IWC 100 (NDN): Final Drafts and Reflections

I can't believe how bad I've been about reporting on my classes this year.  I'm just going to blame it on the incredible mental energy required in starting a new job, with new classes, while also being on the job market.  And once again, I'm writing this as we're under another blizzard threat, this one of the Out Like A Lion variety.  I'm supposed to go to Aberdeen, to Northern State University, to read--a reading that was rescheduled from last fall because of a blizzard.  If I can't get there, again, the blizzard might have bruises from my temper.  But we'll see.  I'm glad I haven't taken the winter survival kit out of my car yet.

Mostly, it's a week of readings--and it's been long enough since I've read that I'm way too excited about it. Especially since it's my first reading since my first book, Water and What It Knows, was accepted by the University of Minnesota Press!  How exciting is this?!  So, I'm reading in Aberdeen Tuesday/Wednesday and then I'm part of the Faculty-Student Reading Series at Concordia on Thursday night and I'm reading with seniors Lisa Streckert and Heather Burtman.  And we're all reading some form of travel writing--it should be awesome.

Anyway.  To the classes.

A few things have happened in the NDN class lately.  They turned in their final drafts, with their Prezis, last week, and I've been working my way through them.  And I am incredibly humbled by the work that they've done, to the point where I don't care if they're brown nosing me in their reflections with what they've learned.  I don't care.  This field research project, which asks them to research a disaster that happened in their hometown and create not only a written paper but a Prezi that will be attached to their local library/historical society/newspaper, is heavily dependent on interviews and primary research.  Most of them have never done interviews before and one of the things I've been most impressed with them is watching them get over their fear of talking to people.  The ones who have gotten the furthest out of their comfort zones and emailed mayors and other people they don't know have produced the most interesting projects.  The ones who only interviewed family and friends are definitely lacking the truly fascinating perspectives.  I had a couple of projects that went generationally with their interviews, interviewing somebody from their own generation, their parents' generation, their grandparents' generation--and that was likewise fascinating.

In their reflections, many of my students wrote that they're no longer afraid of talking to people they don't know, that the risk involved in calling up the mayor or somebody who works for the DNR is worth it.  They might say no, but they might say yes.

One thing I learned:  next time I do this, I might require that they talk to somebody in the government, somebody outside their family/friend memory bank.

Another thing I learned:  next time, I'm going to ban the phrase "the community came together" or "we learned what we were made of" or anything remotely resembling that cliche.  In one paper, I counted "the community came together" 12 times. The sad thing is that those cliches mask the truly interesting moments.  What does it mean that the community came together?  For that student, part of it was that the community housed students from the local colleges.  In another paper, it meant new networks that brought together disparate groups of people.

Another thing I learned:  next time, I'm going to focus more on how what happened in that place is different from any other time and place. For instance, I had many students writing on the various Red River floods, from Fargo to Grand Forks to Valley City, from 1997 to 2009.  What's the difference between Fargo's experience in 1997 and Grand Forks' experience?  Between Fargo and Valley City?  Between Fargo and Oxbow?  They're absolutely different--but how?  We're going to spend more time on that.  In hindsight, I'd do more with examining how the Tri-College affected the Fargo-Moorhead flood efforts; I'd do more with the Air Force Base in Grand Forks.

Something that freaked me out:  when my student writing on the 1997 flood in Grand Forks wrote that he was two years old when it happened.  When did I get old?

The goal of this project is to create new knowledge that has never existed in this form before.  And for me, the real risk of this project is the public Prezi, which I've never required before--because I want that community engagement.  I want my students to understand how what they do in a classroom is much larger than an assignment, that they are a part of something larger.  Concordia is committed to Being Responsibly Engaged in the World (BREW)--and right here, for this project, that's what that means for us.  I'm so ridiculously proud of my students, even the ones who clearly didn't care and didn't put in the time or effort--such is the life of a teacher of required composition.  Because these Prezis are public, I'm sharing a few of them as they come in (attached to their local organizations) and I'll post more as I get them.  Several of my students will be interviewed about their projects by their local newspapers and have parts of their papers published.  One of my favorite moments has been watching their faces (and reading this in their reflections) when they hear from these places, that anybody actually wants their work--and is excited about it.  They've never considered that anybody might be interested in what they're doing.

So, here's the Prezi on the 1972 flood in Randall, MN:  click here.

I learn things every time I teach.  Learning from my students is my favorite part of the job, even as another favorite part of my job is hearing "I never thought about it that way before."  During this project, I watched one student learn that all the tornado prep we all take for granted (tornado drills in schools, going to the basement, etc) came about because of the 1965 tornadoes through Minneapolis, not too far from where she lives.  I watched another student pore into the archives of her town's newspaper and discover that the majority of the photographs she'd been looking at were taken by a great-uncle who had changed his name.  I watched student after student question how memories turn into history and why it's important to preserve what we know, even if it's a storm that took place six months ago--because it's history.  It formed us, even if we're not completely aware of all the ways.

My students in these two classes have been remarkably resilient throughout this semester.  It's been A LOT of work for them, but I cannot believe how much they've grown and improved.  But it's also a test to spend an entire semester on natural disasters, which is one of the most not-cheerful subjects in the world.  I'm so proud of them.

Last week, we watched Donald Worster's lecture on water and the Great Plains--and a huge kudos to my students for not falling asleep.  I had to preface the lecture with why I was torturing them with it (and I pushed pause several times for us to discuss what he was saying, so we broke it up), but it's really hard to watch a guy standing behind a podium and he doesn't move and the camera doesn't move.  We'll start discussing Eric Reece's book The Lost Mountain tomorrow, about mountaintop removal coal mining, and last week and this week, my students are bringing to class examples from news sites about current human-caused disasters going on right now.  So far, we've had articles on the Casselton, ND explosion, the Galveston oil spill that happened last week, and the mudslide in Washington.

We're approaching this last project--on human-caused disasters and why the subject of them is so complicated--from the perspective of exploring complications.  My brilliant sister Kim Babine, who is the legislative liaison for the Minnesota Department of Employment and Economic Development (DEED).  She's going to Skype with us in two weeks, to bring us another set of complications to think about.  What's the state's interest in subjects like this?  The Sandpiper pipeline that's proposed to run across Lakes Country (and too close to the Headwaters of the Mississippi River)? What about the PolyMet mine in the Iron Range?  How does the state balance economic development and making sure there are jobs, so people can feed their families, with natural resource management and conservation?  It's not as easy as saying Keystone Pipeline Good (or Bad).  So, what are the complicating factors?

And my final thought today is that the Hjemkomst Center has an exhibit right now on Minnesota Disasters.  Be still my ridiculous heart.  I wonder if there's a way to get my students up there.  Hmmm.

IWC 100 (NDN): Special Guest Star, Ted Kooser!

I've had a couple of really spectacular classes this week, not only in my Natural Disaster Narratives (NDN) classes, but yesterday in my Place and Community class (also IWC) was also really great.  This morning, our sunshine is back and I don't quite believe the Weather Channel when it says it is two degrees and there isn't any windchill.

This morning, we had a bit of shuffle with my NDN classes, because Ted Kooser (we read his book of poetry, Blizzard Voices, last week) had to reschedule our Skype, which was supposed to be Monday.  So we talked about interviewing on Monday and today we mashed the beginning of Timothy Egan's The Worst Hard Time with our phone conversation with Kooser.  We basically did it, but Friday's going to be a day full of Dust Bowl.  It's true, just like all these other disasters, I get too excitable about it.  I had to give my students the disclaimer that the Great Plains is a subject I get very excitable about, I have soapboxes and opinions, and this does not mean that mine is the only opinion, that I am trying to convince them of something, or that they cannot disagree with me--in fact, I would like to be disagreed with.  

Grasslands!  Bioregions!  History! Why should anybody care?

I can feel myself getting excited just typing.  It's a problem.  I did recommend Google for those terms and places they don't recognize, so we'll see how that goes.  Also, there's a certain level of inexpressible glee that only comes from teaching books that have that many Post-It notes in them, that many notes in the margins, the book that you guard with your life and never let anybody touch, because those notes are not replaceable.

