#dagnotes

[dagwolf]

Class Notes (AP English)

Today, in Kafka. Worked on the first chapter in The Trial and the entirety of The Metamorphosis.

We spent some time addressing similarities between the two narratives. Students are usually quick to pick out the “one morning” aspect, but this is a good brainstorming and close reading exercise. Encourages the readers to see structure they’d likely otherwise leave unexamined, especially in light of Kafka’s apparent simplicity.

We examined the third paragraph of the story to discuss narrative tension a little bit. After all, teachers often use the word without really offering ways for students to see it and work with it, never mind explain what it is.

Gregor’s gaze then turned towards the window, and the murky weather — one could hear the raindrops striking the windowsill— made him quite melancholy. ‘What if I went on sleeping for a while and forgot all these idiocies,’ he thought, but that was quite impossible, as he was used to sleeping on his right side and in his present state he was unable to get himself into this position. However energetically he flung himself onto his right side, whenever he did so he would rock onto his back again. He must have tried a hundred times, shutting his eyes so that he didn’t have to see his jittery legs, and he only gave over when he began to feel a slight ache in his side, something he had never felt before.

There’s tension between the opening lines and what follows. I like this paragraph a lot. I also like the transition from it to the next paragraph which begins with Samsa complaining about his “strenuous calling”, complaining about life as a traveling salesperson. The first part of the story is full of strenuous struggling that quickly turns to acquiescence to state of being and affairs.

The paragraph above begins with something I know my students will dig–a meditation on common melancholy. We know Samsa will end up spending many hours with his insect head against the bedroom window peering outside. Here we are introduced to his inclination and an aspect of his personality that many readers might find in common with him when in similar mood. The opening sentence and a half might first appear incantantion, words recited in spite of content. But the lines are not obfuscatory at all. 

Samsa looking out the window produces a confinement and a restriction within the prose. His response to the rain on the window sets a gloom, of course, and his thought about “all these idiocies” is a nice meta-commentary about that which is to come. It’s not about the situation, then. The story is about something else. And we enjoy the melancholy. There’s a pleasantness to lying in bed rainy mornings that work destroys. One would like to sleep in on murky weather mornings.

The second part of the paragraph gives us so much of the kind of inner-monologue description that we expect from Kafka. Whereas Samsa begins the day invoking melancholy, he very quickly turns to pragmatism and rationality, in spite of his grotesque situation. 

Josef K. and Gregor Samsa are different characters, to be sure. However, the omniscient narrator seems the same. This isn’t always the case with authors who prefer the third person. I told the students I enjoy thinking of Samsa struggling to move, disgusted with himself, and closing his eyes so he doesn’t have to look at his stupid bug legs wiggling out of control. Samsa is not a “jittery” person. However, he will come to embrace his change without protest. He’ll acquiesce to isolated alienation, and we’re going to watch a person slowly learn to give up. The murky weather is the perfect beginning to the tale in which a character’s pointless pragmatism and remnants of his proud social achievements whither away in mere months.

If I had time, I’d have students re-read Miller’s Death of Salesman, even though it’s over thirty years older, and Melville’s Bartleby, the Scrivener. Bartleby just stops eating, too. We’d compare and contrast two vermin, the dead letter and the insect. And we’d compare two salespeople, both of whom author’s are asking us to pay special attention to for reasons that might not be instantly comprehensible.

With The Trial we opened our discussion with Kafka’s excellent illustration of power, class, bureacracy, and the Law, in the first ten pages of the novel. Kafka’s innovation comes with problematizing the way readers will no doubt think about “the Law”:

There’s been no mistake. After all, our department, as far as I know, and I know only the lowest level, doesn’t seek out guilt among the general population, but, as the Law states, is attracted by guilt and has to send us guards out. That’s the Law. What mistake could there be?

In response, K. admits “I don’t know that law”. And his guard responds, “All the worse for you.”

