Ethics and all that

I was struck, reading Kop and Hill and esp. Downes, of their subtext of the need to respect learners, and how many questions that raises. What does it mean to respect students? I think about the teachers' lounge (or blog equivalent) and the utterly necessary freedom there to say what drives us nuts about students. Even as I engage in that, it feels disrespectful-- like gossip. But maybe it's also constructive somehow. I don't know. I feel like I learn a lot from interacting with students, and I don't know if I'd learn as much if I were really idealistic about them. So still thinking about ethics of describing writing/learning communities, but how do you avoid it? Using the people who confide in you? Students, colleagues, clients? I don't know what it means to respect their privacy, or whether I'm violating that privacy when I discuss their work or their behavior. I try to mask the identity and usually revise whatever the question or issue is so that even they wouldn't recognize it. 

I have always TRIED to come up with my own "teachable moments", but I don't have a great imagination, and a client or student or friend will have a writing or editing issue-- like a sentence even-- that is so perfect, I want to talk or write about it. I always try to change the wording or something so it's not traceable. But sometimes--

Once I got an email from -- (you get to recognize this sort of subterfuge after awhile... that really annoying commenter on my editing blog who disagrees with everything I say about commas? That was a woman using a male name, and I only know that because my co-blogger traced the IP address, and really, that should prove I am not the nibby one in our partnership :)-- a man who was trying to sell a romance novel and so wrote under a woman's name (ask Nicholas Sparks... a man writing a romance novel is cool! Keep the male name, fella!). Anyway, this guy obviously-- again, you get to notice this sort of thing-- loves loves loves flashbacks, or anyway incorporated one in a scene and wanted to justify it, and wrote to me asking for my thoughts about flashbacks. Well, I knew she/he just wanted to hear that "flashbacks are awesome," but I actually think flashbacks are lousy plotting, and wrote a long honest answer, and when she/he wrote back and said that surely there were good reasons for flashbacks, and I wrote another achingly earnest reply about how flashbacks disturb the chronology and everything in the book ought to contribute to the character change and flashbacks (which, like dreams, don't actually happen), and of course I referenced Oedipus the King (aka The World's Greatest Plot Evuh), and he/she wrote back a response dripping with contempt (because, after all, after 30 years analyzing fiction, I don't know as much as he/she who just started writing, which makes me wonder why he/she decided to ask me anyway), "Well, that is all well and good for Sophocles, but that was a long time ago, and I'm not Greek, so who cares."

This was SO PERFECT. I mean, really, how totally new-novelist (again, have encountered many) to sneer that Sophocles is outre (only they wouldn't know the term :) and who cares, and "I'm not Greek."

You know, because only GREEK NOVELISTS can learn anything from Sophocles.

So I couldn't help myself! When I gave workshops about plotting, and someone asked about flashbacks, I'd say, "Well, let me tell you about someone who loves flashbacks, and told me, when I explained about how Sophocles used a flashback, 'I'm not Greek, so who cares!'"

It was like, you know, the perfect comment from the scornful sort of writer who refuses to learn from other writers, like, you know, SOPHOCLES.

So once I was saying this line and everyone was laughing-- because it's that sort of awful arrogance we have only when we're just starting to write fiction-- and I noticed that one guy wasn't laughing. And afterwards he came up to me and said, "That wasn't what I meant. I meant just that what you were saying didn't apply to me." IT WAS HIM!

(Well, it did apply to him, but I recognize that most writers have to insulate themselves from influence in order to find their voice, and that very few are like me-- trained in literary analysis and never actually freed from the need to analyze. So he couldn't see that Sophocles's use of doubled roles and revelations-in-flashback really did illuminate his own situation, and anyway, duh, he asked me about flashbacks.)

But instead of snapping back that he should learn more about his craft, and that western lit was based on 3000 years starting with those Greeks he scorned, I ducked my head and apologized for using his very funny line.

ME IS WIMP.

But, you know, ethics? I don't know.

It sure is easier to do research about EA Poe than to write about actual writers I encounter in my life.


(BTW, I just proofed the galleys of my mystery book coming out supposedly in two weeks, and IT HAS A FLASHBACK! On page 3! I can't believe it! Are we sure I wrote this book?)

Cooperation vs. competition

I was just up in Canada, in Stratford, at the truly great world treasure Shakespeare Festival. It's sort of easy to claim this for our own, first because it's within driving distance and the accents sound like us and Ontario looks almost exactly like Ohio.

But it's in Canada, you know? A different country! Their money has colors (and not just green)! They pronounce the "U" in "house" as a separate sound!

