On my way to class

to teach people how to write

with style

to unlearn bad habits

where I try to make everything

a story

& then I see the blood

smudged all over one hand

from where I’ve unconsciously

picked at my thumb

I didn’t feel anything

but I can’t teach

visibly bloody

so I lick the wound like an animal

test to see if it wells again

walk into class

knowing

the blood under my fingernail

will darken all morning.

One of the things I’ve learned this quarter is fewer students in the middle classes are attending the University of California now. Rich students can afford to pay the new high tuition. Working class students are eligible for need-based scholarships. Of course, many middle-class parents like me couldn’t afford UC tuition.

Our Assembly Speaker is proposing a specific scholarship for middle class students, in part to make up for the cuts to our CalGrant program, which is increasingly unable to close the gap (especially when they try to cut CalGrant every year).

Protecting the middle class is important, since it’s endangered. (To see what will eventually happen to it, click here: http://www.theonion.com/articles/national-museum-of-the-middle-class-opens-in-schau,1244/).

However, I think it’s time to consider a more radical solution, one that many first world countries (and a few 2nd and 3rd world countries) have found: free higher education.

We live in a world where a Bachelor’s grants you the same opportunities a high school diploma offered half a century ago. It’s a basic requirement for a decent job. We tell our children that they must get a BA if they want to survive. If they want to succeed, they have to do even more.

Shouldn’t that education be available in the same way that high school has always been? I’m not saying that we educate everyone–schools can still have admission standards (in fact, we could raise them, taking only the actual brightest). There can still be tiers (universities, community colleges, vocational schools), but students will not start their adult lives in debt (and then be blamed by politicians for not being able to do better financially than parents and grandparents who didn’t have the same financial handicap). Those awful for-profit diploma mills will be put out of business–since we are investigating them for fraud, it’s unlikely we would use tax dollars to have students matriculate there.

I know that there would have to be trade-offs. Perhaps we would have to require a year of service from our students. We would certainly have to cut the budget in other places. We would still have a country where more well-off people were in college (due to the current inequality in school funding), but we can’t fix everything with one solution.

If we really believe that our citizens need to be educated, for themselves, for our economy, for our national competitive edge, then we need to do something. Sometimes I doubt we really believe this, though. We sure don’t behave as if we do.

I’m in the midst of writing a response to a student essay on plagiarism. In the essay, the student claims that few people actually steal, that students are “confused” by the accessibility of the internet (thinking that the internet belongs to them), that music sampling is certainly not wrong, etc. The students briefly mentions Malcolm Gladwell’s story about seeing a line he wrote used in play–at first he was angry, then flattered.

The student’s essay lacks focus, etc, but my comments (reprinted below) deal with the lack of counter-argument:

Many counter-arguments to this piece immediately come to mind. For example, as a teacher, I have seen many, many students “wrongfully claim credit and ownership for a project” (1). Students have bought papers online. They have copied off of each other’s papers. They have even claimed that they “had no choice” but to do so because they believe all students cheat, which is an insult to all of us who got through college without cheating. (Even if the cheating students were right about everyone cheating, which they aren’t, they would still have a choice). 

I have been the victim of plagiarism in another way. A paper I had published online was found posted on a cheat site. The site claimed that the author (me!) had given permission for this paper to be used by this site and by students. I had done no such thing. I threatened to sue the site if they did not remove my essay immediately. In a less dramatic example, a man copied an article I published for Mental Floss on his blog. He did not reference my name, the name of the original magazine, or anything else—except his own name. To anyone who didn’t know better, it would look like he wrote my piece.

The cheat site and the blogger were not “inspired” by my research, by my time, by my work. They were thieves. However vague some definitions of plagiarism are, some cases like these are unquestionabl

In terms of the more questionable cases, I don’t understand why these people with questionable cases can’t do what we do in academia. When I want to use another person’s words, I cite that person. If someone wants to use Malcolm Gladwell’s words, why can’t there be a line in the author’s notes about it? If someone wants to sample a piece of someone else’s music, why can’t that person mention it in the liner notes on the CD?

Weird Al Yankovic, for example, always tells you what artist’s song he’s parodying. He also gets permission from artists before using their work. Notably, he doesn’t have to do this, as his creations are protected under the copyright exception made for parodies. While one artist (Coolio) claims Yankovic didn’t ask permission (I don’t believe Coolio’s side of the story here), Yankovic still credited him fully.

The student’s point seems to be that “plagiarism” is too vague a term to pursue action against plagiarizers. In some cases, this is simply not true. In others, reasonable, easy steps can be taken to acknowledge how someone else has inspired us. If s/he has inspired us, doesn’t s/he deserve a respectful acknowledgement of that fact?

This week, I had the honor of bringing Jen Cross to campus as part of the University Writing Program’s Conversations with Writers series. Jen is a writer and workshop leader who specializes in erotic writing, exploring its tranformative and healing effects. I encouraged my students to attend, promising them an amazing time. Luckily, Jen was able to keep my promise.

