Poetry : This I Believe

[This poem was inspired by an email from Saara DeAngelis-Jimenez.
Thank you, Saara.]

This I Believe

I believe in
gain
from losses; I

believe after loss:
lesson;
I believe: in

the long nights
crying. I believe: I can’t
sleep.

Teach Your Students How to Conceptualize, Man!

Sang was on a roll, again.  “You don’t just give them a handful of knowledge,” he said, “some fucking check list of ‘real world skills.’ You make them understand why they should care about what you’re teaching.”  He loved to explain my own teaching to me.  I loved to hear it.  He always articulated my pedagogy better than I ever could.

“You give them the big picture and the larger concepts of life.  Then you show them how being a good writer empowers them in this conceptual world.  Good writers can manipulate concepts, and the world is made of concepts.  It isn’t a big leap from there: good writing is power.  Once they realize that, they want it.  In other words, you give their studies a purpose.”  He puffed on his cigarette for dramatic pause—he taught me the art of the dramatic pause—before he continued. “There was no sense of purpose for any of these students, before they met you.”

He was right about one thing: most of my students seemed to lack purpose.  I asked a room full of freshman what they were passionate about, and was answered with blank stares.  I asked if any of them loved to do anything. I love to write, I offered as an example.  The use of the word love always throws them.  No one responded.  So I asked—falling back on my job training—who at least liked to write. Confusion.  Eventually I got to the truth.  These young people hated writing.  Unless they are texting, IMing, Twittering, Facebooking, blogging, or emailing, they absolutely despise expressing themselves in words.

My students are constantly writing.  But that’s different, they say.  Many of them have been communicating in written text their entire lives.  They grew up in chat rooms, and sending IMs.  They moved into text messaging and facebook status updates — a study of facebook status updates can reveal a thorough narrative of some people’s lives.  Now Twitter has them producing situational American Haiku.  The writing prompt: What are you doing?

You should read them sometime.  Our students are composing their own literature and we are too stuffy and behind the times to notice.  What we do is worse than our parents hating our music.  We are demanding that they express themselves our way, and they aren’t listening.  Our students are producing a written transcript of our culture, and they are doing this at an alarming rate.  They are leaving a real time textual record of the consciousness of millions — archived by time and date.  Maybe some those of us who specialize in language should stop pushing old forms and start looking into this literary occurrence.

What would Samuel Johnson do?

Rescue the Good from the Bad

Sometimes you have to save your last two paragraphs and junk the rest.  The entire paper is a warm up for you to write those excellent last two paragraphs.  Don’t feel a second of discouragement.  This is normal.  Now take those two paragraphs and build your paper around them.  If from that revision you write two more paragraphs that are just as good, now you have four.  Keep those four and discard the rest.  Repeat this process until you have a complete paper.

I know it sounds time consuming, but the more you do it, the faster you will get.  And then you will be able to communicate with anyone, at any time.  Is there anything else worth learning how to do?

UNDEVELOPED THESIS

I know I say that length is not the most important part of a paper, but I always follow that up by saying that you can not adequately explore a topic in less than 2 ½ to 3 pages.  This is a one page thesis statement that offers no evidence, shows no development, and doesn’t use terms correctly.  If you want to write a paper on the allegorical nature of a story, you must be clear on what an allegory is, and how it works.  Remember, rewrites are always welcome, especially since I know you can do much better than this.  SO, I am calling you out.  I know you are smarter than this.