I just flew in from Laredo, and boy...

Highlights from the past week or so (craziness)...

Last Monday through Wednesday I attended the 10th annual fall meeting of the Carolinas Writing Program Administrators at Wildacres. It was my 7th (!) such meeting. I'm getting old. We hosted Doug Hesse, fantastic scholar and teacher of writing and all-around good guy. He led us in a morning of low-stakes reflective writing activities challenging us to rediscover the personal in our professional writing. It was refreshing and calming and fun...fun enough for a few of us (including me) to give up our afternoon speaking slots to free up more time for writing and reflecting.

Who wants to hear me natter on about the effect of LaTeX use on math students' writing rhythms, anyway?

I was then back home (well, in Asheville, anyway) for about 48 hours before leaving town again, but not before helping to host the Honors Program's first world café, an event attended by 66 of our 80 first-year Honors students. Students had conversations about questions we'd designed to elicit thoughtful responses ("What events have shaped your life? Your parents' lives? What events will shape your children's lives?" "What defines community?"). After considering these questions the students were asked to generate questions of their own for other groups to answer...and then we asked them to do it again, leaving each others' company after the final round of student-generated questions were asked.

Late the next morning I left for Texas. I spent a day and a half in Laredo running a workshop on writing in the STEM disciplines at Texas A&M International University (TAMIU). I'd done a similar workshop at TAMIU almost exactly a year before though last year's group was a bunch of middle-school and high-school math educators and this year I worked mostly with TAMIU faculty, with a few Laredo Community College folks thrown in for good measure. I have to say that I'm thoroughly impressed: both workshops were among the most engaged and engaging I've ever led. This last group in particular was stellar, 24 people clearly dedicated to learning more about authentic disciplinary writing. I was particularly excited to speak with Quinaria, a writing instructor who serves the university as one of their first-year experience (FYE) coordinators. Their FYE courses are tied to introductory-level disciplinary courses (like Calc I and General Chemistry), each of which is housed in a designated first-year learning community. There are some course-to-course articulation issues, but it seems like they're dedicated to making their system work. It can't be any crazier than out 179 system.

Back at home for a couple of weeks now. Two weeks from this past Saturday I head up the mountain to Boone for the NC Honors Association conference where my colleague Samuel joins me in speaking about our 179/479 crossover. Samuel and I each have a student presenting, too. I'm excited to see how well my student's talk goes over; Fawn will be speaking about her final project from Oulipo back in the spring, for which she crafted randomly-generated dictionary entries in an effort to satirize the most lofty lexicon ever written. After that it's back to Laredo for a few days, and then to Wilmington for this year's NC English Teachers Association conference...

...always more in store!

Lie to me

It's been a while since I've written here; it's taking a particularly fun exercise I tried out in my Oulipo class to get me back.

Today we played a game I called "Lie to me." Inspired by the byzantine yet convincing fictions Georges Perec creates in Life: A user's manual, I asked my students to spend ten or twelve minutes in crafting the beginnings of a bit of fiction in which they lie their asses off, given the following generic set-up: "You are a _______________ , with a(n) _______________ who hopes to _______________ while in _______________ ." For each blank the students drew cards: the first card gave them a character ("heroin-addicted airline pilot," "one-armed race car driver," etc.), the second accoutred them with an object ("a shard of the cross Jesus hung on," "an ounce of unrefined uranium ore," etc.), the third gave them a purpose ("publish a Pulitzer Prize-winning drama," "escape persecution by political rivals," etc.), and the fourth gave them a location ("Jakarta," "Prague," etc.). I joined in, writing as a homeless classically-trained violinist with a blind Bengal tiger cub who was living in New York and trying to solve the Riemann Hypothesis.

In the spirit of March Madness, the students advanced their stories through quarterfinal and semifinal rounds, ending with a competition between an expert on 17th-century Russian history and a deposed Latin American president. "It's like the darkest ever episode of Dora the Explorer," one of the students said about the latter story, written largely in Spanglish.

Fun times! I'm definitely going to have to try this constraint out again in a future class.