So we went to dinner with a couple there. They'd both lived in the US, so of course we asked if they noticed any differences. "A thousand subtle ones," one said, and gave a few examples. And the one big one-- Americans are competitive. REALLY competitive. Not "we won the gold medal in hockey the last Olympics" competitive (the Canadians are pretty competitive that way :), but the constant assessment-- am I better than he is? Is she dissing me? What's my place in this hierarchy? Who do I have to step on to get higher? <G>

Of course, being a competitive American, I snapped, "That might be exactly why we made it to the moon first, and you-- oh. Right. Canada doesn't have a space program, does it?" (Okay, that was low!)

But as I was working on my community of practice paper, I was noticing that these communities are usually cooperative. And it's especially striking because many of these kinds of communities (like professional networks) are actually composed of people who are kind of rivals-- Fifty attorneys in the same small city. 800 writers trying to get the attention of 6 big publishing companies. Four graduate students in the same program.

It's almost as if for the purpose of the community, they tacitly agree not to compete in this forum. That's essential, isn't it? Otherwise, can you trust? Like I've been in writing communities for a long time, and there's constant exchanges of information and wisdom. If I thought Amy Author over there was trying to undermine me to get some advantage in the marketplace, I can't trust it when she says, "Oh, Avon isn't looking for medieval novels this year." And for the community to work, we have to trust each other. Does that mean we can't compete? Or just not when we're in the "community center?"

My source for the early years of the COP I wrote about remembers that the cooperative spirit of the early year started breaking down once there was a "prize," when the "top rated" manuscripts were to be given evaluations and consideration by a big-name editor. Suddenly it wasn't a bunch of writers trying to improve and helping each other improve, but a group of competitors for the prize of editor attention. It was, in her mind, the beginning of the end (though the community still exists).

It still exists, so isn't that a success? The ones who participate now seem eager and willing-- but the emphasis seems to be more on making friends who will "vote you up" so you win the right to present to the editor.

My source has quit with some of the early members. They still keep in touch, but there's no community-- pairings, friendships, but not community.

So as I read Siemens, as he talks about connectivism and its value, I very much agree. But how does it work with American competitiveness? I have thought for years that the Millennial generation is much less competitive than my own, though I think the culture has been trying to force competition on them by making it clear that only 10% or so will be "winners" and everyone else I guess will be "losers." I love how hard the young people work to resist that, which is hard for many of them because they are such a compliant and pleasant generation and not very rebellious. They are so much more "connectivist" in the Siemen sense-- quick to form groups, eager to find consensus, skilled at cooperation. We are fortunate in this age of online that they are our students, as they are much more likely to be good at collaborating than the Gen-Xers, for sure.

Who what when

I met someone at a dinner party-- how would we go on without synchronicity? -- who worked for a company that did focus groups, and she asked me, does your department ever do student focus groups?

And I blurted out, "No-- we're scared what they'll say."

And I know that's true with my own potential final best practices subject. I'd be interested in a focus group that looked at my group's practices and materials, but I'm really pretty sure that the organization itself does not want to hear it.

Very difficult. I don't know. I like the work, I love the students. Yeah, if I had the choice, I'd do things differently. (To be honest, I DO things differently. I just kind of ignore what I'm told to do and I think is unhelpful. I do what I think will work best with the situation, not what I'm supposed to do, but seriously, if anyone was paying attention, they'd not be happy that I did what I thought was best. Which is not, actually, what I'm "supposed to do.")

Anyway. Point is.

I am thinking of doing a best practices memo for final assignment on this job, and creating a focus group of students to evaluate materials -- most of my work is direct interaction with students, but most of my time is spent creating materials customized to the specific course and assignment-- I'm hoping even if the students don't respond, they'll read the material and have those models.

But let's just say... this is not the sort of thing that is encouraged. <G>.

I do have an alternative of looking at a past job. I'd like to design the whole semester online course so that everything -- the discussion forums, the assignments-- is very purposeful, aimed at accumulating material and sources and analysis for the final project. (That is, there's an "annotated bib" assignment, but it's about the topic that the students will be addressing in the final project.) I'd probably pose this as cognitive -- about skills, but also constructivist because of the scaffolding.

That's safer. More than that, it's not so frustrating. It's hard to just keep battering against the brick wall of utter uninterest. It's frustrating to have to keep saying, "Listen. I do the work, I interact with the students. Why aren't you interested in my experience?" But I've kept saying that, and I get the big sigh of exasperation and the implication that I'm annoying and boring, going on and on about the mission of the writing center and what I've learned from my students, and how we should be doing research or at least keeping track of what we do and what results that produces.... but that's like heresy. It's insubordination.

