Toward an Understanding of On-line Teaching and Learning, Addictions and the Longing for Balance
7/12/06
Toward an Understanding of On-line Teaching and Learning, Addictions and the Longing for Balance.
Author: John Alexander, University of Virginia
Contact Information:
Email: john@virginia.edu
Phone: 434-243-6619
Mail: Clemons Library/University of Virginia/Charlottesville, VA 22904
Web: http://faculty.virginia.edu/jalexander
“Chocolate. It’s not just for breakfast anymore.”
[T-shirt slogan from a local bakery.]
My name is “John,” and I am a teacher.
“Hi, John.”
At this point in my (mid)life, I find the line between my character and my addictions somewhat blurred. And so, for good and ill, I acknowledge a strong dependence on teaching, (and on the writing and thinking, that effective teaching requires).
My life is a perfect cacophony of false starts, threatening distractions, and impatient waiting. And through it all, there are some faint threads of narrative consistency, and pausing to write them down is actually a way of discovering them: I am a privileged, able bodied, aging, white, middle class man, a father and husband, and a husbandman (of plants and domesticated animals); a storyteller, musician, a chocolate lover, and consistently, a teacher. Not all these descriptors qualify as addictions, but the last most definitely does. (Of chocolate and addictions, more later…) It only confuses the issue slightly that this last addiction is the only one in the list that helps to pay the bills. We call that a “vocation.” Writing (and for that matter, teaching) is a “calling”—so the silent, introspective process and the loud, public sound making--writing vs. calling—focus my mind on the paradox and the mixed metaphor of teaching where I may actually uncover something, show it to myself, and, by writing it down, show it more broadly as well.
At this moment, I am reflecting on the teaching and more specifically that I am actively teaching the college essay to students learning online at the University of Phoenix (UOP). I have just passed a milestone, having taught for the UOP for more than four years. Granted, four years may not seem like so much of a milestone in a career of my 30 years of teaching, but when I consider how much I have learned and how much I have changed in these few years of teaching on-line, I consider the milestone significant however relatively short the timeframe.
All of this is to say that I feel more strongly than usual the need to pause and reflect, and in reflecting seek respite from that noisy den of daily life.
But even as I pause, breathe, let thought sink below the noise and find the quiet place beneath the surf, associations, intuitive leaps, beg.
And so, as I reflect, I begin with examples of three kinds of mature essays-- journalistic, scholarly, literary—and their distant, younger cousin--“college.”
Journalistic
I just re-read an interesting and insightful article by two colleagues from the University of Virginia, Ed Ayers and Charlie Grisham. Their Educause article, “Why IT Has not Paid Off as We Had Hoped (Yet)”is an analysis of why the results of instructional technology (IT) have been disappointingly slow. As they say, “…despite the tremendous investments that all institutions of higher education have made in IT, despite the number of classrooms we have wired…the vast majority of our classes proceed as they have for generations—isolated, even insulated, from the powerful networks we use the rest of our lives.” (Ayers & Grisham, p. 41.)
Although I agree with many of the points they make, I also feel strongly that my online students have gotten measurable immediate and long-term benefits from the online course I’m delivering. I gauge the improvements they make in their knowledge of grammar and mechanics and by the enthusiastic comments they make throughout the course and on their end-of-course evaluations. I believe that these improvements will continue because one of the strongest themes I strike during the course is that they need to remain active in working/researching these issues and in their personal commitment to improving their writing. I am convinced that this course marks a turning point for many of my students. While they may have begun the course hoping that it would magically convey expert status to them, they end the course knowing that expert status is an ideal they can strive toward and come closer to reaching by incremental steps. While this course may have brought them dramatically closer to that goal, and may have brought them much farther than they could imagine going without it’s help, they have still more miles to go, and the end point is never clear. These realizations that learning is lifelong and that they are both in charge of and empowered to accomplish it is a huge pedagogic achievement–one that my undergraduate students at UVa do not regularly, reliably make, despite the fact that they are extraordinarily gifted students attending what is regularly recognized as one of the best public higher educational institutions in the country. The fact that the UOP students achieve this empowering breakthrough certainly has a great deal to do with their greater age, maturity and experience when compared to their UVa counterparts, but it is a breakthrough, nevertheless.
The UOP students learn this all-important lesson, as well as the content of the course, online in a class of no more than 20 students who enroll from all over the world. Most of them have never met each other, even online.