Update on Loftyness

Well, I've done it. I've taken the first paragraph from Italo Calvino's If on a winter's night a traveler (the book we recently finished reading together in Oulipo) and applied to it the five loftyizing constraints from the previous post, first one at a time and then all at once. Each individually meets with some success, but the overall effect is quite convincing. Great fun! Please check them out:

Original, the first paragraph from Italo Calvino’s If on a winter’s night a traveler:

You are about to begin reading Italo Calvino’s new novel, If on a winter’s night a traveler. Relax. Concentrate. Dispel every other thought. Let the world around you fade. Best to close the door; the TV is always on in the next room. Tell the others right away, “No, I don’t want to watch TV!” Raise your voice – they won’t hear you otherwise – “I’m reading! I don’t want to be disturbed!” Maybe they haven’t heard you, with all that racket; speak louder, yell: “I’m beginning to read Italo Calvino’s new novel!” Or if you prefer, don’t say anything; just hope they’ll leave you alone.

Germanic capitalizing, a "fair coin" flipped to decide whether or not to capitalize a given noun:

You are about to begin reading Italo Calvino’s new novel, If on a winter’s Night a traveler. Relax. Concentrate. Dispel every other thought. Let the World around you fade. Best to close the Door; the TV is always on in the next Room. Tell the others right away, “No, I don’t want to watch TV!” Raise your Voice – they won’t hear you otherwise – “I’m reading! I don’t want to be disturbed!” Maybe they haven’t heard you, with all that racket; speak louder, yell: “I’m beginning to read Italo Calvino’s new novel!” Or if you prefer, don’t say anything; just hope they’ll leave you alone.

Inverting, a "fair coin" flipped to decide whether or not to invert the subject and verb in a given sentence:

You are about to begin reading Italo Calvino’s new novel, If on a winter’s night a traveler. Relax. Concentrate. Every other thought dispel. Let fade the world around you. Best the door to close; the TV is always on in the next room. The others tell, right away, “No, I don’t want to watch TV!” Raise your voice – they won’t hear you otherwise – “I’m reading! Disturbed I don’t want to be!” Maybe they haven’t heard you, with all that racket; louder speak, yell: “I’m beginning to read Italo Calvino’s new novel!” Or if you prefer, don’t say anything; just hope leave you alone they will.

Theethouizing, “you” has been changed systematically to “thee” or “thou,” and “your” to “thy” or “thine":

Thou art about to begin reading Italo Calvino’s new novel, If on a winter’s night a traveler. Relax. Concentrate. Dispel every other thought. Let the world around thee fade. Best to close the door; the TV is always on in the next room. Tell the others right away, “No, I don’t want to watch TV!” Raise thy voice – they won’t hear thee otherwise – “I’m reading! I don’t want to be disturbed!” Maybe they haven’t heard thee, with all that racket; speak louder, yell: “I’m beginning to read Italo Calvino’s new novel!” Or if thou preferst, don’t say anything; just hope they’ll leave thee alone.

Oloizing, “O” and “Lo!” placed at the start of randomly selected sentences and independent clauses:

You are about to begin reading Italo Calvino’s new novel, If on a winter’s night a traveler. Lo!, relax. O, concentrate. O, dispel every other thought. Let the world around you fade. O, best to close the door; the TV is always on in the next room. Lo!, tell the others right away, “O, no, I don’t want to watch TV!” O, raise your voice – they won’t hear you otherwise – “O, I’m reading! I don’t want to be disturbed!” Lo!, maybe they haven’t heard you, with all that racket; speak louder, yell: “Lo!, I’m beginning to read Italo Calvino’s new novel!” Or if you prefer, don’t say anything; just hope they’ll leave you alone.

Adjectival inflating, every adjective replaced by its longest synonym appearing on thesaurus.com:

You are about to begin reading Italo Calvino’s uncontaminated novel, If on a winter’s night a traveler. Relax. Concentrate. Dispel every supplementary thought. Let the world around you fade. Best to close the door; the TV is always on in the subsequential room. Tell the others right away, “No, I don’t want to watch TV!” Raise your voice – they won’t hear you otherwise – “I’m reading! I don’t want to be disturbed!” Maybe they haven’t heard you, with all that racket; speak louder, yell: “I’m beginning to read Italo Calvino’s uncontaminated novel!” Or if you prefer, don’t say anything; just hope they’ll leave you alone.

