On the eve of summer vacation

The end of a school year is a chaotic time. As I wrap up one year, which means giving and grading final exams, remediating competencies, counting books, cleaning my classroom, I inevitably start thinking about the following year and my goals for the classes I will teach. What will I keep? What will I change?

Once answer I've arrived at for what to change for next year is my approach to writing with my classes.  As none of the classes I teach are exclusively focused on writing, I've tried to blend the reading analysis and the writing practice. I say "tried" because I haven't found a way to manage a balance. What usually gets lost is the writing process as it appears in a workshop-style class.

An experience last week, when I was working with 4 students to revise or write essays they needed for competency, reminded me of how much I love teaching writing, but also how impossible a task it is when class sizes hover around 20.  For those 4 students, that hour and a half they spent with me after their exams were done for the day was probably more helpful than all of the writing instruction I'd given them in class either that year or that semester.

That last statement is hard for me to admit. I feel like I do a pretty good job teaching students how to write, but I know that I can do better. 

But I won't have class sizes of 4 next year, so how do I manage the kind of one-on-one attention that is so essential to developing student writers.  Each writer is in a different place, needs different instruction, and I am only one person. In an hour and a half (longer than my class periods during the year), I was able to get to each student, read what he/she had written, ask them questions about what they meant. They were able to ask me questions about quote integration, citations, topic sentences, transitions.

All good stuff.  But how do I find the time to do all that good stuff in 75 minute classes, with 16 or 17 students in the room.

Honestly, I can't.

But I can schedule time with them outside of class. I can provide more time in class, give more feedback on the first, second, and third drafts than on the final draft where, as the name suggests (though it's not really true), students feel as though what they've written is final and so the feedback serves little purpose.

All of this eats up time, both the class's time and my own, as much of that feedback I will have to write after school and on weekends.  This will probably mean that, in class, we read less and write more. It will mean that my feedback will have to be specific and focused.

What's another solution that would allow student writers to get feedback on their writing, would allow teachers to give that feedback in a small setting, during the school day, so that they don't have to devote hours outside of school to feedback?

 A writing center.

So one of my goals for next year is to begin the process of developing a writing center in the school. Perhaps as a duty for teachers, perhaps as an opportunity for students to tutor. The logistics aren't fully clear to me yet, but at least the goal is.

And, at the end of the year, when I'm tired and the year seems to have gone on too long, I am grateful to have a clear reminder of one of the reasons I wanted to be an English teacher in the first place: I love working with students on writing.

I'd love to hear about how other teachers and schools have incorporated writing centers or work with students on writing.

But you said "results"

Glad you were paying attention. 

The other conclusion I've come to is that I am going to continue this blogging assignment next year with my AP students, and I may re-visit the idea of blogs with this class of AP kids.

I asked my students to provide some feedback on their experience blogging. While there were a few who were not enamored with the blogging activity (great example of a litote if you feel like looking up a rhetorical device), on the whole students enjoyed the experience.

The biggest takeaways for me:

1.  Students appreciated having a say in what they read and, when they chose something they enjoyed reading, saw the blogging activity as more enjoyable than typical reading and writing assignments.

2.  Students felt that, for the most part, their analysis skills improved because they analyzing on their own.

3.  Students liked writing in "blog voice," rather than academic voice, and I really liked reading their academic casual style far more.

4.  Students had a voice; even if they are quiet in class, students communicated clearly in their blog posts, and it was wonderful to hear from them.

5. Some students are way better at blogging than I am. I was so impressed by what some of my students put together, both in terms of the style of their blogs and the content.

6. I loved having conversations about books to choose with the students. I love talking about books anyway, and some of them chose books that I've since added to my reading list.

7. I can let go of a bit of control and put the responsibility on the students. (More about this later)

Some suggestions for next time:

1. Interestingly, one of the number one suggestions was to have students read books in small groups, so other students were reading the same book and they would have someone to discuss the book with.
         I find this piece of feedback especially interesting because this was my original idea, as a totally independent reading experience is just that, independent.  It's nice to have people to talk to about books. 
        Also, it's really nice to feel like they need me! They recognized, through this experience, the benefit of having an "expert" to guide them far more than they would have had otherwise. Working in small groups would also create lots of little experts. 

2.  The comments:  many of the students felt the requirement to comment on different students' blog was frustrating, as they wanted to follow one particular blog.  However, I wanted to avoid, as much as possible, the friends following friends phenomenon that would happen if they could comment on anyone's blog they wanted to. Having small groups reading the same book might eliminate some of this problem. 