But why should anybody care?

I look forward to pressing them on this question as we keep going.  History is only boring when you forget that it's about real people.

Then, about 9:00, we called Ted Kooser, who's just about the nicest person on the planet.  We started off with some questions about the blizzard itself, about the poems (why he chose to not name the voices, where Ron Hansen's short story gave them names), we asked about the poetry as preserving something that might otherwise be lostwe asked about his writing process--AND HE READ US A BRAND NEW POEM HE WROTE THIS MORNING.  Be still my little teacherly heart.  We talked on Monday, as we were going through some interviewing things, about getting the interviewee to say something new, and it doesn't get much better than that.  He talked about getting up at 4:30 to write, suiting up for the work, and I think it made an impression on my students that he considered it work.  He talked about writing every day, and he talked about failing most days, that only a couple of days out of the month does he end up with anything that's usable, but he needs to show up.  He talked about working in the insurance agency and the importance of being able to write--not creative writing--but just clear communication.  

After we hung up with him, and we were debriefing, my students seemed a little stunned that he read us a new poem, that he apologized for its rough form before he did (and I said, remember that first workshop we did when I told you no apologizing for your work (they nodded), and I said, it doesn't go away...).  They also seemed very taken with the idea of failure and that he allowed himself the failure.

This blog post is indeed today's love poem to Ted Kooser.  I love the guy.  What I didn't know is that a jazz musician named Maria Schneider put some of his poetry to music and she just won a bunch of Grammy's.  Poetry is alive.

And the world is beautiful.

IWC 100 (NDN): Ground Blizzard #4

From Wednesday:

There's a certain deliciousness to the fourth ground blizzard of the winter landing on a day that my NDN classes meet.  We're still talking about earthquakes, but it's still relevant.  I don't know what it is about ground blizzards--as opposed to regular snow-from-the-sky blizzards--that have this special quality.  I was a bit nervous about leaving the house this morning, because where I live in south Fargo is basically open country, which equals white out.  But once I got out of my maze of apartment complexes, the roads were protected enough that it wasn't too bad.  Could be worse.  I'm just glad the roads weren't slick.

Today we finish Jonis Agee's The River Wife--and on Friday, we get to Skype with her.  I'm excited about that, just by itself, but I've had a lot of caffeine already this morning, so I'm even more excited.  To back up a few days, I introduced them to the concepts of the Southern Gothic--which this book fits into--and asked them to pay attention to a few things in particular.  First, instances of the supernatural--ghosts and other weird things (like references to Jacques staying young and fit as he ages).  Second, the role of the built environment (the inn, the house) in the formation of the plot, as well as the natural environment.  These ideas seemed to catch fairly well, and in the days since we first talked about this, they've been able to discuss them in class.

The other major concept I introduced them to was Othering.  I had them read two brief pieces on it--and this coincided with one of their weekly Think Pieces, so many of them wrote on it.  As I expected, they mostly wrote about high school cliques, the treatment of jocks and nerds, as what they knew of Othering--and so in the last couple of classes, I've asked them to go further.  Where does Othering happen?  How and why does it happen?  What's the role of power in Othering?  One of my students, who is of Latino descent, however, wrote about his experiences Being Othered--and it always breaks my heart to read about how terribly they've been treated.  It's one of those teaching moments that I want to bring to the large group, but I would never embarrass the student like that.

We talked about MLA on Wednesday, which chewed up a lot of our class time, so we didn't get as much time to talk about the book as I wanted--so that's our plan for today.  It's always a risk to teach a book you love (and always so delightfully surprising when students write about how surprised they are that they like it)--but this book is so, so good.  I think we'll also do some in-class writing

I'm still struggling to get my students to pay attention to the news and current events (West Virginia--Elk River, in particular), but I think that will come as we get into talking about more current things.

IWC 100 (NDN): BEAM and Closer Reading

I don't mean to neglect my Place and Community IWC as I post to this blog, but the sum total of our first day of class yesterday was lovely freewriting and starting our discussion of place and community, and I'm really excited about them--it didn't take much to get them to start talking, even on the first day.  Here's the link to the free writing I did with them yesterday--and it turned out great.

So, today in my NDN I'm trying something completely new and different that newness is just a little bit terrifying.  I assigned my students Mary Warnock's article "What is Natural? And Should We Care?" and Theodore Steinberg's "What is a Natural Disaster?" and I knew that the Warnock article would turn them inside out.  I did preface those articles with "not for entertainment" and honesty about the denseness of the work, and that gave us a starting point this morning.  But in the course of my teaching in the last few years, I've been struggling with the most productive way to teach students how to read critical articles.  I've been conscious of arguments against close reading--and for that, I keep coming back to Heather Horn's article in the Atlantic a few years back, in which she writes:

"Close reading" is about taking a chapter, a page, a paragraph, or even a single sentence, and picking it apart to extract meaning or see what the author is doing.  It's a vehicle for teaching students about cadence and imagery, hopefully leading youthful minds to appreciate the complexity of authors' thoughts.

We should end it.  Students almost universally hate close reading, and they rarely wind up understanding it anyway.  Forced to pick out meaning in passages they don't fully grasp to begin with, they begin to get the idea that English class is simply about making things up...and constructing increasingly circuitous arguments by way of support.  [...] What the attentive reading proponents ignore is that many students are in danger of failing to see the literary forest for the trees.

This, I admit, is a valid criticism and actually one I share, to some degree.  As a creative writer, I believe that sentences have power and much can be learned from the microscope--but it cannot be the only lens we use.  Dawn's Close Focus asks students to get to the nitpicky of a page, research the terms they don't know, names they don't recognize, and to use Google and Wikipedia for the purposes they were invented for.  I've seen this in action, more than once, and I have been inspired to try it, though I haven't been exactly sure how.  Until now.

Because, then, my friend E. gave me Joseph Bizup's article "BEAM: A Rhetorical Vocabulary for Teaching Research-Based Writing." This morning, I melded these together for the first time to see if this method might work.

The premise of Bizup's BEAM is to reconsider the nomenclature of research, from the standard primary, secondary, and tertiary to language that asks how that research is being used.  He argues that definitions of "primary," "secondary," and "tertiary" vary even by discipline, so this isn't the most productive conversation.  Instead, he proposes asking how and why we use sources--for Background, Exhibits, Arguments, or Methods--and as he details his use of this in his own classroom, as a method not only of critical reading, but also critical writing, his use of BEAM offers new perspectives and nuances to how we construct and communicate ideas.  I had my students, in class, read the middle section of Bizup's article, where he defines and explains his terms, and then we talked about the idea.  Basic reactions?  My students loved the idea.  Loved it.  With a vigor I hadn't expected.

And so then, we flipped back to the Warnock article and started into the Close Focus, as a combination of tools for handling dense written work.  Dawn's Close Focus exercise goes beyond thinking about "what does this elm tree symbolize?" because I agree that that's the wrong nitty gritty of a page.  She wants them to research people, places, events, and terms on the page that they don't know--and some other aspects geared towards the study of literature that don't really apply here now. Here's how it worked with Warnock.

