A Day in the Life of a Long-Time Lecturer

 

You wake at 4:30 a.m. You have been doing this routine for over twenty years, so you know it well. It's mid-week, say Thursday. You take some time to plan, to assemble the materials you will need for the day. You pack a laptop, planner, and three-ring binder full of papers to grade into a backpack. You prepare a simple breakfast, a banana today, and get dressed. If you have children, you will have to drop them off at school. If they are sick, you will have to find someone to take your classes. You ride your bike to work, just as the sun is coming up. You turn off the light to save batteries. You cannot afford on-campus parking and can’t afford to maintain your car. Once you get to your office, you will take your reusable cup and go get some coffee. If they ask if it is a refill, you lie and get the coffee cheaper. Then you find a table in the student union where you can think and drink the coffee before you grade papers. If you are lucky, you will write. If you have papers to grade, papers that are due back later today, you will help others with their writing by encouraging them with your comments. You also give a grade.  They are not the best papers, but you have learned not to be too much of a snob. You plow through them and try to be constructively critical and fair to all the 25 students in each of your four classes, part of a 5/5, full-time workload. Later this morning, between classes, you will have a committee meeting. Unlike the tenured faculty, you do not get release time for service, committee, scholarly or creative work, but you do have 20% time for “initiatives;” your 20% is curriculum design, work normally done by administrators who earn four times what you make. The work is time consuming and loaded with complicated details necessary to roll out your course. Student Learning Objectives need to be spelled out; methods of assessment identified; syllabi codified, standardized; pedagogically precise verbs embedded into assignment sheets and rubrics. If the course is good, others will take credit for your work. Credit here goes to those with tenure, but tenured faculty do not have time for such work. They will accept the award your course wins for you because you will not be invited to receive it or have the money to travel to the conference that will recognize the course. Tomorrow, your committee will host a meeting with administrators. You may be asked to take minutes. Today, though, you will sit through most of the meeting, but will have to leave early to teach. On the way to class, you will eat a dry energy bar. That is lunch. You will teach and attend other meetings for five and a half hours, covering the range from a first-year course to graduate level. When you finish your last class you walk across campus in the dark to your office. There, you place your clipboard and the homework that needs to be read for tomorrow. You will then post the grades on-line so students can keep track of the minutest changes in their scores. They will email if they slip down a percentage point. Then you will ride your bike seven miles in the dark. There, you will grade some more papers before falling into bed, only to get up and do it all again the next day and the next.You are lucky that you don’t have to travel to another campus to teach a few more courses for the extra money. For a year of this work you take home about $28,000. Not bad, considering you get health insurance with it, but it is difficult to support a family. You don’t get a sabbatical, or release time, or job security, after teaching full-time for over twenty years, but are expected to serve as a course director, member of several committees, to supervise graduate student teachers, and to write somewhere in there. You have directed national level professional development programs, published in university presses, in national journals and magazines. You direct a high profile service "outreach" program. You know that no matter how much you publish, how much service you do, how well you teach, that you will never penetrate the glass ceiling above you. Promotion is out of the question, not part of your work trajectory or university policy. You keep your mind on the path you have taken, the love you have of writing, reading, and language. You remind yourself that you share that love with students as much as you can. You do this because it is what you wanted to do. You remember how it was when you were a student, how exciting it was to see life spelled out on pages, in words. You work to remember and to keep the rising anger at bay. 

I Bumped Into Jorge Luis Borges on a November Night in 1977

After reading "The Circular Ruins" by Jorge Luis Borges, I knew I had to go hear him speak when he came to Madison many years ago.

His writing opened doors in my little Wisconsin brain. Because of him and words by others that pointed to the power of imagination, the cruelty of circumstance, and a need to act now, I had abandoned everything I called familiar.

I was living alone, going to college, and utterly lost. I wanted the toughest of challenges, to become myself, and Borges had pointed in that direction, but with no illusions as the difficulty of that undertaking. He wrote that the dreamer in the ruins "understood that modeling the incoherent and vertiginous matter of which dreams are composed was the most difficult task that a man could undertake." I was in the breech, had nothing to lose, and driven by hunger. That's the way Borges would like it.

