Cinnabar and Alabaster

david started slowly, letting the students trickle in while he concluded an argument with the copier; it was a snowy, slow, grey morning, & everybody seemed in rhythm with "slow." when the handouts were ready & it was too late to keep stalling to see who else would come in, he shared the papers with them & talked through the annotated bib assignment due next class, for which they need to have citations & 4-5 sentence annotations ("make all three of these moves: summarize, evaluate, & reflect--how does each source fit into your research?") for everything they'd found so far for their projects.

while tedious in production, annotated bibs are useful research tools, he explained, ones that make comparing, contrasting, & aguing from a wide array of sources much easier. "we've already actually done all of this," he added, referring to the citing & summarizing & responding in short paragraphs they'd done previously--"so if you've been keeping up, you've done this for a lot of your sources already & will just have to cut and paste those in. if you don't have them typed up yet, you'll need to do that, but then you'll find yourself cut-and-pasting elements from these summaries into your papers later on--and your final works cited page will just be a matter of cutting and pasting too."

with that arranged, he put them in groups--since a third of the class wasn't there, their original groups weren't going to work, so he asked them to just come in & work 4 & 4 at the ends of the long central table--to re-do tuesday's whole-class conversation about sources & what writers do with them in specific contexts in small groups focused on each others' artifacts. "share the 3 copies of your homework that you were supposed to bring... if you didn't, you'll just have to improvise." they didn't, but they didimprovise; one group pulled papers out, traded, & started reading, the other pulled nothing out, pulled their chairs closer, & started talking.

improvising was the theme of the day; when dave went through the sheet of questions & things he hoped the students would talk about, it was detailed & sounded time-intensive--he had high hopes for the intricacies of their conversations. when they got going, they went fast, & zipped through the questions, so he had to keep juggling, sliding back & forth between groups to ask harder questions than the ones they were trying to take up, to push their analysis deeper, to make examples out of whoever's work was on the table when he came back by, & that seemed to be effective; when he'd leave each group, they'd keep up with the strains he'd started. the paper didn't provide as much guidance as he'd hoped, so he had to do more work to get out of them what he wanted them to put in, but with only two groups meeting, going back-and-forth worked just fine.

one elaborated worksheet task, broken into sub-questions: 1) "think through your opening moves--when i read through your last papers, i noticed a lot of variety in how you approached beginnings, so there are a lot of different ones in the class--the more options you have on the table, the better you can make decisions about where you want to go"; 2) "the blank space is there for you to jot down others' ideas"; 3) "consider why--what are the reasons for your choice? what does it allow to happen? what options does it limit?" then, at the end of the sheet, he left space for a brief reflective paragraph saying "which things you've heard in the group will be the most helpful or likely to influence your writing."

one thing i learned today, from eavesdropping on david fine-tuning students' use of vocabulary in the group nearest me: "flack" isn't just any criticism of the media--it's specifically "conservative groups critiquing the media for being too liberal"--"it's like propaganda--we can't spread it, it has to come from the highest levels of power in society."

what's cool: his students are working with a wide & admirably diverse array of sources, from academic papers to popular publications to the D.O. to live tv news broadcasts to letters & editorials. i wouldn't feel qualified to offer advice & guidance to them for all of those things, b/c i've never done most of those kinds of research, but dave's either better qualified or just braver than me--and does what i try to do & want to do--ask more of them than i know how to do myself, because the goal is for them to become better at what they need to know & be able to do, not for them to leave knowing more of what i already know than they did when they arrived.

what's also cool, although more clearly to me, i'd imagine, than to them: the group i was closest to had this conversation while he was working with the others.

"this is hard! my 105 teacher was like a kindergarten teacher, like 'okay, kids, now we're gonna do this!'"
"mine was like somebody's grandma."
"i got an A in 105--now i'm like 'aaaaaaaa!'"

"aaaaaaaa," according to this teacher, anyway, is fantastic. the end of kindergarten, the beginning of some legitimate challenges. brain-stretchers. things that hurt, & require hurdling. kudos to david for pushing them there, and for the tone of rueful but entirely not resentful frustration in the "aaaaaaaa" i overheard. she might not like it, but she knows--and believes, not just is able to repeat the maxim--it's good for her.

(+ critical glaring note to self: dave's planning next week's conferences, & i haven't scheduled any yet!)