All students will get the common notion that ignorance of the law does not make one innocent of breaking the law, but Kafka presents ignorance in a complex way. K. is ignorant (in his mind, innocent,) of the Law, even mistaking It as merely one law of many. And K. is ignorant about himself. K. is the kind of character who wants to get into other people’s heads and doesn’t really bother spending time in his own. K. wants “to slip into his guards’ thoughts somehow and turn them to his own advantage”. K. is manipulative and he’s used to being able to wield the power to manipulate because of his social status. He’s only capable of seeing status. His guards are lowly, so why would he not be able to manipulate them.

I really like the mean bit of foreshadowing to K.’s execution when the guard, in response to K. saying that the law “probably exists only in your heads” merely responds, “You’ll feel it eventually.” Harsh.

[dagwolf]

Class Notes (Advanced Composition, Autobiography & Brainstorming)

**Introduced the personal essay today, with a focus on autobiographical writing. Students will be composing essays in English for their uni apps very soon, so it’ll be helpful practice. 

There are three elements to the autobiographical mode of writing I’ll want the writers to think about as they begin developing what will become 600-900 word essays about a significant person or event in their lives.

They will need to choose an even or person they feel comfortable writing about and be able to present something meaningful given a purpose. Comfortableness and purposefulness are often mistaken to be obvious in the personal essay mode. So many young writers choose an influential person as subject whom they believe they know a lot about and assume that readers will also already know a lot about. After all, relatives and important community members are significant for universal reasons. Purpose informs comfort in autobiographical writing. Many students use the personal mode to compose essays used in the interviewing process for applying to university; they turn their essays into resumes for achievement. When purpose is listing achievements, comfort will appear to readers as an unwillingness to engage complexity and to be self-reflective. This step--writing with purpose and comfort--appearing to go without saying, it’s more difficult than it appears. It’s good to remind writers about this problem with perceiving ease.

They will need to consider how to tell a story dramatically and how to describe a person vividly. Once again, when we are writing about events and persons that appear to be universal experiences for individuals growing up, we tend to assume the reader will easily comprehend our purpose. It’s important to understand the many ways to vividly describe persons or events. Sensory perception is very important and often ignored in these cases for attention to more practical matters such as narrating a plot and describing characteristics and personalities.

They will need to convey both meaning and importance of the person or the event. The meaning and importance is often referred to as autobiographical significance. This aspect is important for three reasons. Writers will need to compose characters and events in such a way to lead readers to better understand them. They will also need to encourage readers to reflect on their own lives. Such reflection will leave an impression on readers that will be interpreted as engagement and inviduality. When readers believe they understand a writer and feel the need to reflect upon themselves, they more easily become aware of social and cultural influences. We want readers to gain some sort of insight.

**Introduced what kind of thinking goes into choosing a subject. Most importantly focused on complexity and ambivalence. Young writers struggle writing about that which they know well because their writing about the known takes on a predictability and tends towards oversimplification. Writing about a loved one can become superficial. They need to learn how to express complex or ambivalent feelings. We want to lead readers to reflect on their own experiences and all the social forces that shape our lives.

**Brainstorming is important when developing ideas before composing can begin, and many students believe brainstorming to be an incredibly simple system of Listing Until I Can Make a Choice. Actually, brainstorming is a process with many steps that encourages us to organize our thoughts prior to writing an essay. I don’t like the phrase “free writing”, which often is used to encourage students to exploration prior to drafting. Invention is also used. It’s better. Brainstorming permits us to invent something to write about, for sure, but more significantly encourages us to find organization through structure. Useful brainstorming moves from listing to developing to answering.

For the autobiographical essay, I have students begin with brainstorming a list of at least thirty people they know. I tell them to listen and write down my instructions. “I want you to be able to talk about a person or character with the class. Our objective is simple: you will be able to describe in detail how that person or character changed the way you look at the world around you or at life in general. Brainstorm at least thirty people you know well, real and fictional or historical.” This part of the assignment gets them to make a substantial list. (Have to keep an eye on students because they will begin making their lists in class to save time later. Stop them. Get them to take the process seriously. You’re not assignment a simple task. You’re getting them to participate in a complex writing assignment that will begin with a list and end with an essay full of clear sentences and coherent paragraphs.)

