No More Research?

Why don't students know how to cite research anymore? I would estimate that 75% of my students each semester do not know how to put together a bibliography or provide proper in-text citations. I don't just mean that they make small errors, but that they don't even produce anything close!

I get lists of sources at the end in no order whatsoever. I get students who include the entire entry right after the quote and don't put any bibliography at the end at all. Students use Google and Yahoo for research and have no concept of what a scholarly source is.

I expect a certain amount of mistakes, but don't they teach you to alphabetize your list of sources? Don't students at least know to include the author, title, publisher, and date? I know other professors (in history, psych, etc) don't teach research. That's my job as the composition instructor. But freshman comp is about strengthening skills of grammar, essay structure, and thesis statements. Most composition courses include research, but don't focus on it wholly. And why not? I feel like freshman comp should spend about half the semester on research, citations, bibliographies, etc. How else will the students be prepared when other professors expect they know how to do this?

What really blows my mind is that my students who seems to be struggling are not in freshman comp - they're all in the second level of English composition! So I wonder not only what high schools are teaching these kids, but what did their freshman comp professors teach them? And maybe part of the problem is the curriculum, not the teachers or professors themselves.

This is a very scatterbrained dumping of frustration. I just had to pause in my afternoon of essay grading to express a little confusion and frustration over the mistakes I seem to correcting on paper after paper after paper...

Publication!

http://www.yellowmedicinereview.com/id13.html

Sadly, my actual poem is not printed here. But you can see my name and order the issue! And I posted the poem here, along with my other fall publication from The Kelsey Review.

http://devotesherlife.com/Poems.html

purpose

i've been meaning to post this for awhile now... but life (and laziness) gets the best of me. 

this semester i've been teaching 2 sections of English 100 and one section of English 101. it makes me realize how much i enjoy 101. not that my 100 kids are bad, it's just a different level of writing. it's a real challenge to get them connect with the material and keep their attention through class. (and now that the semester is over and i'm reading their final exam essays, i'm seeing lots of small sentence structure issues we should have spent more time on. why didn't i notice this before??) but my 101 class this semester was overall more advanced than sections i've taught in the past. there were a few kids that lagged behind, but no one was a really awful writer. and they all grew. the students who struggled on the first essay stepped up leaps and bounds for the rest of the class.

one of the reasons i like teaching 101 is because i feel it's the most important class any college student will ever take. learning to present yourself on paper in a clear, concise manner will lead to better grades in other classes, and more importantly, can help you get a job or succeed at your job later in life. if you can't write an essay, how can you possibly survive college? get into grad school? get your resume noticed? 

there was one student in particular whose first essay was... scatterbrained. i could tell she had alot of passionate ideas about the world, but that was just it - all passion. no structure. no clarity. her paragraphs were long and unfocused. her syntax was trying too hard to sound smart. her topics were much too broad for the length of the assignment. heck, her essay was a few pages longer than i asked for!

so i told her to focus. to scale back. to try to explain one point as in depth as possible instead of skimming the surface on twenty points. her second essay was worlds better. and when we started working on the third (research) i looked over her ideas and warned her against that old problem of too much information to present a clear, focused essay. when we met for a one-on-one meeting to discuss her draft, she listened thoughtfully and wanted to make sure she was staying on focus. and as she got up to leave she thanked me and told me i was a good teacher. (keep in mind, this is a student who sits in the back corner, is easily annoyed by chatty students in class, and who i might have thought was bored). she had just gotten back an essay from another class and received an A. she told me she applied what i'd been teaching her about focus to her other subjects.

this last week of class, she told me she'd received another A on an essay in yet a different subject.

this is what teaching English is all about.

a literary president

"When I was watching Obama's acceptance speech (Tuesday night), I was convinced that he had written it himself, and therefore that he was saying things that he actually believed and had considered," says Jane Smiley, author of the Pulitzer Prize-winning "A Thousand Acres" and other fiction. "I find that more convincing in a politician than the usual thing of speaking the words of a raft of hack speechwriters. If he were to lie to us, he would really be betraying his deepest self."