• Start with the author, title, publication and date.
• Where was it published?  Philosophy.  Why does that matter?  We know it's going to be a particular type of argument and it's not going to be zoology.
• The title has an asterisk.  Follow the asterisk and what does that tell us?  Huh, it says "Royal Institute of Philosophy Annual Lecture, 2002."  Anybody know what the Royal Institute of Philosophy is?  Me, neither.  So I hopped on Google (with the projector focused on the screen, so they could see what I was doing) and found out it's British, we found out its history, how long it had been around.  Searching further into their Annual Lecture, we found out that it's a pretty big deal.
• Why does it matter that we know it's a lecture?  Well, we decided, that the rhetorical choices for a lecture in the way an argument is structured will be different than an argument that will only be read.  There might be some repetition, there might be a more conversational tone.
• Mary Warnock.  Anybody know who that is?  Me, neither.  Back to Wikipedia.  She's a Baronness, born 1924. Philosopher, with some pretty extensive educational credentials.  A Big Deal.
• We went through the first page together.  Nothing of note in the first paragraph, but then we come upon The Treatise of Human Nature.  What does the italics tell us?  Yes, it tells us that it's most likely a book.  Two lines later, we learn the author, David Hume.  How many of you know what The Treatise of Human Nature is about?  And who is David Hume?  Back to Google.  Scottish philosopher.  This published in 1739-1740.  What else was happening in the realm of science, religion and philosophy in the 18th century?  My science students were quick to jump on the Age of Enlightenment, the Age of Reason.  Ahhhh, yes.  That gives us some room to consider Warnock's ideas of natural, unnatural, and moral judgments of each.  
• Okay, so Warnock is bringing up Hume.  Why?  If we were to toss Bizup's BEAM in here, how is this source functioning?  We decided B.

From there, I told the class to pick a page and pull out their phones or computers (which may be the first time I have actively encouraged cell phones in my class) and for them to hit up Google and Wikipedia.  I gave them about ten minutes and then we came back together and they shared what they had found.  I think three students volunteered to share their pages and what their Googling had turned up--and it was all very good, very interesting, and exactly what I was hoping for.  (At the end of class, I strongly suggested that they use this strategy to work on understanding the articles I assigned for Monday.  We'll see if they do--I hope they do!)

Then we jumped into comparing both Warnock's article and Theodore Steinberg's "What is a Natural Disaster?"  I asked them to consider purpose:  why would I have them read Warnock (and torture them with it) when it doesn't have anything to do with natural disasters?  Why did I pair it with Steinberg?  That got them thinking about my thought processes and I could start to get them to consider the teacher's perspective in putting things together--they might not see the connection right away, but if they put some effort towards it, they'll probably find it.

And I borrowed from Bonnie Stone Sunstein and Elisabeth Chiseri-Strater's Fieldworking textbook (which I did not assign for this class) which asks students to consider various things via three questions:

• What surprised you?
• What intrigued you?
• What disturbed you?

Steinberg's article begins with a discussion of the 1889 Jonestown Flood--and can we consider that a natural disaster?  I also posted a link to the water contamination in West Virginia right now--and can we consider that a natural disaster?  We'll definitely talk about them when it comes to the third writing project and human-caused disasters, but where along the spectrum do we fall?  I told them that there is no one right answer to this question, it's definitely not black and white, and they'll need to decide for themselves what they think.  But, I stressed, since the beginning of time, we've struggled with how to understand the world around us--and one function that disaster stories have is as morality tales (a theme of Steinberg's).  One benefit of being at a Lutheran college is that I can toss off Bible stories and they know exactly what I'm talking about.  So the reason I started with these two articles is that I wanted to give them a foundation for the role of stories in our societies and our struggles to explain what is largely inexplicable--and that there is a wide range of discussion about what we can consider natural and unnatural.

So, this combination of reading strategies and discussion strategies actually resulted in some good--though brief--discussion of these two articles.  I'm hoping we can use them next week, even as we don't talk directly about natural disasters on Monday, because we didn't get as deep into them as I wanted.  In the future, though, I don't know that I'll use Warnock again.  I like it, but I think it's too far in the deep end to throw students so early in the semester.  But teaching is endless revision.

Both of my classes handed in their first Think Pieces today and I'm excited to read them (even as I'm interested to see how many of them could follow directions and use MLA formatting...).  

IWC 100 (NDN): First Day of Class!

My MWF classes (two of them) will be my Natural Disaster Narratives (NDN) classes; the TR class will be my Place and Community.  So, I met with my first class this morning, bright and early in a classroom where the digital thermometer on the clock read 63 degrees; the second was at 11:50 in another classroom that wasn't much warmer.  Hard to be professional when you're trying not to shiver and turn blue.  There are only 13 people in that class, eleven of whom where there (the others had Polar Vortex-related travel delays) and already they're talkative and at least beginning to be interested in what we're doing.  The later class is at capacity and it has a noticeably different energy and chemistry.  (Part of it I think is the time of day and the character of student who signs up for an 11:50 class and I actually think the physical make up of the room, which is long and narrow, is partly to blame.  I anticipate moving the desks around a lot in there.)

I warned them that I get irrationally excited about this stuff, so beware, and both classes laughed. Better to weird them out on the first day of class than save it for later.  And I did get excited.  And it was excitement, more than anything else, when my students didn't know where New Madrid was--or who Mitch McConnell is.  Ah, the field is wide open!  Much learning will happen!  (I also gave them my standard speech about checking the news as they left.)

In addition to our Moodle site, I pulled up the spectacular maps by John Nelson of tornado tracks over the last 56 years and left that on the projector as we went through the general First Day of Class housekeeping.  (I'm also fond of his other maps, so you should definitely follow the links to see them.  Gorgeous.)

But then as I scrolled through the F0, the F1, F2, F3, F4, and then stopped on the F5 map, I asked them what they saw.

And then I made circling motions around the northernmost line, that horizontal line that crosses the North Dakota-Minnesota border, and somebody said it:  that looks close to here.  I nodded.  That's Fargo, I said.  Something sparked behind their eyes--they were not expecting that.  Fargo was the tornado (system, as it was a supercell system) that provoked Dr. Theodore Fujita into creating his scale of measuring tornados--and that 1957 Fargo tornado was an F5.

What this map represents, I told them, is more than a record of destruction.  If you could find somebody to tell you about the 1957 Fargo tornado, they'd tell you a story--they probably wouldn't tell you the wind speeds.  If you asked somebody about the 1997 Red River Flood (which I immediately thought of through this Polar Vortex, because the last time that happened, it was January 1997 and we know what happened two months later...), they might tell you how deep the river got, but you're more likely to get a story.  Stories like this matter.  The historical record of them matters.  It's important to know, if you live in Missouri, about the New Madrid fault line, and know its history of a major shake every two hundred years, and know that we are now overdue.  (I said this to the later class and when I said "every two hundred years," 3/4 of them looked down at the syllabus to make sure that I did write that the last one happened in 1811.)  It's important to know that the Red River floods.  We have to know what it means to live here, as opposed to any other place, because the difference matters.
I didn't mention much about Storm Christine wreaking havoc on Ireland, but here's a link to some of the truly awe-inspiring photographs of what that storm did:  click here. Then we did some free writing as a way to do some introductions:  I introduced free writing to them, as the concept and method, and then I asked them to write (and follow their tangents) about what does it mean to live in this place on this day?  After about 5 minutes, I asked them to write about how they learned what they were writing about.  Some grew up knowing, taught by parents or grandparents or even bad experiences.  I told the story about my friend E. and I taking our friend L. shopping for winter gear early last semester, because L. hasn't ever had a real winter, and as we kept loading her down with a good jacket, snow pants (she insisted on them), boots, hats and mittens, we had to teach her that she needed to dress in layers, not just one thick sweater.  We picked up a little pink shovel for her car (which, we learned later, was appropriated by her daughter) and we taught her that she needed to pick up kitty litter--and the cheap stuff, not the Tidy Cats.  At this point in my story, the majority of my later class looked lost, so I asked how many of them had kitty litter in their car--and one person raised his hand.  So we had a mini-discussion about it. All in all, an excellent first day of the semester.  I've about got my housekeeping for the day done, so I'm ready to take off my heels (which always makes me feel like a badass teacher) and put on my Sorel Snow Lion boots (which make me feel equally badass) and head out into the -7 (-20 windchill).  This, a trick I learned from watching my mother put on her boots with her Sunday finery to walk to church and then put her shoes on once she got there.  But also this knowledge that after this weekend and the windchills of nearly -50, -20 doesn't seem so bad.