So, although Ayers and Grisham express impatience with the benefits of IT, I submit that UOP is delivering such benefits every day to students all over the world using simple and ubiquitous technology.
But of course Ayers and Grisham have something much grander in mind—no less than the transformation of higher education by IT. It has not happened yet, at least in part because Higher Education’s instructional technology infrastructure has, according to the authors, no center: “…American higher education has created a doughnut IT infrastructure: all periphery and no center…. The massive investment in networks and computers will not pay off until we fill in the hole until we work together to create content.” (Ayers & Grisham, p. 51.)
The understandable impatience that we all feel with why instructional technology has not done more (an impatience that is beautifully articulated in their article) distracts us from at least two related facts:
Firstly, the “No Significant Difference” body of work has proved that there is no significant difference in student learning between instruction that is delivered online and that which is delivered on grounds (as we say in the local jargon of the University of Virginia, where I also work and teach). Our impatience is that the capabilities of instructional technology, when used intelligently should significantly improve the learning of its students. I think that evidence is emerging but slowly. I draw at least two conclusions. While it may be that the IT infrastructure is hollow at the center, there has been enough “filling” that learning outcomes are at least equivalent whether one is learning on or off grounds. The impatience that we share with Ayers and Grisham is more focused on how the filling needs to be better, more nutritious, more compelling.
Secondly, there is a paradox about higher education. It is both a phenomenal engine of innovation and creativity and a bastion of resistance and skepticism. We see the huge leaps that are possible because of the technology and feel impatient that the innovative and creative aspect of the university can’t exploit that more swiftly. But that paradoxical, perverse, oppositional Janus head of the University is always there as well, with it’s obstinate “Pushmepullyou” animal nature. In teaching, writing and thinking, we continually strive for an impossibility—to see a holistic reality when our bifurcation lets us see only half of it.
Scholarly
When I was an undergraduate, I wrote a senior thesis on the anti-atomic war novel. In my conclusion, I drew on a different genre, a film, Dr Strangelove; Or How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love the Bomb. It was my first serious attempt at scholarly writing which included extensive primary and secondary research, investigating over 60 novels, numerous secondary sources and juggling with growing dexterity numerous citations from all those sources, trying to hammer and braise them into some coherent, cogent form that at least suggested knowledge. …Or if not knowledge, something that my advisors could read without boredom and dread.
My advisors were kind, patient, even forgiving readers and critics, but one of them did take strong exception to my inclusion of a film in a thesis about novels. “You can’t compare two different kinds of works,” he said, emphatically. “Righto,” I replied. But inside, I couldn’t accept the rigors of scholarly writing.
Of course I also recognize that I was the same brash, ego-centered student then that my UVa students are today. The advantage of the UOP students, more experienced and more mature than the typical on-grounds undergraduate, is that they lack those qualities.
At the same time, the march of technological progress has better enabled the very mixing of metaphors that I envisioned. Today, for example, many faculty members realize the necessity of enriching a lecture with images, sounds, film clips and other media that create a context for the idea, the text, and the focus of the lecture. Mixing metaphors, comparing apples and oranges, film to text, all these things that were either impossible or unthinkable a few years ago are now seen as obvious and, to some professors, essential ways to enrich a course.
And in scholarship itself, technology is enabling what was unthinkable just a few years ago. Ed Ayers, cited above, has recently written with his colleague, Will Thomas, what is arguably the first successful example of new, digital scholarship. In “The Differences Slavery Made; a Close Analysis of Two American Communities,” published by the American Historical Review, Ayers and Thomas construct a scholarly argument online, where footnotes are not, as Ayers recently quipped, simply broken hyper textual links. Instead, the footnote brings up the full reference itself or the data from which the conclusion is drawn. Scholarship is suddenly capable of thinking like we think, comparing apples and oranges, texts to film, and bringing the whole of the cited work to the reader/viewer’s attention.
These are radical changes (and I note that “radical” means “at the root” or “fundamental.” It will take years before such radical, fundamental changes can be incorporated, analyzed, fully understood by the scholarly community. At this point, we don’t even know how to evaluate the contribution of Ayers’ and Thomas’ article, much less how to decide whether they’ve proved their point or structured their essay effectively. New ground indeed. So new, in fact, that it’s hard to think of an analogy that captures this moment.
Gutenberg? …But we knew what books were before the press was invented.
