Watching Kids Write, III

Consider:

All through elementary school, all through junior high and high school, all through college and graduate school, I wrote every paper longhand.  Pen or pencil.  Then--if required--I typed the paper on a manual typewriter.  (In public school, I can remember only one assignment--a term paper--that required typed copy.)  Later on--when I started to care more--I would revise and retype, revise and retype, revise and ...

I wrote my (very forgettable) dissertation--a 400+-pg effort--longhand.  Typed and revised three times, then for the final copy hired a typist; I was sick of it--just as I am sick now as I think of some of the things I wrote in that dreadful thing.

All of this, of course, took myriad hours of effort--akin to assembly-line work.  It took me about ten minutes to type a single page; multiply that by 400 and you get the idea.

Our first "word-processor" was an IBM Selectric electric typewriter (we soon had to buy a second one: two writers in the house, both needing the same machine--not good for marital harmony.)

Joyce and I both graduated with our Ph.D.'s in 1977.  Neither of us ever typed papers "cold" on the typewriter--though my older brother, Richard, could do it--which is probably the first sign that he would be a journalist.  (I still remember him, up at the crack of dawn, cold-typing a paper due that very day.  Having the bedroom next door to him was a bit like sharing quarters with a guy who liked to practice with his pneumatic hammer--at 4:30 a.m.)

When Joyce and I returned to Ohio in the fall of 1979 to teach at WRA, we were still typing on the IBM's.  But within a couple of years--we bought our first computer: a Kaypro II, which required two 5.25-in floppy disks: One went in the top drive (it was the program disk), the other in the bottom (the data disk).  No file could be much bigger than a handful of pages; otherwise, the tiny machine memory just could not keep up with it. The text was green on a black background.  But Joyce wrote her first book on a Kaypro II (the one about Kate Chopin and The Awakening); I wrote a book, too, a very bad but very long novel about a schoolteacher.  It's still not published--but one day it may make it to Amazon/Kindle.

Soon we had to have two Kaypro II machines.  Then we progressed to an early Mac, some PCs; I do not dare calculate the dollars we've spent on computers.

When I returned to teach at Harmon School in 1982, computers were beginning to appear in the school.  Apple II's.  Some Macs.  But kids had little access to them.  But it wasn't long before Harmon got its first computer lab--set up in the Media Center--and the administration encouraged teachers to take kids there for classes.  Which I did.  Many times.

In those days, very few kids (I had 8th graders) could type at all, so it was hunt-and-peck time in the computer lab.  I was able to dazzle some of the kids with my typing speed (the one skill I can trace directly to Hiram High School and Typing I), but the dazzle soon diminished as they became more used to me--and as their own skills improved.

Getting kids to back up their work often (on their own little floppies) was a battle, and they frequently lost their work when the cranky machines crashed.  (Not all that surprising when you consider we were often matching flimsy machinery with kids who had not yet learned the word "delicate.")  As I worked with kids in those early labs, I was constantly having to solve technical problems--and some of them quickly grew savvy enough to create problems, problems which meant that they wouldn't have to work much during the period.  (Can you imagine?)

Later, the technology improved, the machines became more kid- and tamper-resistant, and I actually found myself doing more teaching and less tech-repair during the lab periods.

By the time I returned to WRA in 2001, computers were everywhere in the school, and going to the labs was a regular part of my class.  I noticed that although many of the kids were far more computer-literate than I, their competence did not always extend to word-processing, so I was able to show even the geekiest of them some tricks on Word.  But most of the time, I was able to float around, watching the screens, cutting off writing problems at the pass, teaching usage and punctuation and style to individual kids as I saw the need--it was wonderful.

But sometimes it wasn't wonderful.  Some would try to visit the Internet, check Facebook, etc.  Other kids would get stuck and not know what to do.  I remember one girl a few years ago was sitting there idly with about twenty minutes left in the period.  I chirped some scolding sounds at her; she chirped right back, "I'm just not feelin' it."

I laughed.  (I knew the feeling.)  And let her sit there and feel proud of herself.