The whole enchilada: all five constraints applied simultaneously:

Thou art about to begin reading Italo Calvino’s uncontaminated novel, If on a winter’s Night a traveler. Lo!, relax. O, concentrate. O, every supplementary thought dispel. Let fade the World around thee. O, best the Door to close; the TV is always on in the subsequential Room. Lo!, the others tell, right away, “O, no, I don’t want to watch TV!” O, raise thy Voice – they won’t hear thee otherwise – “O, I’m reading! Disturbed I don’t want to be!” Lo!, maybe they haven’t heard thee, with all that racket; louder speak, yell: “Lo!, I’m beginning to read Italo Calvino’s uncontaminated novel!” Or if thou preferst, don’t say anything; just hope leave thee alone they will.

And yes, they pay me to do this, folks. How awesome is my job?

Midsemester musings

We're about halfway through the semester now, and I have to say I'm enjoying teaching more than I have for a few years now. I love both of my classes and am having tremendous amounts of fun with both of them. The Calc III class is the most engaged math class I've had in several semesters: the students are eager, active, and awesome. And Oulipo...I don't know how we can fit so much fun into three fifty-minute periods each week. I wish we met for longer...

In Calc III I've been starting each Wednesday (the dreaded "hump day") with a contemplative exercise of some sort, much like the first, about which I wrote a few weeks back. The purpose of each exercise is to ask students to put themselves in a positive frame of mind, to reflect on something that's lifting them up and to cast aside something that's holding them down. Today I asked them each to write a simple haiku (no season indicators or "turns," just a simple 5-7-5 syllabic scheme) about their current state of mind. Though I saw a lot of counting on fingers, I also saw a lot of earnest scribbling. Though I don't collect a single word the students write in response to these simple prompts, I have no doubt most (if not all) of the students are taking the assignments seriously, and I hope that they're having salutary effects.

In Oulipo the most recent out-of-class assignment was to write a "lofty" poem elegizing a quotidian object. Each of us selected an everyday object that was then randomly selected by one of the others in the class. We were then each tasked with writing verse that we deemed "lofty" in some fashion, extolling the virtues of the object we'd been assigned. For many people "lofty" meant "classical," and several student wrote poems in a romantic style, with rime and meter appropriate to an 18th-century-or-earlier bard.

After we'd workshopped our poems and read a number of them out loud, we talked briefly about conventional devices we might make use of to "loftyize" a piece of non-lofty writing and as a group came up with the following:

1. Germanic capitalizing: selectively or systematically capitalize nouns throughout the piece.
2. Inverting: selectively or systematically invert the standard modern subject-verb order throughout the piece.
3. Theethouizing: selectively or systematically turn "you"s into "thee"s and "thou"s throughout the piece.
4. Oloizing: selectively or systematically insert "o!"s and "lo!"s throughout the piece.
5. Adjectival inflating (a nod to n + 7): selectively or systematically replace each adjective with its longest synonym appearing in an agreed-upon thesaurus throughout the piece.

I'm going to try these out on a piece of non-lofty writing, maybe something from Jon Rogawski's Calculus...? Results posted soon...

Read one, write two

Today's Oulipo class featured a constraint I made up in the middle class sometime last week but have only just now had a chance to try out. I call it "read one, write two," and it goes something like this:

1. One person begins the process by writing two lines of a poem, each on its own scrap of paper.

2. This person then passes the second line only on to the next person. This person then writes two lines of her own, passing only the second one on to the next person, and so forth.

3. At the end, the finished "poem" is assembled, made up of the various pieces, only half of which were "visible" to more than one person.

We had five rounds going at once, and though the bookkeeping took a little getting used to, we got the hang of it and managed to compile five 20-line poems between us. I've transcribed them below.

Ye, old hag,
why do you look at me so?
Do you not know
the love that's harbored within?
It only helps us to make nonsense out of silence.
The white noise under spoken tremors
is the most terrifying noise you'll hear
and the lullaby from the song on the radio
put us to sleep, like the video
of the man with the golden eye, daddy-o.
She spoke with both reverence and bewilderment,
"he's the smoothest street walker in town."
They say, though, he has a secret:
that once upon a time, he nearly got caught,
our hands upon the deer, illegally slain
the blood stained there and drying fast,
red as a cabernet sauvignon
to be shared with friends at the end of the week,
even when so tired you can barely speak,
with this, with them, the solace you seek.