I usually outline a brainstorming process first and then assign the persons you know writing task. Step one: make the list. 

Step two: choose three people or characters from the list and write about their characteristics/personalities. Have the students develop details about emotions, statements, actions, and mannerism/expressions for each choice. Also, have them write about their own interactions about each choice.

Step three: regarding the influential persons or characters, we remember them in context with places, spaces, and events. Step two encourages writers to think of these. Step three encourages writers to unpack all of the sensory information associated with each choice. They must brainstorm sensory descriptions. What do you see, hear, smell, taste, and touch?

In addition to assigning the students a three-step brainstorming exercise that should take them between an hour and ninety minutes to complete, I assign two, model essays written in the autobiographical mode. Next class, we’ll discuss the brainstorming exercise and read the short, model essays. We’ll be reading like writers, breaking down the essays for engaging phrases, descriptions, and significances. We’ll discuss techniques.

[dagwolf]

Severed Heads “Umbrella” Blubber Knife (1982)

[dagwolf]

To clarify for the lurking Korea experts

No matter what I have to say about jung, I’m never going to interject my opinion into a conversation my Korean friends are having about it. I’m not even going to write about on my blog. And I will insist my white friends over here also don’t do it. If they do, I will call them out.

The Korea expert is a racist. Always. It’s that simple.

Being an expert is not having studied Korean history and knowing what happened when; after all, we should be studying history and language. It’s studying the history and language and then thinking you know enough about Korean being and identity to speak from the heart about something that’s a problem. We shouldn’t do that.

White expats always get upset about jung because some Koreans are adamant that only Korean people can experience it, “have it” as it’s often phrased by nationalists, or can understand that sort of compassion. White people like to use this as an example of Korean racism. (I’m not kidding.)

My point is why the fuck would your white ass ever get into this discussion with a Korean person in this wayunless you’re trying to impose a little western paternalism into the discussion? Really. We can never talk about something like jung without generalizing Korean being. NEVER.

I encourage my fellow expats to realize there’s a difference between understanding what your Korean colleagues, friends, partners, and/or spouses are talking about and thinking you are an expert about it. The former is fine and encourages exchange, learning, and hopefully more understanding. The latter eradicates social difference in a sweeping manner and encourages expertise, paternalism, patronage, and generalization that is rather illustrative of aged colonialist sentimentality.

[dagwolf]

dagNotes: Upon students writing about the Korean "Kangaroo Tribe" youth culture.

Journalism about Korea I confront with student writing about adolescence and employment illustrates a vulgar, sometimes grotesque, view of class and youth culture, even Korean being in general. The authoritarian culture believes Korean college students and other older adolescents are lazy and incapable of hard work because they live at home. (A covert sexist discourse resides within this academic complaint: mothers are placed at the source of a social problem that is actually caused by patriarchal and Confucian culture, which is highly masculinist.)

Practically, graduating students only want to work for big corporations. They'll receive more money and more status, which is very important here. It's not uncommon for society to insist young adults work to gain life experience, but it's the reason for doing so that serves a dual disciplinary purpose: young adults should learn the value of hard work; dwelling for a time, like a tourist, in "the bottom" of society will create more responsible and self-sufficient young adults. The employing class receives a benefit with this training, as well: young employees learn to accept poor conditions in entry-level positions for fear of being sent down, so to speak, to lower status jobs in smaller businesses, or, worse, working for an hourly wage. The minimum wage in Korea is incredibly low--just over 5,000won/hr next year--and many wage earners work off the books for less than minimum. This general opinion illustrates an oppressive determinism in economic class here. "The bottom"--the poor working class--becomes necessary and its qualities naturalized. Poor workers are often thought to deserve poverty; poor workers aren't thought to be worth more. I have had Korean co-teachers ask, "What else can they do?" So, the Kangaroo Tribe concept is a means to worry about young adults, blame mothers, and offer cover for corrupt authoritarian culture and its oppressive construction of worker, employment, class, and cooperation.