I was struck immediately by Jen’s energy. She is welcoming and warm and funny. All of this was on display during her talk.

She warned the audience that they would be writing a little bit–she is a writing workshop leader, after all. Thus, after about 35 minutes of talking, she had us freewrite for five minutes, with the prompt to describe “a first time.”

I was pleased with the product of my efforts, and thus found myself tempted to read when she asked for volunteers. Of course, I had many students in the room, and it struck me that they probably don’t want to think of me as capable of writing like that. On the other hand, them having to read in front of me would likely have been absolutely mortifying. Thus, I put myself out there.

My students do not seem to have been harmed. In fact, they have reported loving Jen’s talk. One student and I talked about how — for lack of a better word — awake we were when it was over. That student also said that Jen’s talk was the most fun she’d had for months.

For those wanting to see it, it’s streaming now on our page: http://writing.ucdavis.edu/speakerseries

I read at minute 40.

Let it wake you up.

The other day, I was thinking about the boy’s many hobbies. Like many young people, he enjoys the glories of the internet, video games, and other forms of media. Unlike many young people, he is widely read. However, he also writes sketch comedy, builds musical instruments, and works on robots.

Then I started thinking about my own hobbies and the hobbies of my friends, noting that although we all read, we have a wide-range of things we create. We are writers, chefs, bakers, knitters, visual artists, musicians, etc. Part of the ties of friendship is the admiration we have for each other’s talents.

Many of my students have great hobbies as well. When they write about the things they create, the things they’re passionate about, their writing comes alive. I find myself caring about subjects I’ve never had an interest in and activities I’ve never actually wanted to do.

Sadly, many of my students don’t seem to make anything. Some students actually say they have no interests when I poll them. This never bodes well for their writing or their conversation. A sizable number report being interested in listening to music or watching sports, but their engagement is completely passive.

It occurs to me that my informal observations of my students has illustrated the need for a person to be a creator to be interesting. The availability of an immense amount of media we can passively take in can hinder our own creative impulses. How much easier, after a long day, to turn on the tv or to fire up youtube than to summon the energy for creation.

However, those of us with creative passions know that we need to create. We might not indulge every day, but if we go too long without our creative outlet–without writing, without trying out a new recipe, etc–we don’t feel right. Creation is hard & usually messy, but we can’t find peace, can’t find ourselves, without it.

I’m not saying that passive enjoyments are worthless. I happen to watch an unhealthy amount of tv, after all. But how much more  rewarding it has become when I end up giving a paper on Buffy (as I will next month) after all those hours? Or when I wrote that book on The Simpsons and I got to meet so many wonderful people who work there?

I’m so thankful that the boy has so many things he enjoys. I wish I could get more of my students to have creativity in their lives. I have the feeling they’d be better students & better fellow citizens of this wonderous world. I didn’t consciously set out to instill the creative spirit in the boy, so I’m not sure exactly how to plant that seed in passive, boring adults. Is it too late for them?

As many of you know, I don’t have a twitter page, but Denise, social goddess that she is, made one for our book, The Simpsons in the Classroom–you can follow us under Simpsonology. It is through this apparently fabulous entity that we got in contact with some of the heavy hitters at THE SIMPSONS: David Silverman, animator & director; Josh Weinstein, producer & show runner & writer; and Chris Ledesma, music editor. The latter invited us to see a recording of the music for the show if we were ever in LA. This year’s MLA happened to be in LA, so down we went last weekend.

Walking on to the Fox lot, we were nervous. As Denise had explained to our friend Kathy, our excitement was extraordinary because the circumstances were. How many people have loved one thing and been obsessed with one thing, since 1987? How many people then teach it and write about it? How do you expect people to react when they get to meet their obsession after over twenty years? (I think we held ourselves together very well, all things considered.)

Getting our passes from the guard seemed surreal; I think we were both expecting to be turned away, like it was all some sort of mistake, but the passes were given and we set off down a fake street that they use on BONES and HOW I MET YOUR MOTHER toward the FUTURAMA trailer to meet up with Josh. Josh used to work on THE SIMPSONS, but now is on FUTURAMA, which Comedy Central will hopefully renew (it’s been really good lately–check it out!). The two nice people in reception were expecting us, and Josh was summoned.

We started with a tour of the Futurama building–his office, the revision room, etc. Josh offered us some Matt Groening doodles that were on post-its in the revision room. Apparently, Groening can’t sit down without doodling something and we now have our own proof of that.

Then Josh took us on a brief tour of relevant parts of the lot. The recording stages in one building are named after three famous Hollywood women–Jane Russell, Marilyn Monroe, and Marge Simpson. We couldn’t access Marge’s studio because they were doing some dubbing for BONES. “You mean Angel from BUFFY might be in there?” quipped Denise.