Spring came too early this year,
we were too young; unready for the harvest,
and yet so old because all that we'd seen,
and each day a reminder of the ages we had
were reflected in the barman, who was mad
from all the ale he drank, he thought he was from Baghdad.
The drink was starting to affect his mind, you see.
Well, his mind along with his liver
were rotting, rotting away,
drinking poison day by day,
I feel my body giving over,
friends and lovers wash away
like suds off a car
washed in the middle of a hot summer day.
Instead of languishing in dismay,
if you must run, then run away!
Run off to the great unknown,
never to be seen again!
No, never to be seen again,
not ever in this world.

Whose great works were served to the throne?
There once was a barber from Rome
who quite enjoyed the company of loose women,
although you'd never know by how much he went to church.
Church, yes, but by night he wanders the murky forest,
hand in hand with darkness.
So trudge I thro' the tortured bush [?],
willows hang in gloomy mourning,
a shadow extending across the field.
The running water would not yield:
wounds so deep cannot be healed
prancing through the poppy field
stopping to watch the butterflies
flying in the air.
But when night fell, so did I;
a broken angel with battered wings
keeps moving forward, although winds blow through;
passing through the cold light of a sunny pale mid-winter afternoon
I saw a man standing in a meadow
and he said to me, "all is well."

Birds skip playfully through trees;
I find I have a sudden urge to sneeze.
The urge builds in the back of my throat,
undeniable, unbearable, I cannot resist any longer.
"Oh, Rowan!" she shouted,
the smell of catfish in the air.
Alive, they predict earthquakes.
Caught, killed, and fried, they are tasty.
Tasty to the one who eats meat,
a vegetarian's nightmare, a vegan's torture.
No, nothing at all, not but rotting meat,
for the ship had sailed  for endless weeks,
endless weeks of throbbing, busy crusading outward on a thin vessel,
looking for a reason to keep from looking
by distracting myself with television shows.
But every so often I begin to start looking...
at the old cafe, where she was once cooking.
And if I look hard enough, I can smell her dumplings.
Their aroma takes me to the kitchen of my 11-year-old self,
where all my dreams began.

A bottle of water under a chair,
to hydrate those who care to drink,
or care not, and drink none at all.
But drink too much? I hardly think
a slip of vodka, a drop of wine --
hardly enough to make me blink.
I've lived it all before, it's no lie.
We will play these games until we die,
and I will die singing songs, telling myself my body was my greatest tool.
There is nothing left to wait for
because I am in the front of the line.
Now the cafe barista asks for my order.
I said "bring me a cafe from Mordor."
The barista said, "we ran out of those in the last quarter.
Running businesses is hard, you see."
Working tooth and nail, and still no profit.
But who needs profit anyway?
Maybe a poor man like he
could live by a liverwurst sea
and eat cantaloup grown from a mulberry tree.

Obligatory whatnots

I've been posting somewhat regularly lately, and though today's not given me considerable fodder for a brand-spankin' new post (cross products in Calc III and an introductory discussion of Italo Calvino's If on a winter's night a traveler in Oulipo), I thought I might mention a few ongoing whatnots.

Whatnot #1, CRTF...WTF? I've begun drafting a "contextualizing" document that might help folks who haven't been intimately involved in the process of crafting the current proposal understand exactly what in the hell those of us who have been intimately involved in the process of crafting the current proposal are thinking. Of course, I've come out semi-publicly (here and elsewhere) as having serious reservations about the proposal as it stands, so it's ironic that it falls to me to explain our reasoning.

I think at this point, the powers that be are concerned that given some of the language of the Strategic Plan (about more below) we're better off streamlining and "standardizing" our curriculum before someone else (*cough* GA? *cough cough*) does it for us.

Whatnot #2, This post by Teacherken of education-related blogging fame. (He's been a fixture in various places, including The Daily Kos.) The writing's on the wall, and it ain't pretty. As if I needed more reason to loathe AP exams. Students, parents, everyone: the AP system is fundamentally fraught with error of every kind. It's a wrongheaded hydra. We need to slay the damned thing. Of course, we're going to have to fight through ETS and friends to even get to it.

Whatnot #1 and Whatnot #2 bring me to...

