Blog 1: Reader's Autobiography

I'm using this blog to post about my own reading but also to blog alongside my students in ENGL 104 and WR 121. For this reason, I'm going to complete the first blog post for ENGL 104.

1. My name is Nancy Knowles. I prefer to be called Nancy, but Professor Knowles or Dr. Knowles work fine. I got a BA in East Asian Studies from UCLA, so I didn't major in English as an undergraduate, but by the time I graduated, I knew I wanted to be an English major. I later went back to school for graduate study in English. My main hobby is reading, so I'm getting paid for my hobby! :) I also like to play with my daughter and walk my dogs.

2. I don't remember learning to read. My parents must have read to me, but I don't remember that either. I remember reading to my younger sister from a fairy tale book with a red binding. I also remember reading under the covers with a flashlight after I was supposed to be asleep. I loved escaping into the adventure in the book! I had long "thinks" where I would picture myself in the action of the stories.

In terms of school reading, I remember reading "Dick and Jane" books in first grade. I read a book called Savage Sam in fourth grade that was the sequel to Old Yeller. I loved the smell of that book! By eighth grade, I had read all the books the eighth grade class would be reading that year, except Moby Dick. So, I read Moby Dick (I enjoyed all the whaling details, including the time a sailor fell into a whale that was being cut up--gross!), and then my teacher told me to read whatever I wanted and to write up a worksheet he could use to assign that book to other students. That was totally my style!

My reading preference has always been fantasy. My current favorite fantasy writer is Martha Wells. I also assign myself classics to read and try to keep up with my students' reading and my dad's reading. I recently read Blood Meridian by Cormac McCarthy. That was a hard book to get through because it is very bleak and violent! However, my dad read it, one of my students recommended it, so I did it. Since then, one of my other students with whom I talk about books has read it, resulting in some interesting conversations. I plan to write a separate post on it, so I won't say any more.

3. I still need to do my interviews... I'm working with some teachers today and will try to pin them down about their reading.

Warnock's Teaching Writing Online

Scott Warnock’s Teaching Writing Online is an important handbook for college teachers of writing to consult when setting up an online writing course for the first time.

The philosophical orientation of the book is process writing. It assumes that writing is a process involving recursive steps that a course would employ, and organization follows that logical order: from developing your online persona, to lessons and syllabi, to structuring the course and managing course dialogue, and then to writing response, collaboration, and assessment. In each section, Warnock provides tips, examples, and questions for consideration.

The aspect of this book that I am using today as I get my summer online courses up and running is the section “A Word on Redundancy.” Redundancy helps students remember what to do when. This probably true in any classroom situation. Warnock provides a list of places he provides deadline information:

• Syllabus
• Assignment
• Weekly plan
• Response to the rough draft
• Course announcements
• Group email a few days before the deadline (56-57)

Deadlines aren’t the only aspect of the course requiring redundancy. I used to have weekly folders and put everything for the week in them. The problem was that sometimes we needed those things in other weeks, and then even I couldn’t find them! Now, I have a redundant structure where materials are grouped by purpose (assignments, lectures, readings, etc.), and they also exist, or I create a link to them, in the weekly folders.

Another aspect of the book that parallels my recent development as a teacher is the section “How Do We Know They Have Read?” I’ve been assuming that if we do enough dialogue (informal writing) and formal writing about reading, I will know whether students have read, and they will know that reading is important to success in the course. I am particularly careful to request that students refer to or quote specific passages on specific pages. This helps in encouraging specificity in analysis. It also indicates that they’ve read enough to find the quote. In research assignments, I’m headed toward requiring more summary and synthesis before drafting to ensure that students have read their source materials and can discuss them as unique wholes rather than cherry-picking quotations.