Prepping the Spring Semester

I'm hoping that spring semester will be kinder to my writing time than fall was, especially with regard to keeping this blog current with the exciting things that are happening in my classes.  I'm not exactly sure where the fall semester went and I'm not exactly sure how spring semester snuck up so fast as to be starting on Wednesday.  My three IWCs ended up fairly well and the independent study I did with a senior, on travel writing, turned out really, really well--so I'm going to take that basic framework we used and create an actual course syllabus out of it.  (In my spare time...)   I'm trying to write this book review on Anna Ryan's Where Land Meets Sea--which is a very, very cool book--but I've got too much on my mind to sit still, and I'm getting distracted,  because in reading Ryan's book, it has direct and specific implications for one of my IWC classes, so here we are.  Yet I hoped the review would be done by the end of today...

Last semester, I had three IWC 100 classes (the first-year writing class) and I taught the same course across all three of them, both the MWF and the TR schedules--and that was really rough.  This semester, I'm going to be teaching my Natural Disaster Narratives on MWF and Place and Community on TR.  I'm hoping it'll be easier than trying to balance the same class on two different schedules.

Mostly I'm getting distracted because we're having the Polar Express here in the Midwest (it's not that bad in Fargo yet, just -16 air temp and -35 windchill) and my friends in Galway are getting battered by a storm that's producing some spectacular flooding.  This, then, has led to seeing several articles about how global warming doesn't exist because it's -40 (oh, dear) and reminiscences of 1997, the last time this trough happened.  Also, weather does not equal climate.  But since I'm teaching on natural disasters, all of this is interesting to me.

Brief Reflection on Fall Semester:
I think my favorite moment of last semester came in my Credo section, where they asked me a question, and true to form, I answered that there was no one right way to do it, and they all laughed and said they were going to put that on a t-shirt.  But on a separate note of reflection, I feel like my insistence on No One Right Way really became part of my teaching this semester in a way that it had not been comfortable before.  This made my students nervous in a lot of ways, because they wanted me to tell them what to do and how to do it.  I rewarded risk a lot more this semester than I have in the past--particularly on the last paper, when I had two girls come into my office after getting B's on their second project and wanting to know how to get an A on their last project.  I had to remind them that there wasn't anything they did wrong to get a B, that I don't start with an A and mark things off; I start with a C (I expect that everything that comes in will be average) and I grade up or down from there.  But I told them (they came in separately) that they were playing things too safe for an A.  What they were doing was excellent work, excellent B work.  So I encouraged them to take a risk in their final paper.  Risk their language, risk their structure, see what happens.  And I tell you, when I saw the rough drafts of their third paper, they just about blew the top of my head off.  Truly spectacular work.  Looking forward to doing more of that this semester.

So, here is the plan for the spring semester:

IWC 100:  Natural Disaster Narratives
We're reading Jonis Agee's The River Wife, Ted Kooser's Blizzard Voices (along with Ron Hansen's short story on the 1888 Children's Blizzard, "Wickedness"), Timothy Egan's The Worst Hard Time, and Eric Reece's The Lost Mountain.  The class is scaffolded to start local, with the land under our feet, so we will read Jonis's novel as a springboard to talk about the implications of knowing the natural history of the place we are living.  What does it mean to live in this place on this day?  We'll talk about local knowledge, which reminds me of my friend Leila (new in the political science department) who moved from California and had no winter gear and no real idea how to handle winter here--so Erika (new in English too) and I took her thrift store shopping, where we found her Sorel boots, a good winter coat, snow pants (she insisted), a shovel for her car, layers to keep her warm (we had to explain that layers were much preferable to, say, a thick sweater).  For this first project, they'll write a summary-response-analysis and I'm excited that Jonis will Skype with us.

The second project will branch out a little--and while I wanted them to construct a digital project that would be attached to their local library, I've backed off that a little.  They're going to read about the 1888 Children's Blizzard and the Dust Bowl and they're going to do field research to research a natural disaster that happened in their community and explore how it affected that community.  Every community has a disaster story and it will never be the same story.  My own compromise to this project is that they're still going to write a paper, but they're going to create a Prezi to accompany it (so that they can incorporate digital sources).  Doing this project in the spring will be interesting, because the Red River always floods in the spring.  And Ted Kooser is going to Skype with us.

The third project moves further out towards the global and the idea of active citizenship by exploring human caused disasters.  We'll read Reece, on mountaintop removal coal mining, which should be interesting, because it looks like Mitch McConnell will have a primary challenger.  Add to that the controversies over Enbridge wanting to build a pipeline through Minnesota Lakes Country (including Itasca, the headwaters of the Mississippi) and the Bakken oil fields, it should be interesting.  Last week, a train carrying crude from the Oil Patch exploded in Casselton, ND (25 miles from Fargo)--and this summer, a train carrying the same crude exploded in Quebec, killing 47 people and leveling neighborhoods.  I can get really worked up over this stuff, so I'm going to have to rein myself in...  But I'm excited that Leila is going to come talk to my class about energy politics (she's teaching a class on energy politics this semester), so that will be another perspective.

IWC 100: Place and Community
This course isn't going to change a whole lot, except for some of the readings--and figuring out what to do at the end of the semester, which seemed to drag.  My students last semester really seemed to like this class, so I'm excited to refine it.  We're reading Mary Pipher's The Middle of Everywhere again, which students liked more than they thought they would. And what's interesting this time around is that a lady my mother does water aerobics with--who also applied for a grant through the government agency my sister works for--is basically doing what Pipher advocates, down in the Cities.  I'm going to see if I can get in touch with her and see if she'll Skype with my students.

The first project will still be the field research paper, the exploration of the relationship between a specific place and community.  A couple of chapters in Anna Ryan's book will be relevant to their fieldworking project, so I'm excited to bring that in.

The second project will again be the advocacy project (the library research paper) and I've definitely got a stronger idea of the pitfalls that will happen, so I hope I can head those off earlier.  One of the best moments of last semester happened in a student's reflection with her third paper, when she wrote about doing her advocacy paper and interviewing the heads of Dining Services about the food waste she saw, and in her final reflection, she wrote that just the act of asking the questions motivated change, because no longer were pots of soup being brought out early, which cut down on the amount of soup they had to throw away.  Just the act of asking the questions.  But doing this project also gave them confidence that they could make a difference, that they had credibility as college students, they had brilliant ideas, and that their voices mattered.

The third project, the summary-analysis-response, turned out to be the surprise of the semester for me--and for them.  Each of them was writing an analysis of Pipher's book, but even as I knew that none of them would write the same analysis, the fact that I strongly encouraged them to use their personal experience as it colored their reading hit most of them in a place they hadn't seen for a long time.  More and more, as the years go on, I realize how much my students have been taught that their personal experience doesn't matter in papers, which is crap.  I told them, for example, that I can't just magically forget that Pipher is writing about Lincoln, Nebraska, a place I know very well.  It colors how I read that book, because I know exactly what she's talking about.  The same goes for their experiences, personal, educational, or otherwise, and to leave that out of the thought process development is going to be extremely problematic.  And as a result, when I saw the final projects, I was stunned with how far my students had come over the course of the semester.

Other Spring Semester Goals:
I'm excited for spring on the Plains, simply because it's going to be a more dramatic example of why place is important, which will be an important part of both classes.  I'm also going to implement a version of Rachel Maddow's Best New Thing in the World each day in my classes, to get them talking about the world around them.  I'm hoping to manage my time better this semester, so I can get some writing done, some revising of the dissertation-book and send out some of those pieces, and I hope that my employment situation settles itself (I'm on the job market) so that I know if I can take the Scamping trip to Nova Scotia like I'm saving for or if I have to spend that money on moving.  I'm thinking about Nova Scotia (and Scamping) a lot lately, because my niece's birthday is coming up in February and her birthday always falls around the Minneapolis RV Show, which has become an annual tradition.  It always gets me too excited about camping, too early.

Now that I've written my way through these thoughts in my head, I think I can actually write my book review now.  Onward!

