Journal writing via cyberspace

I have worked with students and writing for more than twenty years and before that with my own children.  Journaling, for me, is a way of life.  I write on scraps of paper, in notebooks, and now online.  I encourage my students to keep journals while they are in my classes and to continue the practice when they leave me.


My granddaughter, Maggie, has had a journal for most of her six years and has written sporadically in the journal during visits to G's house.  A storyteller, Maggie tells fantastic tales about princesses and dragons that sometimes mimic fairy tales and some of the Disneyfied versions.  And, because she is a talker and a storyteller, Maggie is still much more in the telling phase than in the writing phase of her stories.  This summer we have let the journal drop until swim team is over and my work schedule lightens.  


A couple of days ago, my grandson, Henry, who lives quite a distance away, opened up a Skype video call to ask me to help him with his journal writing. A rising second grader, Henry's school assigned journal writing as a summer project.  He has been fairly diligent about writing in the journal over the summer, but was in need of new ideas.  So we talked.


First thing we dispelled the idea that a parent person should draw lines on his paper for him to follow.  Then we had to talk about what to write about.  The weather seemed like a good place to start and we started there:  "It is hot today."  But Henry's ideas went to a visit to the park, an opportunity to observe and perhaps collect some caterpillars, and a short record of how the present caterpillars in captivity are faring.  All in all, a fruitful journal writing time.  Later, Henry asked if we could set up a weekly appointment for his journal writing.  

And we will do that.  I was fascinated with the whole idea of Skyping a journal session and with watching Henry's thoughts develop on the page.  My help was limited to asking questions that might lead to writing, somewhat like questioning students in conferences to help them expand their pieces.  I wonder if the questions will lead to Henry thinking about what could go next without prompting.  And I'm wondering about this long distance cooperative journal writing.  I can see this working on so many levels.



  

What to Keep, What to Let Go

The UNCC Writing Project's Summer Institute comes to an end on Friday and I already am missing the daily conversations and the excitement as we make connections, scribble notes in our daybooks, and think--collectively and alone.  This always is the time of year when I realize how important it is to be "in the conversation."  Even if it's just sitting in the same room with others who are thinking and working, there is some kind of connection that takes place.

I never would be writing in this space if I had not attended the summer institute.  To say what I think is difficult for me probably because for so many years I have opened my mouth and inserted my foot.  I have had to learn the hard way that silence sometimes is golden and to remember Abraham Lincoln's advice to write a letter, put it aside and read it the next day before deciding whether to mail it.  Now here I am putting my thoughts right out here, hitting publish when I finish and not thinking that I might ought to wait a day before saying what I'm thinking.

For a couple of days we have, off and on, talked about hoarding and holding onto things we should let go.  They always turn to me since for three years I've been working on a self-discovery video about my own hoarding of books and other things that I don't need but am afraid to let go.  I pulled out the dusty storyboards again and vowed to finish that video before school starts this fall.  The unfinished video cluttering my computer's storage space is another example of my not finishing what I start and I've been pondering that trait as well.  I am packing up things to sell or give away and I am tying up loose ends with things in my house--organizing, sorting, pitching.

So today I invited the group to think about what to let go and what to keep as we begin another school year.  Here's what I have decided to let go and what to keep and I hope somewhere in this listing is a key to my holding onto stuff way long after it should have been recycled or loved by someone else.

Here's what I'm letting go:
The fear that I'm not good enough.
The fear that if I can't do it the first time people will think I'm stupid
The idea that everybody knows more technology than I do
All my insecurities
(and clothes that I'll never wear even if the price tag is still attached)

Here's what I'm keeping:
The technology I'm using in my classroom and some new that I'm adding
Ideas for papers I want to write--particularly one on complex texts and one on women (rights, discriminations, bodies, and so on)
My work and my writing and my determination to write every day and to write with purpose and conviction
My friends

I have let go so much and every time I let something else go I feel a great weight lifted from my head.  I love the energy that comes from a clean empty space.

The Picture of Tomorrow

17 July 2012

 The photograph handed to me as part of an exercise in journeying and guiding got me thinking about sense of place.  I'm wondering how—and if-- that sense of place works in virtual classrooms as I continue to sort out my own feelings about students, the internet, and the effects of social media.  The photograph foregrounded an empty eating area just outside Fretwell Hall.  The tables were empty and the trees were bare, indicating that the picture was shot in winter.  One member of our group saw the setting as institutional and sterile.  I saw the lights in the building's windows as warm and inviting—a beckoning to come in from the cold outside.

In the photograph some twenty or so tables sat waiting for people to sit and talk, reflect on a lesson or book, or just be still with each other.  But there were only four people in the picture, all appearing to be walking toward a destination other than the tables and a conversation.  Obviously, the tables would not be so empty in warmer weather; and perhaps leaves on the trees and flowers around the edges of the patio would soften the starkness of this winter scene.  With little thought or imagination I could switch that scene to one of noisy students laughing and talking at one table while those at another pondered weighty academic subjects.

