At the end of a year, after you have been subjected to the antics, the odd projects, the technology, and the exercises that I call my teaching, I often feel I need to deliver just this speech. I am convinced many of you enjoyed your experiences in this classroom; if you didn’t enjoy me, I can see you enjoyed each other. But even if you have not enjoyed your experience with me, I offer my hands to you and at least suggest this: you’ll get another teacher, and eventually, this will all seem like a dream. In that vein I adopt Puck’s words as my own:

If we shadows have offended,
Think but this, and all is mended,
That you have but slumber’d here
While these visions did appear.
And this weak and idle theme,
No more yielding but a dream,
Gentles, do not reprehend:
if you pardon, we will mend
…
So, good night unto you all.
Give me your hands, if we be friends,
And Robin shall restore amends.

That said, I’d like you to take 30 minutes and to write me a letter of reflection on your year. I will set no word length if you will discipline yourself to write earnestly for the entire half hour (Please do not count the time it takes to log in to your blog). You are writing to me, but this does not need to be about me. While I am interested in what your thoughts are concerning English, I am also interested in your broader reaction to your year. That means for many of the thoughts, you might share your experience in English but then broaden the thought to include your whole life.

I list these questions to help you get going. You need not work down them like a checklist, but you are welcome to do so if you don’t want to think about it.

• What have you learned?
• How have you changed?
• What has influenced you?
• What will you remember when you think back on this year?
• What did you enjoy about class?
• What did you find most challenging?
• What did you learn about yourself as a student this year?
• What lesson was most important to remember for the future?
• What is the story of your year? (You might consider telling me the story of your year and include the landmark events that summarize the whole.)

You may write this at home or during your final exam block, but please make sure it is posted to your blog.

Please look back to the chapters you’ve read most recently, or even further if you choose, and use 3 or 4 lines from the text to frame your thinking. (I say three or four because if you can hit the word count by considering only three passages, then you may stop.)

The assignment, then, is to write 300 words about the text, quoting the book three times to spur you onward.

After you address your quotes, I’d like you to direct some of your thinking towards questions you may have at this point. Consider the themes that are developing and ask at least two big-picture, discussion starting questions. Explain why you think these questions are worth asking. These are part of your 300 words.

If you’d like peek at the one I did for chapter one.

• “In front of the low horizontal limb of a giant sycamore there is an ash pile made by many fires; the limb is worn smooth by men who have sat on it” (2).
• “The first man was small and quick, dark of face, with restless eyes and sharp, strong features. Every part of him was defined: small, strong hands, slender arms, a thin and bony nose. Behind him walked his opposite, a huge man, shapeless of face, with large, pale eyes, with wide, sloping shoulders; and he walked heavily, dragging his feet a little, the way a bear drags his paws. His arms did not swing at his sides, but hung loosely” (2).
• “You remember about us goin’ into Murray and Ready’s, and they give us work cards and bus tickets?” (5)
• “Awright. You got that. But we’re gonna sleep here because I got a reason” (7).
• “I’d pet ‘em, and pretty soon they bit my fingers and I pinched their heads a little and then they was dead – because they was so little” (10).
• “When I think of the swell time I could have without you, I go nuts. I never get no peace” (12).
• “Guys like us, that work on ranches, are the loneliest guys in the world. . . . With us it ain’t like that. We got a future. We got somebody to talk to that gives a damn about us. . . . because I got you to look after me, and you got me to look after you, and that’s why” (14).
• “Well, look. Lennie – if you jus’ happen to get in trouble like you always done before, I want you to come right here an’ hide in the brush” (15).

Stage 1: Reading 

Please use the resources available to you on the website and in your textbook (p. 1230) and spend some time researching Miller. You may also look on your own at other sites – use the links at the bottom of the Wikipedia article, for example. The main goal for stage 1: read through a lot of stuff.

