Puttin' on the Style

... and the "snow means global change is wrong" cartoons are flooding in as they do each year at this time ... but let's talk about other things people should learn in middle school ...

 

Big Nate goes after a fairly fat, slow-moving target, but one with particular resonance for me.

My pay-the-rent gig involves assigning and editing the work of some very bright young writers and I enjoy working with them, but, perhaps paradoxically, one of my main goals is to teach them to stop writing the way I want them to write.

That is, while I want them to write like professional journalists ought to write, I don't want them to do it to please me. I want them to earn my praise without seeking my praise. 

Start here: The review of "Saving Mr. Banks" we ran was very positive and I would have panned the film.

But it was also extraordinarily well-written, and I happen to know that her parents don't touch up her work, though some of the kids do get a little too much "help" at home. Here's her copy as filed; my edits for the print version were primarily for length, not phrasing.

I loved the review, after I realized that she had no background in how Disney operates and so didn't bring all that baggage into the theater. Instead, she came in as an 11-year-old who had read the books, seen both the movie and the Broadway play and even figured out the meaning of the title ahead of time.

And, you know, for not having watched through a filter of suspicion and loathing, she may have a more artistically valid POV than I would have.

In any case, she was assigned to go see the movie and write what she thought of it. She wasn't assigned to go see the move and try to guess what I thought of it.

Therein lies the teachable moment.

I promise you that, if your teacher assigns a book, you are expected to like it. I learned this the hard way in 11th grade when I dismissed "Ethan Frome" as "maudlin Victorian melodrama." 

Not only are you expected to like the assigned piece, but you are expected to get from it the things your teacher wants to you get from it. This, of course, includes knowing the author's intentions (whether explicitly stated in the text or not), but it applies to all details of the piece: It's not enough to find symbolism, you have to find the right symbolism and interpret it as the teacher did.

In practical terms, this means that a movie has to really, really suck to get a bad review from our critics.

It is virtually impossible to get a truly frank appraisal, given the twin factors of my having assigned it and their having gotten to attend the preview screening along with the other media.

Book and game reviews are another matter, and they are apt to be more candid in those. However -- and Big Nate will appreciate this -- the boys are more apt to turn up their noses at something than are the girls. The girls will continue to sort through the steaming pile until they find something to praise.

But we do what we can, and I think the kids who are in the program for more than a year (they have to leave after turning 14) do indeed become more independent on that level.

The more insidious element is that they have learned in school to write in a style which gains them praise. Helping them develop their own voice is a challenge to which I have virtually no key except to praise it when it accidentally leaks out into something they've written.

We've got one of our twice-a-year workshops this coming weekend and I am contemplating imposing on them a firm "No question lede" rule. They have learned through reading the chirpy crap foisted upon them to start stories with "Have you ever ...?" and "Did you know ...?" and I've allowed it from time to time.

And I can't blame them for not having their own voices if I don't stop them from mirroring that condescending, patronizing style.

Unless I do so on the basis that, if they don't learn to write pat, formulaic prose, they will never get their personal essays accepted at NPR, which really needs to go ahead and gather up all those insightful -- nay, evocative -- reflections under the title, "What I Learned At The Writer's Workshop."

Which brings us to a rarity here, a rerun. However, today's classic Calvin and Hobbes touched a recently-exposed nerve:

The connection is that yesterday it occurred to me that watching football is depressing because they keep interrupting with promos for TV shows I think could be used by the police to break reluctant witnesses.

That wouldn't be so bad if they didn't follow each sample of a laughably formulaic cop show or a sit-com apparently based on vulgar insults and jokes about boobs with a tagline boasting that it is America's most highly rated whatever.

I've said it before: Back in the Middle Ages, when the marketplace was full of puppet shows that consisted of fart jokes and puppets hitting each other with wooden spoons, the gaping morons gathered around those stalls were not expected or permitted to have any input in society's governance. Their role was strictly to harvest the crops, build the cathedrals and die in the wars.

