"...a natural urge to hide..."

I took the opening address from the Frost Workshop that I mentioned in my last post, and I integrated it into a reflective assignment that I asked my students to put on their blogs. We spent all last week working on each other's papers in pieces: theses on Tuesday, intros on Wednesday, and body paragraphs on Thursday. Then, Friday, I asked them to look back on the workshops to try to reflect on what they might have learned about writing, reading, or their own approach to the process.

The results were very cool. Some students were focused on cataloging some of the basic elements of workshopping, learning what kinds of errors are common in others' work and then looking for it in your own, and weren't so incisively introspective when it came to their own process and feelings, but even that level of understanding is helpful, and we're still rather early in the process.

Some students took things much, much further. For example, Professor Sheehan talks about "a natural urge to hide: a swarm of anxieties, both our own and others' that we pick up on," and one of my students, Max, wrote about his experience with that urge by saying "All I could think about were the negative comments I might get and how I thought people would not like my writing."  But, by the end of his post, he went on to say that "being afraid of what others will say about your work is irrational as if it is being seen by a community of intellectuals there will be no harsh words."

He even embedded a YouTube video of the song "Don't Worry, Be Happy" by Bobby McFerrin at the end of his post.

Another student, Ashley, wrote something similar:

I also have wanted to hide when I, myself, would have to comment on my peer's work. I was deathly afraid that the person would criticize my criticism and say that my ideas were either not helpful, stupid, or just plain dumb. But now I realize that there is no such this as unhelpful criticism. Any form of friendly criticism will somehow help to improve my friends work, and help them to become a better writer.

Ashley recognized the complexity of the nervousness with which we approach even the act of writing our input for others. That itself is a kind of personal, intellectual writing that might cause us to feel insecure. What Ashley's and Max's comments crystalize for me, though, is the emerging sense my students have that they're part of a group of intellectuals with a common goal, and that the more we engage with each other, the more fun we'll have, the more success we'll have, and the more real learning we'll see.

A Friend Remembered

This morning, Kristin and I were discussing self-reflective writing and the idea of drafts, and I remembered something that Donald Sheehan, my poetry professor from Dartmouth, had passed on to us from a conversation with the poet Ellen Bryant Voigt: "Honey, it's all draft 'til you die." Variations on this quote appear here and there in the wide digital world.

I tried to search my computer for the original reference to that quote and failed, so I searched for it online, and in the course of my wanderings, I learned that Professor Sheehan had died. He and I hadn't spoken in a couple of years, though he did write a recommendation for me when I applied to Middlebury's Bread Loaf School of English in 2005, and he helped me get the credit for his Dartmouth class transferred to Middlebury soon after that.

I wrote the best poetry of my life for his seminar in 2003, and I still feel a deep, deep gratitude for having known him and his generosity of spirit. In reading some tributes written by his friends, I came across his opening statement for the Frost Festival Workshop at The Frost Place, which he served for decades:

The heart of the conference is the workshop. Thus, you will need to work from the heart. There is a natural urge to hide: a swarm of anxieties, both our own and others' that we pick up on. Above all, there is an overwhelming 'need'—a false hunger—to be praised, coupled with a hair-trigger impulse to envy anyone else whose work seems immediately praiseworthy. Thus you are likely to find yourself whipsawed between the hunger to be admired and the impulse to envy those who are admirable.

You will need to recognize and acknowledge all of this—in order to reach the key that unlocks all truth: taking very great and very deliberate care with each other.

This taking-care, which is a form of love, increases the quality of the intelligence. If you must make a flash choice between sympathy and intelligence, choose sympathy. Usually these fall apart—sympathy becoming a mindless 'being nice' to everyone, while intelligence becomes an exercise in contempt. But here's the great fact of this Festival, for twenty-seven years now: as you come deliberately to care about another person's art (and not your own), then your own art mysteriously gets better.

Thus, your work at this conference is to make the art of at least one other person better and stronger by giving—in love—all your art to them.

That was the philosophy that defined his poetry seminar, and it continues to inform my teaching, though I have little idea how to imitate the calm gentleness of Professor Sheehan's spirit. I love the idea that by investing in the work of others, we become better ourselves. There's a poetic rightness to the idea that we receive through our giving. I'll take some liberty here and say that I don't believe he was mystified that we got better by examining each other's work, but rather that it is one of the beautiful mysteries of life that by giving away love, caring, and truly deliberate attention to others, we somehow find more of these things in ourselves.

I think he would have appreciated that his care towards me continues to multiply outwards, and while I do plan to reinvigorate my students' workshops with these thoughts, for right now I think I'll just miss him and remember him for a few minutes.

Critiquing

As part of their work on Lord of the Flies, I had my students pick quotes that contained an important image from a climactic scene late in the text and then go back to look for an appearance of that same image earlier in the text. The idea is to get them to see that images in a good book are interconnected throughout the story, and that as the image evolves, so to do the ideas that it represents. Whether that image is a full on symbol (the conch, the glasses, etc.) or more of an emblematic detail (creepers), they should be learning that a critical reader needs to develop the intuition necessary to recognize these details early and the note-taking skills to keep track of these details as a story evolves.

In the absence of having kids read a book twice (and what a world we would live in if there were time and curricular space for that!), it's an effective way to teach the skill and underline its importance.

I had the students post a 300 word prewrite on their insights, and today in class they read each other's posts and responded. I asked them to respond by either agreeing with and extending an idea they saw or by disagreeing and providing evidence (or a little of both). What struck me was the difficulty students had in moving past safe criticism of a concrete problem (incorrectly formatted citations, incorrect grammar) and into an actual intellectual dialogue.

Generally, the posts and responses were fantastic, but I was struck by the particular difficulty some kids had in making an intellectual contribution instead of a concrete criticism. It makes me think that we really have taught them that improving writing is more about error elimination than about depth of statement.

It concerns me, then, that as part of this collaborative, process-focused work that I'm going to do a highly traditional product-focused grading of these papers at the end. Does it send the message that I'm simply talking a touchy-feely game, but my real message (as evinced by what's getting the actual grade and contributing the most to the quarter average) is business as usual?