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May 31, 2005
CSS week 1.5
the summer online course went live--kind of--last monday. it was entirely re-located and officially enlivened--depending on who you acknowledge as "official" this time--last tuesday. i think as of a day or two ago the last of my students contacted me to say something, although i'm not sure yet that all of them have actually gotten into the site and made the technology go.
the rant about the technological collides (a little reminescent of tectonic plate movement, at least as it was happening) is behind me; anyway it's not like i didn't expect a snafu or sixteen or so. i hope we're almost done, but i'm not holding my breath about that. in the meantime, a few discussion forums have been going on at the site, which is good; people have e-mailed me questions and concerns, which is also good; one girl even found me online, like i assured them they were all welcome to do, which is even better; and they turned (most of them) their first actually-gradeable assignment in last night.
now i just have to figure out how to grade it.
i mean, i know how to grade it. i wrote the assignment, i know what i'm looking for, i've told them what i was looking for; now i just have to read each piece, see whether or not they've done what i asked, and determine how much of a consequence small infractions warrant. easy. but. i also have to comment. i have to talk to them. end-notes, margin-notes, whatever. and therein lies the stalling-point that's had me looking at these all day, updating site content, sending e-mails about fifteen other things, and continuing to avoid starting to grade/respond to anything.
writing is a sensitive business. writers' words are... vulnerable. they've taken risks, to commit them to the page. and while that's true of all writers, it feels different when the page is all i have. i don't know the cadences of their voices to help me fill in what a phrase is probably intended to convey, when it doesn't quite. far more troubling--because i read things by writers i don't know all the time--is that they don't know mine.
i'm sarcastic by nature. cryptic, at times, in commentary, although i try not to be. succinct. i had to quit teaching middle school because my little darlings (no sub-i) didn't understand sarcasm and i'd accidentally make them cry. i don't worry much about that when i'm commenting to people who know me in real life, who've seen me "smile when i say that," who've heard that my voice is warm, who hear me drawl & call them "sugar" after i've just told them you can't do that with a comma in this language. and i'm pretty good at it. they don't cry often. i'm usually pretty-well liked, and at least pretty-well understood. me-in-person & me-on-paper complement each other rather well, i think. and here, i've got no avenue through which to show that other side. no real way to balance out the pieces. smiley-faces in mass e-mails get overdone really easily. perhaps i should forward comic strips around. i certainly don't want to encourage them not to take me--what i assign, what i say, how i critique, instruct, and analyze--seriously. but i also really don't want to make them cry.
Posted by ttobryan at 06:56 PM | Comments (0)
May 19, 2005
theory and the ibsc*
karen burke lefevre (invention as a social act) calls them part of an "internal dialogic."
psychiatrist harry stack sullivan says "the formation of the self depends in part on a dynamic process in the individual, involving internalized others," some of whom form "supervisory patterns" who "often take the form of internal critics--readers of one's own writing, listeners to one's talk--who may help or hinder a person" (lefevre 57).
"'it is as if there were two people,' sullivan says, 'one who actually utters statements, and another who attempts to see that what is uttered is fairly well adjusted to its alleged purpose.' such constructs continued to evolve through one's life. they may be derived from actual people one has known, from 'eidetic' or imagined people, or from a blend of both. especially pertinent to composition is sullivan's example of the effect that one of his own supervisory patterns, that of 'reader,' has on his writing:
he's a charming pill, practically entirely responsible for the fact that i almost never publish anything. he is bitterly paranoid, a very brilliant thinker, and at the same time an extraordinarily wrongheaded imbecile. thus when i attempt to use the written language to communicate serious thought, i am unhappily under constant harrassment to so hedge the words around that most bitterly critical person will be unable to grossly misunderstand them, and, at the same time, to make them so clear that this wrongheaded idiot will grasp what i'm driving at.