...Whatnot #3, The Strategic Plan. I'm about 1/6 of the way through reading this sucker. I regaled (read: "bored/annoyed the crap out of") my Facebook friends with a line-by-line response to this damned thing a few days ago when I started reading it, alcoholic beverage in hand. It's awful, folks. It adopts the rhetoric of the corporate community, eyes intently focused on the bottom line, offering one way to the university system, and one way only: make us money or die. It's all about measurable production benchmarks (graduates are "produced," donchano?) and accountability to stakeholders. It's all about uniformity and portability and seamless transfer. It's all about standards. It's NCLB on steroids, repackaged for the 'teens. It's a godawful mess.

But it's the UNC system's lodestone for the next several years. It's our way through the woods. It's the house we have to beat, the inside straight we've got to draw into. It's our future.

I plan on finishing reading it this week sometime, provided I can find enough liquor. I'll post my thoughts about it here as I read it.

Constraint and contemplation

I thought I might mention a couple of the activities I asked my students to take part in today.

The first was a simple freewrite, with an even simpler summative exercise at the end. I asked my Oulipo students to freewrite for five minutes on the ways in which they've noticed their writing to be affected by constraint. Once they'd completed this freewrite I asked them each to identify three words which gave some indication of their freewrite's content and tone. They then shared these words on the board:

I joined the students in this exercise. I was intrigued that my three words ended up being "pattern," "unknown," and "death." The first was unsurprising but the last two were unexpected. I reasoned (if one can call analysis through freewriting "reason") roughly as follows: "we seek patterns in everything we see, including heavily constrained literature, because patterns have predictive power and allow us to extrapolate from the known present and past to the unknown future; perhaps the most compelling unknown is death...can the patterns we find in constrained poetry help us understand even this ultimate unknown?"

We'll have a chance on Friday to discuss the words above more thoroughly. So far we've only talked briefly in pairs about our ideas. I'm looking forward to these upcoming conversations.

The other activity I wanted to mention is a contemplative exercise I asked students in both classes to complete. Knowing full well that Wednesday is the longest and most stressful day for many folks in academia (students, faculty, and staff alike), I wanted to do something to help alleviate the stress. Yesterday, while sitting in the first session of my first faculty/staff learning circle since Fall 2011 (it's been too long!), I thought up the following activity, though I'm sure it's not original to me:

1. Take out two scraps of paper.
2. On one of them, write something that's stressing you out or bringing you down.
3. On the other, write something that's bringing you joy or making you smile.
4. Ball the first scrap up into a tiny origami boulder and chuck it into the recycling bin lovingly provided in the middle of the room.
5. Fold the second scrap neatly and tuck it into your pocket, where you're likely to find it once, twice, thrice, throughout the rest of the day, a gentle reminder of something you should be happy about.

It's a simple exercise, but in both classes it elicited a great response. People in both classes gleefully threw their stressors into the recycling bin in a hail of discarded worry. ("This feels really therapeutic," said one of my Oulipo students.) I noticed smiles and nods from many folks as they put their happy thoughts away. The activity took three minutes out of class time, but I believe it went a long way to establishing a sense of community and a more relaxed state of mind in which we would all be a bit more receptive to new ideas. I might have to make this, or something like it, a regular Wednesday occurrence.

Perverbs

Today's Oulipo class started off with Didi leading us in a constraint she'd read about for today. According to the Oulipo Compendium, a perverb (created by Oulipian Maxine Groffsky) is "the result obtained by crossing proverbs." For example, "if we join the first part of 'Red sky at night, sailor's delight' to the second part of 'It never rains but it pours,' we obtain the proverb 'Red sky at night, but it pours."

We spent a little time making up a few of our own perverbs, building off of a list of proverbs we brainstormed at the outset. Here's a list of several we came up with, including some extremely twisted (lexically and topically) ones:

Sailor’s delight, horse in the mouth.
It never rains, but houses shouldn’t throw stones.
An apple a day shouldn’t throw stones.
Loose lips gather no moss.
A bird in the hand keeps the doctor away.
Spare the rod and sink ships.
Early to bed, early to rise, sinks ships.
A stitch in time catches worms.
You can lead a horse to water, but he catches the worm.
Spare the red sky rod and at night spoil the child; sailor’s delight.
An apple a day is worth two in the bush.
An ounce of prevention is a penny earned.
An ounce of bird catches the worm.
Keep calm and spoil the child.
Those who live in a penny spoil the child.
Haste makes moss.
Haste makes worms.
Loose lips gather sailors.