Babe Ruth at the moment that his home runs changed the game forever? …But the home run rule already existed. It was just that no one before Ruth made so much of it.
Martin Luther King, Jr.’s “I have a Dream” speech, when whites suddenly realize the debt the dominant culture owed to the oppressed. …But whites knew that terrible wrongs had been and were being committed. It was just that no one had been able to say them without invoking our defensiveness and denial.
Hmmm. Don’t know. But perhaps the answer is nestled in the conundrum. In all these cases of huge breakthroughs and paradigm shifts, the leap was made from some known and well-understood point. To understand what is happening with scholarly writing and research we need to stay firmly planted in a known point of view even as reality seems to be reinventing itself all around us.
Literary
Cynthia Ozick in her introduction to the Best American Essays of 1998 argues that the literary essay is the best means yet devised to capture the “fluid, intuitive, creative, focused workings of the human mind”. That’s easy for her to say. I’d say, rather, that it does capture those aspects of the human mind while simultaneously, magically, deftly distracting us from the other “workings” that are possibly best left behind the curtain, safely out of view. Or to say it another way, a deft literary essay gives the best illusion yet of the “fluid, intuitive, creative, focused workings of the human mind”. And if this is the pinnacle of illusion making, it is little wonder that a beginning writer can’t master it. In most fields one must invest more than 2000 hours to gain expertise. Why do we assume that expert writing is any different? At least one reason is that the expert literary essay seems artless, spontaneous. It has the same properties of seeming effortlessness as magic—without the amazement. Or at least, unlike magic, the only ones who feel the awe are the ones, practiced illusionists of language, who can see the invisible wires and have explored--grimacing, eyes shut in anticipation of slime or sudden pain--the secret compartments.
Well, maybe that’s a bit of an overstatement. Even the casual observer of a film can oftentimes feel the magic. When, for example, we find ourselves shouting at the deaf TV screen during the climatic 24th episode of 24, we are moved by the illusion, transported. Or when we watch the film, Adaptation, the screenwriter, Kaufman, deftly, at least for moments brings those other “workings” out in plain sight, before he deftly makes even them the polished gems they become before our very eyes. But these are works of fiction, film—no less--well known for illusion and capturing the imagination. Their same powers can be brought to bear in the literary essay, but few but other literary essayists and expert writers feel awe at the power of the form. I know because when I teach my college students a literary essay, their comments fall everywhere but on the force, originality, compelling power of the language. Their observations, like proverbial husbandman’s seeds fall indiscriminately on rock, on path, on tangential thoughts, on personal anecdote. As the teacher, I try to sweep those seeds back into the fertile ground of the language and the skill of the writer. But for my troubles, I’m likely to get, “Hey, that’s just fallow dirt. What’s interesting about that?”
So Ayers, Thomas and Grisham, Ozick and Kaufman have something to say to me about writing and the teaching of writing. And all of this bears on the teaching of the college essay, the young, unwashed, redheaded stepchild of these mature and magical forms.
College
So what have these mature, expansive, inspiring essays to do with the traditional college essay, that plodding, formulaic thing that states its thesis, proves it in three paragraphs and marches inexorably to a firm conclusion—re-stating in no uncertain terms that it got where it meant to go? They are related by blood. And not the blood that took Henry Wiencek years to uncover and document in the Hairstons. Not the blood, as that book discovered of miscegenation and generations of trauma, denial and alienation. Rather, the relation of the prodigal, welcomed by an adoring parent, fed the fatted calf. For all our culture’s anti-intellectualism, our contempt for higher education, our niggardly response to the patent needs for learning, there is a huge array of hopeful teachers convinced that the writer of the one can mature to become the writer of the other. No, not just “can mature” but does, must mature. For all these writers and others began there. So there must be progress, even if it is not inevitable.
So we welcome the prodigal home, that errant child that might have returned scorned and covered in shame. He was wrong; he was profligate. But he is our blood. There is hope there, and kinship. There is love and union that is all the more difficult after the feast is past, when he stays and doesn’t turn out the lights or close his mouth when chewing, when he channel surfs so fast that we can’t even see what we just missed, when he is surly or uncouth or violates our sense of peace and order in 1001 ways. The hope of progress is hard to find when we are confronted moment-to-moment with the unlettered, the lazy, the evidence of how far education must take him, of how very much we have to teach, of what burdens we have decided to shoulder and he resolutely shrugs off.
