Visions of Apocalypse (3.2): Cracks

As a young poet, I craved a question that would crack open the world. Everyday, I would wake up, literally, with the plan to create it. The world needed cracking—the world needed breaking—and I would dedicate my life to crafting this question.

By this time, I had devoured a lot of books, but my palate was not sophisticated enough to comprehend that the world does not burst from one question alone. No—the world collapses under the weight of a thousand questions, a million questions, presented persistently over time. One book can finally force a rupture, but no one question can sate the appetite for apocalypse on its own.

I enjoyed enough literature to appreciate my error; in this literature, I encountered questions that ruined my taste for anything lacking complexity:

• How can I plan my world in a sane and thoughtful way? (Homer’s Odyssey, Book 18)
• Is a single man in possession of a large fortune in want of a wife? (Jane Austen, Pride and Prejudice)
• Are all happy families alike, and are all unhappy families unhappy in their own way? (Leo Tolstoy, Anna Karenina)
• Is life full of sound and fury, signifying nothing? (Shakespeare’s Macbeth).

These questions, these stories, wrecked me, cracked me apart so that I could begin again.

So that I could begin again.

This is what apocalypse allows us to do: begin again.

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I grew up in Southern California near the San Andreas Fault, which cracks California in two from Mexico to Mendocino.

I’ve witnessed the consequences of major earthquakes and lived through minor ones. When I was ten, I awakened in the dawn-dark as my bed swayed toward the center of my room. At twenty-two, I moved to Northern California, San Francisco, pulling into the city on October 18, 1989, one day after the Loma Prieta 6.2 earthquake. For the next several months, I commuted to my job at the Exploratorium in the Marina District, passing homes whose facades had fallen off, looking like giant devastated dollhouses.

http://sloblogs.thetribunenews.com/slovault/files/2009/10/1989-10-17-loma-prieta-quake79.jpg

Loma Prieta Earthquake, 1989, Marina District

http://www.sfchronicle.com/thetake/article/Loma-Prieta-quake-at-28-Long-forgotten-photos-12281981.php

In childhood, I dreamed of living in San Francisco because, when I visited with my family, I could not believe the combination of cold air, bright sun, colorful houses, the dramatic shoreline, the bridges cloaked in fog, the green carpet of Golden Gate Park. The year I lived there (1989-1990), I learned that despite the wreckage affecting the city and its inhabitants, life went on. Some days, I felt so lucky to live there, I’d pinch myself on my way to work.

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In 1999, my job as a high school English teacher nearly destroyed me; the job demanded so much creative, critical and physical energy that I felt used up. Adding insult to my psyche’s injury, some of the faculty at my school liked to suggest that the arts were “insignificant.” During one English Department meeting, a colleague (a college counsellor) stated that “the Arts classes don’t count; the A’s are so easy, colleges just throw those grades out.” I felt like barking and retching and screaming hearing such trash talk: I had never struggled more in school than during the years spent earning my Masters of Fine Arts. What I did not say in that department meeting, and it’s hard to say even now, is that if a teacher finds it hard to grade creative work, then that teacher might want to leave higher levels of learning. Among my peers, I was known as “the creative teacher,” a reputation that for half of my colleagues meant I was of no serious account. The other half thought I might redeem the school.

Because I would give up a steady paycheck if I quit, I needed serious help deciding whether I should stay or go, even though I knew that if I stayed, I would lose my mind. Magically, I found the serious help I needed in Shakespeare’s Macbeth. Hecate, in Act 3.5, reprimands the weird sisters, demanding to know why they had trafficked with Macbeth at all, “a wayward son / Spiteful and wrathful, who, as others do / Loves for his own ends.” Nevertheless, Hecate allows the sisters to ruin Macbeth completely: “by the strength of their illusion / [they] Shall draw him on to his confusion. / He shall spurn fate, scorn death, and bear / His hopes ‘bove wisdom, grace, and fear / And you all know, security / Is mortals’ chiefest enemy.” 

I left the security of that full-time teaching job in 2003.

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In 2010, I returned to full-time teaching. Now I work at a school that privileges the Arts, what is known as a “Three A” school: Academics, Arts, Athletics—all play a significant role in the curriculum.

Are there cracks in this place? Yes. But, as legendary songwriter Leonard Cohen sings, “there is a crack in everything, / that’s how the light gets in.”

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  Chrysalis, 2017

Making-Strange Paragraphs

My students have been writing rhetorical analyses of Martin Luther King, Jr.’s “Letter from Birmingham Jail.” In an attempt to help them compose their paragraphs more mindfully, coherently and logically, I repurposed an idea from Viktor Shklovsky, the Russian Formalist critic: I instructed my students to take their paragraphs and make them strange.