Oh, well. I've resolved to keep my head down, do my work as best I can, and stay out of trouble. And keep my mouth shut.   (This will last a day or two.)

I think I'll do the other project. That won't, at least, get me fired if anyone is googling and locates this blog.

Multiplicity: A Novelist's Journey

Multiplicity 

Patient: Doctor, I think I'm going crazy.  Sometimes I find that I'm talking to myself inside my head.

Doctor: Now, now, I wouldn't start worrying about it until someone starts talking back.

Patient: Well.... 

Admit it.  You've got a nagging doubt about all those voices in your head.  They not only talk back to you, they argue with each other.  Sometimes you get headaches because they stomp around and slam doors.   When you read Three Faces of Eve, you realized if someone wrote about your multiple personality syndrome, it would be Three Hundred Faces.

Oh, yeah, I know.  It's different for you.  You're not crazy.  Crazy people can't tell the difference between reality and fantasy, and you can.  Right.  Consider that time your spouse came in and found you dissolved in tears at your keyboard, and you looked up and said, "I couldn't help it.  I had to kill Joey off."  Who was more real to you at that moment, your living spouse or the dead Joey?

 It's always been like this for you, hasn't it?  While your little friends were dressing their Barbies up, you'd already endowed Ken with a dark secret, a dangerous smile, and a lethal set of double entrendres.  Other kids quit "making pretend" when they started making out.  Not you.  (You even found yourself murmuring "My hero!" after your first kiss, didn't you?)  And while your college classmates were struggling to understand Othello, you were already plotting the sequel, The Redemption of  Iago.

Then adulthood arrived, and so did shame.  Like Adam and Eve, you learned to keep a fig leaf over your private parts– it's just your private parts were inside your head.  You didn't tell your soap-loving best friend about how you managed to get her favorite characters back together.  And though you confessed every last little real-life crush to your significant other, you knew better than to reveal the fictional hunks leaning insolently against the doorways to your imagination.  You knew even the people who loved you the most just wouldn't understand. In fact, they'd think you were... crazy. 

And then the miracle happened.  You met a fiction writer, or took a writing class, or joined a writing group, and as you listened, what you heard spread wonder through you. Other people had voices too.  Other people– regular people, by the looks of them, with jobs and families just like you– muttered both sides of an imaginary conversation as they drove home through rush-hour traffic.  Other people bought three baby-name books years before they had babies; they too had mental sextuplets to christen.

Do you remember that moment when you realized you weren't alone?  And you weren't crazy?  It was liberating and joyous and it transformed your life.  All you had to do about those people in your head was ... write them down.  You just had to take all those secret jottings and connect them into a plot.  You could use all your elaborate theorizing on their childhoods and call it backstory.  You could take all those crazy floorplans of their castles and call it setting. Then you could give the characters the ending they deserved, and the entire universe, at least the one behind your eyes, would be restored to order, and you could call that plotting.

Since then, you've never looked back, have you?  In the community of writers, it's 
perfectly okay to spend more time decorating your hero's home than you ever spent on your own.  Your writing friends know better than to sneak out and dial 911 when you're discussing your villain's favorite poisons.  They listen sympathetically to your complaints that even after you've killed her mother and blinded her father, your heroine still insists on being as perky as Sandra Bullock.

All this support, however, has made you forget how deeply weird it is to live inside your characters while they live inside you.

  

But here I am to remind you of this paradox: Making fictional humans has the simultaneous effect of making authors both more and less human themselves.Non-writers, I think, assume that we paint from life, that we get our ability to characterize from close observation of our fellow "real people."  (Only writers, by the way, will understand why I put "real people" in quotes there.  It's not like our characters aren't real people too, right?) It's true, we do our share of people-watching, although I suspect for many of us it's more a matter of blocking the motion than deciphering the emotion– "So that's how a man yanks open the door and gets out of the car in one fluid movement!" We are properly appreciative of all the subtle variations of human psychology, and if we have a pen handy, we jot our observations down.

But just as often it's the reverse: We understand the people outside our head because we know the ones inside.  Like Walt Whitman, we contain multitudes, and all we have to do sometimes is ask, and they'll tell us who and what they are– and why.  It's all too easy to extrapolate from their revelations to the motives and values of everyone around us.  (When I was in graduate school in the English program, I took as an elective a Criminal Behavior psychology course.  Impressed with my paper on what combination of background factors produce what variety of crime, the professor asked if I were a social worker who worked with many offenders.  "No, " I replied, "I'm a writer, and I have a lot of villains.")

