Group Development Theory, Romance, and Ursula Rucker

Over half-way into the semester, and I find myself obsessed with poet/singer Ursula Rucker’s song “7,” a duet she sings with M.A.D. The song features a dialog between two lovers remembering the flush of falling in love and recognizing that their love has soured. The refrain depicts their shaky status: “When love is fading away too fast. What are we gonna do?” The pair needs to decide to call it quits or to revive their relationship. Should they passively stand by as their devotion evaporates, or should they make an intentional choice to do something, anything? 

The song ends on an optimistic note: “Trust me, it's us, in a circle . . . The nucleus, the beginning . Take it back to the beginning.” This optimism is less about the lovers actually repairing their relationship, living happily ever after. What is apparent is that the lovers have made a conscious decision to take action, to go back to the root, back to what brought them together in the first place.

Sounds familiar, right? The honeymoon high. The settling into a routine. Those inevitable nicks, cuts, and bumps that threaten to tear a couple apart. The lyrics track the years of their relationship: “The kid's six when we start to fight. The seventh year, tears took it to the limit We maintain full polarity positions. Time explodes with you and me hidden.” All leading to their current predicament: to sh*t or get off the pot.

A Wish for Meaningful Reflection: A Desire for Praxis

The agenda called for a brief quiz. Not a graded quiz. More of formative assessment - for me to see how well students were learning the material. Last week’s lesson went quite well. The class, full of first year, first-generation college student, was engaged, bright, and on task. “They’re getting it,” I had thought to myself. 

But a quick glance at their work painted a different picture - no one got even half of the questions right. Worse, when I assigned students to work in pairs to discuss the reading assignments, over half of the students actively avoided each other and the assignment, much more than I typically observed in prior classes. Was this about not doing homework? About being bored with the material? 

I marshaled my patience, attempting to dispassionately note what was going on so I could pose this problem to students later in the period. 

NoNoWriMo? Not! 30 Days of Blogging? Sure!

I had a huge work deadline last Monday - a major report that ended up being over ten pages long, not including supporting documents. I got the assignment in September. When did I start? Saturday. 

My procrastination, I recognize in retrospect, has everything to do with wanting to be perfect. I have this romantic impulse, a voice in my head that tells me to wait for the proper mood, for inspiration to strike. And when it does, as if by magic, a fully polished, final draft will appear the instant my fingers start tapping the keyboard.  

That's the belief, anyhow. 

Waiting for the inspiration-inducing lightning bolt isn't the only attitude keeps me from getting down to business. A part of me believes I need lengthy swaths of time to grade papers, wanting to finish in a single sitting. So I tell myself I can’t begin without least three or four hours of uninterrupted time. Why bother starting something unless I can finish it all right then and there? You can imagine how well that works for me. Not. 

Entertainment and Art: Mimetic or Productive?

Several of my classes are currently exploring how entertainment and art serve a mimetic and productive function. On the one hand, entertainment can reflect the world around us (mimetic). On the other hand, entertainment can "produce" or influence our society. 

For instance, Suzanne Collin's novel The Hunger Games reflects certain cultural realities: our preoccupation with violence, the reality television phenomenon, and class warfare. This imitation is what "mimetic effect" means.  The novel "tells us about ourselves." 

The novel also has a productive effect; the book promotes a particular awareness that has the potential, by changing our perception of our society world, to actually change our world. This influence is the "productive" effect of Collin's novel. 


These dual functions also hold true for music. We are all familiar with criticisms about certain types of rap and heavy metal which some hold responsible for certain social phenomenon: misogyny, homophobia, violence, materialism, and nihilism. For example, Rapper Ice Cube's' "Black Korea" can be read as a mirror of the growing Black and Korean tensions extant in the eighties and nineties, one of the factors that lead to the LA Riots of '92. Cube's song records the reality of the streets. Cube sings about shopping at the local Korean-American run convenience store: "  . . . the two oriental one-penny countin' motherfuckers that make a nigga mad enough to cause a little ruckus, thinkin' every brother in the world's out to take, so they watch every damn move that I make." 