So, he was going to speak at 8:00 at the Memorial Union Theater. I had just finished my shift as a dishwasher at Paisano's, a pizza place off State Street, and was in a hurry to get home, clean up a bit, get my backpack, and head to the Union to get in line.

I think half of Madison had the same idea. Back in those days, someone like a Borges could pack a house with young people who were on fire with questions. They were heady days. Madison, after all, had been in national news for its anti-war protests an even a bombing that had resulted in the death of a grad student.

Many of us were looking for something, a way to understand the chaos of the times, something that might mean. 

People were asking big questions and Borges was a kind of prophet. His work influenced Gabriel Garcia Marquez, among others, and was an antidote to the flat conformity and consumerism of the early 60s.

All I know is that I got lost in it when I read it, and it propelled me into studying Spanish, its original language. The idea of "dreaming a man" in "The Circular Ruins" gave me hope that I could dream a life that would lift me out of the quotidian small town world of Wisconsin. I couldn't breathe, and Borges opened a window through which fresh air blew.

So I was in a hurry, not running exactly, but passing others in a fast, somewhat determined walk. I don't remember the exact intersection, but just as Borges was stepping off the curb, his elbow in the capable grip of his young and beautiful companion, that I collided with him, his face two inches from my own.

I almost knocked him down, but not quite.

He was blind, so couldn't see me. I was mortified as I realized immediately, even before I actually bumped him, that I had plowed into one of the great minds on the planet.

I stuttered an apology. He looked directly at me, his face unchanged in its serenity, and said something like "no hay de que," no problem.

His companion, however, glowered. If looks could kill, I would have been dead after her first irritated glance. "Idiota," she said.

Borges, raised his hand to calm her. She took the cue and shot her irritation at the broken up sidewalk.

Later, as I sat in the balcony in the theater, listening to him read, I thought back to our collision, a chance meeting on a November night, in a large university town. So close, I thought, to a passing vision. It, like hundreds of other close calls, near misses, and head-on collisions in this life have guided and followed me like spirits, like the magical forces in Macondo of A Hundred Years of Solitude.

It is rushing headlong, sometimes, that you run into things, like bumper pool or pinball, little changes in direction that can affect the trajectory of life.

As I lose speed, my inertia running out, decelerating to a stall, I can see him still. He is calm, out there in the ethers, raising his hand in forgiveness. "No hay de que," he whispers. Don't worry about it.

It's just what happens as you dream your life into being. Sleep harder, focus the beam of your attention on what it is that sustains, for it will pass faster than you think, a speeding wave of voice and light.

As I dream this man I want to be into a form I can embrace, I realize that others, somewhere, not all that unlike myself, are dreaming up the vision I mistakenly call me.

How's that for a cooked noodle?

When Life Lessons Come in the Form of a Packrat

Yes, I am awake again.

Two-thirty a.m., and the packrat -- the one that knows not to take the bait in the live trap, the snap trap, and who eludes my killer cat, Simone -- is at it again. He has found a way into the duct work and has found something to gnaw on. That something has the acoustics of a stand-up bass, and amplifies every little chew into a late night megaphone of irritation.

He, or she, has gotten my attention. I am up with my flashlight, my headlamp, my broom, my shotgun, my Howitzer, and my brass knuckles. I am going to get him.

Only I can't. He is hidden behind plumbing and conduit and couldn't care less about my superiority in the arms race or the hierarchy of Being that puts me and my fellow hominids, especially homo sapiens, well above a lowly rodent.

In fact, he appears in the beam of light, smiles a greeting, and then goes back to gnawing.

Hmmmmm.

This is not the first time this has happened. Everywhere I go, whether Mount Lemmon or New Mexico, I run into my nemeses.

They are in my purview, my line of sight, and won't take no for an answer when it comes to stepping out of the spotlight of my attention.

I am left with no alternative but to consider the packrat my teacher for the time being.

What am I to glean here, dear Buddha in rodent form, from your presence, your smiling invitation to consider my spiritual curriculum? If you could speak, what would you say?

"Oh dear pilgrim, you are irritated by me and my avarice. I can see that. But this is my nature, so I have no choice but to reflect back to you some of your weakness in the ways of things. You, dear biped, while not a hoarder, have let things collect around you to the point where you are choking on them. I am here to tell you to let go, to toss out, to pass along, to free yourself of your need for things. After all, we lowly types have no choice, you of the 'sapiens' species are supposed to be able to reflect, decide, and then act in the world's best interest. You don't have to take more than what you need."

