With so many ambitious plans, here’s where I ended:

1Q84, Haruki Murakami

Advanced Marathoning, Pete Pfitzinger & Scott Douglas

Racing Weight, Matt Fitzgerald

The Third Reich, Roberto Bolaño (the serialized version for the Paris Review)

Radioactive, Lauren Redniss: so taken by this and it’s potential for projects and enhanced reading, am planning to teach it next fall

Beloved, Toni Morrison: for school

The Great Gatsby, F. Scott Fitzgerald: for school

Six Memos for the Next Millennium, Italo Calvino

Bending at the Elbow, Matvei Yankelevich

Laked, Fielded, Blanked, Brooklyn Copeland: my favorite chapbook of the winter, bought on a whim in Hadley, MA

Born to Run: A Hidden Tribe, Superathletes, and the Greatest Race the World Has Never Seen, Christopher McDougall: started listening to this one to motivate me through my final month of marathon training. Instead, am sidelined with a foot injury, and found the book a great one to motivate me through injury and wonder how I can train more successfully the next time.

Blogging for college composition class?? Really? Blogging? How can anybody take this guy seriously?

Thinking back to my final semester (Spring 2010) teaching at Sacramento City College, this student was particularly memorable, as she attended office hours on several occasions to argue my blogging policy. Her main point: nothing good comes from sharing thoughts on the internet. At that time, my blogging assignments were essentially reflection pieces. Sometimes, I asked my students to respond to particular questions. Other times, I asked them to respond more generally to what they read. Before class, I collected some of the more interesting responses (often, from quieter students) and used those responses to start our in-class discussions. When we began writing research essays, I asked students to comment on research questions and abstracts other students posted on their blogs.

For some reason, this one student said blog posts were akin to MySpace rants likely to get her in trouble for her controversial ideas (yes, most flame wars on the ‘net start with a reflection on Malcolm Gladwell’s argument about the synthetic lives we lead through coffee intake). That said, I have an inkling that she resisted blogging due to inexperience, whether with reading or writing or using computers.

Of course, some of my students couldn’t afford the technology (never mind the text), but I would often find them on library computers writing their responses. I, too, would post for most assignments (eat your own dog food, Romano). And, of course, I thoroughly enjoyed connecting with my students so individually, commenting on their posts and starting conversations that would often continue in the comments thread. While other students initially complained (“this means we have to do the reading!”), that particular student-commenter resisted and eventually dropped from my course, even after I gave her several alternatives: e-mail me your response and I’ll post it even more anonymously. Or, just e-mail me your response. Apparently, she wrote me off and couldn’t take me seriously. Or, at least, I imagine that RateMyProfessor post to be from her, as she was the only one who resisted so vehemently.

Really, I’m fairly proud of her post. I tried my best to push her to be a more prolific reader and writer. Most of my students achieved such levels of success (and some even continue to post on their blogs, as evidenced in my RSS Reader from time to time).

This coming school year, I’m excited to return to AWS (headline: D. has also renewed at UPS), and I’m ready to blend my junior level language arts class in increasingly provocative ways. While I’ve faced resistance in the past, I’ve felt increasingly validated by my recent attendance at EdCampIS (Mike Gwaltney, thanks. Really).

So, we’ll post mock IB Individual Oral Presentations on VoiceThread and workshop our deliveries. Discussion leaders will employ Wallwisher to ground our Harkness sessions and create an asynchronous environment for developing ideas. I’ll flip my already short lectures on annotation, reading strategies, paragraphing, and revision sessions (among others), and my students will create their own grammar videos to present to lower grades.

We’ll have more class time to create digital renditions of poems or host conferences on formalized writing assignments. We’ll play with Dr. Wicked’s Write or Die. I’ll Skype in some of the authors we read or some professor-type friends who are experts on texts. Since we’ll be heavy with Chilean Lit, I’ll try to collaborate with a school in Santiago we send students to for a week every year. We might even Storify (or ify other things. Posterify. Writeify. Poetrify. GrammarQuizify).