I have followed the physical construction of the campus of UNCC since it was Charlotte College on Elizabeth Avenue in downtown.  I have watched the architecture change from squat cement buildings to the imposing brick and glass structures that pervade the ever-expanding landscape.  My alumnus head swells with ecstasy as I view that photograph and the lights inside the building wrap me with the security of learning I found in those buildings.  Others in my group did not see the same thing.  One of them saw the starkness and the institutionality of the scene—there was not that pride and joy that I felt.  So as I wonder whether all this beautiful brick and mortar rising up among the trees and shrubs will last, will continue to be a mecca for learning.  Or will it become something else as students and professors opt to learn and to teach in front of a computer screen rather than a real classroom.  Will the tables be tweet decks and facebook pages, conversation flowing from fingertips on keyboards rather than mouths and breath? 

Evolution? 

Interruptions & Disruptions

Interruptions and Disruptions

I am thinking as my thoughts are interrupted by constant talking—a monologue of how to teach that never stops—about how my students value or devalue the noise spaces in my classroom.  I am thinking particularly of a student last year who always wanted the classroom door shut during a test because even one student casually walking down the hall would distract her from her task.  My claustrophobia had always demanded that the classroom door remain open and it took me a while to get over that closed-in feeling.  I have other students who ask to use earbuds or headphones during writing and reading assignments.  I have always said no because I think they need to have some time without their thinking disrupted by an outside source.  Nicholas Carr in his book The Shallows argues that prisoners in Abu Grahib were subjected to constant loud music and noise to disrupt their thinking.  For me, Carr validated my idea that noise is a disruption.

I open every creative writing class with a 15-mimute freewrite and I play music—piano solos and such—while they are writing.  This has been so much of my routine for so many years that I often don’t hear the music.  But I’m wondering if that music disturbed the girl who had to shut the door to take a test.  And what does that do for the kids that don’t like music or don’t like my choice of music?  If I let myself worry too much about this I will never do anything in my classroom because I will overthink it all­­­.  But I do need to be mindful of others.  I am wondering about how to balance that out so that all my students are accommodated.    

I could let this lead to other areas as well, such as group work, class response time, requiring blogs and other social media participation.  But I am going to stay with the noise thing for now because that’s brought on this post.  What causes some of us to need noise and some of us to not need noise?  For instance, I was in a space where one person started to talk and continued to talk until it became a kind of white noise that drove me nuts.  It interrupted my thinking to the point that I had to leave the room.  I was not listening to what was being said—can’t remember the specifics at all, but do remember the constant monotone that droned on and on and on.   

So why can’t I shut out the other noises?   Is it because I want to hear everything around me? Or is it that I am secretly searching for a distraction so I won't have to go to the dreaded writing task and attend to matters such as actually finishing a piece of writing?  I think it's both--but mostly a frustration with my writing--not liking the messy first drafts and not liking what I know is a long and arduous road to the finished product.  It's that old thing about as long as I don't start the project it is still that perfect dream. 

Writers Block continued

22 June 2011
 The question that worries me is that if I am so hesitant about publishing my writing how can I demand that  my students publish theirs?  Suppose they are just as sensitive about their work or suppose they are afraid for other to see it?  What gives me the right to make them give something of themselves to the public?  I feel guilty every time I force students to post publicly, but I don't have any choice  This fall I will have students maintain online portfolios, into which they will store all their work--read and unread, marked and unmarked, draft after draft.  The idea is that they can share with whomever they wish, as long as I am included.  I think about going green and saving trees by not printing out every paper, but there are the privacy issues that rear their ugly heads.  How many students will hesitate to write because they are afraid of criticism from their peers?

Embedded in those criticisms are: the subjects that they choose to write about, their opinions, how they view the issues--what side they take and why--how each fits with the discourse community of which she is a member and whether it will allow him to remain a member of that community or cause him issues.  These are the things that I want to explore.

Writers Block

10 May 2011
I am approaching this blogging space with fear and trepidation.  First off, I am not that public with my writing, particularly writing that hasn't been read and scrutinized by my personal readers and my writing groups. There seems to me to be something about blogs that scream for attention for the writer and I am more of a closeted writer.  However, I am going to use this space to write (talk) about writing insecurities, anxieties, and other issues that seem to make the words stop flowing.  As I put these words on this computer screen I recall all the students who talked about their own writers block--how they didn't turn in an assignment because they couldn't think of anything to write about or they couldn't get the words to come out on the paper in a way that they weren't embarrassed to hand in.  Because our school system is one of grades for work done and handed in, I have often demanded that they write something, revise, rewrite, revise, rewrite until they had at least something to hand in. How tormented they must have felt as they tried and tried to get something to show up on the computer screen or in the notebook, fretted over writing something interesting--worthwhile.  Now all their humiliation comes thudding down on my head.

Filling a space with writing is not that difficult.  I do it every day when I compose my 600 words early in the morning in the privacy of my study on my private computer screen and save them to a private folder.  I do it again at the beginning of every class period when I write with my students for 15 minutes. I can fill pages in daybooks and MS Word documents.  But I hesitate to publish--send it out into the world. I wonder if I have said anything that anyone else wants to read--that fear of looking stupid.  And I wonder how many students write and write, but hesitate to publish--hand in the paper.  I have that same trepidation about hitting publish post.

So.  What does filling a space mean?  How will I fill this space?  And who will care?  I want to use this space to explore the fears and trepidations of writing for the public (whatever and whoever that public may be). Through this exploration I hope to shed some light on writers block--what causes it--and, by getting at the cause, seeking remedies.