"Ah my unwelcome packrat, I hear you and I agree, but it is not that easy. For you see I am identified with all of this and without it I should not be able to rest until I possessed it all again."

"That may be, but it is not my problem to solve. You need to do what you need to do. You can resist or you can surrender. It's nothing to me."

"If I act on your lesson, will you leave me alone at night, let me sleep?"

"If there are not piles of objects around here, I tend to lose interest and move on. I can't promise anything though."

"I may trap you and take you away. Or my cat will catch you. Then I won't have to think about this anymore."

"That may be too, but, for now, I am here and you can't seem to get rid of me. Plus I am legion. My brothers and sons will come after me when I am gone. It's all up to you. Now, if you'll excuse me, I have some work to do, to get more space to store my treasures. It as, after all, what I do."

Then he leaves me there, in the cold, November night.

When I lie down, it is quiet. It looks like he will spare me his gnawing for the time being.

Just as I am about to drift off, Simone jumps up on the bed and gently places her paw on my eyelid.

She sits, calmly, purring, everything about her saying "It's time to wake up." 
 

On Paper -- Advice to Young Scholars

If professional life is like a race, I am losing. Those with whom I started have accelerated and are already crossing the finish line of career achievement. They are deans, provosts, full professors, muckity-mucks to the maximus. They long ago disappeared over the hills ahead of me as I slogged along the path of a lecturer, teaching freshmen, earning a third of what they earn, and getting little or no credit for curriculum design, for long years of experiment and reflection and innovation, for any achievement related to the practice of teaching.

What, you might ask, made the difference between them, the successful, and myself, the slogging, frustrated malcontent?

Well, interesting you should ask.

It's all about paper, looking good on paper. And paper means publishing, marketing, and playing the academic game. Of course, there is "good" publishing, the refereed, scholarly stuff, and "bad" publishing, essays, editorials about your university in the local newspaper, and things like memoirs, at least in my "field." (My field has always been a mix of teaching, writing, reading, language acquisition, literacy, and exploration of ideas. I jump fences between disciplines as a teacher and writer. I guess that's part of the problem too.)

If you want to move up the academic ranks, you need to do the good stuff. And you need to promote yourself, throw your hat into the ring, schmooze like crazy. You have to be the kid in class who sits in the front row and raises his hand before the teacher even asks a question. "I know!" "I know!"

You have to practically squeal with eagerness, a little cocker spaniel of positivity. You need to narrow, specialize, find your niche and fill it up with expertise. You need to hop to it and learn to make everybody else wrong or inadequate in some way. The old guard had nothing to say, unless they were stars. In that case, kowtow.

If you are the least bit slow, reluctant, critical at the wrong times, or a boat rocker, you might get into trouble, be a bad risk, and be doomed to the basement of academic drudgery. If you fall into that category, and carry the title "instructor," or "lecturer," it won't matter how much you publish, how well you teach, how much community or departmental service you do, you will never rise up the ladder of rank, salary, or position.

Even if you are good on paper, you are damaged goods, persona non-grata.

So, when the gun goes off, at the beginning of your race into the world of academe, start scribbling and keep you nose clean. Find the buzzwords -- socio-rhetorical literacy, digital everything, SLO-driven assessment -- and go for it. The end justifies the means. Push down every door you see. Storm the palace. Jump on the bandwagon. Take no prisoners. This is the war of your life.  Look to those who write the checks and kiss up to them. Start racking up the lines on your vita. Make a name for yourself. Push the rest of your life into the background, because none of it will help you if you don't get that paper kingdom built.

Looking good on paper is part of the political hardball that academic work has become.

Don't look to your experience for answers. There you will find only situations and students that require you to abandon your neat and tidy conceptual frameworks, will require you to act mindfully, to be eclectic, to see that no single theory explains everything in the complicated world of teaching, perhaps contradicting your precious concepts. You will find excitement and confusion and multiple truths. You might have to admit that you were wrong about some things. Buy we can't have that. No. No. That takes too much time, will end of costing too much, transferring precious attention to what's actually happening with students in a lived experience.