And yes, we’ll blog. Perhaps not individually, like my early efforts at SCC. But we’ll absolutely push our ideas out into the world and find ways to interact with other thinkers, writers, and students. This’ll be more work on my end, for sure, but with a single prep, it shouldn’t be too exhausting. While I might cause a few wrecks, no sweat, right? In the end, the students will be challenged in new and relevant ways.

How can anybody take this guy seriously?

with a recent, renewed personal interest in cnsnnt and an exciting immersion in a twice-mooned, twisting Tokyo and a forthcoming trip to Phoenix, let’s take another look at Jen Urso, whom I posted in this site’s earlier days. This time, instead of the more aggrieved investigation of the Phoenix landscape, Urso investigates the space between the two Pennsylvania towns where she was raised.

]]> http://cnsnnt.com/2011/12/17/the-things-inbetween/feed/ 0 j from "the things inbetween" from "White Space" http://cnsnnt.com/2011/12/15/if-only-in-my-teaching/ http://cnsnnt.com/2011/12/15/if-only-in-my-teaching/#comments Thu, 15 Dec 2011 05:30:40 +0000 J Romano http://cnsnnt.wordpress.com/?p=490 ]]> Kenneth Goldsmith in a recent interview with Brian Joseph Davis:

“After a semester of my forcibly suppressing a student’s ‘creativity’ by making her plagiarize and transcribe, she will tell me how disappointed she was because, in fact, what we had accomplished was not uncreative at all; by not being ‘creative,’ she had produced the most creative body of work in her life. By taking an opposite approach to creativity — the most trite, overused, and ill-defined concept in a writer’s training — she had emerged renewed and rejuvenated, on fire and in love again with writing.”

Read the rest of the interview, as it’s stellar stuff, and Kenny’s incredible in his ability to a) clearly express progressive poetics and b) motivate all us to join in.

And then, check out his appearance at the White House:

Or:

“Neuroscience, computer science, and cognitive science show that the stories we think convey understanding are all illusions. They show why consciousness tricks us into thinking that narratives actually produce understanding when they do little more than relieve the itch of curiosity. This goes for stories in every day life, in history, biography, literature and the arts.

When it comes to human affairs, the humanities don’t have much to teach us, no matter how entertaining they turn out to be.” Rorotoko Interview.

Oh, Rosenberg, you crank. Denying a discipline’s relevance is for amateur hour (proudly, for a place like this!). Don’t hate the humanities just because you’re bad at them. You’re right: humanities would sure suck if humanists just sat around debating meaning. Just like science would sure suck if scientists spent all their time searching for mouse bones in owl droppings, just like I did in 7th grade.

Yes, it’s stuff like this that reminds me to be engaged and get back to cnsnnt. How’s it going, hey?

The list:

Amulet, Roberto Bolaño

The Celestial Railroad and Other Stories, Nathaniel Hawthorne

What is the What, Dave Eggers

Kalpa Imperial, Angélica Gorodischer

Nox, Anne Carson

Mission Street Food, Karen Leibowitz

Texture Notes, Sawako Nakayasu

The Spy Who Came in From the Cold, John le Carré

The Route:

View Larger Map
I’m fairly terrible at updating cnsnnt, but I’ll try to catalogue for my own memorystuff along the way.

*Am saving David Sherwin’s “The Creativity Killer: Group Discussions” for future use in meetings and classrooms. While I often use break-out discussions as a run-up to larger group discussions, I’d like to try the sticky note method outlined here.

That’s it for the week. With the Paris Review, McSweeney’s, Wholphin, Sunset, and the New Yorker, my week’s and month’s reading just became so much more swamped. Can I keep up?

*A former Olive Garden manager answers questions about the Tuscan Culinary School the company sends its management to.

*While I’m not quite equipped for a S240 like the one described here, I’m hoping to buy a longtail for me and the dog and a city bike  for the D so we can go on a few road-ferry-trail overnights.

*I’ll admit I echoed the collective sigh from the internet when the announcement came that a Chicago school was banning homemade lunches. However, a move like this could really take off, especially if a school integrates food choice and food prep into its curriculum. This could make for a great semester unit in a health class, and it could lead to improvements at home, as well.