We need characters to fill every role, so we might take on the tolerant attitude of "it takes all kinds of people to build a world." Unfortunately, the tolerance we have for some of our characters can be disorienting when we try to apply it to their counterparts in the real world.  I can just imagine Thomas Harris's justification for bestowing connubial bliss upon Hannibal the Cannibal– "Serial murderers need a happy ending too!"  Let's just say, we might not be the best jurors for Jeffrey Dahmer's trial.

The problem is, once we construct the backstory for our characters, we realize everyone in the world has backstory too– traumas and issues and dark pasts that affect their present behavior.  So we search in their actions for some rich and complex motivation, which can make us more intuitive about other people's feelings than almost any shrink.  We know that the boy standing defiant on the playground is trying to conceal his loneliness and longing for a friend.  We know the girl looking up from her book is trying to get up her courage to approach him. That's the wonderful empathy of authors.

The problem is, while we're melting with sympathy for them, we're also plotting how, if we were in charge of this story, we'd have the school bully (hmmm... probably acting out because his father beats him, or maybe his mother's abandoned him?) taunt the boy and then the girl would rush to his defense–

In other words, we would turn those real people into characters.

It happens all the time.  We'll be watching the news, sincerely weeping sympathetic tears as some parent whose child has gone missing begs for her safe return... while idly thinking that there's something a bit off about the gestures and expression there, and wouldn't it be cool if it turned out that the parent actually murdered the child and buried her – That's sick.  (And it doesn't make us feel much better when it turns out, three days later, our fiction is actually fact.)

Or our best friend will be lamenting her mother's increasing frailty, and we'll mention our last heroine's conflict about putting her mother in a nursing home.  And we're surprised and ashamed when the friend snaps, "My mother's broken hip, alas, is real, not some subplot that's going to be wrapped up neatly by Chapter 14!"

But we do agree, don't we, that there is no reason for a husband to object to an entirely rational discourse on the allure of a  flinty-eyed tattooed Adonis ex-cop of a hero?  (And that is nothing at all like our justifiable irritation when he says, as he closes the cover of our latest release, "You know, I'd like to take your heroine straight to bed."  He's.... he's objectifying her!)

Let's face it.  Sometimes our amazing ability to bring characters to life gets a little scary.  It isn't just that our life becomes fodder for our fiction; sometimes, as we try out our characters' poses and test their value system, our life starts to imitate our fiction. It might start with the helpful query "What would my resourceful heroine do?" whenever we're confronted with a difficult decision.  But soon, we're taking self-defense classes because she's getting stalked.  Think of poor Stephen King.  He recalls the spookily cheerful driver of the van that nearly killed him as "a character out of one of my own novels." (And the driver died mysteriously, alone in his trailer-- of course it was a trailer-- a few months later... insert Twilight Zone music, please.)

There is magic in this ability of ours to imagine people so completely, but it's a dark magic too.  A wonderful empathy guides us to embody universal human issues in unique characters, who sometimes inspire our readers to realizations about their own lives.  But the obverse of writer's empathy is a sort of sociopathy that leads us to take a notebook to an aunt's funeral so we can jot down those telling details– the glint of the sun on the teak coffin, our uncle's fist closing hard around the stem of a lily and breaking it.

Only a sociopath, after all, could create people just to torture them with "conflict" and "motivation" and "poetic justice".  Only a sociopath could say, "I couldn't help it. I had to kill Joey off."  A sociopath... or a writer.

"There is a splinter of ice in the heart of a writer," Graham Greene remarked.  I think that is the paradox that ultimately makes us writers– the mix of warm beating love and icy determination.  But remember, the splinter pierces our heart first of all, and as long as we can feel that, experience the pain our characters experience, we will retain the humanity needed to imagine those inner voices into life, and make them become real for the "real people" who are our readers.

Strengths

I have a host of teaching weaknesses! But now I'm going to think of what I do well. I'm actually a good analyst, so my best teaching I think is done in writing. That is, I'm a better textbook writer than I am a classroom teacher. What I'm really good at is analyzing how a piece of writing works and how to make that happen in your own writing. So oddly enough, I'm best at a great distance (writing articles about writing, keeping the edittorrent blog about editing), or working very directly one-on-one with a writer. The f2F classroom has never been my metier, especially college classrooms where discussion is to be encouraged. I'm more a lecturer type (because I want to share all that analysis!) than a discussion-facilitator.

