Year of "Cerebral" Work

Holy hiatus, bloggers! It's been ages since I've posted.

And the reason for that is that lately, I've been working on an enormous revision. This is a post-apocalyptic, dystopian political story. And it's not YA -- it's adult!

Genius Agent Holly has given me lots to think about. Big things. Scope. Stakes. Character.

These things are so hard, I had to think about them for a few weeks before even pulling the draft back up. And after I thought and thought and talked to a lot of people about really weird stuff, I am now writing. Writing!

My goal is to finish mid-February.

Because I want to stay in this all-out flow. And at the end of February, I'm teaching Oregon's first-ever Firefighting Composition Class!

In 2011, I did a ton of writing. I revised a YA literary story, scribbled essays for the NEH Institute in Oahu, designed the firefighting class, penned the dystopian novel, was accepted for publication by the American Journal of Nursing, and took two notebooks of notes on Southeast Asia in Honolulu.

I've read, too. I figure that over the last year, I've graded 600,000 words of student work. That's 2,400 pages!

Also, I've got a new curriculum for my winter research writing class: "Beyond Super-Sized; What Food Does For--And To--Us."

Still to come, in 2012, is an article in a State University of New York anthology on Southeast Asia.

Whew! It was a big year for my brain.

But when I put a sponge in the microwave, or miss the exit to get home, when I check myself in the school parking lot for pants or a skirt, or something, on my bottom half, I know that not much has changed.

Yep. I'm still me.

It Was Addiction

When I started teaching at the local community college, I was completely caught off guard by the deluge of essays about alcohol and meth addiction/rehab/relapse. For years, most of the narrative papers from my school have been about this struggle, the loss that comes with it, the day-to-day recovery.

I'll tell you what, it's heartbreaking, reading these stories of parents offering their 13 year-olds methamphetamine, of kids being taken away/given back/taken away again. Homes are lost. Jobs are lost. Marriages dissolve.

But in many of these papers, there has been hope. These students have been to the bottom, and have found it isn't pretty, and they've learned that they can make things better for themselves. They can choose to stop using, they can join support groups. They can decide to live again.

Now, though, there's another problem. A different problem. A new one.

For the first time since I've been teaching, the big theme is unemployment.

Sadly, it does make sense.

Oregon's unemployment rate exceeds that of the national average, and in our county here, it's two whole percentage points higher.

My students write of being laid off, of looking (and looking and looking) for work, of being turned away for body piercings or heavy-lifting requirements.

They are losing their homes, their families, their self-worth.

In these stories, I'm not seeing the hope, the will, that comes with the addiction essays.

I'm seeing desperation. Devastation. Despair.

I would like to see this turn around. Of course, I would like to see the job market explode. But, realistically, I want to see my students be stronger, be more active, to take control.

I want them to clean themselves up and look admin. right in the eye. I want them to shake hands with a firm grip, leave behind sparkly applications.

I want them to learn a little from each rejection, to get more determined, more wise, more driven from it.

I want them to keep trying.

Why I Love Grading Papers

Okay, there are lots of reasons to not love grading papers (it's tedious, time-consuming, frustrating, etc.).

And a lot of the time, I'd rather be doing other stuff (going on a walk, doing yoga, playing "10 Days in Europe" with my kids).

But there are some things about grading I really do love (beyond the obvious: the excuse to drink fancy coffee, and seeing my students improve).

I like that when I have papers to grade over a weekend, I pack in a bunch of other things around it(this weekend: hiking Mount Ashland, and taking my boys fishing, and having the kids' friends over, and going to breakfast with my good man).

I structure my time, when, usually, I'd be all over the place. Going nowhere. Getting nothing done.

Also, I get to practice what I'm teaching. I get to use the techniques I'm talking about in my own writing. I have to ask myself, Is all of this relevant? Is the story as tight and clean as humanly possible? Are my sentence beginnings different?

And, while I am firing up my neurons, so are my kids. They're doing their homework and playing guitar and building amazing things with Legos. Even The Husband will at least scan Sports Illustrated.

And, the biggest plus: I don't have to cook! I can sit on the sofa or at the table or in bed, and read incredible essays about other people's fascinating lives.

50 papers about "The Most Significant Time of Your Life"?

I'd take that any day over having to fry up a bunch of chicken.

Frozen in Time

So yesterday, my community college writing classroom was visited by the vice president.

I was nervous, I told my husband, because the lesson was a tricky one (the integration of implications), because it was the vice president coming, because even though I trusted my students completely, anything, anything could happen.

