From the Bookshelf: Essays, Identity, and My So-Called Life

Angela Chase (played by Claire Danes), the main character of My So-Called Life (image courtesy of mscl.com).

Very often when I’m figuring out what to teach, I find myself going outside of the classroom English textbook. In this feature, I take a look at those reading selections.

One thing that I have always enjoyed about putting together lessons about short works such as essays and short stories is being able to link several pieces that seem disparate through a common theme. Teaching sophomores, I look for themes that might be relevant to their current lives and then search for works reflect that theme in myriad ways.

Identity is a favorite of mine. At 15 or 16, you’re at an age where you are discovering more about the world and might even be questioning a bit as well. Your identity, you discover, is malleable. Morever, this idea is a near-universal concept. Set aside outdated fashion or melodramatic moments in Rebel Without a Cause or The Breakfast Club and you still have a protagonist or protagonists struggling with the changing idea of who they are.

There are bits and pieces of these themes in the essays I do from Kick Me by Paul Feig, which starts the unit, as well as a piece by David Sedaris called “Us and Them,” which on the surface is a wacky neighbor essay but beneath the surface is an exploration of how we build the identities of other people in our own minds based on preconceived notions and perception.

Alice Adams’ short story “Truth or Consequences,” which is about a girl dealing with the minefield of middle school and the cruelty of the mean girls; and Alice Walker’s essay, “Beauty: When the Other Dance is the Self,” where she contemplates her scars and how they affect her outlook on the world, both touch on this theme as well. Adolescence is a time when we tend to be more self-conscious and hopefully self-aware.

From the Bookshelf: Literary Magazines

The 1999 edition of Loyola College’s “Forum” literary magazine for non-fiction prose and artwork. I contributed an essay and served as assistant editor.

I think that there’s something about being an English teacher that makes me a hoarder.

Okay, that’s a lie because today I handed something out to my advanced English class that a high school teacher of mine had handed out nearly 20 years ago and I had saved. So clearly I’m simply a hoarder.

Although I’ve also been to plenty of colleagues’ houses and apartments and seen stacks and shelves of books, which makes me think that maybe English teachers are a certain type hoarder. Hoarders of the written word, perhaps?

Those last three paragraphs clearly make little or no sense and to be honest I was just trying to come up with a clever way to explain why I have so many literary magazines. You know, other than the fact that they’re from my high school and college days and I am either listed as an assistant editor or contributor.

I’m sure that if you think back to your time in school or higher education, you’ll remember what your campus literary magazine was like: a collection of poetry, fiction, or non-fiction prose that was considered the “best” of what the school’s writing populace had to offer. There probably was even some sort of photography or artwork accompanying the writing. It came out every spring and you might have wanted to contributed but were maybe even a little intimidated by the talent represented (and then were amused to realize it was run by a crack team of editors who probably worked in a dank computer lab during what little time they had availble). But you remember being impressed by the abilites of your fellow students.

My copies of Loyola College in Maryland’s two literary magazines: Forum (featuring non-fiction prose and art) and The Garland (featuring fiction, poetry, and photography) spent the first decade or so after my graduation collecting dust either on a bookshelf in my guest room or in a box with the rest of my errata from high school and college. I probably would have forgotten about them had I not brought them into work last year because someone in the department was floating the idea of starting up a literary magazine and wanted some examples (it’s finally getting off the ground this year).

I forgot about my copies of the magazines again until earlier this year when I was straightening up my classroom and found a copy of Forum from 1997. My ego being what it is, I checked to see if it was one of the editions in which I had an essay published (it wasn’t–I simply was listed as “assistant editor” because I worked on layout), but then started thumbing through some of the essays inside and found one that actually went with a unit I was going to be teaching.

Yet another defense of writing a paper

I created this particular wordle about essays using my advanced English 10 essay rubric (I might have added a word or two).

I was reading another post on “The Innovative Educator” the other morning and in tune with most of the other posts on that site, it advocates for caring about students and making their experiences meaningful.  They are hard things to disagree with, especially when you want your classes to care as much as you do about their learning.  But somewhere on the way to proving her point, the post’s author implies that a critical essay about literature is not a worthwhile task; at least it seems that those teachers who assign such tasks aren’t doing enough.

I guess the critical essay does sound a bit luddite and wouldn’t really be an example of a meaningful task because when students hand in a paper they are doing for me to grade and not publishing to a wiki or blog or anything for the greater world to see.  After all, I am not a real audience for them, just an example of an outdated piece of a machine that ruins any shot they have at real inteligence.  At least that’s the impression I got.

