Reading

PD James: Don’t just plan to write—write. It is only by writing, not dreaming about it, that we develop our own style.

Steven Pressfield: The answer: plunge in.

Anne Enright: Keep putting words on the page.

Joyce Carol Oates: I have forced myself to begin writing when I’ve been utterly exhausted…

Cory Doctorow: Write even when the world is chaotic.

Hilary Mantel: If you get stuck, get away from your desk. Take a walk, take a bath, go to sleep, make a pie, draw, listen to music, meditate, exercise; whatever you do, don’t just stick there scowling at the problem. But don’t make telephone calls or go to a party; if you do, other people’s words will pour in where your lost words should be.

Helen Dunmore: Finish the day’s writing when you still want to continue.

Geoff Dyer: Have more than one idea on the go at any one time. If it’s a choice between writing a book and doing nothing I will always choose the latter. It’s only if I have an idea for two books that I choose one rather than the other. I always have to feel that I’m bunking off from something.

Jennifer Egan: [Be] willing to write really badly. It won’t hurt you to do that.

Sarah Waters: Treat writing as a job. Be disciplined.

Joshua Wolf Shenk: Get through a draft as quickly as possible.

Maryn McKenna: Find an organizational scheme for your notes and materials; keep up with it (if you are transcribing sound files or notebooks, don’t let yourself fall behind); and be faithful to it…

Taken from 99%, where there are other pieces of good advice, including how to break up over your writing.

Students create quizzes:
If you have reading assignments for a course you teach in multiple classes, why not have the homework be that the students create a quiz? Have them turn in one copy of the quiz that is “clean” and one copy with the answers. Then give the classes the other group’s quizzes.

Classes create quizzes:
Or have the class as a whole create a quiz from the individual ones and then exchange the quizzes between classes.

You might want to limit the type of questions they can use, but I can see where this could really help them think about the reading.

We’re having four readings that are the subject of our final. I may use this idea as a reading quiz.

Update:
Creator gets own quiz:
Or you could give the quiz to the person who created it (without the answers) the next class period and see how they do.

Best quizzes get bonuses:
Another idea based on this would be to have all the students turn in clean and answered quizzes. Give them credit for that as long as they meet your criteria (whatever that was). However, let them know ahead of time that you are going to choose the best (not necessarily hardest) three or four or however many quizzes and use those in a class. Then give bonus points (20-50) to the people who created the best quizzes.

If all the quizzes are lousy, then you can take the best questions and only give a few (2-5) points for each question you use.

At SXSW (South by SouthWest) two or three years ago, all the videographers were dismayed to realize that videography had already reached a peak. But when one of them said this, those who were presenting said, NO. You guys are on the forward edge so it seems to you like it has all been done, but behind you is an entire ocean that has not yet been surfed.

This seems to be the same question/perception that is being discussed in Is Design Thinking Dead? Hell, no.

The author, Grant McCracken, says that the moving force behind design thinking, Bruce Nussbaum, has declared that design thinking “has given … all it has to offer.” BUT…

In this world, designers can continue to create extraordinary value. They are the people who have, or could have, the laterality needed to solve problems, the sensing skills needed to hear what the world wants, and the databases required to build for the long haul and the big trajectories. Designers can be definers, making the world more intelligible, more habitable. But this won’t happen if, confronted by the inevitable difficulty of the early days, they take their balls and go home.

In sum, it is wrong to say that design thinking has given us “all the benefits it has to offer,” and it’s wrong to call it a “failed experiment.” I think we should be arguing that design thinking is just getting started. And a good thing, too; we need this approach more than we ever did.

I think McCracken is right.

And I think it is the same problem videopodcasters at SXSW had a few years ago. They were too far ahead of the wave to see the entire ocean behind it.

Scientific American has an article on training your brain which includes three reading/listening recommendations.

The books are:
Healing at the Speed of Sound

In the Thinking Life

The podcast is:
NeuroScene

Mark Sample has a post on Reading Aloud in the Classroom, specifically talking about having the students read.

Reading aloud is a right reserved for the professor.

And how wrong this is. How drearily, dreadfully, dismally wrong this is.

Sheridan Blau argues in The Literature Workshop that one of the most powerful tools at the disposal of readers is rereading. And reading aloud—reading out loud—is in turn one of the most powerful ways of rereading.

I will confess that it is only in my British Literature courses that I have students read aloud. And most of the time in Brit Lit I that is for only one play, Everyman. (And this semester, due to an MWF schedule, the students are reading that at home.)

This is making me stop and rethink my plans, not for reading in class, because I do that, but for having the students read more often. It is true that my students are more likely to be good readers now (at an SLAC) than in the past (at my CCs). I definitely want to help the students in any way I can and it looks like this is one way.

Professor Sample also gives a discussion over a passage from Frankenstein that he chose for reading aloud in the classroom. I may come back to that, as I do Frankenstein in my Brit Lit II course.

I was thinking of this in terms of graduate students particularly, but if you are looking for a job, you may need to do this too. Or if you are one of those people who dithers around thinking of all you could work on but never working on anything, you could use this too.

From Robert’s Rules of Writing by Robert Masello, rule number 96:

[O]nce you do make a decision, and pick one project and stick to it, you’ll notice something strange happens.
…
You become a virtual magnet for related information and ideas. Suddenly, you will start discovering, all around you, all sorts of juicy tidbits–observations, quotes, statistics, stories–that directly relate to, and nicely amplify, the project you are working on. You’ll stop at a yard sale and find an old book, for fifty cents, which provides great background research…. You’ll open the morning paper and come across a piece in the science section that neatly explains a rather arcane bit of business….

The more you focus in on one piece of work, the more attuned you are to everything around you that might help. And there’s a lot.