Stage 2: Writing

Then I’d like you to compile your general impression of Miller in a written summary. You may put this on your blog or you may work with a partner and put it on the wiki, or you may work with a partner and put it on both your blogs. Realize that if you work with a partner, I will expect it to look like two people’s work in quantity and quality.

At the end of your Introduction to Arthur Miller, please make a list of the resources you used (that is, a works cited). Format the list properly, using Easybib to make your citations (most likely you’ll need to select “web site” from the blue drop down menu of source types).

Tips for working well:

• If you’re working with a friend, you might want to use some good collaborative tools. Google Docs allows two people to write on the same document at the same time. It’s cool.
• Zinging emails or IM’s back and forth allows one person to type a part and give it to the other person without the “recorder” being burdened with all the typing. It would also prevent a situation where one person sits there and watches the other do all the work.

We’ll work on this in class for two half blocks before we begin reading the play. How long does it have to be? As long as it takes! Make your piece so good that students elsewhere who desperately google “Who is Arthur Miller?” will be thrilled to come to your page.

Anyway, on the other side of the fireplace sat an old fella, presumably drinking something less snooty than I – maybe a cup of black house blend? His was an aura of simple genuineness – he’d ridden his bike and rested it up against the front window, and then when he sat in that cushioned chair he read nothing and looked at nothing in particular. He just stared at others in the shop, possibly fixing one eye’s peripheral gaze on his unlocked property outside. He reminded me of the folks I have seen at McDonalds on a late morning – sitting comfortably and patiently in a booth with a cup of cheap coffee, content to watch the ever-cycling crowd. Thus, I assumed the black coffee.

I did not stare at him, as I was too interested in my reading to be drawn away from it long, and I was therefore surprised when a gruff voice broke the rhythm of Faulkner’s “That Evening Sun.” I looked up to see the old man leaning over me with a stern expression. I hadn’t heard what he had said.

“I’m sorry?”

“I said, have you noticed you’ve got a hole in your pants?”

“Yes. I have. It’s all my own, though. It wasn’t there when I bought them, and I’m too cheap to buy a new pair.”

“Smart[alec]. What are you reading there?”

“Faulkner. Short stories.” I anticipated his next question and chose to answer it: “They’re pretty good.”

“Garbage.” I anticipated wrong.

With his next words, he dropped himself into the chair beside me, dumping his coffee with a haphazard motion onto the small end table between us. It had a lid, I couldn’t see what it was. “You’re just readin’ that because it’s got his name in huge yellow print on the bindin’. If no one were here – includin’ the silly image you’ve got of yourself – you’d be readin’ the Reader’s Digest sittin’ on that shelf.”

“Wow. That’s strong. I’ll give you the Digest’s joke section. But other than that, I don’t know. What happened between you and Faulkner? Bad introduction in high school?”

“Faulkner, Hemingway, Great Gatsby. You can have them. A bunch of hoity toity ‘watch me and my fancies’ writers. You can’t make any sense out of ‘em, and you can’t enjoy ‘em.”

“Hemingway as hoity-toity? That’s a new one. What would you read? Who’s better?”

“Anybody. Stephen King for one. Somebody who understands it ain’t about fancy stuff, it’s about readin’. Like gettin’ to the next page. Your ‘literature-men’ ” – With this he cast the back of his hand towards my book, as if to brush it out of my hands – “write like they think the reader is going to read it twice.”

“Maybe they will. Don’t you want to think back on something when you’ve read it?”

“Think back? To recall a great scene, sure. To figure out what the heck I just read, no way. If you can’t get it from readin’ it, it ain’t worth gettin’.”

“But thinking on it is the beauty of it. What if you thought back to a great scene and when you remembered it, you suddenly realized it meant more than you first thought?”

“That’s what they say. That ain’t how it works. You think back to it and you wonder why they put that in there. And you don’t know. And the truth is no one knows either, ‘cept a few other hoity-toities who pretend to know and make other people read it.”