3.  Easing up on my control and responsibility for their work did not work for some students. Many rose to the challenge, but there were a few who took the looseness of some of the parameters as a bit of a break, focused on other classes, etc. and are paying the price now that the end of the project is nigh. Perhaps some checkpoint grades along the way would help, but certainly managing time and meeting deadlines set up a month ahead is an important skill that will help these high school seniors when they become college freshmen. 

4. Don't have blog posts due on Friday night because not only do I not really want to spend my Friday night blogging, but these are high school students. They don't want to do that either. Though of course, there's nothing that said they (or I) couldn't have posted last night, but procrastination?

The Results Are In...

I suppose "results" isn't really the right word. It's more like I've reached some conclusions.

One conclusion I've come to is that I would not assign On Such a Full Sea by Chang-Rae Lee to my AP students.  This is not to suggest that it is not AP worthy, though.

Let me explain.

Currently, my AP students read two dystopia novels: Brave New World and The Handmaid's Tale. They start BNW over the summer, and we finish it together in the first week of school. Then we read The Handmaid's Tale.  They are great novels to start with as there is some built in interest in dystopias on the part of students and, particularly with Atwood's novel, the book is compelling enough that students (generally) put up with the complexities of the narrative and so I am able to introduce them to many of the stylistic devices that I want them to pay attention to for the remainder of the year: allusions, syntax, repetition, motif, foils.  I also pair these two novels to give them some perspective and contrast when it comes to dystopia fiction. 

On Such a Full Sea is another dystopia, and I, myself, am a little tired of reading dystopia lit, so I can only imagine how my students would feel about reading a third negative view of the future.  There would be some interesting points of contrast with Lee's novel, as it is certainly not as bleak as the other novels, and in many ways the people and societies of the novel resemble our own more than Huxley or Atwood's novel.  And Lee's writing, though it has far fewer flourishes than Atwood's and it far more spare and less experimental than the other two authors', is certainly powerful in its articulation. There's also that really interesting first-person collective narrator, which would be fun to analyze with students.

But, 400+ pages is just too long. I'd have to spend too much of the precious time I have with students on this one novel and, rewarding as such an experience may be, I want to introduce my students to a variety of texts.  A long novel gets in the way of that goal.

I will, however, add On Such a Full Sea to the suggested reading list for AP students. It is accessible and interesting, offering unique perspectives and raising important questions about how we go through our lives.

Another Ambiguous Ending

After reading The Handmaid's Tale and Song of Solomon with my AP students, I should be used to ambiguous endings. And as I neared the end of On Such a Full Sea, I knew that I was most likely in for another one. Unless some deux ex machina (god from the machine) appeared to tie up all the loose threads of the story, there was no way I would get the closure I wanted (though I did get some).

And what did I want closure about?

1.  What happens to Reg? Would he and Fan be reunited?  

Turns out he has been captured by the drug companies, seeking to discover if he's C-free and has the secret to curing the residents of the charter cities, or perhaps ensuring that they can't be cured, so that they have to keep paying outrageous amounts for their treatments.  Cynical, yes, but the book gives a pretty cynical perspective of capitalism, or industry, of human nature.

 2.  Who is the "we"? and do the residents of B-Mor ever rebel against the power of the charter cities? against the prescribed and contained lives they live? 


While I never found out the specifics of the narration, the "we" tells us that "The act and moment are gone" (390). While there was movement toward an overthrow of the normal order, much like John's attempt to throw out all the soma in Brave New World, it all ends with a whimper.  There is no bang, no overthrow. Instead people return to the "typical habit of [their] lives..." and the rebellions seems "like a dream, irrepresibly vivid and captivating when it was happening but now nearly impossible to remember..." (390).  
 
[Interestingly, this last quote very nearly describes my experience with the novel as a whole. I finished it a week and a half ago, and while I enjoyed the reading of it and found aspects of it very powerful, it is not a novel that has left a lasting mark.]

And why do they submit so easily to the way things used to be?  Because those in power, the directorate, "has reversed some of the more disheartening measures of recent times" (389).  The status quo, the comfort zone, has been returned to the people of B-Mor, and so they fall back into their old ways. Familiarity, tradition, routine: all of these are immensely compforting and make change incredibly difficult, in the novel and in our own lives. 
 

3.   And, of course, I want to know what happens to Fan. 

Fan, who has somehow influenced every person she's met without, for the most part, being impacted in return. Fan, months pregnant now, with no one really the wiser.  Fan, who wanders around in search of Reg, then in search of a long-lost brother she's never met, whom she ends up meeting in the charter city she winds up in, who takes her in and is inspired to re-create his B-Mor life, who promises to help her find Reg.

