The Business of Book Picking

"For what is the use of a golden key if it cannot open what we want it to?" --St. Augustine, "On Christian Doctrine"

Getting students who are not intellectually curious (at least not when it comes to school) to read and write about books is difficult, especially when your goal is to not just give them reading and writing material but to also get them to appreciate the literature. You must give them a book that won’t provide them a reason to not do it.

When I taught A Christmas Carol, I was surprised at the number of students who used the language as an excuse to not work hard. I think it was that particular class more than the book itself, but that semester taught me a lesson about students: any excuse not to read allows them to justify their laziness. If a book has obtuse language, a quirky narrative, or an intimidating length (even if the print is big and the chapters short), students will find a way to talk themselves out of doing the work.

Of Mice and Men has worked well for me. It has around 100 pages, accessible language, straightforward narrative, and easy to follow themes. The story does not rely upon a great deal of historical context. Because of all this, students generally enjoy it. I would love to find several novels that adhere to those standards.

A great source is high school booklists, but even some of those don’t fit the criteria I’ve set up. If I’m going to teach literature in a writing class, I don’t want to spend a lot of class time providing context. I want to jump into the text and simply provide the necessary background as we encounter it within the story.

Of course, I must still teach it well. I just want the teaching to be as downhill as possible. I’ve recently read Remains of the Day and Slaughterhouse Five. The former may be too psychological to keep most students’ interest, and the latter has an obtuse narrative. I’m also considering Heart of Darkness, The King and I, The Importance of Being Earnest, and Wit.

You Wrote This Because You Hate Me or Grading the Research Essays of College Freshmen

“Words are something; but to be exposed to an endless battery of mere sounds to be long dying; to lie stretched upon a rack of roses; to keep up langour by unintermitted effort…these are faint shadows of what I have undergone.”
--Charles Lamb, “A Chapter on Ears”

Ask any teacher. Grading is the most frustrating aspect of the art. Rarely is it a satisfying symphony of what they’ve learned but a mettlesome reminder of what they haven’t. This past week I’ve graded a heap of poorly written, half-plagiarized research essays. And never have I been more burdened by the process of marking up papers.

I can’t understand how things I tested them on less than 2 months ago cannot be transferred to writing. I know I’m not teaching English majors or even English enthusiasts, and I understand that they aren’t going to approach essay writing with much gusto. But I can attribute so many of their problems to lack of effort or careless attention to detail. Those things have little to do with writing talent or high school teaching.

I’m starting to realize that what I do for an expository writing class I’m going to have to do for a research one. That means I’m going to provide them with a very rigid structure and very specific rules. I won’t be able to control their languid research, which is where most of their problems arise, but I will be at least be able to take out some of the overwhelming aspects of it by giving them a very clear vision of what I want their papers to look like. That should help a little bit.

Unfortunately, I can't supervise how much work they’re going to put into their research. No matter what rules I put in place, they always find a way to circumvent them and avoid accomplishing what the rules were intended to help them achieve. I can put restrictions on the types of sources they can use (no websites, nothing that doesn’t have an author, etc.), which can force them to do more work than they normally do. But even that won’t combat completely what I’m trying to eliminate: laziness and apathy.

Hmmm…Maybe I should institute an annotated bibliography.

The Raw Material in All Its Rawness: Lectures on Frost & Eliot's Poetry

"Then how should I begin
To spit out all the butt-ends of my days and ways?
And how should I presume?"
--T.S. Eliot, "The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock"

"Two roads diverged in a wood, and I--
I took the one less traveled by,
And that has made all the difference"
--Robert Frost, "The Road Not Taken"

There’s something funny about literature classes. I know the modus operandi for most professors is to induce discussion through though-provoking questions. But all my best professors were lecturers who spoke much and asked little. So that’s what I do. Sometimes class discussions spill forth naturally like a beer stein that’s been filled without regard to the ubiquitous foam. I enjoy the talking and the questioning.

I’ve just learned best from lectures, and I do believe that well done lecturing can be just as effective as any other classroom format. It depends mostly on the talents of the given teacher.

Well, last week I taught Robert Frost in my American Lit class. And I was amazed at how many students felt compelled to offer explanations for what he said and theories to what he meant. With the exception of a brave few, they are content to let me speak. But something about Frost invites them to speak out. His open-ended poems, his colloquialisms, his disarming use of meter encourages students to see his work less as a verbal labyrinth and more as an invitation to talk.