But the student will eventually shoulder those same burdens. That has always been the way. And the painstaking, labor intensive, soul-wrenching task of teaching writing is the way we show the way. We all were once there.
Addiction
I began this essay with the image of addiction to teaching. And like other addictions, this one is, in Jungian terms, evidence of a longing for balance. Like my attachment to chocolate, though, it does more than state a hope. It heals.
Scientists now tell us that chocolate releases endorphins that give us the waves of well-being and contentment that we crave. For Valentine’s Day this year, I gave my wife some local, fresh hand-made, preservative free, gourmet chocolates. This was not a selfless sacrificial gift. She shared. And we sat in a sea of good feeling, peace and well-being. It was a most satisfying experience. Teaching does not give such rewards regularly or predictably. And even when they do come, when a student in an end of course evaluation says what I’d want him or her to say, or even better, when I learn something from students or feel inspired by a breakthroughs they’ve made, I, being thoroughly academic and skeptical myself, can immediately doubt the truth of their assertion, the validity of their breakthrough, the longevity of progress or even its trajectory.
But for moments the rewards are just as palpable, just as intoxicating, and just as reliable as the rich, subtle ecstasy of those local, amazing lumps of chocolate love.
As I opened with my not so veiled reference to Alcoholics Anonymous, I hinted both at the need I have to confess my addiction, my need to manage it by withdrawing from it and my acknowledgement of the spiritual nature of both the addiction and the benefits of confession and community.
As if for the first time…
A quest ends well at home. Joseph Campbell, who spent a lifetime studying and teaching about them, ought to know. He said, in the end, we come home and see it as if for the first time.
An essay is a journey, a quest. And like any journey or quest, it must end. Martin Prechtel, in his brilliant and insightful book The Secrets of the Talking Jaguar, analyzes a feature of Mayan. There is no concept of or word for “leaving home”. To take the first step out of the door is to begin the journey home. I love that metaphor. We are creatures who, like dogs that turn before they lie down, must move in circles.
A group of dedicated volunteers in my church has painted on a piece of canvass that fills our social hall a replica of the labyrinth that graces the floor of Chartres Cathedral. So now, once a month, a labyrinth can be laid in my church’s largest room, and the room is transformed to a sacred, meditative space.
Walking the labyrinth is a longstanding spiritual discipline that now has found a home in many such liberal churches as my own. When walking the labyrinth, we follow a set path, entering and exiting at the same spot. As we walk we often carry a question, which often feels answered or resolved in some way as we pause in the center of the labyrinth and then make our way out—retracing exactly the path we’d followed in. The labyrinth is a wonderful metaphor for the essay. For the twists and turns that to our bodies may seem random, route-less, meandering, are in fact purposeful, deliberate, laid out by “sacred geometry.” When we exit the labyrinth, we see the place we came from as if for the first time.
I pray for the ability to some day write an essay as exquisite as a labyrinth. But more than that, I pray that my students may some day write such an essay, and that I may be fortunate enough to follow it in the contours of their thinking, their lives, to the center of their being and out again to know them, and myself, as if for the first time.
“Chocolate. It’s not just for breakfast anymore.”
I’ve paused, deliberated and rested. And now I return, return to teaching. As I’ve worked on this essay, I am teaching an experimental course on grounds at the University of Virginia. And even as its workload burdens me, I have scheduled my next class with the UOP. Chocolate, like education, is not restricted to one time and place. And with any luck and any skill and craft, the students I meet and work with in my next class may find the course a turning point in their lives. Meandering though it may feel, the twists and turns will lead them, and me, to the center of the question and back home, which we’ll see, as if for the first time. May we then exclaim, paraphrasing Miranda from The Tempest, “Oh brave new world, that has such people [and erudition and ignorance, addictions and health, connections and chocolate] in it.”
__________________
References
Ayers, E. L. and Grisham, C. M. “Why IT Has Not Paid Off as We Hoped (Yet),” Educause. November/December 2003. pp. 41—51.
Collected on the web on 7/12/7:
www.educause.edu/ir/library/pdf/ERM0361.pdf
Thomas, W.G. III, and Ayers, E.L. “The Difference Slavery Made; A Close Analysis of Two Communities.
Collected on the web on 7/12/7:
http://www.vcdh.virginia.edu/AHR/
copyright John Alexander 2006.