While I found this more true about my novel than my research, which would match up with his “nonfiction tome,” it is something that students need to be told so that they will
1. choose a topic and
2. start seeing what floats to the top around them.

The best line, and its explanation, comes immediately following the quote above.

Writers are scavengers–we find all kinds of odds and ends and either paste them into what we’re working on, or into notebooks for later use.

LiveScience has an interesting article called 9/11 Science: 10 Ways Terrorist Attacks Rocked America

Research that was energized or changed due to the 9/11 attacks:
Climate impact (of airplanes)
Memory
Dreaming
Impact on temperature of planes
Lowered drug and alcohol abuse
Blood pressure
Stoicism good
Closer involvement = raised alcohol abuse
Storage of memories for dementia patients
Collective trauma makes people sick

ScientificAmerican also has an article, called Science After 9/11: How Research Was Changed by the September 11 Terrorist Attacks.

research direction blossomed as a result of 9/11. Scientists and science policy experts say the federal government’s response to terrorist events in 2001, both the September attacks and the anthrax letters in October, have had a profound effect on U.S. research in areas as diverse as forensics, biodefense, infectious diseases, public health, cyber security, geology and infrastructure, energy, and nuclear weapons. Even the social sciences have been affected by the emergence of “terrorism studies” and the new emphasis on the threat in the field of risk analysis.

I don’t see how having planes out the sky for a few days can tell us the impact of planes. The temperatures in Texas have been the highest ever in the history of the state. Does that mean that ten years after 9/11 we are seeing the results of more flights? If so, then the average temperatures will continue to go up for the rest of time until flights drop down. It won’t though.

Others of the scientific breakthroughs or foci are interesting though.

Today I was listening to the audio book of Daniel Pink’s A Whole New Mind.

Left-brain Outsourced:
The premise of the book is that left-brain thinking, predominate in Western history (as is evident in our left to right reading), is on its way to being outsourced permanently in developed countries. Logical, sequential, knowledge that is emphasized in schools is left brain. Folks who are left-brain dominant are what Peter Drucker called “knowledge workers.” They have the ability to acquire and apply information.

Right-brain, the Brain of Tomorrow:
The right-brain thinking, which includes taking the long view, is more intuitive and non-linear, looks at things simultaneously, and concentrates on context, is going to be, according to Pink, the thinking which is successful in developed countries.

Right-brain thinking is all about:
forging relationships
synthesizing the big picture
invention

Despite the idea that work will be outsourced at an increasing level, and my disagreement with his understanding of the computer science field (My husband is a programmer.), Pink’s ideas about right-brain thinking are actually encouraging to me.

Why?

If Pink is right, then my teaching freshman composition is actually MORE important now than it was in the “information age.” And the graduate students in our English program, despite the lack of tenure-track positions for MAs, is actually preparing our graduates for the workplace of the future.

Pink declares that we are in or going into the Conceptual Age. He argues that there are six elements needed for this new time in history.

The six elements of the Conceptual Age:
design (and the engagement of the senses)
symphony (the big picture, not just a focus on the details)
empathy (the engagement of emotions)
narrative/story (not just argument)
play (humor and light-heartedness)
meaning (purpose and meaning, transcendence, spirituality)

These are things I can teach my students. These are things that they can learn, integrate, and use in their college careers and afterwards. These are things which will make them better people and more enjoyable friends.

What does this mean for my classroom?
For one thing, I am going to reframe the essay as “communicative works of art.” If the students think of what they are doing as art, hopefully the design elements will more readily be integrated. Also, if they think of them as communicative, that foregrounds the purpose. And, hopefully, describing them as works will indicate that effort is required to produce them.

Many of our students have been stifled in creativity through the rote memorization, excessive regurgitation, and emphasis on objective multiple-choice exams. That doesn’t even include the students whose creativity has been squashed by teacher attitudes, the need for practice, or because of comparison with some (known or unknown) “better” artist.

Sir Ken Robinson speaks at TED. “Schools kill creativity.

For another, it means I am going to concentrate on document design in my freshman composition classes in focused ways that I have not previously used outside of my own scholarship and my business and professional writing courses.

I have already begun to focus on document design in my own work. When I presented at a writer’s conference this summer, I worked very hard on the design aspects of my PowerPoint. Colors, images, and words were all carefully balanced.

I also focused on design in the QEP I handed in to my CC this spring. I knew that the dean was not interested in my topic, despite faculty support. So I decided that I would do something with my QEP that could be used even if my topic were not. The first thing I did was make my QEP beautiful. I chose colors, images, and graphics that spoke for what I was trying to say, representing and presenting it in an artistic way. Thus, my QEP, though originally about critical thinking, was really about design.

A third thing, I believe, is the focus on invention–a focus which was indicated to me as a higher priority eighteen months ago when Parlor Press’ call for papers brought out so many invention papers that the second CFP specifically delimited invention. I need to help my students begin to think of themselves as not just repositories or receptors of knowledge, but as folks involved in the creation of knowledge. That may be a bit harder than I envision.

When Troy, Michigan opened its first public library in 1971 (! What took them so long?), the librarian asked famous people to write the students letters. These came from important folks in government and two children’s authors, Dr. Seuss and E. B. White. I particularly like Dr. Seuss’s letter, though White’s is more developed.

My brother and I were much encouraged to read by our North Carolina library. (When we went to school in Charlotte, the library and church were the only safe places. I think it is still that way.)

When my family lived in several different places we were unable to access the library because of being outside a library’s taxing area. Even when we purchased rights to those libraries, they were small and limited in value.

Still, I appreciate and applaud libraries for making books available to people who would not be able to purchase reading materials on their own. For many people libraries are a safe place, a growing place. I am so grateful for libraries.