how to tell a story

I am an awful storyteller. My cousin reminds me of this everytime I start to tell him a story. I fumble, forget the sequence of events or the punchline, and worst of all, I feel like I need to relay every detail of the episode. I'm plagued by an overactive conscious. I can't lie!

While reading King's On Writing this week, I kept coming back to the discussion we had at the beginning of a semester about truth in writing. As a kid, I was told over and over not to lie, the sentiment deeply ingrained in me. Now, as an adult, I can't lie even in certain kinds of writing like memoirs, which require the occasional betrayal of truth. In the beginning of the book, King confesses to the reader that his memory fails him, that he cannot remember certain details. In other momoirs I've read, the author doesn't admit to such faults but instead fills the gaps with half-truths or probabilities.

Perhaps, this is the key to good storytelling: knowing when and how to lie. Perhaps, this is what my storytelling is lacking. I focus too much on telling the event faithfully, as it happened. But, I guess, that's also the difference between a storyteller and a reporter. People's expectations for a storyteller and a reporter differ; from one they expect entertainment, from the other, the facts.

As I begin to think about my classes in the future, I think that it would be interesting to explore this issue of truth in writing further. In the meantime, though, I need to learn to lie.

losing my mind?

A friend of mine told me today that his "thing" this semester has been to forget to underline the titles of books in essays. I told him my "thing" this semester is to forget the rules for capitalization.

I've had to fill out several, and I mean several, applications and this capitalization thing is getting out of hand. For example, if I'm referring to the University of Iowa as "the university," do I need to capitalize it?

Who better to set me straight than A Pocket Style Manual?

Besides learning which univeristy the author cheers for (under common nouns the author writes "a good univeristy," cross from it, under proper nouns it says, "University of Wisconsin"), it seems to me that university did not need to be capitalized. Good thing, too! I already submitted those applications.

lightbulb!

I was thinking about grammar the other day, as I often do, of course, and it came to me: what if we teach grammar through the "one-sentence story" that was introduced to us a few weeks ago? I think that this could be considered a challenge to students instead of just an assignment. It might look something like this: learn out how to correctly construct a story in one sentence using semicolons and colons and other punctuation. One story, one sentence. Students would, like Tim Gunn says, "make it work." The students could learn grammar while also constructing a short, short story.

Anyways, I know this is short and sweet but it's been on my mind lately. What do you think?

ugh, grammar.

I had the opportunity to observe an "accelerated grammar" course last week. I introduced myself to the class and took a seat among the students. (And when I say that, I mean it quite literally: I re-learned the rules for direct and indirect pronouns with them.)

I couldn't believe how much the students knew about grammar already! I sat quietly and pretended to follow along as they correctly identified when to properly use the nomitive case. (What is the nomitive case?)The process was almost mathmatical: the subject does this verb and so one uses this pronoun to complete the sentence in this way. Whoever said there wasn't a "right" answer in English class obviously didn't learn grammar.

I left the class, eager to see my own students' costumes for Halloween, before I could ask the teacher the one question on my mind: is there a way to teach grammar without filling out worksheet after worksheet? I know that students need to practice the rules of grammar in order to get them down but is there another way? I imagine that this is much of what we will talk about in this week's class so I'll leave that question hanging in the air...

somewhere in between

Right now, I navigate a fine line between student and teacher. The Iowa River most nearly serves as that intellectual, authoritative line. I cross the river every afternoon and drive past the UIHC and Kinnick and make sure my speedometer falls to 25 before entering University Heights. Past Finkbine, I transform into something quite different, something quite adult. I enter the parking lot of the high school and drop my first name for a Ms. I am teacher.

The line becomes more distinct with the upcoming election on November 2nd. The student in me concerns herself with the 21 ordinance while the teacher side dismisses that, reading up on the candidates' positions on education.(Speaking of which, the rhetoric surrounding candidates' plans for education is interesting, eh?)

The student in me likes the same music and movies and social networks as her students while the teacher side tries to somehow stretch those four years that separate her students' age from her own into a seemily further divide to legitimatize her authority.

I look forward to the day when the two parts are less distinct, the dichotomy erased like chalk on a chalkboard. For now, I'll enjoy my position on both sides of the river, I'll enjoy the ride.

finally

I recently got the opportunity to just sit and write. While hopping between classrooms, experiencing different teaching strategies and personalities during my cooperating teacher's planning period, I stopped in on a creative writing course.

Now that I think about it, this teacher demonstrated several of Newkirk's ideas (yes, those have still been reverberating in my mind). He integrated the reading of poetry with the writing of it as well as gave the students, and myself, the time to write. Also, he didn't limit the students but he did give them a starting point: the first line of a poem of the students' choice. He told them just to write, not to critisize what spilled onto the page or erase every other word, but to let the images unfold on their own accord. Go with it. In this manner, he encouraged the lying down of arms with the inner-dialogue every writer typically battles with. Write now, revise later. I felt a weight lift off myself, as well. Just write.

I started with the first line of a Langston Hughes poem and kept my hand moving. What I ended up with surprised me, and so here it is, the product of a free write, unrevised, raw:

I, too, sing America
in my own way
my own time like
that kid on the tricycle
rides around, young
and red
red hair red freckles
yet

they did not originate
there, here
they immigrated like on
his arm to
his shoulder

they were always there
the freckles
but people,
people could not see them

until the sun
shone so bright so
cyclical in the
blue sky, white clouds
like his eyes bright
as round
and the wheels
round
and the sun hurt
his eyes

he blinked those
long eyelashes blonde
from the sun

people used to stop him
a child
and tell him how beautiful
how magnificant those
eyes
those
eyelashes


The poem is not finished, but it's a start.

Metacognition seems to me the key to being a teacher. A teacher is always in her head, thinking through how she works out a problem or navigates through a project or the steps she takes in starting a paper.

I have been in my head this week, especially when reading through Newkirk's Holding On to Good Ideas in a Time of Bad Ones. For the most part, I write to get it done. When I have to read something, like Newkirk's book, and then prepare a piece of writing, I think towards that: making notes in the margins, underlining, dog-earing. Yet, Newkirk does not think of this as pure reading, and it's not. I am not reading to learn, I am reading to write.

In a sense, how I read is a good thing, the perfect demonstration of the reading strategies I learned in elementary and middle and high school. (My English teachers would be proud.) But can I read in a different way? Sure, I do when I read for me, which I tend to do less and less of these days. (The only time I am jealous of my roommate's Business major, is when I see her lounging in one of our armchairs with a novel...one she doesn't have to read for class.)

Writing for me then becomes about time, about proving a point, about filling the page requirement. Of course, there are times when I allow the words to find their own way on the page but this does not happen frequently. There's no time.

I feel like in one way or another, I have worked through this problem again and again in class, on this blog, and in my memoir. But I feel that it's a very real concern. Essentially, what I've learned this week is to get students writing. I am excited to try some of Newkirk's exercises, or the ones he's borrowed from other educators: the one-sentence story, the multigenre paper, etc. I am excited because just like pure reading can get bogged down by the weight of the hero's journey, writing can get bogged down by structure. Reading strategies and paper structures should be taught, to be sure, but not exclusively. Pleasure--the pleasure of reading to read, writing to write--and thinking are not mutually exclusive.