And it did.

The clock stopped.

Now, you might think there could be a worse distraction. And, there definitely could be.

I had practiced, I had prepped my incredible students. I had ironed, even got my hair cut.

But I had no idea how dependent I was on that cheeky little clock. Starting class, giving the 5-minute warm-up activity, stopping for a break, resuming, ending...there was no measure for any of it.

Technology -- basic technology -- had failed me.

Sure, the lesson went on. There were popcorn kernels and writing prompts. Reflection. Analysis. Evaluation. The students were their incredible selves: engaged, delightful, critical thinkers in full attendance.

Halfway through the hour(?), I stopped sweating it. If we started at 9:47 and ended at 9:47, if anything went super south, I convinced myself, I could pretend the whole class never happened.

Here's Why

I haven't been blogging:

Because somehow we're five whole weeks into the term already.

Because I've been ironing out a new speech curriculum.

Because Dominic has had track meets at the middle school.

Because my sister Erika and her husband Ryan and their incredible 11 week-old baby came to visit from Sacramento.

Because I'm writing a little, and thinking about e-books a lot.

Because with a monthly grocery bill total of over $1500, that's oodles of shopping and unpacking and cooking!

Best Easter ever? Writing group pizza! Four writers, four men, eight kids hopped up on marshmallow eggs.

How about you? You getting any writing done?

Putting It In Writing

Dear Application Essay for National Endowment of the Humanities Fellowship,

You are one tough egg to crack.

I've obsessed over you for four months now: our coffee dates, our dinner dates. You control my dreams.

Why are you so hard?

I mean, I've written tons of essays. Tons. And yet, I don't know what to do with you.

You've got some serious standards.

Can I meet your expectations?

Should I stop overthinking and just embrace you?

What do you want from me?

Lovingly,

Jennie

What We're Doing in Writing 121

Because my class is about critical thinking, today I am changing the room around. So my dedicated students never forget to see things a different way.

Today's lesson is "Corn." Yes. As in "on-the-cob."

I will show these eager learners a big spider-y brainstorm on how to integrate implications. Like: "What is the political perspective on corn?" and "How is corn related to anthropology?"

And while we're thinking and writing, we'll be eating Doritos and drinking Coke. Breakfast of Champions. To taste our content.

Yummy.

This Is How Much I Love My Writing Group

On Wednesday night, I brought the worst piece of writing to Starbucks.

While I sipped my salted caramel hot chocolate, Christy, Anjie, and Julie's pens went to work, crossing out circling and adding arrows and inserts.

It was an essay I've had in my head for four months, an application for a National Endowment of the Humanities fellowship.

The thing was, my creative juices just weren't flowing. At all. I ended up pretty much writing two opposite things and trying to mash them together.

Nope.

And then, there were the beginnings, all twelve of them:anecdotes, imagery, question, setting, thesis.

It. Was. A. Mess.

But after a few minutes, er, an hour, thanks to my WG, I had ideas!!! And since Wednesday, I've let them sit and stew and get all juicy and yummy.

Today is the day I will take Christy's suggestion to really plug the need for diversity in Southern Oregon. I'll add Julie's argument that our current composition topic, "Terrorism," only fuels the fear our students already have. And I'll answer Anjie's questions about how my past experience will enrich the program.

And that will make a way better four pages than I've got right now.

And I promise. Next week, I'll bring my A game to edit for them.

Let Your Light Shine

Before Dave and I pruned our peach tree last weekend, we did a little Internet digging on the how-to, and found that 50% of the growth had to go.

As we Sawz-all-ed big branches out of the middle, half of me cried over all the progress that was taken away, just like that. But the other half of me saw the potential for new growth. Now, there's a lot of room in the center where the sun will shine down, where juicy fruit will bloom in July.

While my students revise their analysis essays today, I will remind them of this. That is takes some heavy pruning to let in the light, the potential, the good stuff.

I wish I had time to grab some canned peaches, so that we could taste the labor of our efforts.

What It's All About

There's a poster in my third-grader's class: "Give a seed of a story, not the whole watermelon."

I teach this to my community college composition students.

And I try to do it in my own writing.

It's the very essence of a story: the content.

How do we cover it though, and how do we cover it well?

Author/editor Nancy Lamb shared this tip at the Big Sur Writing Workshop: "If it doesn't move the story forward, it goes."

Okay, relevance. We move the plot forward. But how?