However, sometimes, by the time we’re talking and writing about our reading, it’s too late for those who haven’t read to catch up. So, after teaching for almost 20 years, I think I’m going to resort to quizzing, not in an antagonistic way, but in a way that gets students into the text and reminds them about important aspects of it. And, quizzing in an online environment is easy because I can set the whole business up to score and post the scores in the grade book. Here are Warnock’s quizzing recommendations:

• Same day of the week
• Easy questions
• Five-minute time limit
• Create question sets and randomize which are given to each student (to deter cheating; 64-65)

As an experienced online instructor of writing, I benefited by checking my own practice against Warnock’s step-by-step recommendations, but as I’ve started to incorporate more multimedia into my teaching (albeit not very capably yet), I feel as if I could rewrite the book to add those elements to his discussion. Of course, the book was in progress before many of the current multimedia tools existed, so I’m sure my feeling is out of line, or maybe because the field is changing so quickly, the book went out of date quickly and just needs a second edition. I’d also like to see a more detailed chapter on online collaboration and an anthology of specific assignments and documents associated with the various chapters. So, I think this book is good for the first-time instructor of writing online who just needs the big picture and general philosophy. 

Works Cited

Warnock, Scott. Teaching Writing Online: How and Why. Urbana, IL: NCTE, 2009. Print.

Asher's "Why Reading Is Always Social"

When I think of reading, I think of me, my book, a comfortable place, and time to myself. I might be reading in the quiet, sleepy time before bed. I might have taken a book to my daughter's swimming lesson or aikido class. I might be waiting in a doctor's office. Wherever I read, I often think about reading as time for myself where the world slows down, and I can relax in my own imagination. As a relatively introverted person, this time to myself is incredibly rejuvenating.

Yet, as Levi Asher argues in "Why Reading is Always Social," it totally is! Asher writes, "To read another person's words is to conduct a meeting of minds." This is absolutely true. Reading takes me to another place and time where I can see through another person's eyes. If the reading is fiction, I experience the perspective not only of the writer but also of the characters. And, if the narrative includes allusions to prior narratives, I've got windows onto those writers and characters, too.

Asher goes on to indicate that reading is social because readers like to talk about their reading with others. I get to do this in my classrooms with students, which is kind of inauthentic, as they are forced to talk to me. My family members are all great readers, so we often talk about books. I also have colleagues with whom I like to discuss reading. As Asher concludes, literature is about reading together.

But, sometimes even in this crowd of readers, I still feel lonely. I want to talk with people who like to read and who have just read exactly what I have read. Although I work with English majors, few of them read what I read for fun, and even fewer stop by to talk about their reading and suggest new books. While many people around me have heard the same news or watched the same movies, few have read the same books. So, maybe that's why I started this blog, so at least I can talk to myself! :)

I also seem to need to keep a record of my reading, as I read a lot of books and sometimes want to go back and refresh my memory about them. I even have a stack of books near my desk about which I want to write but have not yet gotten to. I don't want to put them away until I can record my thoughts. So many books, so little time!

Thanks, Ray Bradbury!

McCarthy Badass

I have yet to write a post on McCarthy, but I will write about Blood Meridian soon, as one can't read it and not write about it. I just want to keep track of the link to "10 Reasons Why Cormac McCarthy Is a Badass" by David McMillan: http://thoughtcatalog.com/2012/10-reasons-why-cormac-mccarthy-is-a-badass/

A Silence of Mockingbirds

My colleague Karen Spears Zacharias set out to write the story of Karly Sheehan as a journalist, using research and interviews to communicate the facts, but because Karly’s mother Sarah had been part of the Zacharias family for a year, the story Zacharias needed to tell became more personal, resulting in A Silence of Mockingbirds: The Memoir of a Murder.

In 2005 in Corvallis, OR, Karly Sheehan, age three, died as a result of injuries caused by abuse. Initially, the prosecution focused on Karly’s father David Sheehan, but eventually, Shawn Wesley Field, Sarah’s boyfriend, was convicted based on evidence that should have triggered law enforcement involvement in the case much earlier. The failure of law enforcement in this case resulted in Karly’s Law, which requires medical evaluation and record-keeping when children present suspicious injuries.