It's about the paper, looking good on paper. 

Touching the Live Wire

He held no interest in the workshops until he saw Sandra Alcosser, a visiting poet, walk with me across the yard on our way to the Programs Room. After that workshop, he hailed me from the other side of the fence separating the sidewalk from the rec yard, and asked how he could get into the workshop. I told him what I tell everyone who asks, "Send in a kite." I thought that was the last I would hear from him. After all, the excitement of seeing a woman visitor on the yard passes as quickly as a June rain shower.

He did, however, follow up, and soon became the hardest working member of the workshops. A. is a lyricist at heart. He writes love songs, but he wants to understand poetry. He devours books I bring in. Laurence Perrine's Sound and Sense, for example, has long been a classic for university poetry seminars. It's a semester-long text book that covers theories of poetry, forms, and it contains a lifetime's worth of prompts for writing verse.

A. worked through the book and about drowned us all with the wave of paper filled with his responses to the prompts. He wrote villanelles, pantoums, haikus, acrostic poems, sonnets. He experimented with form poems, free verse. He crawled into metaphor, metonymy, meditations, and rants. The guy was on fire.

His eyes look at me with  a gaze I would expect from a bird of prey -- sharp and hungry. His nose is sharp, brow low, cheeks chiseled. There is an edge to him to makes me a little uncomfortable sometimes. But his passion for writing gives him charisma of leadership in the workshops. He is unafraid to speak his mind when critiquing the work of big-shot gangsters.

Beneath the sharp exterior, A. is a man in love with words. He spends hours revising single lines once he gets to the point where he wants to polish a piece. And he speaks lucidly about his quandaries between the connotations of one word or another. When he can't decide between one and another, he makes up a new word, such as "contradistinctive" in the piece below, or he juxtaposes opposites, such as the Dionysian Apollonian. I don't if it's because I know him, can hear his voice in these constructions, or if they do carry an organic sensibility, but his inventions make sense to me.

His work looks at complexity, paradox, contradiction. He goes to the heart of ambivalence. His instincts for tension help him sniff out the stories lurking in his own work and the work of others. He loves deeply and is angry. That might fuel some of his insights into conflict.

When, J., a grad student in the MFA program came in to talk about prose poetry, she brought along copies of J.G. Ballard's poem "What I Believe." Here A. found a form capable of conveying the range of his vision. Here is a sample of his work:

Untitled III 

            I believe in the power of the pen to bleed onto the page the pains of yesterday, to pollute the bright surface with audacious ideas laid down as loops and stray marks.

            I believe in painting in words, done by one stroke at a time, to add a little bit of blue to the natural gray of this dream called life.

            I believe in ideas, abstract as they come, to grab hold of them and smash them to the concrete, to create and destroy them, to conceive, deceive and make them bleed, to kill them.

            I believe in reading a novel but once, and to go over a poem over and over, ‘til each line becomes a novel in itself.

            I believe in making many pictures into one image, in making many lines into one, in making many words into one, in summing up many ideas into one punch line, in imagining how much more we can say using one word to convey sentences.

            I believe in observing the unseen, in containing the untameable, in capturing the wind from the East and keeping it for selfish gain.

            I believe in the daemon that troubled Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, the writer, in that shadow that is the light hidden in the vale of tears, that is the soul, in the entity that some call evil, but what I call the spring that gushes forth gold.

            I believe that before Satan was cast out, he robbed the treasury of heaven, and now showers those who will listen with rubies from the Holy of Holies, the secrets of the dream of life itself.

            I believe that the mysteries of life aren’t mysteries at all, but are the things we know the most of, the things that scream at us to only look within, into the mirror inside us that reflects true being, the demon within.

            I believe in the blunt talk, how oxymoronic it is when it cuts with machete-like words, hacking to the heart.

            I believe in putting notes to words, in giving voice to the heart, in giving color to the soul, and hope to the young.

            I believe in not holding Death at arm’s length, in not trying to avoid paying one’s debt to nature, in not running from tomorrow.

            I believe in illegality, in being tabooish in order to be crowned with the regal headband of Alexander the Great, in crossing moral borders, climbing the Great Wall in order to be Genghis Khan and trample into dust the so-called chosen, in breaking the law, in being part of the 1%, the rich and outlaws, giving it 100%, and schooling the street 1·0·1, all in order to be the Dionysian Apollonian.