Toward an Understanding of On-line Teaching and Learning, Addictions and the Longing for Balance.
Author: John Alexander, University of Virginia
Contact Information:
Email: john@virginia.edu
Phone: 434-243-6619
Mail: Clemons Library/University of Virginia/Charlottesville, VA 22904
Web: http://faculty.virginia.edu/jalexander
“Chocolate. It’s not just for breakfast anymore.”
[T-shirt slogan from a local bakery.]
My name is “John,” and I am a teacher.
“Hi, John.”
At this point in my (mid)life, I find the line between my character and my addictions somewhat blurred. And so, for good and ill, I acknowledge a strong dependence on teaching, (and on the writing and thinking, that effective teaching requires).
My life is a perfect cacophony of false starts, threatening distractions, and impatient waiting. And through it all, there are some faint threads of narrative consistency, and pausing to write them down is actually a way of discovering them: I am a privileged, able bodied, aging, white, middle class man, a father and husband, and a husbandman (of plants and domesticated animals); a storyteller, musician, a chocolate lover, and consistently, a teacher. Not all these descriptors qualify as addictions, but the last most definitely does. (Of chocolate and addictions, more later…) It only confuses the issue slightly that this last addiction is the only one in the list that helps to pay the bills. We call that a “vocation.” Writing (and for that matter, teaching) is a “calling”—so the silent, introspective process and the loud, public sound making--writing vs. calling—focus my mind on the paradox and the mixed metaphor of teaching where I may actually uncover something, show it to myself, and, by writing it down, show it more broadly as well.
At this moment, I am reflecting on the teaching and more specifically that I am actively teaching the college essay to students learning online at the University of Phoenix (UOP). I have just passed a milestone, having taught for the UOP for more than four years. Granted, four years may not seem like so much of a milestone in a career of my 30 years of teaching, but when I consider how much I have learned and how much I have changed in these few years of teaching on-line, I consider the milestone significant however relatively short the timeframe.
All of this is to say that I feel more strongly than usual the need to pause and reflect, and in reflecting seek respite from that noisy den of daily life.
But even as I pause, breathe, let thought sink below the noise and find the quiet place beneath the surf, associations, intuitive leaps, beg.
And so, as I reflect, I begin with examples of three kinds of mature essays-- journalistic, scholarly, literary—and their distant, younger cousin--“college.”
Journalistic
I just re-read an interesting and insightful article by two colleagues from the University of Virginia, Ed Ayers and Charlie Grisham. Their Educause article, “Why IT Has not Paid Off as We Had Hoped (Yet)”is an analysis of why the results of instructional technology (IT) have been disappointingly slow. As they say, “…despite the tremendous investments that all institutions of higher education have made in IT, despite the number of classrooms we have wired…the vast majority of our classes proceed as they have for generations—isolated, even insulated, from the powerful networks we use the rest of our lives.” (Ayers & Grisham, p. 41.)
Although I agree with many of the points they make, I also feel strongly that my online students have gotten measurable immediate and long-term benefits from the online course I’m delivering. I gauge the improvements they make in their knowledge of grammar and mechanics and by the enthusiastic comments they make throughout the course and on their end-of-course evaluations. I believe that these improvements will continue because one of the strongest themes I strike during the course is that they need to remain active in working/researching these issues and in their personal commitment to improving their writing. I am convinced that this course marks a turning point for many of my students. While they may have begun the course hoping that it would magically convey expert status to them, they end the course knowing that expert status is an ideal they can strive toward and come closer to reaching by incremental steps. While this course may have brought them dramatically closer to that goal, and may have brought them much farther than they could imagine going without it’s help, they have still more miles to go, and the end point is never clear. These realizations that learning is lifelong and that they are both in charge of and empowered to accomplish it is a huge pedagogic achievement–one that my undergraduate students at UVa do not regularly, reliably make, despite the fact that they are extraordinarily gifted students attending what is regularly recognized as one of the best public higher educational institutions in the country. The fact that the UOP students achieve this empowering breakthrough certainly has a great deal to do with their greater age, maturity and experience when compared to their UVa counterparts, but it is a breakthrough, nevertheless.
The UOP students learn this all-important lesson, as well as the content of the course, online in a class of no more than 20 students who enroll from all over the world. Most of them have never met each other, even online.