Anyway, I've sort of kept teaching until I happened into the two (opposing) situations I'm good at-- giving lectures about writing and plotting to large groups, and tutoring students directly in a writing center. (Also I do coaching of fiction writing on an ad hoc basis, and teach text-based email-list classes on various fiction-writing subjects, during which I always give way, way too much information and analysis, which annoys many students and delights (the best) some others. Also these classes are a way I create gobs of material that I use later to write books and booklets about these writing topics.)

So anyway, tonight I decided my greatest strength was not the analytical ability, or my enthusiasm about the rather arcane topics I teach. Rather it's... acceptance.

I was having dinner with my son, a newly commissioned military officer kicking his heels for a couple months before his next training assignment. He is, like so many of his generation, a serious gamer, but he's always been his mother's son and more fascinated by the stories than by the technology. We talk a lot about how this new medium allows for a different type of story, one with multiple protagonists, for example, where they don't all have to be brought together somehow in the end-- they can have separate experiences as the player will be able to "be" that person for the nonce.  He'd told me a few months ago about a post-apocalyptic story he had in his head, and tonight I mentioned that it seemed more suited to a videogame than to a novel for various reasons that made sense at the time-- his story is a road story, which is hardly unknown in fiction but would be more interesting in a game; he had a strong idea of the ending (endings are essential in fiction, I think... if there's no ending, there might be episodes but no story) but alternate paths to that-- again, a "game" advantage that would of necessity be trimmed in a novel.

Point is, I accepted it-- the story, the particular medium (gaming), and above all the acceptability of creating stories as a viable way to spend your time... and also the entire possibility that he could write this and it could be good. That I think is strangely enough my greatest strength. I exude, "You aren't insane. It's perfectly normal that you are preoccupied with these stories and these people who don't really exist. That's not crazy. It's cool."

I have actually been doing that much of my life. I sold my first novel when I was 22 (trust me, that was the very height of my brilliant career-- nothing like hitting your peak early to chasten you for life :), and so all along I've had credibility-- I'm just a normal person, and yet I write novels and have had some small success at it. There's nothing particularly exceptional or insane about me, so really, if I'm okay with it, if I think you've got as much chance as I do, then you can stop having that secret shame, you know, who the heck am I to think I can write a book?

That's my great gift. By accepting this as acceptable, I tell writers they're not crazy to write. I like to think that's really a good thing. :)

That doesn't of course mean that everyone I deal with is a good writer or will probably succeed. But I actually think almost anyone who wants to write probably can learn to write in some way. There are those who are already good at storytelling but might not be good at mechanics (these are the ones most likely to become pretty good fiction writers-- you can always hire an editor, and what you can't hire-- an imagination-- they already have). And there are those who are meticulous at mechanics but have little imagination (journalists are often this way), and might best apply their talents to something other than fiction, maybe-- but there's a huge world of genres and modes to choose from.

I've learned that if I read someone's story or outline and think, never in a million years, I better keep that to myself, first so as not to shut down their enthusiasm, but also because you can't really predict what combination of idea, hard work, and connections might cause a story to end up getting published or produced.

So what the heck. Deal with the writing as it comes to you. I once worked with a young writer who had apparently never noticed that chapters have many paragraphs-- every chapter was a single unbroken paragraph, and I don't mean in the Faulknerianly magisterial stream of consciousness way-- it was more a regular passage where the writer had forgotten to hit "enter" (I had "return" there and deleted it so you wouldn't realize I learned to type on a typewriter :) and "tab" occasionally. It was sort of breathtaking, and I remember thinking direly that anyone who has so little ability to absorb the conventions of written prose had little chance. But we soldier on. I said, as affirmatively as I could, that I wanted to show him how to paragraph, and we discussed where a little idea ended and a new one began, and then when one person stopped speaking and another started, and other places where a new paragraph might be useful. He thought this was fun, and pretty soon started incorporating paragraphs into his chapter. Once he did that, I could see that the helter-skelter pace that led him to rush through was actually the sign of a powerful engine of narrative propulsion-- a kind of exciting story. And wouldn't you know it, a few years later, his first book was bought by a major publisher (he did have paragraphs by then :), because that propulsiveness was actually the sign of a natural storyteller.

Anyway, since then I haven't written anyone off. Who knows what will combine to create a great story? I know that I have great training-- I know how plots work, and how sentences work, and even so, I never pull off the great story I should be capable of, given the expertise. (A natural teacher, perhaps-- the greatest teacher bar none I've ever had teaches screenplay writing, and has taught dozens of writers who later won awards, and yet hasn't ever had a big writing success of his own. That's me too, only I'm not that good a writing teacher.)