            I believe in being unconventional, in untying one’s hand and foot, in being unconstrained, freewheeling my free will down the great road, in being unstuck, shaking the mud off my boots in order to stomp and get blood on them.

            I believe in being contradictory, in being contradistinctive, in being the contrarian, surpassing the norm, antagonizing the average, directly contrasting a constellation to a planet, putting to shame the prevailing wisdom of the age.

            I believe in Jesus and Darwin, in Muhammad and Krishna, in Buddha and Confucius, in the Aztecs and Spaniards; take a little here and a little there, puree and drink up the mixed blood of my ancestors.

            I believe in the sad eyes that hide a happy heart.

            I believe in being honest, in not lying, but honestly telling you nothing, in being truthful, and the truth is this; silence is the ultimate truth, in being sincere; I sincerely do not apologize.

            I believe in being passive aggressive; you can laugh now; I’ll just wait ‘til no one is watching.

            I believe in being aggressive; sometimes there won’t be a next time.

            I believe in keeping score.

            I believe in the rose, the petals and thorns of life, in the one apple a day, and in that one apple from that one day, he must have eaten the arsenical seed that took root in his loins and poisoned the seed of man.

            I believe in names, if we only lived up to them; in titles, if we only honored them; in handles, if we only grabbed hold of them.

            I believe in the deus ex machina, in the Godsend, in the Jesus of the story, in the eagle perched upon the nopal cactus devouring the serpent, in the father of my daughters.

            I believe in changing with the times, in if you live by the sword, you will die by the gun, in giving up your dreams of a better tomorrow for a better tomorrow.

            I believe in holding on, only to let go; in capturing the hummingbird, only to let it fly once more; in catching the white whale and releasing it back into the deep; in getting the girl, only to leave her in the morning.

 

Bicycling Magazine's Appeal to the Peak Experience

Once in a long while a moment surprises us with all the ingredients of perfection: weather, motion, health, happiness, and meaning. This is rare, and sometimes laden with insight; the usual chaos of day-to-day living gives way to clarity, a sense of "this is IT."

Poets and artists call these fleeting seconds epiphanies. Others might call them bliss or magic or ecstasy (though that term now has other connotations). Bicycling Magazine, which is read by over 2 million readers, and claims to be the premier cycling publication, calls them "The One Thing," as in "The One Thing That Changed It All," and it portrays these images as a regular feature of the larger "Know How" section of the magazine.

In this series, readers of the magazine share a personal experience with cycling that gave them a reason to go on, a way to approach life, or a strategy to ride better, with more passion. The specifics vary, but the shared message is one of change, realization, or awakening. Bicycling sits down with readers for a personal chat of the most significant moments, one would think, of life, not just a bike ride. This is serious stuff and Bicycling collects testimonials from the faithful, has readers speaking intimately to other readers, in language that motivates, inspires, and, yes, transforms 98 pound weaklings into newer, better, more fully realized prophets of the wheel. You might think of the Buddha under the bodhi tree or other great spiritual teachers, but on a bike: picture Jesus in lycra racing up to the Sermon on the Mount.

The first impression viewers get of these testimonials to the redemptive power cycling is one of perfection, of achieving the ideal in terms of setting (always in nature), comfort (lovely weather), health (fit, young, beautiful), prosperous (great clothes and bikes), and moving (uniformly portrayed in as action pose).

In one a road twists like a serpent off toward the horizon. In another, the trail, covered with fallen leaves, looks like Robert Frost's "Road Not Taken" and its "yellow wood." Viewers see no traffic, no strip malls, no industrial smokestacks. No one seems worried about work, about juggling family responsibilities, paying health insurance premiums, income inequities, or having to put food on the table.

In terms of Maslow's Hierarchy of Needs, these models are at the apex. Judging from the images, they have the basics of food, shelter, clothing, community, and security. All they need to achieve is self-actualization. This impression fits with Bicycling's description of its readers. According to its mission statement, "Bicycling is the world's leading cycling magazine and connects with millions of active, affluent professionals for whom cycling is the centerpiece of a vibrant, experiential lifestyle." Some of the key terms here are "affluent," and "professionals." The magazine invokes in readers success and career, two traits that make it possible to concentrate on personal fulfillment through recreation. It's not surprising then that what is consistent across this genre is elite social status, and the freedom that status allows, to train, compete, and sculpt a lean, fit, and stylized look. 