Let’s set aside those things and look at the issue at hand, which is that there is still value to be found in a critical literature essay.  I’ll make a bit of a switch and call it a “paper” instead of an “essay” because to me, “essay” implies either a piece of personal writing and not analytic writing, and I want to be clear that I am not referring to that scourge of high school English class, the five-paragraph essay.  Furthermore, since the literature paper is still a viable form of assessment, then it’s right to consider that the teacher is still a genuine audience (then again, I’ll go out on a limb and say that teachers not being “genuine” is simply a label meant to denigrate the profession and harp on the already-tired “industrial model” talking point).

But why, if said paper may never go beyond the classroom or past my desk, do I consider myself a genuine audience for my students and consider their writing a paper a genuine assessment of what they have learned in the study of literature?  I’ve touched on this subject before, but I did want to come back to it here and talk a little more about my experiences with the literature paper this year with my advanced sophomore English class.  I know that many of them are considering colleges and having gotten to know a good number of the 25 students in that particular class, I can see several of them going after acceptance from a competitive school like Virginia or William & Mary (if this were my old high school, they would be applying to at least one Ivy).  So, their immediate future more than likely involves a classroom or lecture hall and if they wind up taking a class in the humanities, they may wind up doing some sort of critical analysis by way of a paper.  So it’s still a relevant way to use a skill that’s been labeled “21st Century,” although to be honest, the lit paper has been around for quite a long time.

And come to think of it, the idea of a “closed” audience, no matter how collaborative an environment you work in, is also relevant as well.  I spent quite a number of years in sales support and marketing positions where my work was done for either my boss or someone in another department or a partner and the only people outside our company/firm who saw it were clients.  So the idea that you are producing something that’s for a specific audience and not “published” in the sense that it is available for a mass audience is also important and therefore those types of audiences (your clients, your boss, your teacher), are genuine audiences.

From the Bookshelf: Kick Me

Very often when I’m figuring out what to teach, I find myself going outside of the classroom English textbook.  In this feature, I take a look at those reading selections.

When I was fresh out of college in 1999, teen television shows and movies were experiencing a renaissance.  American Pie was one the biggest hits of that summer’s box office and Dawson’s Creek was still going pretty strong on the WB.  Having seen this success, television networks did what they always do when a concept is successful: copy it and hope that it works.  That fall, we were treated to teen aliens in Roswell, inter-clique fighting with Popular, and the angst of Jesse Eisenberg and Anne Hathaway on Get Real.  But my favorite show out of the teen explosion–well, the only one I actually watched–was Freaks and Geeks.

Set at McKinley High School in Michigan in the 1980-1981 school year, Freaks and Geeks follows a brother and sister, Sam and Lindsay Weir, through the travails of going to McKinley.  When the series opens, Sam is the geek, finding himself tortured by a bully and having a hopeless crush on a cheerleader; conversely, Lindsay has thrown aside her geek friends and is hanging out with the stoners and burnouts who make up the “freaks” of the title.  NBC cancelled the show in the middle of its season due to terrible ratings (it was on at 8:00 on Saturday night, losing in the ratings to COPS and Early Edition), although fans poured enough effort into a “save the show” campaign that three more episodes were aired in July 2000 (I contributed myself and have a T-shirt to prove it).

The men responsible for getting this show off the ground were Judd Apatow (he of The 40-Year-Old Virgin and Knocked Up fame) and Paul Feig (who recently directed Bridesmaids).  Feig is credited as the show’s creator and in 2002, he published a collection of autobiographical essays entitled Kick Me: Adventures in Adolescence.  The stories about torture at the hands of bullies and ineptitude around the opposite sex (something he would further document in Superstud) are clearly the inspiration for a number of the storylines on Freaks and Geeks, as Feig is brutally honest about the ridiculousness of his formative years while at the same time being hilarious enough to not have a pity party.  It’s kind of like he found the correct way to answer that torturous standardized test writing prompt, “What is your most embarrassing moment?”  and answered it enough times for an entire book.

What Prompted This?

“It has been said that laughter is the best medicine.  Think of a time when your ability to laugh helped you get through a difficult situation.  Write about what happened. Support your response with details and examples.”

No sooner do I finish reading when the questions start:

“What if we’ve never had something like that happen?”

“What does this mean?”

“How do I start this?”

“How many paragraphs does this have to be?”

“Can I go to the bathroom?”