In very recent years, I began noticing a sort of general restlessness among the kids during these writing periods.  I couldn't figure out what the problem was.  (There were times when I felt I'd flashed back to my days as an 8th grade teacher--and these were high school juniors.)

But then one day--JUST LAST YEAR--a young man asked a simple question: "Dr. Dyer, can we listen to our iPods while we write?"

My first reaction, "Hell no!"  (This I thought but did not speak.)  After all, the school had a rule: No iPods

Out came the iPods in a flash of white, earplugs danging on the cords like minnows.   And the kids wrote that period with a focus I'd not seen all year.

And--doofus that I am--I realized: Of course!  They always have that minnow in an ear!  They can't concentrate without it! The sound of DUH echoed about the campus ...

Who says you can't teach an old dog ... ?

Watching Kids Write, II

Roaming around classrooms and computer rooms over the past decades, I learned very very quickly that not all of us write the same.  Before the advent of word-processors (of the electronic kind; pencils and pens qualify, too, don't they?), the range of students in my room on a let's-write-for-a-half-hour day ranged from what I guess I'd call Grinders to Geysers.

Edwin Arlington Robinson

The Grinders wrote with great reluctance, great resistance--and, sometimes, great despair.  Each word emerging from pen or pencil came only after a fierce battle that raged between brain and hand; some of the writers seemed not to be writing on a piece of paper but carving into a piece of granite.  (Lifting their papers, I wouldn't have been surprised to see gouges in the desktop.)  Some of these youngsters wrote only a short paragraph in 30 minutes.  The Grinders were not--at all--necessarily less bright or verbally gifted than the Geysers.  Some of the best writers I ever taught were very deliberate, choosing words with care, not advancing to the next one until they were certain the one they'd just used was the best one for the purpose.  Some professional writers are like this.  The three-time winner of the Pulitzer Prize in Poetry, Edwin Arlington Robinson, once said that he spent the morning adding a semicolon to a poem, the afternoon removing it.

The Grinders, of course, are those who most suffer on timed standardized writing tests.  I saw them have trouble on the Ohio Proficiency Tests in 8th grade (sometimes failing, even, when I knew they could write better prose than the judges who were evaluating their papers).  At WRA, I saw them do poorly on the SAT Writing Test, that insanely stupid 30-minute assessment that measures little but how fast and how conventionally a kid can write.

On the other end of the continuum--the Geysers, the kids who had written a hundred words before the echo of my voice reading the prompt had even begun to soften.  With lots of kids, this eruptive fluency was married to quality, as well.  Somehow, their ideas transformed seamlessly and effortlessly into remarkable phrases, clauses, sentences, paragraphs.  Some of those kids astonished me, spewing out pages of handwritten text in 30 minutes--often virtually errorless, engaging, even novel.  I write pretty quickly, but I revise heavily--and slowly.  But some of the kids I taught over the years were somehow able to produce "rough" drafts that were smooth, sometimes even elegant.  (Is it wrong to envy a student?  If so, I'm a sinner!)

Anthony Trollope

There all sorts of examples of professional writers like this--from Anthony Trollope (1815-1882) who wrote forty-seven novels (and a bunch of other books)--all after the age of 32.  And John O'Hara (who typed his novels and stories once--straight from his typewriter to his publisher).  And Joyce Carol Oates, who writes great books faster than I can read them.

Of course, there were all sorts of stages between these two--and even combinations of them.  There were Grinders who never paved any road but with rough gravel; there were Geysers who sprayed barely punctuated nonsense all over the page--the written equivalent of logorrhea (a word I adore: "pathologically incoherent, repetitious speech," says dictionary.com).

But what about kids writing with computers?

Check this space tomorrow ...

***
And don't forget--my bios of Mary Shelley and E. A. Poe on Amazon Kindle!  (You will get sick of reading this before I tire of writing it!)

Watching Kids Write, I

When I began teaching seventh graders in 1966, I had no idea what to do for writing assignments.  I had written very few in my own school years (I remember one awful term paper on the White House--the building, not the institution--that I wrote--well, copied from the World Book Encyclopedia--in eighth grade; a classmate, mishearing the assignment, turned in his effort with Turn Paper written in bold blue crayon on the cover).