The old SIMPSONS‘s building itself looked like a motel–it was small and two stories and all of the rooms were accessible by the outside. When you look straight on to it, you see a fountain with koi (and netting to unsuccessfully keep feral cats out) and bathrooms. Groening’s office is behind a nondescript door to the right of the bathroom doors.

Along the way, we met Ian Maxtone-Graham (who wrote, among other things, “24 Minutes” and who is very tall), Rob LaZebnik (“Homer vs. Dignity”), and Michael Nobori (“To Surveil with Love”). Due to Denise’s description of my love for Weird Al Yankovic, Mr. Nobori has probably banned me from the lot from now on.

Josh then took us for coffee at Moe’s Bar on the lot. We talked about working with his old writing partner, his brief stint on SIT DOWN, SHUT UP, Groening, and the behind the scenes stories of some episodes.

By this time, it was 11; we’d been there for an hour. Josh had to hand us over to Chris, which is where I’ll continue with the next post.

(Relevant pictures are being uploaded to Facebook; I can’t get them to post here . . .)

Diane Ravitch, former assistant secretary of education under George W. Bush, has come out with a new book explaining that the Bush education agenda was flawed.

Of course, this is one in a long line of such books. Cheney seems to be the only one who thinks everything went just fine.

I read an excerpt the book in a recent American Educator. I was shocked (shocked!) to discover that apparently, making tests the only test for whether education is working is a bad idea. It leads to people teaching only to the test, to cheating, and to students knowing how to fill in bubbles while their little minds are unfilled. It leads to an incomplete understanding of whether a teacher is successful or not.

And under George Bush’s plan, it leads to rich schools getting richer and poor schools getting poorer, as schools are punished for low scores. It leads to putting all of the blame on our low-paid and ill-respected educators when the scores don’t turn out right. It leads to a perpetuation of class stereotypes–rich people are just better and smarter and poor people deserve to be poor because they’re lazy and stupid–if they all take one test, surely we can see that (never mind that they are starting off on a teeter-totter rather than a level playing field due to the money coming from property taxes rather than fair allocation).

Wow. Who would have thought that No Child Left Behind would have left children behind? Well, any of us who opposed it from the beginning. Ravitch basically says that everyone in the administration was well meaning, that these were honest mistakes. I will buy that they were well meaning. And some of these mistakes might have been innocent. I mean, all of the consequences were totally forseeable, but not everyone is smart enough to actually think things through. I would guess that some people were fine with letting certain children fall behind–because it defended the class and power status quo, because it might have ultimately led to the dissolution of public education, etc.

Ravitch is good when talking about what went wrong; she is less effective in talking through what needs to be fixed.

Here’s what needs to happen. 1. The ideologues need to look at the reality and to see that this policy is flawed. People on both the right and the left need to make sure that Obama doesn’t keep this policy in place.

2. We need to level the damn playing field–all children have a right to equal education. We will all be stronger if we are all literate.

3. We need to think about the mental infrastructure of this nation. If I want a nation of smart, educated, critical thinkers, which I do, I need to be as supportive of mental infrastructure as I am of the other kinds. Our current economic crisis has meant that banks and car companies and airlines have gotten bailouts, even when those companies have been spending and making money willy-nilly. We have invested a lot of stimulus money in public works–even while the schools in my district (including the university for which I work) are struggling, we have tons of crews working on the roads downtown and the down the street.

Why don’t we consider our schools too big to fail? Wouldn’t giving stimulus money to educators to create smaller class sizes be a good idea that would pay off a thousand times? How many teachers could we hire for what one bank CEO makes? How many decent textbooks could we buy, so that each child has access to one (one of my friends knows a teacher who has 25 books total for six classes of 35 students)?

America is all about investment. Why aren’t we investing in our children? Why aren’t we investing in ourselves?

In the September 09 edition of Wired, Clive Thompson has a short article in which he basically cites and agrees with Andrea Lunsford (a writing teacher at Stanford) that our students are more literate in the age of facebook and texting–they actually write (even if it’s just tweets) when they aren’t required to by a teacher.

The argument further says that the students understand the idea of audience more because of the “life writing” they do.

I find the argument intriguing, but I have one quick bone to pick. “As for those texting shortforms and smileys defiling serious academic writing? Another myth. When Lunsford examined the work of first-year students, she didn’t find a single example of texting speak in an academic paper.”

Well, I’ve seen it. I’ve actually returned a paper to a student and asked him to spot the error in line four. Even when looking for it, he couldn’t see the “you” is not spelled “u” error because he was so used to texting. While texting speak in academic writing isn’t rampant, it happens.

I’m upset that we would declare something a myth because one teacher didn’t find an example of it from the papers she collected at Stanford. This is a hasty generalization–the sample size is too small and is perhaps not representative of the college population.

Just saying.

The article is here: http://www.wired.com/techbiz/people/magazine/17-09/st_thompson