The Beauty of Detail: Style, Grammar, & Essays

"In small proportions, we just beauties see; / And in short measures, life may perfect be."
--Ben Jonson, "To the Immortal Memory and Friendship of that Noble Pair"

This semester, I've tried to teach grammar on the days where students bring in their rough drafts. So far, those classes have gone well. They turn in their papers this week, and so I'll be able to measure their application of the principles.

In the past, I've tried to mark style and grammar errors on papers, believing that by revising, they will understand their errors. Only the exceptional students are able to learn this way. The rest just rewrite the sentences. Like a blindfolded dart thrower, they hope that their newest attempt will yield success, but they don't know until they see the results. I want them to know. Unlike satire, style and grammar are not "myster[ies] of the noble trade" that "no master can teach to his apprentice."

So hopefully, in class instruction coupled with out of class direction will make more effectual their capacity for understanding the labyrinth of English style and grammar.

Teaching (British) Lives

"Poets are made of poems and other literary works from a past that especially engages them and of works by near antecedents and contemporaries that embed themselves in whole or in part in their imaginations."
--Michael Schmidt, Lives of the Poets


This semester I've been teaching Brit Lit. I was excited to do so because I knew this course would give me a chance to supplement my literary background by reading works I either haven't read or haven't read since undergrad. The details of Beowuf, M'orte D'Arthur, and A Modest Proposal had faded from memory. Now their best passages dance nimbly on the tongue's tip.

Yet beyond the texts, outside reading such as Michael Schmidt's Lives of the Poets have given my lectures (and my knowledge) a background that has made literature newer, exciting, and more complex. My interest in writers' biographies continues to evolve. As Schmidt says, "as speakers, each of us is an inadvertent anthologist." Hopefully, I will be able to incorporate my growing interests into more than just my lectures.

John Wooden, Marianne Moore, and the Tradition of Learned Reading

The legendary college basketball coach John Wooden began everyone of his basketball seasons the same way: by teaching his players the most elementary of functions--putting on their shoes and socks. He did it slowly, punctiliously describing his movements. Why take the time to go over this simple action? I imagine that the attention to detail included in it a lesson that went beyond merely how to put on one's clothes.

On Saturday, a former student informed me that my literature classes has helped her greatly since she's transferred to Vanderbilt. She said that my lectures on how to read and how to take notes while reading has helped prepare her for a more rigorous reading schedule (apparently Vanderbilt pushes you harder than community colleges do). She also said that my daily quizzes got her used to reading and looking for details. (My favorite reading quiz question of all-time remains "What was Marianne Moore's favorite baseball team?") The answer requires the student to not just read the assigned poems but to have the discipline to read the biography section on the writer. (The answer is the Brooklyn Dodgers.)

I enjoy the quizzes because they show students that reading can be a leisure activity, but when doing it for school, a focus and seriousness should accompany it. Earlier this semester, my Experiencing Lit class read "Teenage Wasteland." One of the questions was "a version of the song 'Teenage Wasteland' is the theme song for what tv show." A student wrote on his paper, "that was not in the reading." I marked the answer wrong and wrote back, "it was in the footnotes." Detail. Fastidiousness. Focus.

Now, I'm no Vivian Bearing (look her up), but I do want to push my students, not for the sake of simply being hard and definitely not to give myself more work to grade but to show them that meticulous work brings forth its own rewards, whether in a work setting, on a quiz, or at Vanderbilt. Good luck, Jess!

Learning Who I Am in a 10 x 12 Room

"But today I realize I've never really known what it means to be Chinese. I am thirty-six years old. My mother is dead and I am on a train, carrying with me her dreams of coming home. I am going to China [...] I look at their faces again and I see no trace of my mother in them. Yet they still look familiar. And now I also see what part of me is Chinese. It is so obvious. It is my family. It is in our blood. After all these years, it can finally be let go."
--Amy Tan, "A Pair of Tickets"


The excerpt above is from Amy Tan's short story, "A Pair of Tickets," which discusses, among other things, the importance of setting, how you are and how you think can be changed, influenced, or defined by where you are.

As a first time, full-time professor, I know what Tan is referring to (to a certain degree). This may be a small thing to some, but this is my first semester where I have my own office. I do share it with an office mate, but I don't have an adjunct office that I share with a host of other people (and apparently, their students). I have my computer, my phone, and my desk.

I have a home base. And to my surprise, I am a more efficient teacher. The day is much more controlled; I rush less. And I get more work done sooner. I cannot completely attribute this to an office: I have fewer classes (but oddly enough am paid more)and am more experienced. But having somewhere to keep my stuff and somewhere to go before and after class makes teaching easier.

So, although I'm not Chinese and my office is not the city of Guangzhou, and more efficient teaching does not compare to uncovering part of my heritage, I'd like to think that what I'm learning this semester is helping me discover at least part of the identity that will allow me to become the great teacher I know I can be.

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.

A Teacher's Field Trip

“I wouldn’t let Pete Rose use my bathroom or anything, but I think he should be in the Hall of Fame.”
--Sarah Bunting, Baseball & Lit Conference


This week’s classes were cut short by a Friday conference on Baseball and Literature. Since I wrote my Master’s thesis on several baseball novels where I examined the ways in which the baseball star is presented as an archetypal hero mirroring ancient champions like Achilles and King Arthur, I feel it’d be irresponsible and lazy of me not to present at this conference. Also, the conference is at one of the schools I teach at. And my thesis directors are the organizers. I don’t mean to sound like my participation is forced. It isn’t. It’s just implicit that I will produce something to present, an act I am very proud to perform.

Ah, the academic conference. A reunion of sorts where like-minded men and women gather to discuss, sometimes debate matters that deal specifically with their fields of interest. Conferences are a good excuse to travel and socialize. The culture of the conference often mirrors the content, which in turn, mirrors the people drawn to the particular content. For example, a Virginia Wolf conference is (from secondhand accounts, not firsthand experience) a bit stuffy and slightly snobbish. Questions after a presentation resemble declarations of what the presenter got wrong. Consequently, a pop culture conference is a little more convivial. Questions are, in fact questions, and post-presentation discussions are rarely intended to be an informal game of Trivial Pursuit.

I loved Mrs. Dalloway, by the way.

So as it has been for the past 3 years I’ve been involved with it, the conference went well. The keynote speaker was Dr. Harriet Hamilton, a professor at Alabama A & M whose father played in the Negro Leagues. The main speaker was “Mudcat” Grant, a former 20 game winner for the Cleveland Indians who roomed with important figures like Larry Doby and Curt Flood. Grant spoke about his experiences playing during segregation and about learning how to pitch.

My paper was not as interesting. That said, it was on the 20th century shift from the boxer to the baseball player as the preeminent American sports hero worked well. Only about a page of it came from my thesis. The rest was new material where I discussed Harry Stein’s Hoopla, which I mentioned only briefly in my thesis’ conclusion.

Conferences are the key to establishing and maintaining contacts. They also allow us to stay current on the latest ideas in our field. This Friday, I was able to hear some new takes on baseball’s usage in academia. And I was informed of a position opening at a school in Alabama (and encouraged to apply).