“Well, no one said it was easy. But I think regular folks can get this stuff. You could. You probably get it more than you know. All you have to do is reach up to the higher levels of meaning -”

“Now you’re talking like one of them again.” This time he cast the back of his hand to his ear, indicating the rest of the shop behind us? I wasn’t sure how broadly he meant them to be. “You make more sense when you’re defending your ridiculous pants.”

“Okay, okay. What I’m saying is that with some careful reading, some real curiosity – maybe asking other people questions and seeing what a group of people can figure out in conversation – you might get more than you thought you could.”

“Sounds cute. You got an example?”

“Well actually, yeah.” I reached into my bag and withdrew a folder full of essays from my juniors. I don’t know why I had them – I never bring work home and when I do, like this time, I never do anything with it – but I pulled one out this time and handed it to the old man, who took it willingly.

I didn’t hope for much. His eyebrows furrowed as he took the essay from me – a thin, three page sample – and the grimace stayed. Even when he lifted his coffee to his mouth and sipped it, his expression never broke. If you’d taken a picture and photoshopped out the paper, you’d have thought he was drinking the worst cup of coffee in town.

When he finished, he flipped the pages back to the beginning. “Some of these stories he read sound pretty good.”

“They are good. But they’re by your hoity-toity folks – O’Connor, Fitzgerald, Faulkner.”

“They don’t all sound good.” He shot me a look of reproach. “But some of ‘em do.”

“He argues that the more than meets the eye part is what makes the story great.

“I suppose it could – like he said. But I’d have to read these stories to see for myself.”

I held out the copy of the Portable Faulkner and raised my eyebrows.

“Some other time. I got places to go.” With that he struggled out of the chair and took a hunched step to the fireplace, which he grabbed with one hand as he straightened his frame. He laughed through his nostrils one time as he walked away, and I heard him remark without ever looking back to me, “If you’d spend less money on that fancy-coffee you might be able to buy yourself some pants.”

_______________________________________________

The assignment: Please write the essay that the old man read. Make it three pages long (I recommend at least 6 paragraphs) and use three stories to support your explanation that a story can have more to it than meets the eye, and that often that “more” is what makes it great.

Put your essay in MLA format.

For this article, however, I am going to dictate the format a little bit. I want to give you a chance to write an article that injects quotes from the text like little asides. It would be the writing equivalent of when a radio announcer makes a statement and then jumps to a sound bite – but where the sound bite is not specifically introduced or acknowledged in the language around it. I did this a lot in radio when I’d make little promotional spots. One time I wrote a letter to my brother to say happy birthday, and I filled the letter with ridiculous advise and bits of wisdom. After each bit of wisdom the audio would cut to a quote from a movie that we had seen and loved. I never said anything about the quotes, they were just there to augment my points by juxtaposition. In that case, obviously, they were also there to get a laugh.

I do this at times in my blog (see this article on the meaning of poetry for an example), and I think it’s a perfect form for the medium. I take the quotation in question and at the most opportune time I insert it as its own paragraph. I set that paragraph apart with the block quote formatting (located in the tool bar ) and never specifically mention the quote. But it does fit in that context, and it does support my point. I also do this with photographs which I pull usually from a search engine that mines Flickr.

The advantage to you, of course, is that you don’t have to worry about how to punctuate the quote in your article. You simply stick it in there and keep trudging along with your insight.

That is what I want you to do in terms of format. In terms of writing, I want you to use the same general topic that you had for “Winter Dreams” and “The Life You Save May Be Your Own“: say something interesting about the story by reflecting on it personally, and do so in at least 250 words. Use four quotes from the story as asides to support your reflection. For “A Good Man Is Hard to Find” you should feel free to compare it to “The Life You Save May Be Your Own,” since you’ll see obvious similarities. You don’t have to do so, however.

Write on!

______________________________________________________

• Original image: ‘rustic country store‘ by: Je Kemp
• Original image: ‘vintage Sinclair pump‘ by: Je Kemp

This time, however, I’d like to hear more of your personal reactions to the story. Take a reader through not only through a basic recap and your biggest insights, but your personal connections with the characters and stories as well.