They undertook Shklovsky’s concept of Ostranenie by rewriting one of their analytical body paragraphs on index cards, parsing the paragraph’s sentences out card by card. I provided each student with the number of cards he or she needed; post-it notes could work as well, although index cards are slightly easier to move around and manipulate quickly, and I happened to have a lot of them on hand!

As students wrote out their sentences, which took 20 to 30 minutes, depending on the number of sentences in their typed paragraphs and the length of their quotations, I fielded questions.

“Can I put ‘dot, dot, dot’ in the middle of a long quote so that I don’t have to write the whole thing out?” a sweet 16-year old boy called out.

I responded firmly. “No.”

“But this quote is so long!” he whinnied.

“Hmmmm,” I answered, “maybe you don’t need the whole thing?”

It was working! Students noticed things that normally are hard for them to notice; for example, the process slowed them down enough to recognize that maybe they didn’t need the WHOLE quotation to support their idea — maybe they only needed a part of it.

I emphasized that students should pay attention to any awarenesses and thoughts they had while they wrote their sentences out on the cards. “Maybe you’ll see a grammatical error that you didn’t see before, realize that you’ve mistakenly tried to make a dependent clause stand on its own. Maybe you’ll notice that one of your sentences can be broken into two sentences, or that one of your sentences doesn’t really belong logically in this paragraph.”

Students continued to work; their engagement inspired and thrilled me.

Once they’d finished this part, I gave them ten minutes to read and annotate a handout about paragraphs from The Little Seagull Handbook. Any grammar and writing handbook would work for this part of the lesson; I pulled from my bookshelf the book closest at hand, but I could have easily pulled the Hodges’ Harbrace College Handbook or Easy Writer: A High School Reference, both of which are in my bookcase, too. These types of handbooks provide concise instructions for writing issues (like “Developing Paragraphs”) and provide examples for students to examine. Aimed at beginning writers, the lessons from these handbooks can be read and comprehended quickly.

After they read the lesson on paragraphing, we discussed it briefly, reviewing the functions of a paragraph and the suggestions for how to make them more coherent using strategies like repetition, parallel structure, transitions. I spent a few extra minutes showing them examples from the Purdue Owl website of non-parallel and parallel structures, because in my experience, the importance of using parallel structure is the greatest challenge young writers need to master.

I asked them to shuffle their sentence cards before spreading them out before them again in the appropriate order.

“Based on what you just read, take some time to see if any of your sentences might benefit from the repetition of key phrases, from parallel structures, or from transitional words or phrases.”

“Wait,” a girl with braids said, “I can’t remember the order of my sentences! Can I look at my typed paragraph?” (They’d been told to put their typed drafts away).

“No,” I said, firmly again. “My hope is that you are able to tell which sentence goes where.”

This was one problem I had been hoping for. I wanted students to understand that no matter how strange they made their analytical paragraphs, the techniques they employed could make the order of ideas so apparent that they — or anyone else, for that matter — could reconstitute the paragraph from the index cards, based on the component parts (topic sentence, evidence, analysis of the evidence, etc.) and the logical flow (coherence).

Once they had finished finessing the sentences on their cards, I asked them to shuffle them again and then give me their stacks. Then, I randomly reassigned a stack to each student.

“Now let’s see how well you can reassemble your peer’s paragraphs!”

They were not allowed to talk at all during this process, to ask the paragraph writer which sentence went where. I gave each student a large post-it note and told them to write any comments or questions they had for the writer on the post-it. I gave them about 20 minutes to do this part of the activity.

At the end, I asked students to number their peers’ cards in the order they thought was correct and to return the cards and the feedback sheet to the paragraph’s owner. I overheard them giving great feedback to one another at this point, telling each other what had made it easy or difficult to reassemble the paragraphs.

One student asked, “What if my peer put my sentences into a different order than I meant them to be, but her order works better than mine?”

“Fantastic!” I beamed.

This lesson worked really well for all the students and they had a great time doing it.

“Doing this made me realize how I needed to make my paragraph stronger,” one student said.

“While writing out my paragraph on the cards, I felt really bad because I could see how bad my paragraph was,” another student said.

“That’s okay,” I consoled the latter. “It happens to the best of us.”

Inspired by Shklovsky, I hoped that by making their paragraphs strange, my students would see them in a more mindful, vivid light (instead of numbly recognizing them), and in seeing them more clearly — five days before final drafts are due — they could make revisions that would help them become clearer, stronger, sounder writers.