Fifteen minutes on home—a peace-yielding soundtrack for a raucous world

Last night, at the Kelly Writers House, we thought about home—a theme that has carried my current class of memoirists forward. We were graced by the presence of the exquisite memoirist/novelist Rahna Reiko Rizzuto, the young adult novelist super star A.S. King, and the all-round talent (fiction, young adult fiction, New York Times/Slate style commentator) Margo Rabb. We were joined by Penn faculty, my current students, my previous students, and friends. Jessica Lowenthal facilitated every last detail. Jamie-Lee Josselyn brought her ineffable spirit. Al Filreis sat among us, in the home that he has built. Julia Bloch was the woman we all love, and, Julia, I'll be forever grateful for your words.

The evening was made possible by the generous gift of the Beltrans, whose endowment causes all of us who teach writing at Penn to think even harder about how we hope on behalf of our students.

We closed the evening by dimming the lights and listening to the voices of students and faculty as they answered the simple, confounding question, What is home? This is a gloriously produced soundtrack (thank you, Wexler Studio's Zach and Adelaide), made even more stunning by the guitar work of our own music man (and someday Grammy winner), Cole Bauer.

I encourage you to listen (here). In a fractured world, these words offer light.

For even more writing and thinking about home, I encourage you to stop by the Writers House and pick up your copy of our Beltran chapbook, Where You Live & What You Love.

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how does one grade a memoir?

I spend this spring break week reading the memoir work of my Penn students.

It seems unkind, in fact, to assign a grade to work that barrels forth from open hearts.

It seems right to read slowly, to make notes, to think hard.

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Academically Adrift: Limited Learning on College Campuses/Richard Arum and Josipa Roksa: Reflections

When you pull back the heavy curtains of my classroom at the University of Pennsylvania (an old room in an old once-house), you find yourself face-to-face with this fine addition to the Wharton School.  I survey this scene, before my students arrive.  I wonder what I can do, what I must do, to prepare my sixteen for the world. 

It's the perpetual, perpetuating question.  Richard Arum and Josipa Roksa's new study, Academically Adrift, raises the ante.  Across the nation, according to the authors, students enrolled in U.S. universities and colleges aren't reading enough, aren't writing enough, and aren't learning enough.  The country that needs them to reflect seriously, analyze well, and write coherently falters and corporations lose hope (or hire overseas talent for the harder tasks).  This country's future is at risk, thanks to grade inflation, easing standards, and a willingness, on the part of many, to look the other way as students party more and study less.  And very little, the authors argue, is being done to fix the problem, for few see the situation as a crisis:  "No actors in the system are primarily interested in academic growth, although many are interested in student retention and persistence," write Arum and Roksa.  "Limited learning on college campuses is not a crisis because the institutional actors impicated in the system are receiving the organizational outcomes they seek...."

The students enrolled in the authors' study reported spending only 12 hours per week studying, while 37% of students, the authors say, spend less than five hours per week preparing for their courses.  A shockingly low percentage of students are expected to read more than 40 pages a week or write more than 20 pages over the course of a semester.  And yet, "[s]tudents' lack of academic focus at today's colleges... has had little impact on their grade point averages and often only relatively modest effects on their progress towards degree completion as they have developed and acquired 'the art of college management,' in which success is achieved primarily not through hard work but through 'controlling college by shaping schedules, taming professors, and limiting workload.'"

I, for the record, refuse to be tamed.  I recognize, as this study also does, that a teacher can matter in the life of a student—that, while, it might be easy and more popular to let a good student stay merely good or to glance away from another student's struggles, while it might be nice to slack off now and then from the more than the 30 hours I spend each week preparing for and teaching a single course, I cannot and will not slack off. The measure of my achievement at Penn is certainly not my adjunct professor salary and certainly not the evaluations the students choose to give me at semester's end.  Ultimately I must be measured by how effectively, how purposefully I have insisted that these students commit to and exhibit actual growth—greater competency, deeper knowing, enriched capability.  I make my students read—a lot—and I read to them.  I require my students to write each week.  I believe in my students, and sometimes that belief is demonstrated by perhaps unwelcome requests:  Do it again, and do it better. And after that, do more.

Does this make me popular?  I don't know.  Does it make me rich?  Not in the least.  Can I write (which is equivalent to research for the science/math crew) while I am teaching?  I cannot.  It would be easier to do this another way, but these are our students, this is our future, this is our shot to get it right. I read Academically Adrift nodding my head and shaking it, too.  I read it hoping that someone will listen.  That teaching the way teaching must be done will be rewarded in a fashion that will attract those who can do it well.

Because I work in corporate America when I am not on that Penn campus.  I see what colleges are graduating.  I see the erosion of the English language, I see how utterly inconvenient logic and grammar have become.  If we can't fix what is happening on college campuses, we will not save ourselves.  Teaching has to matter; it has to be supported.

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On Editing Down

It was a quite wonderful week of conversations with students. The high school crowd kept me on my toes on Monday; Karen Rile's class at Penn was hugely well-prepared to peel the layers off process, to ask difficult questions about a narrative's seeming loneliness, say, about a river's gender, about the song writing that is story writing, about the honing of a voice.

Often the conversation circled back to editing. To the hard reality (hard on me, at least) that every page I write undergoes at least two dozen drafts. I'll spend weeks on a passage that ultimately does not serve the narrative, I confessed; weeks, and that prose is set aside. I devoted five years of my life to a novel, a post-Spanish Civil War novel, to more than 80 drafts of that novel, that ultimately did not sell, and why? Because I had not found a way (no amount of editing had saved me) to make that book authentic.

It is hard, perhaps, not to look at the work we set aside as wasted effort. It is perhaps hard to imagine that we've used that time well. But all these years, all these drafts, all these stories into this grand, confusing, sometimes exhilarating, often frustrating journey I'm on, I know this: We are kindest to ourselves when we are hardest on our selves. Be ruthless. Birth a poem.

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