Behind the Mask: Tupac's Rose, Introducing Rhetoric, and Surprising Revelations

I am constantly blown away by my students' vulnerability, perseverance, and courage. But I can only appreciate those qualities when I create the conditions for them to feel safe enough to share their stories with me. Often, that's tough to do given the pressure to meet our learning goals and objectives.

So it's on me to figure out how I can do "double-duty" in the class, i.e., find activities that meet a legitimate learning objective and that allows students to share something that helps me appreciate them for the three dimensional human beings they are.

Luckily, since our class is about strengthening rhetorical skills, I get to choose texts that serve the needs of textual analysis and that lend themselves for introspection and personal reflection. To demonstrate and practice the sort of rhetorical analysis we will do all semester, we analyzed s poem by Tupac Shakur, "The Rose that Grew From Concrete" from an anthology of the same name.

Writing Alongside Students, "Readicide", & Empathy

"You are the best writer in the room!" The facilitator repeated this refrain several times during his workshop for English professors. He seemed to know I needed a push, a reminder that, in my classrooms, I am the most experienced writer. I'd never thought of it that way. Yet the fact is, I've written quite a bit already - as a student, as a professional, and now as a neophyte blogger - I have decades of experience. Definitely more than most if not all of my students. I see now that this isn't bragging; it's the truth. 

The facilitator, Kelly Gallagher (a major proponent of using mentor texts) put us through several activities demonstrating how we, as the "best writers", could (and should) model writing for our students. That's a message I've heard before: write alongside ours students. Students need to see the how writers (I'm still uncomfortable with that label) generate ideas, craft sentences and paragraphs, and make revision and editorial choices - it's the "show" part of "show and tell" so crucial to learning. 

I've always liked the idea of writing alongside students. And I've "threatened" to do so a few times, doing an activity here and there with them. I've drafted a few paragraphs, demonstrated how I brainstorm to generate ideas, and have on occasion shared a draft, asking students to make suggestions about what I could do to clarify my ideas. I've even shared a couple of blog entries with them, but have been hesitant to encourage them to read them because I don't want them to feel obligated to "like" my entries. 

I decided this summer would be a good time to give "writing alongside students" another try. I teach in a special program for first-year college students that began in June. Our summer assignment is to read Toni Morrison's The Bluest Eye and write a response over the summer break. The purpose of the assignment is to introduce the theme of our learning community (African American perspectives), reduce "summer melt",  to promote reading, and send students a message that we mean to work hard in our program.  

Avoiding Summer Melt & Prepping for Fall

Here's a common misconception: Teachers get the whole summer off to loll about in the sun, vacation, and otherwise divert ourselves. Pure recreation - not. 

Now here's my observed lived reality: Teachers' summers can easily morph into one extended prep period. Certainly, there's time for decompressing and recreation. But I find that even when I'm "off the clock", I've got teaching and learning on the brain.  Inspiration weaves it's way into practically whatever I do. I can't read a book, watch a movie, or listen to a song without seeing a new lesson for class.

I also use the summer, particularly this one, for reading to keep up with best teaching practices. Reading inspires fresh idea to try next semester. Reading makes me reflect on the assignments and activities I did over the last semester, figuring out how to be more effective. Instead of "being in the moment" of summer fun, I'm looking forward and looking back. 

Because I work in special programs, I've also devoted time to recruiting, admitting, and orienting students to those programs this summer. I teach in a Learning Community, a pair of linked classes that share a common focus. I'm the English professor, paired with a counselor who is the professor for the personal development class - sort of like a general colloquium, the "how-to-be-a-college-student" class. 

One of the learning communities I teach is Bayan, Tagalog for "hometown/heritage" or "community." Bayan is geared toward first-generation college students, and we focus Filipino American issues and perspectives (the program is open to any student regardless of race, culture, or ethnicity - they simply have to be invested in our focus).