This story is not easy, of course, and to get you started, I would like you to examine a couple essays on the story. They’re personal essays, one posted on a blog and one on a personal website dedicated to O’Connor, but I think they will help you connect with the higher levels of meaning in the story – places that are difficult for us to understand on our own, but when we combine our insight with those of others, we “get it” in a whole new way.

• Scroll to the bottom of this page to see the review on the story.
• This one ends a bit abruptly but I think it’s worth reading anyway.

________________________________________________________

Image Attribution: ‘Railroad Crossing‘  by: Austin Tolin

That’s not much of an explanation, I realize, but that aides my goal for this assignment. I want you to be able to discuss a book, story, or movie in a way that is interesting. I’m trying to teach you to be interesting people. How’s that for curriculum?

Part II of this assignment will be for you to get someone outside our class to read and comment on the article on your blog. It can be a parent or a friend, but the idea is to make your article so interesting that you will engage your readers and draw them into conversation.

How do you do that? I recommend respecting the Rising Levels of Reading that we discussed at the beginning of our unit. Your reader won’t have read the story, so you’ll need to describe it with the right amount of detail to give them a feel for it (not too much, that would bore them, but enough that they understand what you’re trying to say). Then, having described the basics of what goes on in the story, explain what you infer from the story – what you “read between the lines” of Fitzgerald’s text. Once you explain that, you’re ready to rise to the top and write comments that your readers will find particularly interesting: comments about life and your experiences of it.

In class, that top level is where I brought in my conversation about Richard Shindell’s song, “A Summer Wind, a Cotton Dress.”

You read the story, now say something interesting about it.

________________________________________________

Original image: ‘Let’s Golf!‘ by: Guiri R. Reyes

Not that I ever do any of it, however. I can’t afford the equipment needed to climb and I am not interested in doing something so dangerous that I’d risk my chance at being with my girls as they grow up. But I love hiking and I love camping and I love winter – and I love reading about it. Thus, the book on display in the back of the room, Jon Krakauer’s Into Thin Air. Krakauer’s book chronicles his disastrous trip to the world’s rooftop, where 8 people died on a single day (May 10, 1996) and a great number of others escaped narrowly.

As an interim assignment, I have had you watch a documentary made about an ascent of Mt. Everest. Coincidentally, the team making the documentary climbed Everest in 1996 – the same year that Krakauer attempted the mountain on a fatal expedition. You’ll hear the fatal attempts mentioned in the film.

I’d like to give you the chance to respond to the film in writing, on your blogs, but I do not want to push your writing into a particular box by listing a series of questions. Instead, I’d simply like to ask you to respond to what you saw in this film by writing a blog article of at least 200 words. If you are having trouble finding enough, feel free to augment your exploration by reading online about the mountain or about other events concerning it. I’ve listed a few below.

If you’re stuck, however, I will list a series of themes that I think are pertinent when discussing Mt. Everest and attempts to climb it. Considering themes makes it simple for us to connect what is happening as far away as Mt. Everest to our own lives.

• Dreams
• Ambition
• Challenge
• Physical exertion
• Adventure

Looking for more? You can read Jon Krakauer’s original article about his experience on Mt. Everest, which was published in Outside magazine. Or you could read a rebuttal to Krakauer’s article, written by another climber on the expedition, Anatoli Boukreev. There is a response from Krakauer to Boukreev’s claims, though Boukreev’s claims were later turned into a book of their own -The Climb.

If you’re a picture kind of person (like me) you might enjoy a series of shots of a 2001 ascent of Mt. Everest. Or, you surely could find something interesting in National Geographic’s special Mt. Everest website, which includes a virtual climb video where a cameraman almost falls off a ladder and a host of other great photos (and I’m sorry, but this is just plain nuts). Other virtual climbs are on the Discovery Channel website and a panorama view from the top of the world.

Respond! You’ve got at least 200 words.

________________________________________________________________________

Click on the photos for source.