Of course, things do not turn out as she, or her brother, or the reader, intends.  Once again, Lee throws at us both the horrors and the heroism of human nature. From the beginning of the book to the end, Lee has created complex, flawed characters, characters who repel us with their cruelty and those who draw us in due to their kindness. And so it is in life too. One only has to watch the news to see what horrific things people are capable of, but we know too that is only part of the story.


These thematic ideas speak to me, as they have in other novels, because I am fascinated by this aspect of people, by what makes them do the things they do. I am no different from most, just trying to come to terms with the big questions, the biggest of all being "why."


While literature gives me answers to these questions, I can't come to terms with all of the answers, can't fathom some of them.

 I have, however, come to terms with that group narrator-a Greek chorus of sorts that speaks to us about our strengths, our follies, that forces us to not only follow the characters of the novel but to also look inward, at our own tendencies.

We are One

In most ways, On Such a Full Sea is not very experimental in its structure. While it takes leaps with the actions of its chararacters in this imagined future, the plot moves fairly chronologically, revealing details slowly as we follow the main character, Fan's, journey.

As I mentioned in my first post, the use of the first person plural narrator is the most unusual aspect of the narration. 

The "we" chapters fluctuate between focusing on the events that unfold in B-Mor as a result of Fan's departure and describing the events of Fan's journey. This fluctuation between chapters is a bit jarring, or at least it was for me, at the beginning of the novel, as it's clear that the "we" knows so much more about Fan's journey than we do at the beginning of the novel. Without knowing all of the information about Fan's experiences, the reactions of the residents of B-Mor seem disproportionate to one young woman leaving the confines of the city. 

As the book moves on, however, and we learn more about what Fan has experienced (becoming almost as knowledgeable as the "we" narrator), the shift between the two kinds of chapters stops, and instead the two separate stories become united within chapters, shifting back in forth from one paragraph to the next now.

This shift in the narrative structure makes the book move more quickly, as though it's picking up speed as it goes downhill toward the book's resolution and the culmination of Fan's and the residents of B-Mor's experiences.

I've finally come to terms with the "we" narrator, in fact appreciating how it speaks for the group reaction to Fan's experiences. As Lee writes, "It turns out we are one, if not ever how we expected" (338). The unity of the experience for B-Mor residents is clarified through the use of the "we," who recognizes that "We have lashed ourselves together, we are cheek by jowl but now in an entirely different way, yet we can't help but murmur the question that is surfacing in all our eyes: so who are we now?" (357).

As I mentioned in an earlier post, Fan's departure gives them hope and "none of us can resist such hopeful flashes, which are, in the end, what lights our way through this ever-dimming world" (355).

I found this quote incredibly powerful given the dark events of the past week, and especially fitting given that it is the coming together of so many people in France that has created such a powerful and positive reaction, a "hopeful flash," to counter such violent actions.

This next part is unrelated to the rest of my post, but I wanted to share another line from the section I just read, which reads like poetry to me. It describes Oliver, Fan's long-lost brother, a man who is coming to terms with his wife's affair but trying not to cry:
"It was then that Oliver got very quiet, not shedding tears but shuddering very finely, as if he were earthen inside and loosely caked and just about to shear." (370)

The More Things Change, the More They Stay the Same

One of my favorite assignments is when I ask students to compare our current society with the imagined society in Ray Bradbury's Fahrenheit 451 (and no, I didn't plan a Bradbury focus with this blog post). 

Students research our society to support their ideas about similarities and differences between the two cultures, commenting frequently on the use of technology, the lack of relationships between citizens, etc.

This is nothing new in dystopia fiction, as the intent of dystopia authors is to comment on the society in which they live.  Chang-Rae Lee is no different, and his focus seems particularly accurate when the main character, Fan, escapes from the confines of the Charter house in which she has been held, and is able to stay with a Charter doctor for a while.

As a reminder, the Charter residents are the upper-class of this society. They have money and use this money to buy items to fill up their lives, moving "...in and out of food shops and gadget shops and home furnishings shops, too. Then shops for drinks, and bathwares, and kitchen supplies and equipment...[filled with] pans, ladles, and spatulas..." (306).   This consumerism leads Fan to feel as though "...every movement or act of Charter life, however trivial, required specialty objects and mechanisms for the best chance at an ideal outcome" (306).