Philip Freneau

And in college--except for the two creative writing classes I took--I wrote nothing but "scholarly" papers (the quotation marks say it all, in my case) on such subjects as Frank Norris, The Glass Menagerie (my professor, perhaps hurried, perhaps too depressed at my text to do little else, wrote nothing at all on my eight-page effort except the grade, a circle around a typo, and a marginal comment near one particularly troubling sentence: weak passive; then, I presume, she poured herself a stiff one), and the poetry of Philip Freneau.

These are not assignments that translate well into a classroom full of twelve-year-olds.  I shudder to think what would have happened if I'd written "weak passive" on a paper.  A boy might have thought I was denigrating his ability to execute the screen pass.

Salem Searches for Satan

But I did have some good topics I remembered from my creative writing classes.  So I had my students write descriptions, dialogues, and short stories, and I offered them wisdom plagiarized verbatim from my professors: "Don't give your characters problems," I declared.  "Give them demons."  I'm surprised I didn't get a call from an angry parent about satanism in seventh grade--the sort of call I did once receive when I was talking about the Salem Witch Trials (I taught American history that year too; don't ask) and read aloud to them some rather unambiguous passages from the Bible on the subject--like Thou shalt not suffer a witch to live (Exodus 22:18).  A very supportive parent called that night and asked if I needed any help with this community-cleansing effort of mine.  She was serious; I was more than alarmed.  And it took me awhile to explain that I was talking about the Biblical passages the Puritans used, not initiating a new student club.  ...  She seemed a little disappointed.

Those first years, it never dawned on me that I could have kids write in class (I certainly had never done so as a student--except on tests), but as the decades drifted by, I found myself doing more and more of that, initially (confession) because it took some time, and early in my career I was often baffled about what to do with all those hours every day.  But later, I realized that having kids write in class--while I circulated about, answering questions, helping them solve problems, unsticking the stuck, and putting out the occasional brush fires always igniting in a middle-school classroom--was far more than a time-filler; it was one of the best ways to help kids learn, and improve.

And, as I've written before, the other great way I discovered--quite by accident--was by writing with them.

So what did I notice, watching kids write?  And did anything change over the decades.

Short answer: A lot.

Long answer: See my next blog post.

***

Mercenary Moment: And remember--my two e-books (biographies of Poe and Mary Shelley) are available for Kindle-users on Amazon.com.

And Speaking of Words ...

I used to like to read William F. Buckley, Jr.--not for his politics (he was somewhat to the right of me) but for his language.  Just about every time I read one of his books (and I read most of them)--and even some of his essays--I found myself scrambling for the dictionary--all back in the days when a dictionary was a book.  I still remember learning from him the words anfractuous and maiuetic (look 'em up: you don't need a book!)

For many years I've been a looker-upper of new words.  But not always.  As a junior high and high school student (okay, probably in college, too ... definitely in college) I had a simple two-part strategy for dealing with unfamiliar words: (1) check the context and guess; (2) skip them.  (Hey, I got my degree, didn't I?)  But I had one professor--Prof. Ravitz (now a FB friend!)--from whom I learned some cool words--apotheosis and (a favorite) lycanthropy, a word that has become very useful since the advent of the Underworld movies.

But once I became a "Professional Educator" (one responsible for, you know, English), I gradually became more responsible (if that's the right word) and was soon looking up every word I came across, writing it down, trying to employ it when I saw the need.  Like in grad school papers.  I remember using the word spatchcock in a paper; the prof circled it and wrote something like "Don't ever use this word again."

And later, reading biographies of Jack London, I learned that he became obsessed with words as a young man, writing them on little slips of paper, carrying them around in his pockets, affixing them to his mirror.  Learning.  Making up for lost time (he'd had a rather, uh, nomadic youth, some of which--during one of his nomadic periods--he spent in the Erie County [PA] Penitentiary).

