Weekend? What weekend?

Another thing I dislike* about my wonderful, chosen, profession as a college teacher is the fact that I can rarely enjoy a day off during term time. There is always homework: marking, prep, reading. Or thinking about homework. Even when I make time to do something else, the work that needs to be done is percolating in the back of my brain, nudging me, making me feel guilty about walking the dogs or taking photographs or working in the garden.

When I was in grad school the second time around, while continuing to work at least half time, I worked out a system whereby I did as much school work as I could, morning, afternoon and evening for six days a week but always reserved Sundays for myself. That worked well, but I don’t seem to have the energy these days for evenings, so the work time bleeds into the day that should be “off.”

Oh well, in another ten years or so I can retire… and probably then, I’ll complain about not having enough to do

*Sorry for the moans today and yesterday, but I’m feeling a bit tired and under the weather…

Marking

Just finished a small set of creative writing assignments.

I hate marking. It’s my absolutely least favourite part of my job.

Yet, marking creative writing is not so bad, perhaps because there I am focussed on giving positive reinforcement. It doesn’t feel like my job to say “you are doing this _wrong_,” rather, to point out possibilities for improvement.

I don’t mind marking things where things are clear cut: you do it right, you get a mark; you do it wrong and you don’t. The most difficult cases are where someone has written an essay and it’s careful and safe and … boring … and unoriginal. How can you tell them how to improve? “Having some ideas would help…”

I’d like to try and make more assignments just “complete/incomplete” and giving feedback for its own sake and not for “marks.” I need to think about how to do that; any ideas would be welcome.

Friday Linkage: Nablopomo day SIX!

Our Blogging Challenge has made the Camosun website: on the School of Arts and Science and the English pages.

Some encouraging words for writers by Neil Gaiman

Velvet Verbosity, who dropped by to comment on my 100 words post yesterday, has more 100 word prompts, and tips for writing word portraits.

100 Words

Early in the term, I asked my creative writing students to write 100 words exactly on either “lemon,” “asparagus,” or “bread.” We were working on descriptions, and I thought it would be an interesting exercise in writing something precise and focussed (one of the things many students have trouble with is getting to the point right away and keeping focus). Some of the results were amazing; it was a good exercise, and one that I’ll use again. I’ve given them a few more words to try for their blogging challenge, and I hope that some of them will.

It’s also surprisingly difficult. Here’s mine, on “asparagus.”

I tried growing asparagus once. It’s my favourite vegetable; I love its indescribable, slightly musty, flavour, the strange combination of textures in my mouth – crisp stem and rough, bitty tops. There’s an art to cooking it. If undercooked, it’s bitter; if overcooked, it’s soggy and tasteless. Nothing is better than eating your own asparagus fresh from the garden. Phallic, it pokes up through the soil, the early shoots surprisingly thick, sometimes twice as fat as anything you normally see in the store. At the end of its season, the shoots become wiry and fragile, tips finally bursting into feathery fronds.

Certainty

I am certain of nothing but the holiness of the heart’s affections and the truth of the imagination (John Keats)

My creative writing students are a passionate bunch, and many of them are activists and advocates of causes. Last night, I asked them to think about things they are _not_ certain of, because they seem so confident in their beliefs, and I like to get them to mix things up a bit.

That, of course, made me wonder about what I AM certain of…

I am certain of warmth, and light, and laughter
I am certain of bread, and wine, and clear water
I am certain of friendship
I am certain of the love of my animals, of the new growth of plants in springtime, of the heat of the sun.
I am certain of poetry, of beauty, of the possibility of joy
I am certain of cruelty, of injustice, of humanity’s potential for brutality,
But I am also certain of redemption, of hope,

of love.

Thinking About Audience

One of the reasons I make my students keep blogs is that it forces them to consider an audience. If they write a journal on paper or in a Word file, they know that I am the only person who is going to read it; write that same document in a blog, and they know their peers will see it too, and conceivably anyone who stumbles over their work. Heck, Neil Gaiman or Stephen Fry might find their blog, who knows! For most of them, this tends to change their work, to “up” the quality – isn’t it interesting that they’ll write better for an audience of their peers than for me

So I shouldn’t be surprised that in this blogging challenge I find myself thinking about audience more than usual. I’m publicizing the challenge; I could be attracting a new readership to this blog, including my own professional peers and other members of the college or wider teaching community. And even though I’ve always had an audience at the back of my mind, as you have to when writing a public blog, all of a sudden that audience has become more immediate and real. Has it changed my writing? You bet! I find myself much more conscious of spelling and grammar – heaven forbid that someone catch me out in an error. I’m taking care to preview my work, and am being more scrupulous about my writing. Because I’ve linked my Twitter feed to the entry publicizing the challenge, I find I’m censoring my tweets just a bit more than usual, and limiting the personal content a bit: writing less about what I had for breakfast and more about what I’m reading while eating it.