Exactly.

How is one of the two (hard) questions that bring us deeper in content. The other is why. Both deal with character motivation, conflict, backstory,and meaning/significance.

We do it by showing character action/reaction to dialogue/scene.

We all have the who, what, where, when down, right? So taking these elements further, with why and how, is really the heart of the story.

It's tricky, yes. But that's what makes the story good. Because the things that happen to the character (the plot) and how they affect him is what the reader cares about.

At the end of the story, the reader has to be able to say, "So...the character lives happily ever after with his true love, because he deserves that." Instead of the reader thinking, "So... what?" Which is empty, unsettling.

Content is everything.

Between What Rocks and A Soft Place -- Part I

I'm applying for two fellowships: to examine the history and nature of American consumerism at Bard Graduate College in New York City this July, and to the University of Hawaii for an interdisciplinary curriculum approach to integrating Southeast Asian cultures.

I mean, I think I'm applying. I'm collecting letters of recommendation, working with my department head to refine my scope of study. Dave even took off the whole month of July from the fire department, and in my dreams, my family comes out to wherever I am for the last couple weeks and flies me home.

But while I'm forming the research questions--How have the effects of material culture shaped the American class system, and how it has been/will be emulated globally? versus How have the collaboration and conflict of Southeast Asian cultures influenced/been influenced by America?--I'm watching Dominic color a map of the Great Lakes, and I'm asking a different question.

Should I even go?

My boy is thirteen, growing up every single day. What if I miss something really great when I'm gone? What if I miss something terrible?

Is this a selfish thing, going away to study, to stretch? Does it make me a bad mom? Or is it an opportunity I have to try to take? To show my kids that learning is important? Will I be better mom because of it?

Big Wow!

It's over, this first term of the year, and my students wrote the best research papers, got the best grades I've seen in my teaching career.

Part of this is because of a program my community college is piloting: high school graduates with a 3.5 or higher GPA will have 75% of their tuition paid the first year, 100% the second.

So, the valedictorian from South Medford High School was one of my students, adding to the diversity of a college with 25% Hispanic students, ESL and GED programs, workforce training, first-generation college attendees, drug and alcohol recoverees, ranchers, second-career seekers, two-year degree earners, four-year degree hopefuls, unemployed.

She and her fellow Rogue Ambassadors brought a confidence to the classroom. Lively discussion flowed freely and respectfully, papers were structured and clear, speeches were poised and purposeful.

The class is hard, and (from what I've heard), I'm a tougher teacher. But this term, I entered more As into the computer system than ever before, and we celebrated with donuts and Diet Dr. Pepper and a silly class picture.

Art Attack!

Art is everywhere, and I'm loving it!

This weekend in Eugene, Mary, Daney, and I went to an incredible art fair. There was pottery, paintings, silver, silkscreenings, soap. Weavers spun wool, glass blowers blew, and Young Bollywood dancers pranced across a packed stage.

When I came home, I framed and put up a few of the kids' pieces: Dominic's bright bald guy sitting on a couch with peace pillows, Daney's watercolor owl under the moon, Rees' colored pencil "Duk Bil Platapoos."

Tomorrow in class, I'm sharing my love; we're doing a lesson on writing essay titles with a billion little worksamples from Pacific Northwest artists.

One of the things I love about art is how long it takes. That it's a process. a quick change, making the world different, better.

I've planted all kinds of bulbs and perenialls outside. Nothing will pop for four or five months, but the seeds are all there, the color is waiting.

If you are in need of some reds, greens, and purples, if you're craving pretty, look up Catherine Denton's blog. You might win yourself some inspiration!

Cerebral Week

By Thursday night when my writing group resumed after our summer break, my head was seriously swirling.

In four days, I had drafted a new curriculum for the community college writing classes I start teaching on Monday. I began writing a new novel with my husband. I critiqued a fabulous manuscript, went to an inservice day at school, and penned an 8-page essay about my dad. (A couple of these were done simultaneously. Guess which?)

Plus, there was the middle school math homework: Dominic's statistics and Daney's factoring.

Thank goodness for the season premier of "Glee."

Nothing soothes me like some Sue Sylvester.

"Part" Time

It's over, my fifth year of teaching at Rogue Community College.

At the end there, it got a little crazy. But I made it, and not only through 7 writing classes at 3 different levels, with around 200 students, and maybe 2,000 pages of grading.

I made it, despite our house's having swine flu, chicken pox, fifth disease, and two broken noses.