A Silence of Mockingbirds tells the poignant story of Karly’s brief life and its aftermath without sensationalizing it, instead carefully juxtaposing elements of the story to encourage readers to consider how the community failed Karly, perhaps even before she was born. The first two pages of the memoir introduce Shawn Field as “Inmate 16002306,” relate David Sheehan’s background as a Hewlett-Packard engineer from Ireland, and then identify David as Karly’s father and Shawn as Karly’s murderer. There is no mystery: from the beginning we know Karly is dead. The task remaining to readers is to understand the events that led to her death.

As indicated in Zacharias’s research, the evidence of abuse was overwhelming, beginning nine months before Karly’s death, when Sarah began dating Shawn. Karly lost weight and hair, wanted to sleep all the time, expressed a fear of being hit, and cried for her daddy. Despite some investigation, officials determined that Karly’s injuries were self-inflicted, based on anxiety associated with her parents’ divorce and her mother’s new relationship (125). At the trial, the most damning items of evidence were photographs Shawn took of Karly’s injuries, photographs that might have been used in framing David, except that Karly died from those injuries before anyone besides Shawn had contact with her (262). Shawn clearly committed the crime and was convicted of it.

Yet, Zacharias’s background with Sarah adds a terrifying dimension: the role of Sarah Sheehan in her own child’s murder. Zacharias traces this role back to Sarah’s youth. Sarah was intelligent and pretty but also erratic and selfish, making problematic decisions based on attraction to fancy possessions (63). A similar self-centeredness occurs in the depiction of Sarah two years after Karly’s death when her discussion of her charitable organization Karly’s Angels focused more on celebrity and partying than on protecting children (64-65). Zacharias uses her knowledge of Sarah’s character to make Sarah’s complicity with her child’s death explicit: “Sarah, alone, could have offered her daughter salvation. Instead, she betrayed her” (80-81). Zacharias extends this complicity to herself for not doing more to combat the potential for Sarah to neglect Karly after she divorced David (20) and to the community for not taking action based on signs of child abuse (81).

A Silence of Mockingbirds ultimately extends complicity to the justice system that failed to charge Sarah as an accomplice in her daughter’s death. As early as two months into her relationship with Shawn, Sarah began fabricating a journal intended to implicate David (94, 129). She continued this line of argument in testimony collected following Karly’s death (187). However, the district attorney determined that there was no community benefit to charging Sarah with neglect and that her grief had punished her enough. Once Sarah testified for the grand jury to indict Shawn, she could no longer legally be charged with an associated crime (214-15). Zacharias situates this failure within a tradition of courts viewing mothers as incapable of cruelty toward their children (215). The narrative in Silence of Mockingbirds indicates that, at least in this instance, the mother stereotype was overcome by the desirable-woman stereotype as Sarah intentionally traded Karly’s safety for her own relationship with Shawn.

Zacharias’s juxtaposition of these strands of Karly’s story suggests a community need to hold Sarah accountable for the selfish behavior that made Shawn’s crime possible. Accountability would deliver the justice we expect of our court system. It would also protect Karly’s loved ones from further trauma caused by Sarah’s insensitive behavior in using Karly’s death as an opportunity for self-marketing. However, Zacharias’s selection of memoir over journalistic non-fiction implies an additional need, the desire of a parent, even a parent by choice rather than blood or law, to assist in a child’s moral development, to help the child see the results of her actions in order to become a healthy, responsible adult capable of contributing to the community. In this most quixotic desire, the mourning of a surrogate parent for a child’s lost potential, A Silence of Mockingbirds is doubly tragic. 

Image source: A Silence of Mockingbirds Cover Image. amazon.com. Web. 28 May 2012. http://www.amazon.com/s/ref=nb_sb_noss?url=search-alias%3Daps&field-keywords=Silence+of+Mockingbirds

Work Cited: Zacharias, Karen Spears. A Silence of Mockingbirds: The Memoir of a Murder. San Francisco: MacAdam/Cage, 2012. Print.

Karen Spears Zacharias's website: http://karenzach.com/

Passage

The point of no return occurs in reading when I get to the point where I can’t put the book down. I don’t want to do anything else; I just want to read, read, read until I find out what happens. After that point, all reading is gobbling. I don’t read thoughtfully or carefully. I just read as fast as I can.

