children, to join hands and enjoy the dances from countries around the world and through time, to music that can be soft and prayerlike, or bawdy and rollicking.  After almost 40 years, I know most of the old dances and need only to hear the first few notes and my body knows the rest.  But there is always a leader, whom the rest of us watch.  If I were to put on the music at home, I would know neither the name of the dance nor which step comes next.  That’s because I have mostly Right-Brained these dances.  And, although I am known for being a “good dancer,” expressive, joyful, knowing how to style—and seem to know all the steps—I don’t.

            On the other hand, I have learned dances to teach others, and these I analyze into their component parts, memorize them, practice them, make and correct my mistakes while replaying videos.  I, in other words, take a Left-Brain approach, to “get it right,” correct others.  We have some master teachers in our folkdance group, who always know the steps, and whom the rest of us use as guides.  Too often, though, they devolve into a Left-Brainy make-wrong mode—conventionalizing, criticizing, scolding. What makes my teaching different from that of most other folkdance teachers, is that I also incorporate images in my teaching: “make believe you’re the Statue of Liberty, raising one hand and tucking in the other”; “make believe you are moving through water.”  This helps others to be expressive, joyful, stylized.  And I don’t scold.

            For me, when I’m at my best, this is an example of optimal coordination between the Left and Right brain.  Unfortunately, as Gilchrist argues so cogently in his book, the Left Brain functions have usurped control to assert the will to power. 

In politics, Left Brain leaders manipulate the voting public and constituencies with fear and rigid values. The traditional classroom, too, favors a Left Brain model. The posts on this blog serve as reminders that we are far larger and have greater capacities than the Left Brain would allow, by itself.  We invite the Right Brain into the mix, and favor

Imagery over plot

Experimentation over right/wrong

Community over leaders

Creativity over tests

Original over linear thinking

Learning over grades

Rainbow over black/white

Shapes over straight lines

Possibility over boredom

Spilling over the edges, like the picture above

Poetry over all

And more…

How are your learning experiences structured? Is there a generative balance of Left Brain/Right Brain in your classroom and in your learning process?

Works Cited:

Cover Art: Left Brain/ Right Brain Image

Text:

Jaynes, Julian. The Origin of Consciousness in the Breakdown of the Bicameral Mind. 
      Boston: Mariner Books, 2000.

McGilchrist, Ian.The Master and His Emissary: The Divided Brain and the Making of the Western
      World,  New Haven: Yale UP, 2009.

Intentional Fallacies: The Literary Seance

                        

“What does Poe mean?" 

                                                “What is Dickinson saying?”

                                                                        “What’s Shakespeare’s purpose?”

                         “Is that Plath’s intention?”

            You’ve heard it all your life in classrooms: questions that assume to speak for an author, that imply that we can somehow discern what she or he Really meant, that urge that there is some ultimate interpretation that will forever tie up the poem in a bow.  It’s an antique way of speaking about literature—patriarchal, limiting, and false.  It turns the class into a séance: “Put your hands on the table.  We call on you, Will Shakespeare.  Tell us what you want.” And the table trembles under the note-taking that the teacher, as medium, channels from the ghost of William Shakespeare, entering the room.

            Let’s step back a moment to appreciate how intricate the process of literary interpretation is, here analyzed into discrete, although non-definitive steps:

(1)   We identify an experience as coalescing into “object.”

(2)   We reach out to touch it.

(3)   We pick it up. It might be a doorstop.  It might be something to turn into a Christmas tree.  It might be a log for the fire. 

(4)   But we identify it as book.

(5)   We turn it this way and that. What shall we do with it?

(6)   We look at the ink marks.

(7)   We identify a language.  If it is Hebrew, we lay the book down with the ruffly

edges to…What shall we call it?  Our left.

            …

And so on.  All this happens intuitively, speedily for most 21-year-olds.  For a 2-month-old, there will be a preliminary process of gumming, ripping, crumpling, throwing, and growing into a 2-year old—who, by that time, might have learned to assume the culturally-correct book reading position.

            By the time we come to call those marks words on what we discern as page and start to interpret it as poem, an infinite series of sophisticated, enculturated, interpretive choices have been made.  So why is it that we suddenly turn the process into a supernatural mystery, a séance?

            True, we hope that by this time in the 21^st century teachers will acknowledge that interpretation is subjective. But they and their students continue to use the discourse of divination and fortune-telling—to the extent that teachers make-wrong any but their own “official version” of what, let’s say, Shakespeare is saying. Why continue to commit this intentional fallacy?

According to Britannica.com, “Intentional fallacy,” is a “term used in 20^th-century literary criticism to describe the problem inherent in trying to judge a work of art by assuming the intent or purpose of the artist who created it.” Shakespeare is dead, and his gravestone curses anyone who would exhume his bones.  We have found no personal records discoursing on his plays and poems. You’d have to believe in Shakespearean witches and ghosts to argue your teacher qua medium knows what he meant. Prolific novelist Vladimir Nabokov said never to ask what an author is trying to say—because (s)he already said it.  And poet Robert Frost said “I own the first reading. I’ll take a mortgage on the second.  The rest is up to you.”

             More often that not, when readers, critics, audiences voice an interpretation of my poetry, songs, essays, they offer interpretations that I did not consciously work into my writing.  I find them compelling. I am fascinated by the plasticity of literature, mine and others’, to inspire vastly different, and not infrequently contradictory readings.  And if there isn’t this plasticity, then the piece of work is not a piece of literature.  Creativity (discussed in other posts on this blog) is a process of dipping into that 99% part of our minds—intuitive, universal, visionary—which we share with all other human beings.  Memorable writing dips into the greater mind where we all exist—the better the author, the more intuitive her or his process. That’s why we look into the dictionary—a compendium of shared meanings.

A séance is always a group activity, often orchestrated by either a charlatan magician or an intuitively sensitive actor.  The pointer on the Ouija board does not move without the participants relaxing into their 99% minds, by believing that the process works.  But interpretation is just the Oui (French for yes) ja (German for yes) credulity of the participants—just as interpretation is a process by which we turn marks on an object into lived experience and ideas.

                            

And Shakespeare does not exist without us picking up that object and naming it a soliloquy or enacting it in a production.  We are Shakespeare, and it would be more appropriate to ask “How do I interpret these marks on a page?”  “What do I make of this?”  "What do these words mean to me?" When we read, we're looking into a crystal ball: we see ourselves.

                                                           

            Notice the language used in your classrooms and how the teacher becomes the medium at the séance. Report back here.