So, although Ayers and Grisham express impatience with the benefits of IT, I submit that UOP is delivering such benefits every day to students all over the world using simple and ubiquitous technology.
But of course Ayers and Grisham have something much grander in mind—no less than the transformation of higher education by IT. It has not happened yet, at least in part because Higher Education’s instructional technology infrastructure has, according to the authors, no center: “…American higher education has created a doughnut IT infrastructure: all periphery and no center…. The massive investment in networks and computers will not pay off until we fill in the hole until we work together to create content.” (Ayers & Grisham, p. 51.)
The understandable impatience that we all feel with why instructional technology has not done more (an impatience that is beautifully articulated in their article) distracts us from at least two related facts:
Firstly, the “No Significant Difference” body of work has proved that there is no significant difference in student learning between instruction that is delivered online and that which is delivered on grounds (as we say in the local jargon of the University of Virginia, where I also work and teach). Our impatience is that the capabilities of instructional technology, when used intelligently should significantly improve the learning of its students. I think that evidence is emerging but slowly. I draw at least two conclusions. While it may be that the IT infrastructure is hollow at the center, there has been enough “filling” that learning outcomes are at least equivalent whether one is learning on or off grounds. The impatience that we share with Ayers and Grisham is more focused on how the filling needs to be better, more nutritious, more compelling.
Secondly, there is a paradox about higher education. It is both a phenomenal engine of innovation and creativity and a bastion of resistance and skepticism. We see the huge leaps that are possible because of the technology and feel impatient that the innovative and creative aspect of the university can’t exploit that more swiftly. But that paradoxical, perverse, oppositional Janus head of the University is always there as well, with it’s obstinate “Pushmepullyou” animal nature. In teaching, writing and thinking, we continually strive for an impossibility—to see a holistic reality when our bifurcation lets us see only half of it.
Scholarly
When I was an undergraduate, I wrote a senior thesis on the anti-atomic war novel. In my conclusion, I drew on a different genre, a film, Dr Strangelove; Or How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love the Bomb. It was my first serious attempt at scholarly writing which included extensive primary and secondary research, investigating over 60 novels, numerous secondary sources and juggling with growing dexterity numerous citations from all those sources, trying to hammer and braise them into some coherent, cogent form that at least suggested knowledge. …Or if not knowledge, something that my advisors could read without boredom and dread.
My advisors were kind, patient, even forgiving readers and critics, but one of them did take strong exception to my inclusion of a film in a thesis about novels. “You can’t compare two different kinds of works,” he said, emphatically. “Righto,” I replied. But inside, I couldn’t accept the rigors of scholarly writing.
Of course I also recognize that I was the same brash, ego-centered student then that my UVa students are today. The advantage of the UOP students, more experienced and more mature than the typical on-grounds undergraduate, is that they lack those qualities.
At the same time, the march of technological progress has better enabled the very mixing of metaphors that I envisioned. Today, for example, many faculty members realize the necessity of enriching a lecture with images, sounds, film clips and other media that create a context for the idea, the text, and the focus of the lecture. Mixing metaphors, comparing apples and oranges, film to text, all these things that were either impossible or unthinkable a few years ago are now seen as obvious and, to some professors, essential ways to enrich a course.
And in scholarship itself, technology is enabling what was unthinkable just a few years ago. Ed Ayers, cited above, has recently written with his colleague, Will Thomas, what is arguably the first successful example of new, digital scholarship. In “The Differences Slavery Made; a Close Analysis of Two American Communities,” published by the American Historical Review, Ayers and Thomas construct a scholarly argument online, where footnotes are not, as Ayers recently quipped, simply broken hyper textual links. Instead, the footnote brings up the full reference itself or the data from which the conclusion is drawn. Scholarship is suddenly capable of thinking like we think, comparing apples and oranges, texts to film, and bringing the whole of the cited work to the reader/viewer’s attention.
These are radical changes (and I note that “radical” means “at the root” or “fundamental.” It will take years before such radical, fundamental changes can be incorporated, analyzed, fully understood by the scholarly community. At this point, we don’t even know how to evaluate the contribution of Ayers’ and Thomas’ article, much less how to decide whether they’ve proved their point or structured their essay effectively. New ground indeed. So new, in fact, that it’s hard to think of an analogy that captures this moment.
Gutenberg? …But we knew what books were before the press was invented.