While there are consistencies across the samples, Bicycling has strived to portray some diversity. The subjects in the photos vary in terms of race and gender. We see young women and men, but men outnumber women 3 to one, both in these four samples and the survey of two years of issues. One is black. They are well groomed, affluent, in their 20s or 30s, looking into the lens of the camera, or off toward some distant vista, with faces lit with confidence and ease with the world. These people have it together. The light is slanted, gauzy even, and their lean, muscular gams pop with definition. Three out of the four are standing, and the backdrop ranges from mountain ridges to heavily wooded forests. They look resolute, focused on what is coming, charging ahead, and happy. They look like people one would want to meet at a party, hang out with, travel to Colorado for a camping trip with. Viewers might want to know them, want to be them. They are the best of what an industrialized economy can provide, namely leisure, toys, and beautiful, unspoiled places to play. 

And they ride great bikes. The exact brands and models are not revealed, but a close look with an experienced eye ascertains right away that these are no ordinary machines. They are high-end rockets designed for competition. These are all tools for pro-level riders. They are all newish, made of carbon fiber, decked out with the best components, perfectly fitted. Some are road bikes, others, mountain bikes, still others are cyclo-cross bikes. Notably, bikes used for utility or transit are conspicuously absent. These machines serve purposes of recreation and competition. Likely, their owners drive or fly to the beautiful sites where they ride. Within that constraint, the message is clear: epiphanies are not limited to any specific discipline. The whole elite tribe, under the big tent, can find their deepest desires on bikes meant to fulfill recreation on and off road.

A closer look reveals a short, dreamy, narrative account to accompany the visual richness. The text depicts a specific moment, tells a brief story of that place and event, and then finds the meaning in it. One rider crashes and finds the courage to get back on the bike. Another finds inspiration in a professional rider's aggressive attacks during the Tour de France, attacks that would never result in winning the overall race but that yielded individual stage victories.

The language is casual, conversational, full to the brim with familiar motivational slogans. One states "I learned to go for the win, not to be content with just sitting on a wheel." ( "Sitting on a wheel" is an expression specific to cycling-speak, and stops just short of the much more pejorative expression "wheel sucking," which has obvious parasitical connotations.) This rider is now in the wind, risking everything, living life large, and if he gets "dropped" because he takes a risk, he claims "so be it."

Others broke a leg or did an iconic climb in France. Because of this experience cycling, they recovered, "discovered a passion," or realized "it's all mental." The thread of inspirational testimonials runs through the series as a bright and predictable tonic for readers looking for more reasons to ride their bikes. Like pleasant Hallmark cards, the realizations come to readers in an easy to digest generality that borders on the banal. These are more slogans or appetizers than real, hard-won life-changers. But that's what works, what doesn't require much work from readers. Complexity, ambivalence, nuance, or doubt, are conspicuously absent here. The larger meanings derived from these high points are lightweight bon-bons that we can all agree on and feel good about.

The magazine wants readers to trust their fellow riders' new-found direction and to identify with their stories. The narratives come across as helpful, friendly, intimate even. These testimonials open the door to a spiritual communion with bikes. One could say that the magazine is offering a kind of religion, a church of the bicycle.

I can't deny that I enjoy the articles and find myself opening to the personal, and vulnerable stories of fellow cyclists. There is no argument that exercise is an inescapable element of a healthy life, that cycling offers benefits like stress reduction, community connections, and emission-free transportation. I like the idea that cycling, or any physical activity done mindfully, can heal, and I want to believe in the church, the shared significance. I even confide such experiences with my cycling brethren and sisteren. We sometimes warm our hands at the fire of a shared lifestyle and bond as a tribe of velo geeks. But I can't quite call the sport, or industry, if you want to be blunt, a source of spiritual direction. They are just bikes, luxury toys, and bikes are a product that corporations want us to buy. There is a reason why many cyclists deride the magazine as "Buy-Cycling." They know that advertisers and the editors of magazines will do just about anything to promote and sell us their products.