Read the full article of writers on Barack Obama:

http://news.yahoo.com/s/ap/20081106/ap_en_ot/writers_and_obama

freelance?

anyone have any advice about freelance writing/editing? i know there are some chicago publications (the reader, new city, red eye, etc) that accept articles, but i never know where to start on things like that. i'd rather have some sort of guideline or assignment. or better yet, editing and proofreading. i try looking on craigslist and other things like that, but so far nothing i've responded to has panned out. 

advice? anyone successful with this?

back to school...

once again, i've become a writer who doesn't write. life gets busy and filled with work, and work, and tv, and internet, and books, and friends, and laundry, and dishes, and cleaning, and errands, and... no writing. tomorrow i go back to teaching - three classes this semester. i don't feel at all mentally prepared for this, but i'm just trusting that i'll walk into my first class of the day and feel renewed again. that's how i felt last fall, after a whole summer off i went back to teaching and felt my heart fill up a little more. i like teaching. i think i'm getting good at it. i hope it'll be a good semester.

and with it, i hope i can still somehow find time to read and write in the midst of it. i keep saying i look forward to some day down the road when i have my own office and a full time position and i can write poems and read books for fun and mentor students and focus on all of that and built my life on it. but why does that need to wait? i don't want my other part time work or my need to make money to pay the bills to get in the way of the things i believe in, the things i want to devote my life to. isn't that why i decided to get an mfa? why i decided to start adjunct teaching in the first place? to fill some sort of crazy dream that i can have a career i love and not be a "sell out" just pushing buttons all day trying to make millions?

hopefully more regular blogs can help me keep that writing going. i know i've said that before, but i really am going to try this time. honest.

a writer who doesn't write

inspired by bethany, who admitted to rereading old blog posts... i just went back and skimmed through some fall 2004 entries, when i first started this thing. i used to post a lot! and pretty reflective things, too. i'd like to get back in that habit. i find i don't write much anymore, and it makes me sad. i'm supposed to be a writer.

i've always known this about myself: i'm not very self-motivated. despite all my best efforts to get up in the morning and run/write/go to church/go to the farmers market/read my bible/sit on the porch with breakfast... i usually end up lying in bed, watching tv, playing on the internet, etc. so when i'm not in a writing class, i find it difficult to write.

i have a graduate degree in poetry. i have a 96 page book, my thesis, full of poetry that i wrote mainly in grad school (a few older pieces that i revised). since finishing grad school, i have written 5 poems. yes, 5 poems in the last.... 15 months. that's pathetic. what kind of poet am i?

a lazy one. that's what. and i don't like it much. but it's hard when i'm teaching 2 classes and working 30 hours a week at the cafe. when i'm not AT work, i'm preparing for class, grading papers, or exhausted.

and i have a problem with sitting around too much. if i don't have plans with people, i feel like all i can do is sit around the apartment. this is not true.

summer of 2005 i studied in prague for a month. i went by myself. and until i made friends during weeks two/three, i spent a lot of time alone. i wandered the city. i sat and wrote or read. i went to museums and churches. i explored. why don't i do that now? just because i live in chicago doesn't mean i can't get out and walk around and enjoy it. chicago is huge. there are loads of neighborhoods i haven't yet visited. and there's more to do than just eat out and go to bars. i've been to all the major musuems, but what about the smaller ones? the modern arts museum. chicago history museum. etc. and there are tons of beautiful churches i haven't been in. and neighborhoods i haven't walked through. i need to just get off at a random el stop with my digital camera, notebook, and pen... and explore. i need to sit in coffee shops... and write. whether it's on here, or in a notebook, or typing, or whatever.

the cafe i work at is actually part of a new cultural center. i teach tap there also. and today the director talked to me about a new project. she wants to start a Boocoo publication. a monthly newspaper. and she's gathering the small group of writers and individuals at Boocoo who might be interested in helping edit/write/etc. i'm excited for this possibility. for now, it will all be on a volunteer basis. so this won't be earning me extra money or anything. but being involved will look good on a resume. AND it will be fun, and fulfilling, and will hopefully get me writing again in some capacity.

i'm so busy the first half of my week, and the second half i crash. and in the midst of the crash i start to feel lonely and cold and boring. i think what i'm missing is more time with friends. often i attribute my loneliness to the lack of a man in my life, which i think is part of it, but i think more time with friends in general would fill the majority of that void. and i think it's more than the lack of friend time. i think it's the lack of art time. writing. poetry. reading. photography. etc. i think my "me" time has been lazily spent. my change in location and jobs only helps so much. i think i need to bring myself the rest of the way in my quest for a fulfilling 25th year of life.

slowly but surely. i'm figuring it all out. i'm getting there.

Poetry Speaks Day-By-Day Calendar

"The reinvention, the making of a poetry for our time, is the only thing that makes poetry matter. And that means, literally, making poetry MATTER, that is making poetry that intensifies the matter or materiality of poetry--acoustic, visual, syntactic, semantic. Poetry is very much alive when it finds ways of doing things in a media-saturated environment that only poetry can do, but very much dead when it just retreads the same old same old."

-Charles Bernstein-

waking life