Cinnabar and Alabaster

and i don't mind doing it on my own, in theory. i can swim, i can teach a writing class, i know at least a few things about style and should (at least "should") be able to talk a bit about the stuff.

but we weren't as prepared as we needed to be to have this happen gracefully. we were planning to run pretty loosely with this course, debriefing each other about our ideas, our plans, the actual practices of what-went-on when one or the other of us (which was planned to only ever be me except for a possible snow-day) wasn't in the room & making things up on the fly to go with what the students wanted & needed & where things seemed to be going. it was supposed to happen pretty organically. which can be great, when you have a cohesive organism doing the evolving. but with the roster still changing, the students at varying levels of proficiency with not just software but with writing and talking about writing, and her & my images of where the course needed to go still so nebulous--for each of us, let alone for both of us together!--it's not so much set up for evolution as entropy.

on tuesday, the class tried--or at least i tried--to talk about the reading we'd assigned them from gage, who had thwarted and confused most of the students. i gave them the crash-course of his main ideas: 1) it's possible to talk about style from a linguistic perspective, a rhetorical perspective, or a philosophical perspective, and people confuse each other easily when they don't specify; 2) the major philosophical divide he acknowledges as pivotal, and talks about for the second half of the article, is essentially (although he never uses language this plain) the difference between believing that "style" (form) is divorceable from meaning ("content")--that you can change the style/form of something and retain meaning, or express the same meaning in many different styles--and believing they're inseparable--that a change in style/form always, automatically changes the meaning of a piece. they nodded a lot, which might mean that helped clarify, and might not.

i'm supposed to be reading their summaries and responses, but i already know that most of them didn't get it--so they won't summarize well, and their responses will be worse, reactions to misunderstandings. this doesn't motivate me to get into them or give me much of an idea how to respond. i'm also supposed to be reading the papers becky asked them to write for thursday--originally a project she was going to manage, that she picked up as an idea from her husband's teaching practices & had some idea what she entended to do with--and turning whatever responses i manage into something that guides our work next week. i can do this. (i'm going to keep telling myself that.) really, i could do it any number of ways. but what i want is to do it the best way that's going to be the most conducive to the broad picture of where this course is going & what our driving intentions are, so, lacking those things, my hands are to some degree tied.

this is where the proverbial teacherly "bag of tricks" comes in. "never be without extra tricks in the bag," they tell you. i'm used to planning. i'm used to being more on top of things than i am right now. i'm not used to digging into that bag very often; i have no idea what kind of sentient purse-lint i'm going to find amid the eraser-fluff and candy wrappers i'm sure are down there. i have no way of knowing that what i find and what this group of students wants and needs are going to match each other.

but they're hanging out there in space right now. i can feel it when i look at them. we have no focus, and they know it. we have no cohesive plan. and the fact that our lack of cohesion is corresponding with becky's accident and absence can't help but communicate to them that she's the one w/the plan & vision (only half true, in both ways--she herself only has half of our joint plan/vision, & we collectively only have half of a plan/vision!) & without her we're a wreck (currently quite true)--which means that when she comes back, they'll look to her to carry/save them. i'm not making the grade right now. (this post is one stylistic boo-boo--mainly in the form of stressed-out clichés--after another. this is what happens--have we told them this yet?--when you're too busy and fragmented to focus. whether style and meaning are irrevocably entertwined or not, when you're this flustered, they both suffer--and drag grammatical functionality, as a general rule, right down with them.)

she keeps forwarding me e-mailed questions they've sent her. and i'm answering them--technically it's working just fine. but they're sending the questions to her, not to me. corey's initial inquiry lulled me into a false optimism. their trust is going elsewhere. & i've got to do something about that. because a) this won't work as a truly team-taught class, no matter how much collaborating she and i do outside the room, if the students see me as her assistant rather than as half the team, and b) she's not in a position to be the leader they want to make her right now--envisioning her "in charge" doesn't just work against our agenda, it's going to hurt them, because she's not there to answer (and i am. so i have a lot of work to do this weekend, several hundred pages of reading for L & some conners & white for becky & whatever collin wants us to know & all the planning i'm behind in for my other class aside, because tuesday has to go differently. tuesday has to be pivotal, and productive, and grounding. otherwise this entire experiment is going to unravel before we even get a good cable-knit started.

for the record, tom, tuesday, required no management at all. i have to thank martha kolln, however, for her wonderful example-sentence selection in rhetorical grammar, the book they had a chapter from to begin looking at sentence-level style with. kolln begins by dissecting a paragraph of annie dillard's about weasels, and so the first set of her example-sentences, taken from or based off of this paragraph, are all about weasels. then, later in the chapter, presumably once she's weaselled-out, she builds a grammar excercise out of an extended explanation of the british navy's experience with scurvy. weasels and scurvy. never a dull moment here. tom and his groupmates spent a little too much time looking scurvy up on the web to quite finish their grammar lesson, but a) it was a learning experience, b) it wasn't disruptive, and c), hey, if they're more likely to remember this on account of scurvy, more power to them!