Around my teaching, life happened. Dominic did basketball and track. Daney had fewer seizures than last year; she played piano and read through the whole kids' section of the library. Rees strummed "I Feel Good" to a packed audience.

Dave fought a few huge fires, and several smaller ones (some right here at home).

In eight months, I went to Seattle, Sacramento (four times), San Diego, Mexico.

I revised a book.

And now, we're leaving for Auburn again. My brother, Mac, graduates from high school. There's a pirate party, of course, and a surprise slide show that Steven and I have been working on.

So more from there, later.

But for now, I'll say this: my year, it was nothing.

I sketched out a little prose of what went on in my classroom in this last term. Sure, I'll post it, and it's all true. But you'll never, ever believe it.

Catching Up

It is now called an "epidemic" in America, and spans the globe--a "crisis" even in the United Arab Emirates, an otherwise male-dominated society.

It is the rate at which males are matriculating (getting into) and graduating from higher education institutions.

In February, the New York Times reported that for every 100 males who graduated from college, there were 185 (almost twice as many!) females.

In Australia, women graduates outnumber men by hundreds of thousands.

And in Dubai, 60% of the university co-ed student body is female.

What's more astounding (or alarming) is the rate at which females are superseding males in terms of higher ed.

I see it in my classroom. These 18-25 year-old "boys" wiggle in their desks, with their iPods and iPhones stuffed in their pockets. They're drinking Dr. Pepper and thinking about Megan Fox.

An hour and 50 minutes of learning how to write is a really long time, time these guys could be advancing their next mission on Halo 3.

Their female counterparts, however, are writing down every word I'm lecturing on kinds of conclusions. They're asking questions and leading group discussions on the anthropological implications of corn.

Last night at a party of almost all university professors, I asked a sociologist how his male students are performing. He responded by motioning a steep downward slope with his hand.

This morning, I chatted with a proud Harvard dad. His daughter was one of 16 Oregonians to be accepted into the university for the fall, hefty scholarship included. The three other applicants from her high school--with state swim team wins, national debate wins, and perfect SAT scores: all male--were denied admission.

What's the deal?

The deal is that the chasm between female and male students is widening. From the beginning, boys are young, active, kinesthetic learners. But that's not how they are taught.

Their hunter nature to seek and provide food and protection, to procreate, conflicts with their ability to maintain hours inside, in desks. That's why they're thinking about Megan Fox and Halo instead of citations and sentence fluency.

They don't care.

Okay, so what? How is all this an epidemic?

Because, for one, it's an economic issue. The marriage market is changing. Educated women are willing to hold off on weddings. And they're just short of out-earning their partners. But. The divorce rate is steadily climbing. One might argue that males aren't ready to settle down as young as before. And if that's so, they're probably less ready for higher ed., as well.

Sociologically, for too many males, the alternative to college is blue-collar work, or no work, which leads to a higher tendency toward crime.

It's also an equity issue. Are colleges actively recruiting, funding, and supporting men the way they have with women since the Rights Movement?

Males are valuable. Yet they don't know it. They offer a plural perspective--"the other," Lisa Loomer, my friend and co-writer of "Girl, Interrupted," has reminded me.

How can this "other" be preserved, even fostered?

First, recruitment and support have to be engaged. Even filling out college applications and scholarship forms can be overwhelming. Also, the structure of college classes has to change. More frequent classes for shorter periods over a quarter system is more apt to curving attention issues.

Curriculum has to include a variety of teaching methods, including hands-on approaches, out-of-classroom experiences, and one-on-one sessions with the instructor. I'm going to throw out a radical solution here: to crank up competition, the essence of males' nature.

Boy-friendly literature must be used, considering narrator, theme, plot.

For writing, suggested topics must embody concepts males know about--and like. Since male writers tend to be more succinct, papers need not be long. If guys can write a tight 2-page paper, they can write a fluffy 20-page one.

Parents have to recognize the un-readiness of males before kindergarten. These boys need to be supported in preschool programs for an extra year, to start their whole education later.

Mostly, parents and teachers have to recognize that boys are not learning the way we are teaching them. Because they can't connect with it. Because they don't care.

We have to care about that, first. And then we have to change it.


*photo by Veer.

I Don't Seem Like That Kind Of Person

Today I took my writing classes to the college library for a teensy schpiel on the perils of plagiarism, as well as to gather some info. for the upcoming Big Paper.