Babe Ruth at the moment that his home runs changed the game forever? …But the home run rule already existed. It was just that no one before Ruth made so much of it.
Martin Luther King, Jr.’s “I have a Dream” speech, when whites suddenly realize the debt the dominant culture owed to the oppressed. …But whites knew that terrible wrongs had been and were being committed. It was just that no one had been able to say them without invoking our defensiveness and denial.
Hmmm. Don’t know. But perhaps the answer is nestled in the conundrum. In all these cases of huge breakthroughs and paradigm shifts, the leap was made from some known and well-understood point. To understand what is happening with scholarly writing and research we need to stay firmly planted in a known point of view even as reality seems to be reinventing itself all around us.
Literary
Cynthia Ozick in her introduction to the Best American Essays of 1998 argues that the literary essay is the best means yet devised to capture the “fluid, intuitive, creative, focused workings of the human mind”. That’s easy for her to say. I’d say, rather, that it does capture those aspects of the human mind while simultaneously, magically, deftly distracting us from the other “workings” that are possibly best left behind the curtain, safely out of view. Or to say it another way, a deft literary essay gives the best illusion yet of the “fluid, intuitive, creative, focused workings of the human mind”. And if this is the pinnacle of illusion making, it is little wonder that a beginning writer can’t master it. In most fields one must invest more than 2000 hours to gain expertise. Why do we assume that expert writing is any different? At least one reason is that the expert literary essay seems artless, spontaneous. It has the same properties of seeming effortlessness as magic—without the amazement. Or at least, unlike magic, the only ones who feel the awe are the ones, practiced illusionists of language, who can see the invisible wires and have explored--grimacing, eyes shut in anticipation of slime or sudden pain--the secret compartments.
Well, maybe that’s a bit of an overstatement. Even the casual observer of a film can oftentimes feel the magic. When, for example, we find ourselves shouting at the deaf TV screen during the climatic 24th episode of 24, we are moved by the illusion, transported. Or when we watch the film, Adaptation, the screenwriter, Kaufman, deftly, at least for moments brings those other “workings” out in plain sight, before he deftly makes even them the polished gems they become before our very eyes. But these are works of fiction, film—no less--well known for illusion and capturing the imagination. Their same powers can be brought to bear in the literary essay, but few but other literary essayists and expert writers feel awe at the power of the form. I know because when I teach my college students a literary essay, their comments fall everywhere but on the force, originality, compelling power of the language. Their observations, like proverbial husbandman’s seeds fall indiscriminately on rock, on path, on tangential thoughts, on personal anecdote. As the teacher, I try to sweep those seeds back into the fertile ground of the language and the skill of the writer. But for my troubles, I’m likely to get, “Hey, that’s just fallow dirt. What’s interesting about that?”
So Ayers, Thomas and Grisham, Ozick and Kaufman have something to say to me about writing and the teaching of writing. And all of this bears on the teaching of the college essay, the young, unwashed, redheaded stepchild of these mature and magical forms.
College
So what have these mature, expansive, inspiring essays to do with the traditional college essay, that plodding, formulaic thing that states its thesis, proves it in three paragraphs and marches inexorably to a firm conclusion—re-stating in no uncertain terms that it got where it meant to go? They are related by blood. And not the blood that took Henry Wiencek years to uncover and document in the Hairstons. Not the blood, as that book discovered of miscegenation and generations of trauma, denial and alienation. Rather, the relation of the prodigal, welcomed by an adoring parent, fed the fatted calf. For all our culture’s anti-intellectualism, our contempt for higher education, our niggardly response to the patent needs for learning, there is a huge array of hopeful teachers convinced that the writer of the one can mature to become the writer of the other. No, not just “can mature” but does, must mature. For all these writers and others began there. So there must be progress, even if it is not inevitable.
So we welcome the prodigal home, that errant child that might have returned scorned and covered in shame. He was wrong; he was profligate. But he is our blood. There is hope there, and kinship. There is love and union that is all the more difficult after the feast is past, when he stays and doesn’t turn out the lights or close his mouth when chewing, when he channel surfs so fast that we can’t even see what we just missed, when he is surly or uncouth or violates our sense of peace and order in 1001 ways. The hope of progress is hard to find when we are confronted moment-to-moment with the unlettered, the lazy, the evidence of how far education must take him, of how very much we have to teach, of what burdens we have decided to shoulder and he resolutely shrugs off.