The students' task for Monday: write a holorhyme and a snowball.

My task: find a good .txt file full of profanity to use for the homovocalism generator I wrote in Mathematica.

You're welcome.

I have a Beau-présent for you!

I'm sitting in my Oulipo class at the moment, updating as my students take part in their first peer review activity of the semester, reading over one another's beaux-présents, poems written using only the letters appearing in the name of the poem's dedicatee (in this case, the author herself or himself). For shits and grins, here's Mathematica's representation of my beau-présent, as a finite-state automaton:

I'm curious to see how these turn out! Perhaps I'll ask permission to share one or two of the resulting poems once they're done.

It's been a bit since I mentioned my other course this term, Calc III. Please know this omission does not indicate dissatisfaction; on the contrary, this section of the course is by far the most engaged and engaging section I've ever taught. (I think the presence of several really eager nontraditional-aged students helps!) I'm just a bit more outspoken regarding the Oulipo class owing to its newness.

More soon!

n + 7: variations

Today's Oulipo class began with an (n+7)-like exercise: I chose a single sentence from Mark Dunn's Ella Minnow Pea (the first of the books we're reading for the course) and generated a number between 1 and 50 using Mathematica. (The number 24 was chosen.) I then asked students to turn to that page in a book other than Ella Minnow Pea (I provided such a book to those who didn't have one on them, including Peggy Meszaros's Self-authorship: Advancing students' intellectual growth and Carl Sagan's The cosmic connection) and perform the following algorithm: for the kth noun in the original sentence beginning with a given letter x, find the kth noun in the other text beginning with x and replace the original noun with this new one. The sentence I selected to start with had two words starting with "p" and three starting with "c," necessitating a little searching (a couple of students had to look long and hard for a "w" word, too).

We let ourselves modify number in order to preserve grammatical correctness. Other than this, we made all changes verbatim. The results are below, beginning with the original sentence as it appears in Dunn. See if you can tell which one came from a calculus textbook, and which from the Bible. Carl Sagan's led to the most mirthful replacements, I think.


Parents: you may wish to help your children absorb these new words by turning the process into a game of some sort, simple flash cards also constituting a tried and efficient course.

Policies: you may wish to help your chapters absorb these new welfares by turning the precedent into a government of some setting, simple flash congruences also constituting a tried and efficient care.

Partnerships: you may wish to help your conisiderations absorb these new ways by turning the professor into a going of some script, simple flash cases also constituting a tried and efficient challenge.

Privileges: you may wish to help your challenges absorb these new works by turning the partner into a group of some story, simple flash cars also constituting a tried and efficient claim.

People: you may wish to help your city absorb these new ways by turning the presence into a gateway of some sake, simple flash catastrophes also constituting a tried and efficient condition.

Packages: you may wish to help your courses absorb these new worlds by turning the place into a Georgia of some sorrow, simple flash clouds also constituting a tried and efficient child.

Paths: you may wish to help your c(t) absorb these new ways by turning the planet into a graph of some set, simple flash curves also constituting a tried and efficient cos(t).

Planets: you may wish to help your chapters absorb these new ways by turning the purpose into a generalization of some size, simple flash circles also constituting a tried and efficient confusion.

Points: you may wish to help your ciphers absorb these new writings by turning the place into a gear of some solution, simple flash cases also constituting a tried and efficient change.

Pies: you may wish to help your charts absorb these new ways by turning the passenger into a group of some slice, simple flash classes also constituting a tried and efficient category.

Pioneers: you may wish to help your criticism absorb these new women by turning the president into a genitalia of some salutation, simple flash Chicagos also constituting a tried and efficient castration.


By the way, I managed to get this class moved; starting this coming Wednesday we'll be meeting in the Honors seminar room, a windowless affair about fifty feet from my office door. It's bit dark and dreary for my tastes, but the kids seem to like it. It'll be nice to have a room where we can actually sit in a circle.

Time's up!

The prompt for the first reading response I assigned my Oulipo students asked them to consider the nature of constraint and the impact one constraint in particular has on their individual lives: "pick some sort of constraint that governs your work life, your school life, or your personal life, and write about the way in which it affects your perception of and action in the world we share together."