I was sort of doing that, too--though I did not use mirrors.  I don't like mirrors, especially now.  Instead, I wrote them in little notebooks, tried to memorize and use the ones I really liked.  One of my favorites: callipygian, a word with many uses.  (A related word: steatopygic.)  Neither is particularly PC, but still ...

As one who memorized words but did not necessarily memorize their pronunciations, I sometimes goofed.  People corrected me.  My mother would promptly use the word--correctly pronounced--in another sentence, employing a slight emphasis on it, the emphasis containing the message: "You are my ignorant son."  My older brother would stop me and pronounce, as if to say, "I can't stand another second of of this boorish jangle!"  And I had a good friend--a former WRA English teacher, Mac--who would say, after I'd finished my sentence, "I believe the word is pronounced ...."  Mac and I would often meet for coffee at the old Saywell's Drug Store in Hudson, and the owners were kind enough to keep behind the counter an unabridged Webster's so we could settle these mild logomachies.

And finally--sometimes I was positive that a word meant something that it didn't.  For years, I thought sojourn was a fancy word for journey.  (When I learned it isn't, I promptly put it on all of my vocabulary lists for my students--and acted as if to say, "Every dolt on earth knows this ... why don't you?")

I now subscribe to three different word-a-day calendars online.  And have a couple of different word-a-day print calendars around.  And several times a week there's some damn word I swear I've never seen before.  From one of those calendars I learned a new favorite word: borborygmus.

Which reminds me: I'm hungry ...

PS:  Link to my new biography of Mary Shelley on Kindle ...

THE MOTHER OF THE MONSTER: THE LIFE & TIMES OF MARY WOLLSTONECRAFT SHELLEY

The Mother of the Monster

I have finally formatted--and uploaded to Amazon/Kindle--my book The Mother of the Monster: The Life and Times of Mary Wollstonecraft Shelley.  It should be available on Amazon's site in an hour or so.  For the astronomical price of $4.99 (that's less than $5, in case your arithmetic is a little rusty).

I began working on the book shortly before I retired from the Aurora Schools (January 1997), then worked on it every day for four years (and I mean every day) and then spent five or six more years getting it into its current shape.  I read all of Mary Shelley's works--as well as the complete works of her father (William Godwin), mother (Mary Wollstonecraft), husband (Percy Bysshe Shelley), and any number of the contemporaries, friends, and associates (Lord Byron, Coleridge, Trelawny, Charles and Mary Lamb, et al.).

Most fun of all--a six-week trip to Europe in 1999.  I visited England, Wales, France, Switzerland, Italy, and Germany, seeing the Shelley sites and some of the sites in the novel Frankenstein.  (I even had a gooey sundae at the restaurant at Castle Frankenstein near Darmstadt, Germany--a castle that does not appear in the novel & probably has nothing to do with the story.  But still ...)

I also saw many (all?) of the Frankenstein movies, including Tim Burton's short film Frankenweenie (about a dog) and that great world masterpiece Frankenhooker.  You can imagine ...

I tried--off and on--to get some traditional publishers interested but, obviously, did not have much luck.  So here it is, such as it is.  A labor of love and years ...

"Words, words, words ...."

I taught Shakespeare for years with my students, and the past few years, I used to begin it all by having them write about their own experiences with the Bard.  The experiences ranged from "not much" to "too much."  The affect ranged from "He's the greatest" to "I wish his mother had been barren."

But most of the students knew that he was, well, important, and most felt sort of proud of themselves after wading with me through The Taming of the Shrew, Much Ado about Nothing, or Hamlet, the three plays I taught most frequently.  There were always those who remained unconvinced, however, and their initial essays sprayed sparks of resentment, even rancor.

One student wrote one complaint (a complaint I heard quite a few times in my career): "Why did Shakespeare get to make up all those words but if we do it, we get in trouble!?"

Yes, Shakespeare did make up a lot of words--the OED credits him for the first published use of quite a few (though it's hard to know if he was just one of the first to write down a word that others were already using).