like sullivan, w. h. auden talks of an inner critic. auden's 'internal censor' of his poetry provides helpful correction and is more like a 'censorate': 'it should include, for instance, a sensitive only child, a practical housewife, a logician, a monk, an irreverent buffoon and even, perhaps, hated by all the others and returning their dislike, a brutal, foul-mouthed drill sergeant who considers all poetry rubbish'" (lefevre 57-8).
novelist anne lamott suggests the following:
close your eyes and get quiet for a minute, until the chatter starts up. then isolate one of the voices and imagine the person speaking as a mouse. pick it up by the tail and drop it into a mason jar. then isolate another voice, pick it up by the tail, drop it in the jar. and so on. drop in any high-maintenance parental units, drop in any contractors, lawyers, colleagues, children, anyone who is whining in your head. then put the lid on, and watch all these mouse people clawing at the glass, jabbering away, trying to make you feel like shit because you won't do what they want....then imagine that there is a volume-control button on the bottle. turn it all the way up for a minute, and listen to the stream of angry, neglected, guilt-mongering voices. then turn it all the way down and watch the frantic mice lunge at the glass, trying to get to you. leave it down, and get back to [work]. (lamott 27)
for the ultraviolent, lamott adds: "a writer friend of mine suggests opening the jar and shooting them all in the head. but i think he's a little angry, and i'm sure nothing like this would ever occur to you."
*ibcs = the "itty-bitty-shitty-committee" that lives inside your head & tells you your writing is CRAP. as far as i know, it's paul heilker's term; if he's passing it along from somewhere else, i don't know where.
listening to:
(xp to compositionism)
Posted by ttobryan at 10:24 AM | Comments (0)
May 15, 2005
this is for HEATHER...
...and anybody else out there who reads this & a) wonders why they bother checking back, when i never say anything or b) thinks i'm secretly a supergenius & should be much more talkative about it or c) wants to buy me another cape for my collection. i've got one with an "e" for "exception-girl" and another with some as-yet un-drafted insignia for "insightful-fortune-cookie-girl" (this for my ability to always come up with a pithy saying about courage or suchlike any time it seems even vaguely warranted).
HI, HEATHER!
it's official. i'm losing my mind.
i was taking 2...and 3/4? 3 1/3? courses this term? 2 actual, 3-credit (which in a phd program is just a laugh-riot of a designation) courses, one audit i did almost all the reading for despite there never being credit in the picture, and one independent-study variously designed and redesigned until nobody was really sure what it was supposed to look like. i was also teaching a class-and-a-half, which is a fair average; at the beginning of the term it really was 2, and by the end entirely 1, so the math will do. those i'm thankful to be done with, not because i wanted them to end--i never do--but because everybody else who's behind in their schoolwork is also moaning about getting their grading done, and i get to project a focused, one-track-only moan instead.
i did a lot of early work for the audit, and then phased out when the pond ph got not-exactly-to-my-liking. i finished one of the credit-courses on time. i finished the independent-study on time. & i've just pushed back the pushed-back deadline for my last one a little longer, which was supposed to give me more time to work, and has, instead, given me more time to stare glassy-eyed at the screen, vaccuum, drink tea, and woolgather. i get more work done when i'm cheerleading. last stint of reading-for-school i did was while playing spy in the empty late-night office-halls. the wool i've gathered, by the way, is neither fluffy nor untamed, but is already dyed and neat-woven into a soft tartan i'll never get to wear.
i need to get materials on the web for the online course i start teaching the 23rd by tuesday, which is the day after tomorrow. i should have been doing that all weekend while i was shirking my reading list. i need to annotate the last 2 books i've read, & read & annotate another 5 or 6--and then write a PAPER--by next-next thursday, by which time i'll already be a week into the summer class i'm sitting in on and planning to do all the reading for. and i'm late (i think) in getting feedback back to my chair about exam-lists.