Teaching Update: IWC 100

My brain is very full right now, mostly in a good way.  It's partly, also, very full in a way I hoped would never happen.  Gram passed away on Sunday morning, at the age of 90, and her death--even though we knew it was coming--hits me in a way that I don't yet know how to process.  She was the holder of so many of our family's stories, witness to so many important moments in history, and my opportunity to get her to tell me a story, just one more time, that's all gone.  On a strictly personal level, I'm incredibly grateful that she did not die on my birthday (Friday) and that Mom and I got to take my niece and nephew to see her on Saturday, so her last memories would have included Cora "reading" her a story and Henry giggling at her.  She, a loyal Gopher fan, lived long enough for the Gophers to beat the Huskers in football for the first time since 1960 (though she was not exactly aware of it).  Things work out the way they should, but death never gets easier, no matter who it is that we lose.  But losing grandparents--something that happens with alarming frequency to my first-year students--is a special kind of loss.

You might want to check out this State of Mind post from last year, when Gram cast her ballot:  it's a good one.  But there are larger implications here, beyond the grief my family and I are working through, trying to balance that with our existing commitments (mine being to my students).  My grandmother made an incredible impact on my life.  And one way that I bring this into my classroom is that I want to teach my students--and it surprises me, every semester, that my students don't have more confidence--is that they can and will have the power to influence and impact the lives of other people, often without realizing it.

We're in the midst of Writing Project 2 right now, which is an advocacy project that involves the department's library research component.  They've researched a need in a community, formulated a solution, and are arguing for it.  And I have to say, the projects that my students are coming up with are just making me speechless.  We've had conferences this week, so I've gotten to talk to my students about their drafts, and drafts being what they are, they need work, but they're on the right track.  Mostly, my students aren't focusing on their solution yet and their audience isn't clear.  Many of them simply want to advocate for awareness and so far, convincing them that awareness isn't enough has been a struggle.  But the lightbulbs going on in this office in the last three days have blinded me.  I've told them basically that the goal of the project is for them to take this project, hand it to their audience, say hey, you've got a problem, here's a solution, here's what the solution looks like, here's why you should do it, here's research that contextualizes and supports--GO.

And I've given them this Real World Example:  a colleague and I have an idea that we want to take to the department chair.  Were we to wander in to his office and say, hey, let us do this, he would look at us, shake his head, and kindly tell us no.  So.  We're going to write up a proposal.  Here's what we want to do, here's how it would work, here's why we want to do it, and here's the research and the scholarship and the pedagogy behind it.  Which might get us upgraded from an immediate no to a maybe.  (At this point in my anecdote, this usually gets a grin from the student.)  And then the light bulb goes on.

I cannot stress enough how spectacular these proposal are.  And I will say that getting my students to focus on the local, a particular community has made all the difference in the world.  I've told them individually--and I will tell them collectively when I see them today and tomorrow--that I hope to God they actually do hand their proposal to their audience and work towards getting it implemented.  Because these are beyond good.  This is the kind of change we need.  Some example of advocacy proposals:

• Setting up a free thrift store in each dorm on Concordia's campus to cut down on landfill waste and help students with financial issues pick up items they need (that others don't need any more).
• Organizing a Health Day (clever name to come) on Concordia's campus once a month, to help the United Blood Services in Fargo increase their donations--but this would be assisted by nursing and premed students (to get experience), food and nutrition students (to make healthy snacks for donors), and she has a lot of other ways to get other majors involved.
• Advocate for Pass/Fail art/music/writing classes to be included in the Wellness/PE requirement, to give students not only a physical outlet in a low-stakes requirement, but also to increase their creativity.
• Several ideas to solve Hope Lutheran Church in Fargo's space problem--including a proposal to buy the empty St. Mark's in downtown Fargo, rather than building new.
• Advocating for the Arc of Cass County, that the program become a permanent part of Concordia's Service Learning program.
• Setting up mentoring programs in their high school to bridge the gap between Somali immigrant students and Caucasian students.

There are more.  I've handed back almost all the drafts, so I'm running out of remembering--but they're so good.  They seem to like that what we're doing in this class is not just a classroom exercise, that everything we're doing has Real World Implications that they can see, that we're in active pursuit of learning and expression and that there is no one right way to write these papers.  They're starting to understand that what they do has consequences--both good and bad--and that they can make a difference, that what they have to say matters.  If the need could be solved by existing solutions, it would be solved already--and that means there's a fantastic opportunity for them.  

We're shifting into WP3 today, which is a rhetorical analysis of Mary Pipher's book, The Middle of Everywhere, and they're going to be analyzing that book and honoring the unique perspectives they have on it.  I want to see how they filter that book, given the specific experiences they had doing their field research in the first project, the library research and advocating in the second project, their own personal, life experiences that make them who they are.  And I get to wave around the Real World Implications of this type of analysis, because I'm writing a book review for New Hibernia Review that was technically due in two days, but I've gotten a two week reprieve because of Gram's death.  Since we're teaching transferrable skills, here's my contribution to that.  

But it's also impossible to stop thinking about next semester, since our book orders were due.  I'm going to teach my Natural Disaster Narratives class on MWF and the Place and Community class on TR.  I'm not going to try to do the one-class/two-different-time-schedules again, like I did this semester.  It's too hard.  A few things have come up in the last few days that (a) make me think of Gram and her love of travel, commitment to conservation; (b) how I'm going to approach next semester, especially the last project on human-caused disasters:

Exhibit A:  "Enbridge Files Application to Run Pipeline Across Northern Minnesota; Opponents Gird For Fight."Absolutely not.  This enrages me to the point where I can't see and all my vocabulary is full of four-letter-words.  They want to run this pipeline through Itasca State Park, which is the headwaters of the Mississippi--and through my home county.  

Exhibit B:  "Nearly 300 Pipeline Spills in North Dakota Have Gone Unreported to the Public Since January 2012."  How many of my North Dakota students have any idea about what really goes on in the Oil Patch?

Which brings me to the timeliness of Exhibit C, from last night's Rachel Maddow Show and the world according to Nebraska, climate change, and who cares about a flyover state?




Exhibit D comes from a friend's posting on Facebook and a reminder of why place matters, how we look at place matters, and the implications of those views has.  Also, I'm just in love with maps anyway.

 

State of Mind: Hot Enough Fer Ya?

The sadness with which I have left the lake is immense, but I'm in my parents' new house in Minneapolis, putting the finishing touches on my Focus Portfolio, which I hopefully will submit this afternoon.  The weather outside we have stopped describing as "hot" or "humid" and just reduced our adjectives to "gross."  I mentioned to my father this morning that it's too bad that the crops can't just suck the humidity out of the air.

This last weekend was Muskie Days, the annual celebration in my hometown of Nevis, and it corresponded with the 100th anniversary of the Nevis School.  Such great fun.  I saw so many people I haven't seen in years, caught up with classmates, got to see their kids.  And I got to hang out on Sunday with my high school history teacher, Larry Smith, and his wife Julie--their daughters are the same age as my sister K2 and me.  I sometimes still have a hard time calling Mr. Smith by his first name.  But we got to talk history and politics and as we did, I was reminded of how much difference good teachers make.  The last of my English teachers retired this year, after 38 years.  Another of my English teachers MC'd the opening ceremony.  I reread my senior yearbook and saw that my science teacher wrote that he hoped he hadn't turned me off to science--and I wished I could have seen him this weekend, because I think he'd be as surprised as I am that most of the classes I'm teaching are science related in some way.

But Mr. Smith--Larry--told me a while back that he was curious about my Natural Disasters class and wanted to see some of my materials.  I'm in the process right now--as I'm still trying to pry my eyelids open and focus my eyes--of sending them to him.  But the reason for this post is that the universe seems to align when it's supposed to:  last night on the Daily Show and last night on the Rachel Maddow show, two different segments on energy policy.  I wish I could consider the Daily Show segment funny (though I will always love John Oliver), but it hits too close to home, too close to existing arguments about the value of land, resources, and commodities.