I’ve been blogging for six years, and blogging really seriously for four. I maintain two regular blogs: this one, and a “personal” blog on LiveJournal. Although my LJ blog is theoretically public, I’m reluctant to attract a readership beyond the chosen circle of “friends” there, and will never link to it from a more public blog. I’m realizing that in the blogging world, as in “RL” – real life – I monitor the information I divulge depending on the level of friendship. I have very close friends, close friends, acquaintances, and random meetings online, just as I do in the “real” world. What it can be difficult to remember sometimes, though, is that conversations at the level of “to a very close friend” can be seen and responded to by those I’d put in the “random” category. Is that going to stop me from revealing myself in my personal blog, or on Twitter? No, but I may be more careful. You never know when Neil Gaiman might stop by.

Left at College?

One of the students in this month’s blogging challenge wrote yesterday about discovering the predominance of “leftist” ideology at the college. He had heard that places of higher learning were hot-beds of left-wing activism and thinking, but was surprised at the extent to which the stereotype was true.

Of course, no one would be surprised by the notion that college and university students were “lefties,” but what gave me pause was this student’s assertion that his instructors were all left-leaning as well. But I don’t disagree with him. On reflection I admit that I and many of my colleagues espouse leftist principles to one degree or another; my own political position, in fact, is probably somewhat to the right of that of some of my colleagues. And I don’t think this is surprising; it’s not called a “liberal” arts education for nothing. What makes me stop and think, though, is that this is so obvious in the classroom. I’m not saying that we should censor ourselves: heaven forbid. But – as dear to our heart as many of our principles are – isn’t it our responsibility as educators to present both sides? A balanced view? Is it “okay” to teach what we believe because we believe it’s “right”? Even if it’s “left”?

Any thoughts?

nablopomo #2

November Blogging Challenge!

Help me and my students raise money for the United Way!

November is writing month, and many people around the world are taking part in challenges to write every day for thirty days. The best known of these is NaNoWriMo, but my English 152 (Creative Nonfiction) students and I have agreed to try Nablopomo: National Blog Posting Month, and in the process raise some money for the United Way.

I have pledged a certain amount to each student, and I’m hoping each one will individually match my pledge to him or her. We’re all going to try and write every day. My posts will be here; my students all have accounts in LiveJournal. I’m not going to link to them all because some are not comfortable with the world watching them do their homework, but I may link to some of them individually here, with their permission. I’ll post updates on how we’re doing, and you can follow along here, or on Twitter.

Help us out! Make a pledge in the comments; later on, I’ll post the easiest ways to send us donations.

Wish us luck!!

Happy 80th Birthday, Ursula Le Guin

I find it an almost overwhelming task to write about what Ursula Le Guin means to me. Perhaps you will get an idea of how I’m feeling if I tell you that when I had a chance to meet her, at a reading, and get my copy of Tehanu signed, I got tears in my eyes as I mumbled some incoherent thanks for what her work has been to me over the years. She gave me a sharp look, out of that canny, lined, intelligent face that somehow looks exactly as you would imagine her, and wrote spontaneously “with best wishes” along with my name and her signature.

I think I was twelve when I first read A Wizard of Earthsea. I thought it was the best book I had ever read, which is saying quite a lot because I had already read Tolkien (though not with the depth and appreciation I brought to him later). I read the succeeding Earthsea books, the original trilogy, as they were published. I loved that harsh, cold, brilliant world of islands and dragons and raiders and wizards and Words.

I was in my thirties when Tehanu was published, and I loved that, too. It was, perhaps, the perfect time to read it, when no longer young, no longer captivated with the adventure-quest aspect of life, beginning to understand the world’s cruelty as well as its beauty, and to appreciate Le Guin’s recognition of the redemptive power of love against what can be a bleak existence in the world.

The Dispossessed and The Left Hand of Darkness made me think, and taught me new ideas about politics (anarchy) and religion (Daoism). I wrote a paper about The Left Hand of Darkness for a graduate seminar on Androgyny in Literature, and studying its images made me appreciate even more Le Guin’s austere and orderly mind.

Her work is intellectual, clear, serious, beautiful, always thoughtful. I love her essays as much as or even more than her novels, because I love the glimpse of the personal, the mind behind the words. I have taught, and continue to teach, her short stories such as “The Ones Who Walk Away From Omelas”, which always raise deep and far-reaching questions about the world and about humanity.

Her work presents sentiments – love, hope, courage, faith – but is never sentimental. She is clear-eyed about the darker elements of human life, yet retains a steadfast optimism about the power of the imagination, of story-telling, of community.

Ursula Le Guin’s work has informed me as a reader, a writer, a teacher, a feminist, an activist, a woman. She has changed my life.

Thank you, Ursula Le Guin, from the bottom of my heart.

Cinema Politica

Cinema Politica’s first showing is King Corn, which follows two brothers as they farm an acre of corn. In the process they, and we, learn about the ramifications of the increasing industrialization of corn growing in America. Introducing the film will be Don Genova, the coordinator of the group “Slow Food.” Don Genova writes food columns for the CBC, and has written/produced a film called Islands on the Edge which is about food security on Vancouver Island. He’ll be showing clips of that film on Wednesday. You can read more about him and listen to his podcasts at his website, Pacific Palate.

Wednesday, September 23, 7:00 pm. Camosun College, Young 216.