This serves the crooked elite here and explains why so many people continue to support reactionary authoritarian politicians and bosses. I think it helps me understand why my students say the things they do about poor immigrants, laborers, and working class people in general. I don't like it. I insist they critically think about their class lessons. They're all capable of it. They're good kids. I respect them. I don't think what i went through when i was their age is much different. I find it difficult to teach about economic and social class here because when I use examples from my experience, the students quickly insist "that's not Korea". So, I work to get them to learn to communicate their minds and experiences without considering my authority. Pedagogically speaking, I'm learning a lot about what "student-directed" learning really is all about. And sure as shit I've learned we're all alienated.

Anyway, this has got me thinking. A student is writing about "kangaroo tribe" Koreans, which was a popular concept ten years ago used to describe young adults living under their mothers' care. I guess it's still being used here. I can understand why. A majority of young adults live with their families well into their later twenties. (Kangaroo Tribe reminds me of the pejorative, mammoni, used for single men living at home in Italy. And as with Kangaroo Tribe, it's a sexist way to implicate mothers in problems with their children. Both terms exonerate fathers.) I found an old quote from a Korean economics professor. Kim Dong-won, a professor at Korea University, claims “Generally, Korean young people lack professionalism to achieve something through hard work. For them, it might be best to let them experience the bottom of society through part-time work from university.” This is from 2004, maybe earlier, yet it's still being paraphrased and recycled ten years later. It's common for this to happen with journalism about Korean culture, especially in English language. It's a shame because it shapes cultural discourse both in and outside Korea. A claim becomes a stereotype. My students are using this as if it's a key to every problem here. Getting them to unpack this stuff is difficult. "But an economist at Korea University said so" is not uncommon.

You can search for "kangaroo tribe" and also "kangaroo shoppers" and find a lot...

[dagwolf]

dagNotes: On Grading

The grading process is oppressive for most students, especially those who aren't conformist and bourgeois. How does grading affect teachers? Perhaps it's fair we don't consider teachers in this way all too often. In many cases, teachers gleefully "grade" students as if to be graded is in the nature of study. Too many teachers refuse to critically consider practice unless they complain about administrative practice; at those times, teachers immediately comprehend oppression and always have and want student (and parental) support.

Anyway, I'm spending my day grading short essays in which my students attempt to define three significant concepts in context with an essay we've been studying for the last two weeks. It's time consuming practice. I'm an experienced essay grader. I can quickly assign grades for over a hundred students with a 300-word writing assignment. I've been grading since 1999; I have a useful rubric for almost every kind of typical writing situation. Nevertheless, I take my time and try to comment on each and be considerate to the writing process as I can sense it from each writer. Although I don't think fair grading is possible. I get seriously bummed out. I keep my comments objective and use phrases that direct students to our lessons in class on clarity, accuracy, focus, organization. Especially with my Korean students, I want them to raise their hands and ask questions in class about the work, the assignments, even the grading process--to get them speaking as well as writing.

Grading is repetitive and, no matter how good my intentions or fair my rubric, the process becomes a problem after 90 minutes. I don't want to be grading everyday, so I save up the evaluation work for a day or two every other week or so.

My students are new to high school and are struggling to embrace critical reading and writing strategies. They want me to tell them what to memorize so they can regurgitate it in sentences and paragraphs for me. This is what education has been for most of them until now. Also, writing anything when presented with a blank screen or page is intimidating. I've been talking a lot about anxiety with them and trying to illustrate methods for turning that common writing anxiety into a useful tool to generate tension between ideas. They're not buying that not-knowing but wanting to know can at all be useful. They're struggling, and grades for their weekly journals are typically between 11-13 out of 15 points. Some 9s and some 14s, but they're all in the same range. It's not bad, but they aren't liking the experience. They're not even aware that they're learning and improving. That's what grades do for my students. Grades distract them. After all, they're working very hard and not being rewarded. Grading teaches the capitalist system of rewards. Hard work is supposed to lead to something better and is the key to upward mobility and ambition. They're not happy because they're teacher is encouraging them to embrace mistakes. Ambition is measured in snuggling up to a standard the writing process cannot accommodate.