Should I be surprised that four of the nine students whose reflections I've read so far zeroed in on "time" as a constraint, complaining that they've not got enough time in the day to do all they feel they need to do? I know these kids, Honors students all, are the driven, the determined, the year-after-year best-and-brightest, but I'm beginning to worry about them. Admittedly, it's taken me a long time to learn this lesson, but I know it now (though I don't always heed it): productivity makes a poor yardstick when it comes to measuring how well the day's been done.

Maybe tomorrow I'll bring a carafe of white Russians and a copy of The Big Lebowski to class.

Day Three

Calc III's now met thrice (love that word!), and Oulipo twice. I've learned a lot in both, already.

The second meeting of the latter offered a great discussion on the many ways we can construe "constraint," and how constraint affects us. "What kinds of constraints do we see in our lives?" I asked. One student spoke of the way her anxiety constrains her actions: she must choose to do or not do certain things for fear her anxiety will overwhelm her. Another student talked about physical constraints, explaining how the perspectives we take on, constrained by the routes we take when we travel and the modes of transportation we use, affect our engagement with the world. While much of our discussion focused on the negative aspects of constraint and the ways in which removal of constraints liberates us, I asked the students to indicate some positive effects, too.

Regarding constrained literature, one student brought up a point an Oulipian might make: by constraining the words you're allowed to use or the way you're allowed to use them, though you you may find yourself with an impoverished list, you can nevertheless focus your attention on this list and make more astute, intentional choices as you write. Indeed, much the same can be said in other forms of art: as one of the Honors Program's star musicians pointed out, once free jazz hit the scene and all bets were off, one could argue that music became meaningless and it was only with the reinstitution of constraint that meaning was restored. Though we find pleasure in flouting constraint, as another student pointed out, that pleasure is unobtainable if constraint does not exist: how can we break the rules if there are no rules to break?

This class is going to be a good one, I think. The only complaint I have is that the classroom stinks, as I explained in a previous post.

More on my Calc III class, and curriculum-review goings-on, Honors Program whatnot, etc., soon. For now, I've got to get to dinner.

Day One, Spring 2013, Part II

My Oulipo (HON 373) class didn't have quite the zing I was hoping it would have, but it could be because everyone was a bit tired. We'll see how it turns out.

As planned, I started off by asking all the students to join me in writing for ten minutes or so about what they did over break. After this, I gave them each (each of 9) one of the 9 most common letters in the alphabet (giving myself the last of the most common 10, out of ETAOINSHRD) and asked them to revise what they'd written and, retaining the same meaning and tone, omit the letter they'd been given. Hilarity ensued.

Well, for some it did. I'm not sure what folks thought of this first exercise in constraint. Admittedly it was a bit contrived, but it was a nice introduction, I thought. We'll unpack it some more on Wednesday, before which I've asked them to think about the role constraint plays in everyday life.

Meanwhile, Honors Program nonsense made up most of my day. An incident with the Honors sections of our Humanities courses made me think deeply about the inherently exclusionary nature of the Honors Program. It made me feel a little dirty about the deeds I do.

More on this tomorrow, perhaps. Now I'm off to my first real meal in nearly 8 hours...

P.S. -- for those of you not familiar with Oulipo, check out its Wikipedia page, at least...

Day One, Spring 2013

My first class of 2013 went well! I've got 31 folks enrolled in Calc III, and one more itchin' to get in.

We met today for the first time and began with a brief low-stakes writing activity, a brief version of the now-common object-ive writing activity elaborated in the blog 3 friends, 30 things, 90 stories which I wrote with my colleagues Libby and Mariposa (and yes, we're doing it again this coming April!). This broke the ice, got people talking, and got everyone up to the board to jot a few words down. After that, we had just enough time to go over the syllabus before breaking for the day.

A minor rant: I hate hate HATE the configuration of Rhoades 213, the windowless pit in which I teach both of my courses this term. The "desks" consist of modular table-lets which each accommodate a single chair. They're small and mobile and ideal for gathering together in small groups to form a place for collaborative learning...if only they weren't bolted together, side-to-side, in phalanges of three or four per row. This static and stultifying configuration is nothing short of asinine. Only a pedagogical peewee would think that this structure of classroom is helpful. I am appalled.

How will it work out? Stay tuned...I've got the first meeting of my Honors seminar on Oulipo in that same classroom in about 30 minutes...