So, here's your food for thought for the day:

The Daily Show with Jon Stewart
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Visit NBCNews.com for breaking news, world news, and news about the economy

Eng. 180: On the Need For Crime Lit

In the past few days, I’ve been reading the crème of contemporary Irish fiction for my Focus portfolio (the second half of my comprehensives), which is Contemporary Irish Prose (1966-present), but I’m really concentrating on Celtic Tiger and post-Celtic Tiger work (1990-present).  I’ve read Seamus Deane’s Reading in the Dark (I’m going to have to read it again, I think, for pleasure), Roddy Doyle’s Paddy Clarke Ha Ha Ha, Emma Donoghue’s Room, and Colm Toibin’s The Blackwater Lightship.  I’d already read John Banville’s The Sea, but I skimmed it so I could remember that the prose is stunning (it’s Banville, after all), but I like other works of his better.  This is Literature with a capital L. 

(And as I’m reading through my list alphabetically, I ended up reading three in a row that featured child narrators…so I skipped the next one on the list, Frank McCourt, because I couldn’t handle another child narrator—which is why Toibin follows Donoghue.)

But I turned in my book orders for my fall classes on Friday, my Crime Lit 180 and my Micro 151H.  (More on the 151H later.)  But the purpose of the 180, as detailed in the Aims and Scopes, is that we question what constitutes literature, why we read, and how we talk about and value that written word.  I could have chosen a reading list for that class that focused on canonical work of some sort, but for the most part, I’m not a canonical person.  It’s not my forte.  But as I started to consider what I might do for this class, months ago, I started with a maxim that’s become a staple of my classes (no matter if they’re comp, creative writing, or literature): 

I don’t care what you read, just as long as you read. 

I mean it.  I don’t care if my students are reading romance novels or Twilight or whatever the New York Times bestseller is.  You don’t have to read the latest National Book Award Winner, the latest Nobel Prize winner, the latest Pulitzer winner.  You learn as much about what makes a sentence work (or fail) in a thousand other books, a thousand other writers.  If you tell me you don’t like you read, I’ll tell you you’re not reading the right stuff.  And then I’ll hand you a book.

You can learn as much from a mass market paperback—I can learn history, I can learn politics, I can learn what it means to be human from any of a zillion “popular” books on my shelves.  But the point is not to make a distinction between Literature and other books—even though my literary fiction is separated on the shelf from my fluffy fiction—but to recognize the value (and the shortcomings) of popular fiction.  When I taught intro to fiction these last two semesters, I deliberately started my class reading short stories, but we finished up the class with a novel.  Why?  Because while my students will probably sit down to write a short story, when they want pleasure reading, they’ll probably pick up a novel.  So it was important to teach my students how to look at a novel like a writer.

Teaching literature, the flip side of that writing coin, offered a different challenge.  What kind of literature (as in a group of books) did I feel was necessary to teach, and why did I feel that way?  During my Fall 2011 fiction writing class, the novel we read was William Kent Krueger’s Iron Lake, because it was his debut novel, it had won several awards, it was brilliant, and it was a mystery set in the wilds of rural northern Minnesota.  I wanted to show my students that there are no boundaries to good writing, that you can write about anything and anywhere and it can be good—and you’ll find masters and mistresses of the brilliant sentence in all kinds of genres.  The same goes for reading.  (Ironically, in my Spring 2012, where the texts I chose were Irish, the cover copy of Joseph O’Connor’s novel Star of the Sea is described as a murder mystery.  That was an accident…)

But when it came to figuring out how a class on crime literature could function, and more specifically, on place in crime literature, I needed to justify to myself what I was doing.  I would teach Poe, because that’s where we start—and nobody does atmosphere like Poe.  I hadn’t read any Sherlock Holmes myself, which seemed weird considering mysteries are where I go when I want literary entertainment.  So we’ll read some Sherlock Holmes.  He’s also getting some contemporary film and television adaptations (with Robert Downey, Jr. and what’s his name), so there’s an enduring quality there.  I’d also never read Agatha Christie, even though I did see “The Mousetrap” when I was in London with my family in 2000.  Dad had seen the play in 1975 when he was in London and so we carried on the tradition of participating in the longest continuously running play in the world.  I thought we’d read some Dashiell Hammett (The Maltese Falcon, probably)—but then I thought we’d watch the movie, add to the discussion of forms of literature—but I really dislike Hammett.  Maybe if I hadn’t read Lillian Hellman’s memoir first I’d like him better, but I can’t.  So I switched to The Big Sleep—and we’ll watch that one.  I’ll photocopy a few pages of the book for my students, because Chandler is brilliant, and I kind of fell in love with him and his wit.  And we’d round out the “classic” portion of the semester with Daphne du Maurier’s Rebecca.  After the midterm paper (wherever it falls in the semester), we’ll read Dennis Lehane’s Mystic River (place-based urban) and Krueger’s Iron Lake (place-based rural), then finish out the semester with Sarah Vowell’s Assassination Vacation (nonfiction).

But here’s the point, the reason why I think all of this is important to teach a class on:  popular fiction, specifically crime fiction, plays an essential role in how we form discussions in real life.  Because crime literature—in all its various subgenres—fills a gap in our entertainment, in our lives, that we can hardly acknowledge exists.  There’s a reason that John Grisham is the force he is—and it’s not because of his luminous prose. 

Crime literature allows us to have conversations and raise issues that literary fiction does not—and I’m not drawing a distinction, that crime lit can’t be literary and vice versa.  In the books I’ve chosen, it’s easier to have a discussion about how place and class affects characters, like in Mystic River (which is a good movie, but should not be compared to the book, which is freaking brilliant and nuanced in ways the movie cannot be).  It’s easier to talk about gender with Rebecca, how the narrator (the second Mrs. de Winter) is never named, how the character who provides the engine for the book—Rebecca—is dead, for crying out loud.  We can talk about gendering with Chandler (book/movie) too, how women are represented in hard-boiled fiction.  We can talk about violence against women being used for entertainment value.  We can talk about the effect that place has on the characters.  (I'm working on articulating a clearer vision of this, so stay tuned...)

But mostly, it’s because the world is a cool place that rarely makes sense, bad things happen to good people, and sometimes it’s nice to read a book that bears absolutely no resemblance to your own life.  And it’s easier to have these kinds of conversations about books my students are more likely to pick up on their own, and teach them what they’re looking at and how to look at the book, how to talk about what they see and what they think.  That’s what any good course will do.

Eng. 150: Wangari Maathai

I absolutely love Fridays. Not because they're the last day before the weekend (because the way that my schedule is this semester makes it feel like my "weekend" happens on Thursday mornings), but because both of my classes turn in their Think Pieces (their reading responses). I love reading responses. I absolutely love them. It's a safe space where my students can write about their fears, frustrations, surprises, joys, and connections where they don't always bring those wonderful moments up in class.

I've been struggling in the last two weeks with this class as I've been teaching Erik Reece's Lost Mountain about mountaintop removal coal mining in Kentucky and other human-caused disasters happening, because it seems like the whole thing has been so overwhelming and so huge that my students (and me too) are getting buried under the powerlessness of the whole thing. I think I underestimated the power of this reality on myself and my students. Mostly, for them, it's because they didn't know these things were happening and so that makes them feel even more powerless. As I'm reading through their Think Pieces for this week (that they just handed in), some of them are being able to push through that shock and powerlessness and helplessness that they're feeling into a place where they can start to think about what they can do.

Thank goodness. I was getting really worried there for a while.

Of course, it helps that today we looked at Wangari Maathai's website for the Green Belt Movement. I read her memoir, Unbowed, in Tom Lynch's Global Environmental Literature class during Fall 2010 and Maathai was supposed to come to UNL in the fall, but she died of cancer in September. She was the first African woman (and first environmentalist) to win the Nobel Peace Prize, in 2004. What the Green Belt Movement was able to accomplish is staggering.

We watched these two videos:

And I asked my students to jot down notes of things that sounded familiar to them and we put them on the board. We heard issues of gender, class (specifically poverty), the rural/urban divide, politics and power, government and power, and grassroots empowerment. Such a simple thing, to plant a tree and allow rural women the opportunity to stand on their own two feet.