So these testimonials are crafted and shaped to offer up simple fun, good stories, a heightened sense of meaning, and their purposes mix honest experience of readers with a subtle urge to upgrade, to buy, to travel, to be young and free enough to live the cycling ideal. They appeal to a dream-scape in which cycling can solve problems, provide direction, put viewers on a path to answers.

They are fun to enjoy, but only up to a point. The dream is a good one, its allure all but irresistible, an invitation to another life, its message "if only I had that, there, with that significance, then I would be happy."

If only changing it all were that simple...

Turn of Phrase: A Writing Teacher's Manifesto

The look they give me lies somewhere between irritation and perplexity when I say that writing is different from speech. I tell them that writing allows them to revise, to polish, to sharpen, to deepen, and to explore in ways that spoken language seldom does. They persist in "the look," not buying it, or maybe even not understanding what I am saying. The concept is sometimes resisted, dismissed, or seen as a threat to familiar ways of thinking and expressing.

As a teacher, I think it's worth the trouble to break down and explicitly name what I mean by writing being different from oral communicating. This is not to say that literate oral discourse is not possible, but it often is based on being steeped in written treatment of a subject.

Writing, for one, allows one to be more precise. Not "car," but "candy apple green, metal flake, '68 Chevelle with Hurst shifter, black leather interior, Bose 12 inch woofers, and fuzzy dice." Sometimes a subject needs that kind of precision. Or, not just "love," but "that time you had no money, but gave me the last can of Mountain Dew you were saving for the final game of the World Series."  Writing teachers harp on the need to specificity, precision, concreteness, vividness of language, but we don't always help students see what that looks like, how they can break out of highly abstract thinking.

Writing also allows one to create frameworks of categories. It pushes students to see what it is that they didn't see before about a particular subject. They might see a sequence of steps in a process that would never have been pursued in spoken conversation, or reasons for an argument they hadn't though about before. The defining characteristics, for example of a group they belong to, might escape if they didn't think to name them. A baseball player for example, did not notice that his team was almost all white, in spite of it representing a high school that was very diverse. Another student found that the "unity" she felt at a college football game came from the prospect of "taking territory" from the opposing team. She wrote "our tribe gained ground from the other tribe, and it made us all feel part of the taking. Now it was ours."

Writing also requires that the writer stand back from a subject enough to see it differently. Talking is so often so immersed in what it is that it can't see the forest for the trees or the water fish swim in. Talking takes things for granted, asks listeners to take speakers' word for the topic, to give benefit of the doubt. Writing invites critique. The best writing demands critique, or at least detachment from the subject to see it better for what it is and isn't.

Writing makes the writer accountable to support assertions. Writing carries more burden of proof than speaking, usually. Truisms and self evident claims don't often stand up to much scrutiny. Readers want examples, evidence, explanation in what they read.

Readers want writers to do the work of digesting an synthesizing their subjects. They want writers to divide and arrange material into bite-sized pieces that can be considered for their integral complexity. Writing addresses complexity in a way that speech often avoids. Creative tension, opposing but united traits, round characters and subjects come across better in writing than in speech. In speech, we can lapse into stereotypes and over simplification and get away with it. "She's such a drama queen," for example, in speech, will likely get a "yeah," while in writing, there may follow something like "but she also works the phones at the domestic violence center." People, like the subjects we consider in writing, are often far more complex than spoken discourse tends to address.

Students often wonder about these differences, especially when the topic of grades comes up. "A" writing tends to require that students convey complexity, order, shaping, division of ideas, careful explanation or commentary. Students often resist taking the step beyond what is a shared level of obviousness, or self-evidence.

I know, or infer this because of "the look" when I question widely shared cultural assumptions, such as the beliefs underlying patriotism, gender roles, the functions of asking questions of authority or what is deemed "normal." Constructs like white privilege, in particular are met with resistance when I ask students to step back and take a look at them.

Writing, as an act of inquiry, of re-visioning, or re-considering, can function to create new understanding, but sometimes students need to hear this stated explicitly, demonstrated, modeled, and then practiced.

It is only then that "the look" may turn from one of resistance and perplexity to one of surprise, curiosity, and wonder.

[This is a rough draft. More to come as I get some of these ideas together.]