Fan's reaction to the Charter community is similar to the reactions readers of F. 451 have upon meeting Mildred and hearing her desire for a fourth television wall, or upon reading the hypnopaedia in Brave New World, which suggests that "spending is better than mending."  Authors in the 20th century are concerned with the increasing focus on the objects that people buy to fill their homes, their lives, their time.  With such full lives, shouldn't their lives feel fulfilling?

We know the answer, even as we fill our shopping carts, whether at Target or Amazon. Of course not. And in this same way the members of the Charter communities, who should be the happiest in this futuristic America, are the least satisfied. They shop, they eat, the exercise, but it is all hollow for them.

Our narrator suggests this flawed approach to life early in the book, pondering whether "...the most fulfilling times [might] be those spent solo at your tasks...when you are able to uncover the smallest surprises and unlikely details of some process or operation... [which is how] you begin to learn what you value most" (6).

Amidst the post-Christmas surplus making a mess of my living room right now, these messages about the superficiality of stuff and the significance of solitude and simplicity are welcome reminders.

What it's all about

A friend recently posted this NPR book review about Ray Bradbury. The premise of the review is the reviewer's issue with the recent spate of dystopias. He argues in favor of Ray Bradbury as different from these other dystopia authors because of his capacity for feeling both hope and despair about the future.

We're going to leave Bradbury for a little bit to discuss the dystopia I'm currently reading.

The basic premise of On Such a Full Sea by Chang-Rae Lee is that the main character, a young girl named Fan, has left the confines of B-Mor, a self-contained settlement which supplies a Charter village (the elite of this society) with their produce and fish. She leaves (and leaving is a rather unusual act, as the "countries" are not viewed as very safe or desirable by the standards of the residents of B-Mor) to find her boyfriend Reg. Reg is apparently C-free, C standing for "the Crash, a degenerative condition in which the major organs begin to fail, one after another..." (75). However, the narrator ("we") states that "Nobody goes C-free--nobody--an axiom that we B-mors and counties people have surely accepted but that Charters probably never will, given the obscuring veil their essentially inexhaustible resources can throw over reality" (117).

It is this anomalous aspect of Reg that seems to have led to his disappearance, the narrator speculating that the Charters have taken him for testing to discover what is so unique about him that he can avoid "C."  It is this hope that he offers an answer that leads to his disappearance and it is Fan's hope that leads to her departure and, in so doing, causes her to become the beacon of hope for those in B-Mor.  Hope seems to be the major theme of the first parts of this book, followed closely by its corollary, despair. 

Which brings me back to the review of Bradbury. In the review, the author writes that Bradbury "...sings about the possibility and the promise of the future because, to him, it was all right there. Because tomorrow was the future and the future was inarguably awesome." This is the same function that Fan serves for the residents of B-Mor. They live in a world with little mobility, little chance of change in their lives, and Fan serves as a sign that the "world can sometimes split open, in just the way we hope. That it and we are, in fact, unbounded. Free" (7).  For people with little power over their own lives, Fan's action propel, for some reason, a rash of strange behaviors, behaviors that allow people to assert their own freedom to choose. The narrative, in fact, shifts between chapters that trace Fan's journey and chapters that narrate the changes that occur in B-Mor after Fan's departure.

This shifting narrative helps to frame, and delay, our understanding of Fan's actions, as we get them filtered through the group narrator's perspective and, in many ways, that narrator is trying to make sense of things as well.  For example, the narrator wonders whether Fan intends any of this reaction to her search for Reg or whether, as the narrator reveals at the end of a chapter, she is just looking for the father of her unborn child.

Such a quest is rather a ridiculous one given that Fan has no clue where Reg is or how to find him. Nor does she really have any resources at her disposal, except for her hope and her persistence:

Very few can step forward again and again in what amounts to veritable leaps into the
void, where there are no ready holds, where little is familiar, where you get constantly
stuck in the thickets of your uncertainties and fears. Fan was different...she was not one to bold herself back. Or to be fettered. ...She was someone who pursued her
project...following with focus and intensity as well as an enduring innocence a goal she
 could not quite yet understand or see but wholly believed. (182)

So far, Fan has survived multiple setbacks, including being hit by a car and being kidnapped by a circus family who intends to feed her traveling companion to their dogs and force Fan to be part of their troupe.  Currently, after narrowly avoiding a sexual assault, Fan has been made the "property" of a strange woman who has "kept" seven other girls locked in a room for years. These are some really strange plot details, which suggest that the future is indeed a bleak place. However, "within [Fan] was the promise that could deliver us, the seed of all our futures, Charters' and B-Mors' and even of the shunned souls out in the counties..." (121).