There are all kinds of topics: health care, corn syrup, quitting smoking, female snowboarders, faith-healing, dieting fads.

One younger man came up to me at the end of class and asked how he could flush out his essay on the history of the NBA.

Well, I told him, you could integrate the anthropological implication--like how Dr. J's game and attitude and image were completely different from Allen Iverson's. What would the legendary Larry Bird say about a guy like LeBron James?

These troubled, trash-talking, tattooed players are role models. Even though they don't want to be. Should they be held accountable for values? That could definitely be explored.

So could the media's exploitation of them.

Then there's the economic implication: the salary the players are getting--which is controversial in itself--and the cut their agents and owners take.

Plus, there's the politics: the draft, recruiting, contracts, unions...

My young student looked at me with big eyes. "Wow," he said. "You don't seem like the kind of person who would know all that."

Part 2: The Other Stuff I Learned Lately

So, among finishing my revision and grading 60 5-page papers on terrorism, and oh, yeah, raising three kids (sorry, baby, now I get why you've been doing all the shopping/cooking/cleaning/laundry), I was recently a critiquer for a literary contest. I can't say which one, or where, or anything, but I can pass on what I learned from reading the first couple dozen pages of a mound of literary fiction entries.

Most of them were purpose-centered around the MC's journey of self-discovery.

Themes were mostly relationships or historical or spiritual.

Internal and external conflicts were tough to balance and maintain.

Often, secondary characters could've used much more rounding out.

Somehow, I could hear the masculine voice of the writer. These premises were either a war or a quest, and were action-packed. But they often lacked reaction and emotion.

Also, as the reader, I found myself looking for dialogue -- really craving it.

And setting was everything: I wanted to know the place and time exactly.

There. Reading all this other work really made me evaluate my own. It was insightful. If I can use it to make my work stronger, that's good. And if I helped other writers strengthen their work, even better!

What I'm Learning From Reading -- Part 1

I'm smack in the middle of editing and scoring 60 community college critical thinking papers (hence the bloglessness), that are, for the most part, pretty decent.

The topic isn't an easy one, especially for conservative Medford, Oregon: "How have the events of 9/11 shaped or shifted the U.S. perspective on Muslims?"

Yet, the papers--the first of the term--are sophisticated in sentence structure, with questions, semi-colons, participial phrases.

College-level word choice is used.

Usually content is a problem: putting in what's relevant, and keeping out what's not. Hard to do in 5 pages. But it seems less so this time.

Because it's APA, there's an abstract, and a reference page.

It's all definitely not something a student can whip up in an hour.

Most papers are either B-s or Fs.

Here's what's going well: leading into and away from citations, using transitional phrases, integrating implications and interesting introductions, titling the person quoted.

Militant Islam is distinguished from Islam itself.

Conclusions include calls-to-action of examination, understanding, and education.

The pitfalls are what they usually are: connecting introduction to the body, achieving length, citing properly, tightening conclusions.

I try to head off those issues in class, but they seem hard to overcome.

In all, I learn from these. How to be a better teacher. How to be a better writer. How to be a better person.

Most students will put about 10 hours of work into writing these papers.

Between the planning, the prep, the instruction, the grading, me, I'll put in about 60.

After the Intro

Well, I'm 9,000 words into revising, now! I'm on page 25, which doesn't seem very far, but I'm happy about where the book is going.

I overhauled the whole beginning.

"Did the agent ask you to do that?" my husband asked.

"No," I told him. But I can't redo the end without changing the intro.

And it's better: stronger, with more layers and conflict, and character development. More wanting. More mystery.

I even changed how the character dresses. And how she talks. She is softer, more fragile, mistrusting.

There's so much to do. I remember Editor Nancy Lamb saying at a conference: "If it doesn't move the plot forward, it goes."

And as I use description, setting, I'm wondering how much of that moves the plot forward.

My book, DRAIN, is a literary paranormal. A WHAT? I know, right? A literary paranormal? The seeing element is minimal, though, to my character's conflict. It interferes with what she wants, and how to get (or keep) it.

I'm a skinny writer. Not at all skinny in the physiological sense, but skinny in that my manuscripts flush out around 52,000 words.

For this voice, I'm sticking with something hollow. It's often sad and empty, like wind through a tunnel.

But today, I go back to school. For two Critical Thinking classes. And there's a stack of manuscripts I need to give feedback on in the next couple of weeks. And there's kids and laundry. But I'll get it done, DRAIN. I totally see the end, and I'm super excited to get there.