But the student will eventually shoulder those same burdens. That has always been the way. And the painstaking, labor intensive, soul-wrenching task of teaching writing is the way we show the way. We all were once there.
Addiction
I began this essay with the image of addiction to teaching. And like other addictions, this one is, in Jungian terms, evidence of a longing for balance. Like my attachment to chocolate, though, it does more than state a hope. It heals.
Scientists now tell us that chocolate releases endorphins that give us the waves of well-being and contentment that we crave. For Valentine’s Day this year, I gave my wife some local, fresh hand-made, preservative free, gourmet chocolates. This was not a selfless sacrificial gift. She shared. And we sat in a sea of good feeling, peace and well-being. It was a most satisfying experience. Teaching does not give such rewards regularly or predictably. And even when they do come, when a student in an end of course evaluation says what I’d want him or her to say, or even better, when I learn something from students or feel inspired by a breakthroughs they’ve made, I, being thoroughly academic and skeptical myself, can immediately doubt the truth of their assertion, the validity of their breakthrough, the longevity of progress or even its trajectory.
But for moments the rewards are just as palpable, just as intoxicating, and just as reliable as the rich, subtle ecstasy of those local, amazing lumps of chocolate love.
As I opened with my not so veiled reference to Alcoholics Anonymous, I hinted both at the need I have to confess my addiction, my need to manage it by withdrawing from it and my acknowledgement of the spiritual nature of both the addiction and the benefits of confession and community.
As if for the first time…
A quest ends well at home. Joseph Campbell, who spent a lifetime studying and teaching about them, ought to know. He said, in the end, we come home and see it as if for the first time.
An essay is a journey, a quest. And like any journey or quest, it must end. Martin Prechtel, in his brilliant and insightful book The Secrets of the Talking Jaguar, analyzes a feature of Mayan. There is no concept of or word for “leaving home”. To take the first step out of the door is to begin the journey home. I love that metaphor. We are creatures who, like dogs that turn before they lie down, must move in circles.
A group of dedicated volunteers in my church has painted on a piece of canvass that fills our social hall a replica of the labyrinth that graces the floor of Chartres Cathedral. So now, once a month, a labyrinth can be laid in my church’s largest room, and the room is transformed to a sacred, meditative space.
Walking the labyrinth is a longstanding spiritual discipline that now has found a home in many such liberal churches as my own. When walking the labyrinth, we follow a set path, entering and exiting at the same spot. As we walk we often carry a question, which often feels answered or resolved in some way as we pause in the center of the labyrinth and then make our way out—retracing exactly the path we’d followed in. The labyrinth is a wonderful metaphor for the essay. For the twists and turns that to our bodies may seem random, route-less, meandering, are in fact purposeful, deliberate, laid out by “sacred geometry.” When we exit the labyrinth, we see the place we came from as if for the first time.
I pray for the ability to some day write an essay as exquisite as a labyrinth. But more than that, I pray that my students may some day write such an essay, and that I may be fortunate enough to follow it in the contours of their thinking, their lives, to the center of their being and out again to know them, and myself, as if for the first time.
“Chocolate. It’s not just for breakfast anymore.”
I’ve paused, deliberated and rested. And now I return, return to teaching. As I’ve worked on this essay, I am teaching an experimental course on grounds at the University of Virginia. And even as its workload burdens me, I have scheduled my next class with the UOP. Chocolate, like education, is not restricted to one time and place. And with any luck and any skill and craft, the students I meet and work with in my next class may find the course a turning point in their lives. Meandering though it may feel, the twists and turns will lead them, and me, to the center of the question and back home, which we’ll see, as if for the first time. May we then exclaim, paraphrasing Miranda from The Tempest, “Oh brave new world, that has such people [and erudition and ignorance, addictions and health, connections and chocolate] in it.”
__________________
References
Ayers, E. L. and Grisham, C. M. “Why IT Has Not Paid Off as We Hoped (Yet),” Educause. November/December 2003. pp. 41—51.
Collected on the web on 7/12/7:
www.educause.edu/ir/library/pdf/ERM0361.pdf
Thomas, W.G. III, and Ayers, E.L. “The Difference Slavery Made; A Close Analysis of Two Communities.
Collected on the web on 7/12/7:
http://www.vcdh.virginia.edu/AHR/
copyright John Alexander 2006.
posted by John Alexander at 9:33 AM
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