I struggle to evaluate essays with numeric and letter grades because the point of such evaluation is to norm both my labor and theirs according to a transparent standard that has nothing to do with the lessons our work supports. Furthermore, a number grade has nothing to do with our writing and reading tasks. A number grade exists to rank students and to implicate teachers in the ranking process. The process exonerates those in power. State education practice implements grading to encourage parents, students, teachers, and administration to isolate classrooms from society. Teachers become the problem. Parents are so easily tricked to favor grades as a means to evaluate their students' educations, but I'm always shocked at how easy the embrace comes for teachers.

What does "11/15"--a loss of two points for clarity and one for both relevance and proofreading--have to do with the work my student did in class for 100 minutes last week, the work she completed outside of class, probably around 75 minutes, and the work I've done on my own and with her class? Surely, nothing but an arbitrary assignation connects her score to our labor. 

Moreover, I struggle with grading essays because the process encourages me to dislike students and their wonderful work. Fuck that.

[dagwolf]

dagNotes: From the ESL/EFL Reading and Writing Classroom

Teaching English composition to students in Korea can be difficult, and the students aren’t the problem as many teachers like to portray. First, students don’t really get any writing education until university and then the universities hire cheap and mostly unqualified labor to do the basic instruction. Some students are lucky to encounter a teacher along the way who does more than addresses what is expected of writers and who carefully instructs about writing lucid and precise prose. At my school, we have some students who’ve lived and studied abroad and so have learned basic composition skills. It shows.

On the other hand, and as I already mentioned, most encounter expat teachers in university who like calling themselves “professors” and who pretend to be authors but have never had any training as writers nor have they taught writing outside of Korea. The culture of crap rhetoric being taught in universities here seeps into the high schools with crappy expectations of what should be taught and how it should be taught. And the problems become professionalized. Surely there a inexperienced instructors who'll become good teachers some day, but for every one dedicated teacher there are a dozen or more "professors" with egos and a stack of name cards who'd never be allowed in a classroom back home.

To make matters worse, my students are riddled with anxiety about choosing proper words—one result of all the vocabulary they’re forced to study and memorize as English education. Memorization (and Repetition) is a learning process that comprises at least three-quarters of their language study.

I have students read and write together. With every reading assignment, they must type a journal entry and submit it. Each reading and writing assignment builds on previous assignments. We work towards writing an essay. Eventually, class sessions become writing workshops where they work with writing groups to draft, revise, and produce final versions of essays. We work in quarters. My students get three weeks practical instruction while they read and write journal entries followed by three weeks of writing workshops where they revise essays. In the first three weeks, they practice various reading strategies with each assignment and type between 200 and 400 words in response. (See an example assignment below.) Often the students experience difficulty finding the confidence to write in response. They want to know what to write. I won’t tell them. Coupled with word anxiety, writing becomes a frustrating task.

However, they try. The results are usually very good considering the dread. This week I’ve been reading selections from their written work in class. I use the selections to reinforce my lessons. What do I mean by clarity? What does it mean to define concepts? How does a writer illustrate a claim? What is a good transition? What’s a good paragraph? And so on. That I find examples in their writing, which they so recently struggled to produce, helps build confidence. I can illustrate how they are actually quite skilled at creating sentences using proper grammar and conventional syntax even though they struggle with word choice. And I can coach, which is important here. 