We spent the rest of the class period working on the topics for their WP3, on human-caused disasters. Most of them had a decent idea of what they would do: tracking, the BP oil spill, ocean dead zones, the Keystone XL pipeline, and more. What I emphasized as we wrapped up the class is that I want them to concentrate on complicating what is going on. One of the problems we see with these human-caused disasters is that there is a huge divide between people and the environment. It's an either/or, not a both/and. So, I want them to make sure that they're talking about a disaster in a specific place--fracking in Texas is going to be a different issue than fracking in Ohio or Pennsylvania. The place matters. The people matter. Who, specifically, is affected? Race, gender, class, economic status, heritage, etc. Why should anybody care?

Their rough drafts are due next Friday, so I'm pushing them to work on the researching now, this weekend, so they can have something solid before Friday, because their last rough drafts were not good. I hope they can apply what they learned last time to this paper. I'm going to be very interested to see what happens with this project. Verrrry interested. And like I'm noticing with my 252, there's still an energy to the class that defies this race-to-the-end-of-the-semester, which is just plain awesome.

Eng. 150: How Do We Measure the Value of a Place?

Today was actually the third day of our WP3, on human-caused disasters, but we didn't have class on Wednesday because we went to Don Worster's terrific lecture titled "An Unquenchable Thirst: How the Great Plains Created a Water Abundance and Then Lost It." (The video is 84 minutes long, but it's worth watching if you can make the time.) But the larger questions we're asking ourselves include "what is the value of a place? How do we measure the value of a place?"

The crux of Worster's lecture was that Americans have been living in this "culture of abundance" for so long, a culture supported by ingenuity and technology and straight-up American exceptionalism that we cannot begin to conceive of a time and culture where we cannot have everything we want. The consequences of ingenuity, he said, "required a lot of cultural change. What do you do when the natural world does not treat you the way you should be treated?" The Homestead Act assumed the benevolence of nature, which is interesting considering that the Plains were the Great American Desert, a place of no value, a place that stood between us and our destiny to possess both coasts of the continent.

"We have become a mining economy," Worster said. We mine coal, oil, gas, and water. The rate of consumption of the Ogallala Aquifer means we will mine it dry very soon--something that is complicated by rising global temperatures. All the projections, he said, indicate that the Plains and the central US will be hotter than the global mean and will be accompanied by decreased summer precipitation. This drought will last centuries, be permanent.

What was particularly interesting during his lecture was the irony I noticed between the "Bureau of Reclamation" and the role of Mother Nature in thwarting those efforts, the idea of Mother Nature as a bitch. But Worster's larger question was what happens, then, when we turn water into a commodity, rather than a resource? Our culture is shifting from a American individualism to a community, and he spoke of the "moral economy of water." He discussed solutions to the water problem, that one is a market-based approach to water distribution, to let the markets put a price on the water and then buy and sell it like any other commodity. But what's interesting about that is the people who can afford the water will not be in the agriculture industry. And, as I question, when ever has putting a price on nature ever protected it? Is money the only thing that holds our society together?

He did propose some solutions, most of which will take an incredible mental shift: a movement back to dry-land farming, reconsidering how we define wealth and affluence (and our role as a consumer society, with our transportation, the size of our houses, etc.). He spoke of "learning new ways to be rich."

In class this morning, we put that up against the interesting interview Stephen Colbert did with Mark Ruffalo on Wednesday:

The Colbert Report	Mon - Thurs 11:30pm / 10:30c
Mark Ruffalo
www.colbertnation.com
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And through the humor of the interview, which is about hydro-fracking, brought up some issues that my students and I then applied to our conversations about human-caused disasters and what we're reading in Erik Reece's Lost Mountain, about radical strip mining and mountaintop removal. If you watch this interview, a few things are important: how do we place a value on places? Are they only valuable if we can get something from them? Who is affected? Who has the power to act? One of the things my students pointed out--and it's only briefly mentioned at the end of the interview--when Colbert points out that Ruffalo is the Hulk, that comment is larger than a role that Ruffalo played. It brought up a really important issue of class. Ruffalo can buy a solar system to power his house. Those who live in the houses that could blow up don't have the money to fight those tracking companies.

As we moved into talking about Lost Mountain--and we were running out of time by this point--we talked about what we thought answered "how do we measure the value of a place?" and what we put up on the board boiled down to two categories: what it can do for us and location. (I didn't know what I would get when I started this activity, but again my brilliant students surprised me.) When we talked about valuable locations and what it means that a place can give us something, the issue of "pretty" came up. We talked about how we define pretty, how somebody from the mountains may not think the Plains is pretty, etc. And then we talked about how our own place was described in its infancy, as the Great American Desert. Once it became able to give us something, then it became valuable, the Breadbasket of the World. Rhetoric matters, people.

One of my students remarked that he's trying really hard not to hate humanity as this class progresses and it's true, there is a real danger of fear and disillusionment in starting to understand what's happening in the world. Over and over my students will comment that they had no idea that any of this was happening until my class. Well, I think they're being too hard on themselves. They're eighteen. Nobody knows anything by that age. But the larger question, I asked this particular student, is not how not to hate humanity, but to question how we got to this point, because if we can do that, then the next question, "what do we do about it?" is actually a step of hope.

(And then I told them about my parents buying a new house (having just sold theirs) and me trying to convince them to think differently about what they want and need in a house, because they're Baby Boomers, growing up in a culture that told them that they deserved this, that the American Dream equaled a certain size house, and what it might mean to think outside the box in terms of housing. And then I pulled out the floor plan of my dream house, because, yes, I do carry it with me, put it under the document camera, and told them my dream house was a tiny bit over 300 square feet.)

I can't wait till Monday.

Post-Spring Break

It's gorgeous (albeit windy) out there in Lincoln today and I've spent most of my day inside, unfortunately. But it's been a really good day, even the first day after Spring Break. It was good enough that I came home, bubbling with energy and thrill when I knew I didn't have any energy to back it up with. I love my job, I love my classes, I love my students.

Two major things happened today: we started the third and final writing project in my English 150 class. I'm almost done grading their second WP, which are turning out to be really good. The first was on Jonis Agee's novel The River Wife and they wrote about how a character (an individual person) can be shaped by a natural disaster, even a hundred years or more after it happened. Then in the second project, we moved out a little and considered how the student's own community was shaped by a natural disaster. As they moved through this project, they started to ask--without any prompting from me--what do we do about this? It made my little heart go pitty-pat. Unbeknownst to them, the third project is designed to address exactly that question.

This third project is about human-caused disasters (yet another cheerful topic in a semester of cheerful topics) and we're reading Erik Reece's The Lost Mountain, about radical strip-mining and mountaintop removal. The purpose of the project is to find a human-caused disaster and propose a solution (of some sort); part of this will involve arguing why it's a disaster, because obviously the coal companies don't see mountaintop removal as a problem. The situations are much more complicated than that. As my students did their final two author presentations of the semester (on Reece and Don Worster, who's giving a lecture my students are going to on Wed night), I asked my students to consider a few things as we start reading this book:

It's not as simple as saying that places should be protected because they're pretty, because they mean something to us, because they represent something in the mythology of our country or our world. The world is a lot more complicated than that, so we have to get beyond our emotional reactions. I asked them to consider the role that the economy and class play in Reece's book--because these areas of Appalachia are extremely poor--and we'll continue to add to our list of complications. I like complications. They make life--and class--much more interesting.

In my 252 today, we started Joseph O'Connor's novel Star of the Sea and our awesome collaborative project with Dawn Duncan's class at Concordia. The truth is I'm extremely nervous. I've never done something like this before and between Dawn and myself, between our two classes of students, this could go really well or it could fail spectacularly. Add into that that I've never done a wiki before and new technology scares me. If you want to check out our wiki, click here for Imagination and Knowledge. I hope it turns out well.