Obviously, part of his appeal is that, like certain epics, we feel as if we’ve somehow heard them before even if we haven’t. “Fire and Ice,” “The Road Not Taken,” “Stopping By Woods on a Snowy Evening” seem to inject into students a measure of loquaciousness often reserved for post-class chatter w/ their friends. For students, Frost’s contemporary T.S. Eliot does not receive the same level of enthusiasm. Though I find Eliot’s anthologized work more fun to dig through, I’m careful not to mistake accessibility with simplicity.

I’ve read more of Eliot, enjoy him more, and am tempted to pronounce him the superior poet. But I must be fair to Frost, and I must remember both sat down with different objectives in mind. Simply saying one is better than the other would be like saying that group discussions are better teaching methods than lectures. Both are potentially effective means of teaching, but so much depends on the teacher’s abilities and the students’ sensibilities. Declaring one to be clearly better than the other is to wrongly characterize an objective standard. Comparing the two is like comparing the drawings of an engineer and an architect.

Perhaps Frost v. Eliot isn’t the best way to discuss them, perhaps the best way is to juxtapose them and let the similarities and differences fall where they may. Maybe poetry, like teaching methods, are best when you have them working in the hands of respective masters, not comparing them in a conversation that isn’t really about what you’re discussing in the first place.

What College Professors Do on Spring Break

“I remember my father saying that early in his teaching career he would ask himself at the beginning of each term, ‘Have I read enough to be a good teacher?’ And he would have to answer, ‘No, not yet.’”
--Kim Stafford, The Muses Among Us

The week of spring break, for the professor, is punctuated with very little of the merriment that their students associate with it. We still enjoy the time away from classes and students and, if we’re lucky, the campus. But it’s still filled with work; the luxury is that you get to pick the time and place to do it. This is more of a treat than it sounds.

I spent several Sbux hours grading midterms...many, many midterms. The freedom to work several straight hours on so single minded a task is not often afforded during the active parts of the semester. Strangely, I enjoyed the freedom I dedicated towards my slavish workload. I still have about 15 lit papers to grade, though.

But I didn’t just work. I visited an art gallery. I went to a bar/club (Don’t ask. Even I’m not sure why I went). I read Kim Stafford’s excellent letter/poem/essay/book on writing and creativity, "The Muses Among Us." I spent a day at the hospital supporting my father while he received a pacemaker. I wrote in my notebook. I accidentally ran over a kitten. I went to dinner w/ friends. I watched Bill Maher’s entertaining and thought provoking (yet rhetorically flawed) documentary "Religulous." I basked in one of my childhood pastimes by watching my favorite 90s action star’s latest movie: "JCVD." I participated in some beer brewing at a friend’s cookout. I ran. I watched a sextuple overtime college basketball game until 12:30 am w/ my dad. I recommended several books. I loaned a book. I went book shopping. I borrowed a book. And I answered emails from students who spent more of their Spring Break in the library than on the beach.

College Folk Hero...Well Sort Of

“[S]he seemed to follow the rules and customs of some exotic, faraway nation where the citizens drilled the ground for oil paint and picked pastels from the branches of stunted trees. Without copying anyone else, she had invented her own curious personality, which I envied even more than her artistic ability.”
--David Sedaris, from “Twelve Moments in the Life of the Artist”

Last week Adrian, one of my freshmen writing students told me that, to his friends I’m like some sort of folk hero. Apparently, he is roommates with another one of my students from another writing class, and they sometimes sit around and tell Professor Bush stories. Adrian told me how his girlfriend, his other roommate, and the people in his band aren’t sure if I really exist.

Another writing student in a 3rd class, told me something similar. She said that I reminded her of her boyfriend and that when she tells him stories about me he says, “that’s something I would say! I wanna meet this guy!” When she told me that, I commented that if I started a fan club, he’d be my choice for president. She just shook her head and said, “No. You two must never be allowed to meet…Although, he probably would take you up on the offer.”

The funny thing about these comments is that I want to be a campus character. One of the attractive aspects of being a college professor is that you can develop a reputation (and later a legend) based on outrageous things you’ve said and funny things you’ve done.

To a certain degree, isn’t that what all of us want, to be recognized and appreciated by the community of which we’re a part? Whether it’s the Hollywood community that the whole world sees or part of an obscure Guinea tribe known only be specialists of that region, don’t we all want an identity that we can point to and take pride in?

But I have to admit: something Adrian said validated his “folk hero” comment. Before leaving the empty classroom, he turned around and said, “and besides all the memorable moments, you’re also a great teacher. That’s what makes it so fun.”