The flaw in those days was the lack of social mobility. The peasant who watched for a few minutes and said, "What is this shit?" or even the one who watched and said, "I really shouldn't be laughing at this" was never going to escape from a life of harvesting crops, building cathedrals and dying in wars.

And that was wrong.

But honestly? If he'd been allowed to wash off the mud, put on some untattered clothes and go live in the castle on the hill, the big difference would be that the highly stylized entertainments would be played out for him by live actors rather than puppets.

And about once a month, they would promise to stage concerts of popular, highly entertaining minstrels, but at the end of each song, someone would interrupt for 15 minutes of badgering him to donate to support the wonderful live presentations he likes so much, and which are only made possible by the support of the Goldsmiths' Guild, the Saddlemakers' Guild and contributions from people like him.

Count me among those who would rather stand in the mud saying, "I really shouldn't be laughing at this," than sitting amid plush tapestries thinking that I really should.

 

 

 

Comments

[Dave from Phila]

Regarding your discussion about wanting your young writers to find their own voice - it is the same with teaching young musicians composition. You teach them the "rules" of harmony, counterpoint, etc. and their efforts largely sound like music already composed. Then, you tell them to break the rules in just the right places so they can find their own voice. Fascinating process.

Oh - and don't hold it against me, but I happen to be the Artistic Director of a concert choir. www.TheChoristers.org

Loved your line, "they keep interrupting with promos for TV shows I think could be used by the police to break reluctant witnesses." Gave me a belly laugh!

[Dave from Phila]

Oh - I forgot. While I was reading the draft of the review for "Saving Mr. Banks", I was thinking the author is a high school student. I was stunned to discover she is a 5th grader. Maybe there is hope for the future after all.

[Mike Peterson]

She's the one whose mother I told I was confident they weren't ghosting her work because they wouldn't have the nerve to make her sound like that. Her mother said she just disappears into her room for awhile, then comes out with a story and says "What do you think?" And they say, "um ... that's nice."

I have a couple of those each year. It makes life a lot of fun, but it also makes me feel a real sense of responsibility to teach something valuable.

[Brent]

In University, one professor made a point of having the first book be one he found rather banal to help get things stirred up in the second class and make sure that everyone understood that he was fine with people not liking books on the book list, providing they could still discuss it and debate on the themes.

[gezorkin]

I don't watch the NFL much, but the sporting events I do watch, I do so with remote in hand. I used to have TiVo and now have a cable dvr.

I did watch an NFL game yesterday -- I first let the game record for a while so that I could fast forward through the crap.

Unpatriotic and subversive, I know, but wothehell, as one blogger says.

[Mike Peterson]

As I was thinking what a good guy he was, I thought of my own department, where readings in various minor classes -- the novel, poetry, drama -- were at the discretion of the prof, but the major piece, a twice-weekly two-hour Great Books seminar, had a list set by the department.

I suppose with seniority you could get out of teaching a particular year's seminar, but if you bailed on the seniors because you didn't want to teach William James, you'd also miss out on teaching Gulliver. I don't imagine anyone did (at least not for that reason -- they may have tried to avoid being bathed twice weekly in the wisdom of the sophomores).

And I have to say, I never got a sense that the prof didn't find a lot to work with in a particular book, nor that we were required to like the books in seminar. I think the department managed to pass along a strong sense that bad work doesn't survive long enough to end up on a list of classics.

It was, on the other hand, fairly plain that, if you took the novel course from Dr. Cronin and you did not feel that Ulysses was pretty wonderful, you really really really needed to keep that opinion to yourself.

[Brian Fies]

So you're an editor in the mold of Charles Foster Kane, who completed his opera critic's scathing pan of his (Kane's) wife's operatic debut after the guy got too drunk to finish it himself. Good to know....

I had an English teacher once who said I'd come to the exact opposite-of-the-intended conclusion about an assigned book but defended my opinion so well she had to give me full points. Good teacher....

The "find your own voice" thing is hard, and partly because writing ornamental bullshit can get you very far in life. Especially smart kids. I think I've mentioned before: in some alternate universe I'm an English teacher who strips down my students to plainly stating what they mean using clear declarative sentences, then slowly builds them back up one adjective or subordinate clause at a time. Thus I change the world.