Today was the Famine background power point in 252 and I thought it went fairly well, considering the subject matter. But as I was putting the power point together, it occurred to me the juxtaposition of politics and ecology, particularly The Little Ice Age and revolutions. I recommended Brian Fagan's awesome book The Little Ice Age, which I spoke of in tones I don't normally use for climate books. He's got an incredibly awesome chapter on An Ghorta Mor. And then also Michael Pollan's book The Botany of Desire, which contains his chapter on control and potatoes. I brought up the winters during the American Revolution and the famous painting of Washington crossing the Delaware. I brought up the French Revolution. (I brought up Stradivarius and the theory that the Little Ice Age partly explains the superiority of his instruments, which made a few students nod in interest.) I mentioned Mt. Tambora's eruption in 1815, the Year without Summer (and with a mention of Frankenstein), and then we get into the Famine itself. The lecture was more complicated and more linear than this, but strangely, this is what my students seemed most interested in. A lot fewer of them looked bored than I thought they would. Go figure.

We start the actual book on Wednesday and I can't hardly wait. The book is freaking awesome. The landscape of the text, the manipulation of the form, the switching POV--sigh. I asked my class if anybody had started reading yet, some had, and those that had were so raring to go, with so much to say, so many questions about it, that I really, really can't wait for Wednesday.

It's the point in the semester where I have too much to do, not enough time, but I still can't wait for the next class. That's a good sign.

Eng. 150: Reflections on WP2

I meant to write and post this post last week, but Spring Break started and I just got back last night from my whirlwind trip to Minneapolis to visit K2, K3, M. and C, then up to visit my parents and Gram (who had a bad fall last week and broke her nose and wrist), and then I came back down to Lincoln last night. It's 9:15, I'm up, showered, my pot of Maritime Mist is a quarter emptied, and I've got my books in front of me so I can get some work done before classes start back up on Monday...

On Friday, my 150 students turned in their 2nd writing project, which was on the subject of how their community was shaped and affected by a natural disaster. (Click on the 150 page at the top of the blog to see the class overview.) We started the project with the idea that every community has a disaster story, somewhere in its history. Chicago and the Fire, San Francisco and the 1906 Earthquake, just to name two. My students initially struggled with thinking that their communities in Nebraska had a story like these, because they didn't know of any. And this stressed many of them terribly.

Eventually everyone found a topic and we started reading Timothy Egan's The Worst Hard Time, about the Dust Bowl, and David Laskin's The Children's Blizzard and Ted Kooser's Blizzard Voices, about the 1888 Children's Blizzard. My class is a William H. Thompson Scholars section (I have fourteen students in there right now), which means that all these students have won the WHT scholarship, one that goes to low income and first-generation students from Nebraska. So, most of my class comes from Lincoln or Omaha, though some come from other towns. Four or five chose to work on the 1975 Omaha tornado, I had one on the 1993 East Coast blizzard (this student was born during that blizzard in Georgia), one did the 2004 Jackson, NE tornado, another did the 2006 Arkansas tornadoes, and I also had one on the 1952 Misssouri River flood.

The project included many different components (some of which I was very nervous about, never having done these things before): they were required to do interviews (this, I'd done before), but I was nervous about the blog component. Because the focus of the project was to examine how their own community was affected by a natural disaster, I wanted them to use a platform that would serve their community. I envisioned links to these blogs from their local libraries and such, to be a resource for others. When I do this again, I like the blog aspect of it, but I know better how they work and what I need to do to ask students to reply meaningfully to their group members' blogs. (I'll also spend a day more specifically talking about what makes a blog a credible source, not just for their own research, but how to make their own blogs appear credible to others.) But the blog part did offer the opportunity for students to post YouTube videos of the disasters (if they found them) or articles they found. I did have them post their interviews, as well as their interpretations of their interviews.

Something I'll do differently next time: I'll more clearly point out how our texts (the Laskin and Egan) incorporated interviews--it was something I thought we'd covered well enough, but when I saw their rough drafts, apparently that was not the case. Another thing I'll do differently: making explicit connections between the Think Pieces they posted to their blogs (which offered some really excellent critical thinking and insights) and making sure that the students transfer those to their papers. Somewhere along the line, they seemed to think that they couldn't use their Think Pieces or other things they'd posted to their blogs in their paper.

The main problem I had in teaching this project was getting my students to think about how their community was affected by this disaster--and this is something that didn't pop clear for them until I handed back their rough drafts and gave my "I'm so disappointed" speech (and this is also where I spoke about them not using their blogs and in-class writings in their papers, because that was the point...). But between the rough draft and the final draft, things started to move: they started to understand what and who their community was--and they needed to get beyond the cliches of "we found out what we were made of" and "we all came together and helped out," because that's not the point.

I used north Minneapolis as an example: last summer, a tornado hit north Minneapolis, just blocks away from where my sisters, brother-in-law, and niece live. When I went back in February for C's birthday, there were still houses that had blue tarps for roofs. In Minnesota. In February. I let that image sink in, and then I continued: north Minneapolis is historically low income, historically African-American, and most people rent their houses. It makes a difference if you live in a trailer or a stick-built house when a tornado comes through. It makes a difference if you own your house or rent. It makes a difference if you have insurance or not.

My student who did the 1993 East Coast blizzard was the key here to making this clear for my students: it's not just a blizzard, it's a blizzard in a place that doesn't have blizzards. Georgia is largely rural and there's a lot of low-income families there. What happens if you lose power and you live in a trailer? What happens if you can't buy a thousand-dollar generator to power your house? The people who lived around him were predominantly low-income and predominantly retired. It makes a difference. And by the time they turned in their final drafts on Friday (which I haven't graded yet), this really started to become clear (so when I teach this again, I'm going to start this conversation much earlier). And I'm so proud of them, I can't stand it.

Here are a few moments from their reflections that I think are amazing (and since they posted these to their blogs, which are public, I'm not crossing any privacy boundaries):

• "The whole point of our class is to view disasters and not just to know they happened but how how they have impacted people. It's our job to not only learn about them but find ways to stop them from happening, finding ways to prevent them or just having a plan that when and if they happen we can come together as a community and help each other out."
• "Throughout writing this paper I realized that the whole point of this paper isn't necessarily an assignment to get us a good grade in the class, it's an assignment for us to realize history in the places we come from, and what we can do in the future to help our community. It's a paper to realize that not everyone gets the same help even if they experience the same disaster. It was a paper for us to realize that the community we live in is shaped by the certain people who live there. We all have a different story to tell and we all live different experiences. That is what makes us different from everyone else. And it's our duty to learn about our history because our history is a part of us as well."
• "Although this project was overall very stressful and difficult, it really gave me an opportunity to explore more of where I come from and even gave me the chance to meet a new family member. This project also I believe allowed me to come out of my shyness shell. The fact that I called and had a long personal conversation with a woman that I have never met in my life was actually a huge deal to me. If it was not for this project, I most likely would have never in my life taken that step."
• "I found out so much and my reaction was a subdued elation. I felt awesome, being able to bring my mother into my work. That was one of the most exciting things about this project. I was able to show my mom what I work on and the pride that she had was immense. I could hear it in her voice while we were doing interviews. Another thing that I really liked was being able to open up the lines of communication between my extended family. After we moved from Georgia, we never really talked. I was able to get past the past and everyone was all the more excited. Old ties of friendship were renewed and that is a big thing in a family like mine."
• "I learned more about my community and where I come from than I thought I would. It is weird to think that my grandfather and I both experienced a flood of the Missouri River. They were almost 60 years apart, but it was interesting to see how history can repeat itself. This sounds crazy, but I have learned more about Nebraska history in this English class than I have ever learned in any history class I have been enrolled in."

So, in hindsight, as much as I wanted to emphasize different ways of knowing and valuing those different experiences, I think I underestimated the value of doing the interviews and the value of the students interviewing family members. Not everything went as well as I wanted it to, but in the end, I'm really proud of my students and their progress and efforts, I have new ideas for the next time I teach this, and I'm really excited to start the next project on Monday, on human-caused disasters. And the truth is, I get more excited about what my students are doing and the conversations we've had this semester--and the conversations I know we will continue to have--every time I think about it.

Why I Love My Job, Thursday Edition.