Unlike many teachers, I do not punish them for creatively constructing noun and verb phrases from words they know and understand in search of more complex and technical words they’ve learned but aren’t able to presently access. I attempt to get them to use the reading as a model. For example, we’re reading an essay that proposes solutions to problems with how we try and sentence criminals, specifically individuals who aren’t necessarily responsible for their actions.

I encourage them to use the technical words the author uses. To insist, though, is sometimes asking too much. From my experience, student writers choosing the best word is not of primary importance at this point. They need to learn that they can clearly illustrate reading comprehension in their own words. It’s important for them to understand what they’ve learned about English. They need to trust their minds and get a good feeling for acquisition. They need an experienced writer to illustrate what they’re good at and to invite them into discourse as fellow writers. They need time to trust what modeling can do for their own writing. And studying vocabulary doesn’t translate into being able to use vocabulary in composition.

And so many teachers forget this for the easy grading action that comes with counting-off for poor word choice or awkward phrases. But fuck them, right? Fuck those shitty, oppressive teachers—those grade-hounds that mark up papers without any idea how the marking-up will instruct their students.

_________________________________________________________

Reading and writing assignment example:

"Many of us like to believe that all adults possess the same capacity to make sound choices. It’s a charitable idea, but demonstrably wrong. People’s brains are vastly different."

These sentences are from David Eagleman’s essay, “The Brain on Trial”. Find the sentences on your copy of the essay and re-read them and the next six paragraphs.

Read with a pen. Take notes, if you want. Mark the margins of your paper. Look up words you don’t fully understand. Highlight important phrases and clauses.

For your Reading Journal #2 assignment, write at least two-hundred words about this part of the essay. Here are some questions to consider before writing.

What is Eagleman’s argument?

What is your reaction to his claims?

Explore the meaning of his discussion about Nature and Nurture, how he says “we choose neither one”. What does that make you think about?

Why is it important to realize, as he suggest, that it is not enough to say, “I wouldn’t have done that”?

I will use the Reading Journal Rubric to evaluate your responses. Consider it before submitting your work. Please save your work as “doc” rather than “hwp”. You should write at least 200 words. If you have a lot to say in your journal, try to keep it below 500 words.

[dagwolf]

dagNotes: On what makes white paint white & 20 Feet from Stardom

Younger readers often have difficulty sorting out some of the social critiques in the Ellison's novel, Invisible Man, even though they think they understand the meaning of what is being described. For example, the famous Liberty Paints section, I think in Chapter 10. Liberty Paint produces an Optic White Paint. And we learn that, in order to create the most pure white paint, employees must add ten drops of black toner to the mix. Basically, the black toner makes the white more white.

This is the sort of social critique that demands a clear and contemporary example in order for students to understand it, even if they've lived it themselves. Students are often at a loss of words not because of a failing vocabulary but because of a lack of experience. Access to information is simply not enough to help. Also, capitalism has so naturalized white supremacy that it's hard to see it and colorblind liberal rhetoric is so prevalent in education that it's difficult to see other-than-white. (Why I insist pairing Ellison's and Wright's novels is that they deal with the same social problems differently; they disagree and agree in wonderful ways about the same problems in different cities and narrative styles.)

We just watched 20 Feet from Stardom, a documentary about backup singers. Right in the middle of this wonderful film is a vital discussion about the black women who made rock and roll classics classics. As a record collector, I used to follow producers, session musicians, and backup singers, to find new records to buy. So, I love backup vocalists. I was knocked over by the story about the singer who sang the infamous backing vocals for The Rolling Stones "Brown Sugar" ("Rape! Murder! It's just a shot away..." and so on) that makes the song so powerful and why she decided to sing backing vocals on Lynyrd Skynyrd's "Sweet Home Alabama" after first deciding to turn down the offer, for what should be obvious reasons. That discussion clearly and potently explains the Liberty Paints story in Invisible Man. You'll not find a better way of explaining to students what the social process in capitalism is that uses black bodies to reproduce itself for the benefit of supremacist popular culture--a process that consumes the black culture and producers. You have to check it out.