In reading Connie Willis’s Passage, I reached the point of no return very early, which made the fact the book is 780 pages slightly problematic. I wanted to gobble the rest, but the book was so long, I often felt frustrated with the pace. I do think potentially some of the muddling around in the first part might have been reduced, but the muddling also made the action realistic. (Spoiler alert: this review discusses the mysteries unraveled over the course of the novel.)

Passage tells the story of researchers seeking a scientific explanation for near-death experiences (NDEs). Dr. Joanna Lander attempts to collect and compare details from memories of individuals who have almost died about their experiences. She is opposed by Mr. Mandrake, a popular author of books about the near-death experience that offer comfort in a particular pattern of steps that confirm a spiritual afterlife. If Joanna reaches the subject after Mr. Mandrake, the subject is ruined for scientific study because Mr. Mandrake has injected his own steps into the subjects’ narratives, and the subjects no longer accurately remember their own experiences.

Joanna joins forces with Dr. Richard Wright, who is attempting to map brain chemicals associated with NDEs. He has discovered a drug that allows subjects’ brains to mimic NDEs, so he puts subjects under the influence of this drug and photographs their brain activity. As the subjects available for his study rapidly decrease, Joanna herself becomes a subject.

Because her NDEs occur onboard the Titanic, Joanna begins to imagine that maybe everyone’s occurs in that setting. Her probing of her own experience sends her back to her high-school English teacher, a one-time Titanic enthusiast who has Alzheimer’s, and puts her in contact with “Coma Carl,” who eventually emerges from his coma to provide key information about the NDE--his NDEs take place in a cowboys-and-Indians setting.  Joanna also makes friends with young Maisie who needs a heart transplant and is routinely admitted to the hospital in the midst of an NDE. Just as Joanna reaches understanding about NDEs--that they are SOS messages the brain sends to the body seeking assistance--she herself is killed in an emergency room accident.

The remainder of the novel finds Joanna permanently in her Titanic reality with her friends in the living world scrambling to understand her last words (“Tell Richard it’s SOS” [588]) in order to find a scientific response to NDEs that will save Maisie’s life. Ultimately, Maisie is saved through Richard’s ability to use Joanna’s discovery for medical purposes, and the book ends with the image of Joanna in a lifeboat being picked up by another ship that was part of a tall tale told by one of her research subjects. While we know Joanna is really and truly dead, it’s comforting that after the terror of the big ship sinking and the sensation of drowning associated with the brain’s SOS role, the brain ultimately generates images of solace.

Passage is an important story about the last passage between life and death or whatever comes next. The word “passage” also plays in interesting ways against the idea of passage on a ship and the hallway passage that often figures in near-death narratives. The detail of the scientific world in which the characters live is depicted effectively, and the connection between NDEs and literature as another kind of message is satisfying to me as a scholar of literature.

A key component to Joanna’s discovery is based not only on her English teacher’s passion for the Titanic but also on his passion for literature. She remembers him standing in front of her class smacking a book on his desk and repeating “’Literature is a message!’” (543) As she realizes what the brain is doing physically as death approaches--attempting to send messages to other parts of the body to avert death--Joanna connects this key sentence with the images of telegraph distress messages from the Titanic with the need communicate through the Pony Express and smoke signals in Coma Carl’s NDE.

Stories are vitally important. They are the way our brain shapes reality, and they are the way we communicate that reality to ourselves and others. Perhaps the poignancy is that we don’t live to tell our stories forever. We have only our brief moment on Earth, and then our stories must be carried forward by others. And our stories, like the messages occurring in NDEs, are about survival. They alert others that death is approaching so that they can fight it and live to appreciate another day. 

Image Source: Passage Cover. amazon.com. Web 27 May 2012. http://www.amazon.com/s/ref=nb_sb_noss?url=search-alias%3Daps&field-keywords=Connie+Willis+Passage

Work Cited: Willis, Connie. Passage. New York: Bantam, 2001. Print.