So. When I think of my greatest strength as a writing teacher, that's it. I don't think you're crazy to want to write. I think it's awesome, or at least perfectly normal. Let's go out to lunch and talk through your plot!
Alicia

Community of Practice

This paper will be about a writer's group a friend of mine belonged to. (I've been involved in fiction-writing groups for decades, so I have kind of a broad experience with the in-person kind, but not a lot with the online variety.) This writer (Jenny) and I have been friends-- actually, we met online! We were both in an online community back in the early 90s-- we were real pioneers. GEnie-- it had "roundtables" for romance writers (us), mystery writers, sf/f writers. I belonged to all of them as I wasn't sure what I'd end up writing (and what do you know, my first mystery novel, after 30 years! comes out next month, so I guess it worked). And as far as communities of practice, two of these roundtables-- Romex and SFFnet-- were by far ever the greatest discussions of popular genre fiction since, who knows, Dickens and Trollope were matching pints at the Old Cheshire on Fleet Street. Wow-- there's no record, of course, of all that incredible discussion, but I was in charge of several "topics" and remember how breathtaking it was-- mostly published authors talking very intensely about HOW they wrote, how they characterized, how they plotted.

Anyway, Jenny and I met there, but long after GEnie went the way of Lycos (so many corpses in this internet history), we stayed friends, visiting each other, emailing through major life traumas, all that. A long, long relationship. We're nothing alike-- she's a NY Jew, I'm a small town Catholic girl-- but we actually -- long before we met-- attended the same university (U of Chicago), years apart. She hated it, I loved it (it changed a lot in between).  Oddly enough. She lived in a commune, which was my dream when I was growing up in the tail end of the fun times, aka the 60s.

So... I got published very early-- my prose style has always been, if I  may say so, very graceful and always got me farther than I really deserved. So I had a Regency romance out in 1984 or so, when I was really young. And her first novel came out recently when she was 60! But she was always one of the most cogent commentators on how fiction worked, and she really just needed to wait until she found an editor that understood her work. Point is-- we were always in contact, always brainstorming plots. We had our own little community of practice. She recently sent me a compilation of all the emails we'd exchanged about the book that she eventually got published, and there, amidst all the book talk, were emails about our marriages and our kids (about the same age), and among other things, I realized that the kid I always thought of as an eternal source of worry was no worry then, and the "good kid" (as he still calls himself :) was angry at me all those years. Weird how the memory works, but can't argue with contemporaneous emails! And we were SO honest with each other, so I guess it was true, that the sweet son was really sour.And I might owe the other one an apology for remembering him as so difficult!

At some point, Jenny joined this group centered in the UK, I think (online, I mean), where she hoped to regain that Genie level of discussion. I think the group wasn't like that, but was much more interactive, focused on critiquing rather than discussion-- that is, participants post their chapters and others give helpful comments. After a couple years on this site, she sold her book, and I've always thought maybe this was a really successful group as she told me about others who sold their books after participating in this group. So I thought recently I'd write about this (as I'd have some distance -- it's not my group), but now she tells me that the group got all commercial and those who really connected and wrote well withdrew and work together but outside the group. (I don't know the details yet.) One of the problems we're seeing a lot with online groups is that they start more or less as voluntary groups with one leader or a few leaders, and then as it becomes successful, everyone thinks, "Facebook!" and there's an attempt to cash in. I don't blame them, but "monetizing" a group so often ruins it (cf. Goodreads) as the purpose of the group stops being whatever and starts being "making a profit" or "selling a service" or "attracting more members".

We'll see. I'll interview her and go there and actually join the group and check it out.

I keep running into the kind of ethical issues I never had when working on my thesis about Edgar Allan Poe (long dead guy, that is). Even blogging here about my sons (who are both grown and wonderful men, btw) feels like it could be a bit unethical. But writing about my friend and her colleagues at Authonomy-- hmm. I'm not used to that. I do write about my students sometimes, but I'm careful to disguise the situation (like changing "her" to "him") enough that I don't know they'd even realize I was writing about them. And I'm not writing about THEM but the writing/teaching/editing situation.

I am... constructivist! I am... affirmative!

I think I want to focus in my own practice on constructivist tools. I'm really into analysis myself, and then sharing my analysis, explaining it (at great length) and assuming anyone who can learn from that will learn, because no one is ever going to explain at such length. :)

But that's fine with my "writing practice". I mean, the people who read and learn from my Edittorrent blog learn from that sort of analysis.