My reply to this complaint was always the patient (?!?) observation that we make up words all the time.  There are, of course, those technical terms that emerge continuously (turn-signal, flat-screen, USB, Twitter) and all sorts of other words and phrases (Hogwarts and Levis and Chipotle), and on and on and on.  I've told my students that if Shakespeare were to suddenly appear at their lunch table and listen in, he would not understand a thing they said. He would not recognize most things he saw, smelled, heard (what would he find to rhyme with Muzak?).  That's just cultural ignorance on his part--just as it is on ours when we come across a wild passage like this one from Shrew that deals with clothing and clutter and all things equine--told in terms the vast majority of us just don't any longer know:

Why, Petruchio is coming in a new hat and an old
jerkin, a pair of old breeches thrice turned, a pair
of boots that have been candle-cases, one buckled,
another laced, an old rusty sword ta'en out of the
town-armory, with a broken hilt, and chapeless;
with two broken points: his horse hipped with an
old mothy saddle and stirrups of no kindred;
besides, possessed with the glanders and like to mose
in the chine; troubled with the lampass, infected
with the fashions, full of wingdalls, sped with
spavins, rayed with yellows, past cure of the fives,
stark spoiled with the staggers, begnawn with the
bots, swayed in the back and shoulder-shotten;
near-legged before and with, a half-chequed bit
and a head-stall of sheeps leather which, being
restrained to keep him from stumbling, hath been
often burst and now repaired with knots; one girth
six time pieced and a woman's crupper of velure,
which hath two letters for her name fairly set down
in studs, and here and there pieced with packthread."

I don't know anyone who could read that without a glossary--certainly not I.  But here's the message: Just as Shakespeare would have to learn about Angry Birds in order to talk with us; so we must learn his language, learn his world, to listen to him.

Which leads me to this: The other day, I was standing at the health club counter, about to leave, when I heard one of the attendants talking with a young man who was apparently studying criminology somewhere.  She asked him, "Do you have to learn lots of forensicky stuff?"

She'd just made up a word.  She knew what it meant; the guy knew what it meant; I knew what it meant.  (Oh, our agile language!)  Not that I think forensicky will catch on soon, but we often manufacture words for all sort of purposes and in all sorts of ways ("You are so abso-freakin-lutely wrong!").

All of which brings me back to Shakespeare and Shrew.  During the big battle between Katherine and Petruchio--a battle more of words than anything else--a weary Kate looks at him and asks, "Where did you study all this goodly speech?"

And Petruchio replies: "It is extempore, from my mother-wit."

In other words: I made it up.  Just as Shakespeare did.  Just as the rest of us do.

The Monkees Are Here!

"Hey, hey, we're the Monkees!"

With the death of former Monkee Davy Jones yesterday came a number of FB posts from former students who had really liked the group--and especially Davy.  And it reminded me of an event I'd written about some time ago--about the day the Monkees (sort of) came to Aurora, Ohio, where I was teaching (sort of) very early in my career ...  I've pasted the memory below ... with a GoogleEarth map to show the setting ...  (Note for former Aurora students: Until the new Harmon School opened in 1974, the Aurora Middle School was in the old high school building on Rte. 82.)

Selection is from a teaching memoir--Schoolboy--that I will soon be uploading to Amazon/Kindle ...

Friday, 13 January 1967.  Aurora Middle School.  Aurora, Ohio.

            The Monkees are staying at the Inn!

            The kids are sure of it.  They’ve known for months that the group will be performing in Cleveland on 15 January.  And Micky-Mike-Peter-Davy have to stay somewhere while they’re in town, right?  Around the school the story outraces even Rumor himself.

            From my classroom window I can see the Aurora Inn, right across the old football field, now our playground.  The kids will go outside for lunch recess today.  It’s in the forties.  No snow.  No mud.  Later, eating lunch in my room, I watch gangs of girls sprinting across the field (convicts escaping from minimum security!), luckless lunch supervisors chasing behind, arms waving, a wasted effort.  A silent film: Keystone Kops chasing Chaplin.

            Later, the girls trudge back, weighted with the worst news …

            … the Monkees are not staying at the Inn.

            Detentions await them … it’s Friday the Thirteenth, for sure.