[Lost in A**2]

Mr. Peterson, I don't know why, in all you wrote above, this stuck with me, but there it is: upward mobility in the middle ages was not as hard then as it is now. I just recently read "The Birth of the West," which included the history of the peasant who became pope.

[Mike Peterson]

Interesting, and sent me to Google. I didn't find anything to suggest it was easier to rise then -- "rags to riches" stories being the exceptions I mentioned the other day in suggesting that too many privileged meet only the formerly poor who have triumphed against the odds and are now feted as "proof" that the system is not unfair and that poverty is an issue of character.

I'd like to know more about Sylvester II, because he sounds pretty amazing, but I do note that the only source I found that was specific about his birth said we really don't know anything except that he was lower class. Given the structure of the time, that wouldn't necessarily put him in the mire and he might have been, for instance, the son of a craftsman or even a servant within the house of the local lord. (Here's that link: http://www-history.mcs.st-and.ac.uk/Biographies/Gerbert.html)

Still, had his parents been anyone of any note, it would likely be recorded: Michelangelo's father was a banker-turned-bureaucrat, Leonardo was the illegitimate but (all but legally) acknowledged son of a minor noble. In some eyes, then, Michelangelo would still be considered base-born, but it's not the same thing as being a peasant in the sense of carrying a hayfork in a Bosch painting.

The question in my mind was how he was able to enter the monastery and then rise to the level wherein influential men began to take notice of him and assist his subsequent rise. Does Collins know more?

(I'll certainly grant that pointing out that he lived at the edge of the Dark Ages rather than in Medieval times proper would not exactly advance my thesis, by the way.)

[WVFran]

In terms of book and game reviews, are you saying that both boys and girls tend to be less than candid, but in gender-linked ways? That is, the boys by tending to turn up their noses and the girls by tending to look for the pony? My first thought was that you meant turning up their noses to be a measure of frankness - but perhaps you are saying that that can also be an approval-seeking (or perhaps protective)response? In many of the teen groups I've worked with, saying something publicly positive often takes courage/integrity, too.

[Mike Peterson]

Both boys and girls are often quite positive, but the boys don't hesitate to find fault when it's there and are quite straightforward when they do. If it's bad, it's bad.

The girls seem always to undercut their negative comments with "but on the other hand" good things. Sometimes that's "balance" but often it feels like trying to be polite. As the young folks say, "polishing a turd."

But I'm speaking of really negative reviews -- they're pretty even on doling out either faint praise or moderate misgivings for stuff that falls short without actually crashing.

[Lost in A**2]

So I went back to the library and got the book. In Chapter 16, "Gerbert, the Magician of the Millennium," Paul Collins writes, "Undoubtedly one of the greatest polymaths in European history, Gerbert was born about 945, most likely of free-peasant stock. His birthplace was somewhere near Aurillac, although no one knows the exact site. The monk Richer of Saint-Remi, a former student, says in his Histories that Gerbert was Aquitanus genere, 'born in Aquitaine,' possibly a tiny village named Belliac. There is some evidence that his father's name was Agilbertus" (pp 363-4).

Mr. Collins continues, "Exactly how and when he entered the strictly observant monastery of Saint Gerald in Aurillac are uncertain. He may have taken up an offer to study in the monastery school, or he may have been offered by his parents as a boy oblate" (p 364).

I guess my point was that then as now, now as then, exceptions are exceptional. That is, talent will out.

[Mike Peterson]

Indeed -- my grandfather was plucked off the slag heap by the local school superintendant and the mine manager, who arranged for him to finish school and attend the University of Wisconsin on pretty much of a full ride, back in the early days of the 20th century.

I asked him what his father thought of it all, and he said he thought it was a waste because, when he got out, his father would have no contacts for him to take advantage of. So that immigrant dock worker wasn't so dumb either, but he did live long enough to see his boy as a mine manager.

Wonder if Gerbert's folks got to see the outcome of his vault from obscurity?

[Lost in A**2]

Oh, my. Yes. Shades of "The Bell Curve." ;)