laundry-list, anybody? why are they called that? laundry doesn't involve lists. you take what's dirty, shove it in the machine, guess what's best on the dial, add potions & go. which reminds me i need to do laundry.
if only scholarship were half so simple.
listening to:
Posted by ttobryan at 06:28 PM | Comments (0)
May 01, 2005
by the way, i'm kind of an elitist snob
i read a novel yesterday--don't tell the people i owe a lot of work to, because unlike my cheater-husband i haven't figured out a clever way to get reading fiction to count toward the academic work i'm supposed to be doing, so it was in no way technically productive. i didn't write a single word on any of the half-done or not-even-started-yet projects i'm supposed to hand in in the next few weeks. hell, it's hours into today, and i still haven't written anything but a poem. see why this fiction thing is bad for me? guilt is not the point, though. ffs, i've never been catholic! the point is, i loved this novel. adored every second of reading it. lost myself--lost an entire day--in it, to it, with it, and gained a lot of self back too, that i hadn't seen in a while, & lived a whole lot more than a day's worth of life inside the characters--i got by far the best end of the trade-off. and yet
when, finished with it and still delighted, i had a friend on the phone , & was bragging about my defiance and frivolity ("you inspired me," i said, "the other day when we were studying at your house and you were reading comic books!"), my friend asked what the book was, and i found myself embarrassed to explain.
"it's a probably-cheesy love story," i said sheepishly. "it's on the national bestseller list. oprah probably loves it. but it's this really cool story about..."
my friend, who is one of the wonderful kind who never lets you get away with shit like that, called me on it immediately. "why do we do that? why assume that because it's popular it must be crap, that if a lot of people are reading it that it must be somehow less worthy, that it's not refined enough for us to spend our time on if it also pleases-" "-normal people?" "normal people."
we had a good bonding moment over that, side-stepping sheepishness a little once we'd both acknowledged it was there; he admitted getting a rush out of the slash-burn-smash ending of a recently-read wolverine comic, and i confessed to having enjoyed the da vinci code--"it's not stupid," i said; "not to hear them describe it," my friend named a few of the grad students we know--and sometimes love--overheard trashing the book in the basement computer lab. "there are a few things he could have made a little more realistic, like, i don't know, the characters sleeping at least once in their 3 or 4 day wild adventure--they just kept running!--but i liked reading it. i didn't know all the answers to the puzzles, & it was fun to follow along, to try to guess, to figure it out." we also, it turns out, on occasion, both enjoy a little brain-candy detective fiction, so long as the pieces actually lead to some kind of conclusion that we get to cooperate with the protagonists to figure out.
all of that accounted for, however, i'm still a little embarrased at the "national bestseller" banner emblazoned in dark red across the top of this book, the "today show book club selection" banner mirroring it across the back, at the list of approval-granting organizations on the inside cover that includes the "book-of-the-month-club," and most especially--this is the part that has me considering not lending it out, even to people i know would also love it--at the set of book-club discussion-questions on the last few pages. this is the biggest sin of all to me--even worse than its publishers printing brag-lines about its own popularity all over the text is this set of guidelines for how to read it, how to talk about it, like it's an eighth-grade book-report assignment...
i'm more ashamed to be ashamed of these things than i am of the things themselves, but i'm still considering asking the friend who loaned the book to me if he'd mind me tearing out those question-pages before i hand it off to anybody else. that might be a personal pet-peeve; i won't adopt textbooks that have questions after the reading-selections they include either.
the most important point, though?
audrey niffenegger's the time traveler's wife is the best book i've read in years. i love the writing, i love the story, i love the voices for reasons this isn't the place to explain. it was the best way to spend a day i've stumbled across in months. it was one of those books you feel as you go through like you're recognizing your own face, and someone else's, even as you're seeing them for the first time, that you're coming home again to somewhere you've ever been. that might be a cliched appraisal, but cliches become what they are because they're true.
Posted by ttobryan at 10:36 AM | Comments (2)