Thinking of my "college student" practice-- what works with them? First, affirmative. Always. I don't care about tough love. That's not who I am. I'm the person who always says, "That's interesting. Tell me more." And I say that even if their initial post is full of typos and a-fluencies. It's always interesting. I always want to know more. Most important, I think that works with students who might be worried or even ashamed of their lack of skill.

Shame-- I keep coming back to that. Shame is the dark secret of universal education. No one who gets into Harvard is ashamed, even that Bush clone who got in as a legacy and probably OUGHT to be ashamed of taking the place of a better student or someone who really worked hard to be there.

No, my students are always a step away from shame. They're afraid they'll get unmasked as impostors. They're afraid at every point that someone will point out that they -- poor, or working class, or enlisted, or learning disabled, or just never any good at this school thing, or a non-native English speaker, or a minority who isn't supposed to aspire, or... -- don't belong here in higher education.

You know who that is-- my mother. The immigrant kid from an industrial wasteland of a town, whose father worked in a factory and whose mother waited tables.
Or my father, as native as could be (ancestors fought in the Revolution), but working class as could be, no one in his family ever going to college, no one in his TOWN ever going to college--

And you know, they felt ashamed every single course until the PhD. (Yeah, both got PhDs. The GI bill was pretty wonderful.) They kept waiting to be outed-- but they were somewhat fortunate to be in the post WWII generation, when the colleges were full of working class kids, and many were damned good.

I see that now-- all that progress lost. Anyone who says the US is "classless" should look at this. I grew up actually pretty classless (parents at the top of education scale, but the bottom of the income scale-- two professors!), but I can see from when I went to an elite private college surrounded by other scholarship students that now-- now, really. Many of our students have to constantly battle society's edict that "you don't really belong here"-- the university's edict too. Yeah, even when I lament that my students are so unprepared, that's kind of what I'm saying-- you don't belong here. Sneer.

I will never shame a student. Never. They are there. I don't know whether they will learn or not. I don't know whether they will drop out and invent Facebook. I don't know if they are wonderful people who will make a difference in their communities. All I know is-- they deserve my support because they are students and I'll assume they are trying to learn.

There's a real disconnect, I think, between those who think most people can't learn and those who think most people can. The first are very into shaming-- if you are not "one of us" and you're here at the university, you are encroaching. You are stepping out of your place. You're cutting in line.

I don't want to be that snobbish, slighting type.

I know this-- the greatest American intellectuals of the 20th Century didn't come from the upper classes. They  went to CCNY. They were immigrants. They were Jewish. They didn't speak English in the home. Hey, maybe that's why they thought so deeply.

My mother-- the child of immigrants -- was the second in her family to go to college, the first being her older brother, who died in grad school. Late in her life, she discovered Google, and because her family name was one of those Ellis Island inventions, we were able to find just about every relative she had in the US (that is, everyone with her maiden name was at most a second cousin, descended from the grandfather who came in Ellis Island and was given that name).

So here you have a Slovak family from a tiny industrial town. In her (depression-era) generation there might have been 20 people. FIVE -- FIVE-- became scientists (at the PhD level). (Would have been six, but her brother died before finishing grad school.)

None of them won Nobel Prizes. However, there were 11 patents registered to people in this family. (Mostly in food, believe it or not-- my mother was a food scientist-- but come on, Slovak life was a lot about food. :) Somehow I doubt that the Rockefellers or Astors or Bushes have that many patents. Maybe it takes a seeker, not a haver, to invent?

I cannot remember that and think about shaming anyone who has the courage-- without money or family support or tradition-- to decide to be the first to attempt college. Who knows. Not me. They are brave and they are seeking, and they could surprise themselves and us all. They probably will surprise us somehow, no matter how far they get in the academy.

(Just a historical note: I grew up in a college town, so the high school was full of professor's kids, but it was in Appalachia so there were also kids from the deep backwoods. Anyway, here it is, decades later, and I realized recently that "America's worst serial killer" and one of the Google founders were in school there about the same time I was! I have 7 siblings, so for a couple decades, one Todd or another was there, and none of us can remember either of these guys. So one unmemorable nerd becomes a serial murderer, and the other a billionaire. There you have it. It was a lovely town, small and quiet, but you know, there's this odd echo of murder-- this was where that massacre took place on-campus a few years ago, and one of my classmates' parents were murdered in their home in a Manson-like killing, and then this serial murderer dude. Really, there was almost no crime there. Except murder.)
(And I suspect the Google guy didn't enjoy his time at good ole BHS, because he doesn't come back for reunions-- neither do I, live in the moment as I do, loathe thinking about the past, never remember anyone's name) and hasn't given any money though he's notoriously generous. Note to high schools: Be nice to nerds. You never know.... David Letterman actually grew up about 3 blocks from where I live now, and he's given huge amounts to the grade school and the state university and the little league... but none to his high school down the street. Methinks high school for him really was over a hellmouth, to quote Buffy.)