If you haven’t guessed already, that is the beginning of the most dreaded high school English class assignment of all:  the essay.  And not just any essay, but the prompt-based essay, which is a form of torture so horrific for students that it flies in the face of the Geneva Conventions.  Teachers suffer too, as having to grade 100 essays in a timely manner can send them to the edge of the abyss of insanity, teetering on it as they wonder which “alot” is going to send them careening over into the darkness emerging not with constructive comments but with “All work and no play makes Jack a dull boy” scrawled multiple times on each of those 100 essays.

But the thing is … I love essays as a literary form.  There’s an art to them that I have appreciated for years ever since I read stuff by Dave Barry and E.B. White in high school and college.  And I love writing them as much as I love reading them.  So why is it that they are such hell?

I want to, and it would be easy to put the blame squarely on standardized testing; more specifically, the writing prompt.  After all, it’s been the standard model for essay writing in high school for decades and it doesn’t look that’s going to change anytime soon.

We all know the drill:  you set aside a couple of days of class time, present a prompt, and the students turn out a five-paragraph essay that consists of an introduction/main idea paragraph, three body paragraphs, and a conclusion.  Sometimes, there is something in that pile of essays you wind up grading that blows your mind; unfortunately, most of them are passable at best, tepid displays of the basics of structure and style.  And what drives you crazy–or at least what drives me crazy–is that the prompt and the test it is on has turned writing into an assembly line-like process instead of a craft.

Which is unfortunate because teenagers–even though they are not often awake at 8:00 in the morning–are often full of life and expressive.  They are at an age where they are forging their own identities and finding their own voices.  The essay should be an opportunity for them to tell you what they think and feel and for you to help them make that voice stronger, to help them gain more confidence about expressing themselves in the written word.  But they have been … well, ruined, in a way.  They’re not writers, they’re sled dogs.  Here’s the prompt!  Five sentences per paragraph!  Five paragraphs in the essay!  MUSH!

Obviously, we must be stopped.  Or we must stop ourselves.  Or something  just as dramatic–I’m having a hard time finding a transition here.  I would personally love to be able to completely transform writing in high school so that the standardized test is not considered the be-all and end-all as far as an assessment.  However, since that is not happening anytime soon, what can we do to “stop the bleeding” so to speak and make writing an essay in English class more appealing than losing a limb?

The first answer to this question is blatantly obvious. We can give students an open topic.  You know, do away with the idea of a prompt, and after having them read some very good essays by a variety of writers, tell them that they can write about whatever they want.  This will help them own their topic.  They will care what they write about.

Except that this can backfire and you have to be prepared for it.  You still might get the tepid, bland pieces you’ve already been getting (especially if said blandness is engrained), but what very well might happen is that they are completely lost from the get-go.  I experienced this earlier this year with one of my classes when I told them they could write about whatever they wanted.  A few students came to see me saying that they were glad that they didn’t have to answer another bad prompt but they weren’t exactly sure what to do because it was almost like I had given them too much freedom.  After conferencing with them, I had the beginning of the next day’s class be a quick brainstorming activity: think of as many things as you can think of to write about in an essay.  You have 30 seconds.  Go.  When under the gun, they made lists and we wrote them on the board.  I don’t know how many were actually used but at least it got the blood flowing and the essays have been okay.

Another approach, which I sometimes take and which kind of flies in the face of standardized testing is that I give my students a prompt or choice of prompts (I tend to prefer the latter even though Virginia’s writing SOL is a one-prompt and one-prompt-only test) but don’t get too strict about whether or not they answered the prompt.  If you’re writing a personal essay, you’re not writing a term paper, so you may have a good story to tell and a good point to make.  If it is not exactly on point with the prompt but is a well-thought-out or well-written piece I would like to evaluate it for what it is.  Why should I ding someone on a technicality that seems like a petty technicality?

Of course, the problem with that approach is that when it does come to standardized test day, I am not the person grading my students’ essays, so they will get dinged on a technicality.  So what I did last week in my classes was to give them four different prompts (that were taken directly from state tests) to brainstorm answers for in a short amount of time.  Then, we posted a table on the board and listed all of the different answers that they could possibly come up with.  I even said at the beginning of the exercise that I was trying to show them how to get past the “Well, I never …” and “I can’t think of …” questions that stymie them whenever they get a prompt.  And lo and behold, we found between five and ten different ways to answer each of the prompts.

We went on to write an essay a few days later and the results are mixed, but I didn’t expect a miracle to occur right off the bat.  Getting a process to be less mechanical and more organic takes time, but my hope is that as they head into next year they are a little less sickened by the thought of an essay.