Best practices

Thinking of that best practices memo.

Thinking of doing the Best Practices assignment about the writing center where I work, though I'm going to narrow the topic down to just the language of the materials (comparing negative constructions: Two things you must avoid... Don't do this.... with positive constructions-- Here are two things you should try to achieve... and Try this) and the possible use of student focus groups to assess which gets the better response from students. 

I'll say (thinking out loud here), that this offers twin benefits, one that we get information on student responses, and two that this could be the basis of research, like someone could write an article on using focus groups in the writing center. 

One of the problems that comes with the good thing of having lots of work is that we are not encouraged to take time to do research, though there are wonderful research possibilities primarily in the area of "what helps students learn whatever." We have such good opportunity to observe what works and what doesn't or in what situation some policy helps or doesn't. But there's no time to stop and think or even make note of what we've just experienced. There's always another week starting with four more new classes. It's such a missed opportunity. This is a good reason to consider writing center advisors "faculty," however low-level (I've always been adjunct in my teaching, so I know how low the levels can go). We're "staff" which is good for practical reasons (we are actual employees, not semester-by-semester adjuncts), but "staff" suggests that what we do has some administrative function. And in fact, we're teachers. We teach in a limited way, a week at a time, one particular assignment, and only the writing aspects, but it's still teaching. We function as visiting faculty. As faculty, we would not be thought weird if we said we'd like to do research. But "staff" doing research? Absurd! 

I've worked in writing centers since about 1991, when they were becoming widespread, and I think there was a decision made back then, for whatever reason, that writing centers were not going to be part of the faculty but part of the administration. (Probably this was about funding!)  Libraries, notice, went the other way-- librarians are often considered part of the faculty, get tenure, etc.  I wish I knew more about this. It does seem like more than just the whole administration-octopus evolution, that pretty soon 90% of the university will be "administration," and there'll be more administrators in a department than teachers.... but rather some decision that if the program can't be assigned to an academic discipline, it's "administration." A lot of writing centers are in the "Writing Program", and some are under that big administrative "Student advising" section. The one I taught at when I started was under the Liberal Arts dean, though we worked with all students.

I should ask the WCenter list about this-- is WC administration or faculty?

Alicia

Digital generation.

Tapscott, Don. (1998). Growing Up Digital: The Rise of the Net Generation. New York: McGraw Hill. 

That's so early! So much has changed so fast since 1998.

My husband and I joke that we're from the "mechanical generation," where Newton's laws still applied, no action without a reaction, etc.  And you could, without much effort, figure out what action caused the reaction, because they were similar-- the piston turns the axle which turns the wheel. Simple. The gasoline burns and the energy makes the piston turn. Etc.

I was just in Wells (UK) where in the cathedral there's the oldest still-working clock in Europe. (Very cute--

That's 14th Century. The little knights you see above the face? When the quarter hour strikes, they came out and clash their swords. 

Anyway, even I can figure out how the clock works, with the weights in the casement under the face gradually shifting and all that. Very mechanical. Everything's got a cause that can be determined.

But the electronic generation-- my kids don't have that need to have a cause that fits the effects. I want to know why my MP-3 player makes me press four buttons (not one of them saying "start"-- you know, they're "menu" and "select" and anyway, none of the names are on the MP-3 player... I have to look up the manual online to see what they are!) in a certain order to get the song I want. They don't mind. They just give in and do it the way they're told. Or they push buttons until something happens. "Everything doesn't have to make sense, Mom!" my younger son said the other day. "That's such a Boomer thing."

Cough.

But this might account for the deficit I've seen the last decade in students who have an automatic understanding of cause and effect. Maybe now that's something they really have to be taught.

(Then again, this is a very good reason for all children to learn how to cook-- that'll teach 'em cause and effect.)

Anyway, in DE, we're dealing with the electronics, where cause doesn't necessarily lead logically to effect. (You know, the old "control alt delete" thing? That's how you get a computer to reset? Because there's no reset button?)

It means that we can't fix our cars ourselves anymore. (Not that I ever did, but my brother did.) What does it mean for the classroom? We have about 100 times more access and apps to help learning. Are we changed cognitively? Have we gained and/or lost? What?