Jim Burke: The English Teacher's Companion

2011: Revising Ourselves

I have spent the last few days working long and hard on my next book. In particular, I was thinking about the writing process. This afternoon, working through the section on revision, it occurred to me that nothing so captures this process by which we create ourselves and our lives as the writing process.

We come first to generate and gather ideas of who or what we want to be, though like the inexperienced writer, we have no idea: we must learn to trust the process that leads us deeper into the self. But early on, those initial ideas: they are almost always wrong. I thought I wanted to study marketing and be a business man. And as I watch the young people in my life, both at school and at home, I can only understand what they are going through as some rough and tumble try at an initial self.

Then you move onto the drafting stage during which you try on all sorts of selves, some fitting better than others, each having some part of yourself as you are or hope to be. As the writer seeks the shape of thought, so, too, are we chasing some shape to our lives, unable to realize that we are living that pattern all the while. And this drafting process, which we mistake so often in our youth as an arrival at some final draft, is barely the beginning. We are a little bit like Rilke's monk in his cell, thinking: 

I live my life in growing rings

which move out over the things around me.
Perhaps I'll never complete the last,
but that's what I mean to try.

I'm circling around God, around the ancient tower,
and I've been circling thousands years;
and I still don't know: am I a falcon, a storm
or a great song.

Thus, even after that most complete draft, we realize we are only beginning to glimpse who we are, who we can be, what we want, what we are or could be. For to revise is to re-see, to re-envision, to re-imagine in the smithy of our imagination the greater self we aspired to be when we first set out.

As I enter into 2011, I hope for the courage to keep asking myself the questions that have kept me company these many years. And I hope you, too, will take time to revise yourself, keeping what you want, tossing the rest as you would a sentence or a word that no longer fits. And as you should when you write, dream big. 

Enter into that conversation with your deepest self and take the time to listen. 2010 told me all sorts of things about myself and the world I did not know. These changed me in ways I am still striving to understand. LIke Rilke's speaker in the poem above, I do not yet know what I am, but I do know I have a song inside me and a voice that's mine to lift in prayer and praise. 

What song do you want to sing this year?

An App for the Teacher

In the old days (allegedly), teachers received apples. Now they want apps (to use on their Apple iPhones). 

Some years back, I created an online digital anthology for students in my freshman classes. The idea was that we needed functions (color, animation, video, audio) that the cool, quiet, static page could not provide. So I created The Weekly Reader to incorporate a wider range of texts and reading demands on my students. Kelly Gallagher has something similar, though it has a different emphasis: The Article of the Week. (Kelly, Penny Kittle, and I are planning to present together at NCTE next year in Chicago!)

I just moved The Weekly Reader over to this blog site as part of my effort to consolidate my online resources and provide more ongoing content to you in the year ahead. You can also access it at all times through the link on the menu bar up top. 

Whether it is an app or a website, a blog or a book, the materials of our work are evolving, as they are for those such as myself who create such materials. As I write the new edition of English Teacher's Companion, I find myself thinking, even as I write out pages on the computer, what an app of the book would do, what it would look like, how it would be similar and different.

2011 will be here soon. The forecast calls for: more of the same: change.

Typing is not writing

That book, article, or poem you want to write---you know, the one you keep thinking about, keep rolling around in your mind like a candy on the tongue? So long as you are tasting and testing it, chewing it, ruminating on it, you are writing. 

Less and less of my writing seems to take place at the computer; that is merely typing. The work is in the taking of time to read, to think, to make notes. 

The old saying is true: When the student is ready, the teacher will appear. So it is with writing: when the words are ready, they will come. This does not mean you cannot rehearse them, try them on, work your way into the piece.

This is rarely how we let students work as writers; instead, too many treat writing as if there is only time for the typing, none for the thinking. 

So what will you write this year, even if it means turning off the radio to think about it for as long as it takes you to drive to work? And on the way home, furthering working the ideas, till you get home and can harvest that day's word horde onto the bright white page which you can then tweak, revise, rethink entire ly at your leisure over your oatmeal the next morning before driving to work, during which time you can begin again the conversation that leads to the writing you keep saying you want to do.

You do eat a good breakfast, don't you? What better time for the patient, thoughtful work of revision, which is where the real writing begins...

Telling Your Life Stories

The other day, while working on this website, I revised my biographical details. But it felt inadequate to describe myself by what I have written, where I teach, any awards I may have been fortunate enough to receive. 

So I decided to write three different biographies (okay, to be more precise, autobiographies): my educational autobiography, my writing autobiography, and my professional autobiography, which people typically use to introduce me when I speak or describe my work in convention programs. 

I found it interesting and useful to think about these different lives I've created for myself. While we are busy thinking about how to help students make their own lives a story worth telling, we might find it worth thinking about our own. We might be reminded, as I was, that those students we worry about or who can frustrate us so much often bear a curious resemblance to the person we were at their age.

Here are my three versions of the path that has led me to you this morning.

Students' Search for Meaning

For the last few days, I have been reading Victor Frankl's Man's Search for Meaning, a book based on his experiences in Auschwitz. As a psychologist, he sought to understand what it was that allowed survivors to endure what others could not. 

In his introduction to the book, rabbi Harold Kushner begins by quoting Nietzsche in summing up Frankl's ideas: "He who has a Why to live for can endure almost any How."

Kushner then discusses what is, for him and me, one of the core arguments from the book, writing that "life is not primarily a search for pleasure...or for power..., but a quest for meaning. The greatest task for any person is to find meaning in his or her life. Frankl saw three possible sources for meaning: in work (doing something significant), in love (caring for another person), and in courage during difficult times."

This quest for meaning calls to mind our own ideals of "life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness," which inevitably leads me to ask how these relate not only to my own life but what I teach and how I teach it. It was the richness of one's inner life and the depth of love one felt for another (his wife, in Frankl's case) that sustained many during the terrors and trials of their time in the camps.

I find myself challenged by the book to ask what I am doing in my classroom to cultivate that inner life of the mind and spirit through what we read, discuss, and write about.

The United States of Complexity

I spoke with a teacher this semester who had four Latino boys, all in her reading class, all freshmen, all showing evident potential for success. And all four left at different junctures throughout the semester. Each for different reasons. Some involved family and work opportunities. Others involved more private but no less
urgent reasons. There was little notice. They just said they were not returning one day; then were gone. These kids, as with so many other students, were undone by complexities over which they themselves had no control. 

Here is an image used to represent complexity theory. I can see most classes on most days in that pattern.

I had kids this semester who suffered from personal traumas, psychological crises, along with the challenges common to the condition of being a high school senior. I had students who came every day ready to work, committed to the learning; yet I had others who came every day, but always ten or twenty minutes late, or a couple others who came rarely at all. 

One of these students, who experienced great crises this semester, came perhaps 40% of the time. But when this student was there, this student was there, which is to say was present, engaged, attentive. The final for this class was demanding, much more so than they seemed to believe a college prep senior final should be. (Didn't he get the memo?! This semester is supposed to be chillaxed, man.)  This particular student showed up for the final, wrote the two best essays in the class, then left into the vacation, leaving me with a set of very complex questions to answer when it comes to how to assess the work.

This final, I should mention, was based on an article about Abercrombe & Fitch and the policies they use to choose their models and their employees. At one point, when discussing this article, this class of thirty-five seniors and I realized that not one of us had what the Abercrombe & Fitch representative in the article called the "natural, classic American look." 

We have to all think long and hard about what it means to be an American as we enter into the new year and how much responsibility we each need to take for what we have now and hope to still have in the future. All those kids in my class are American, but they are living in many different Americas, all of which must be united, indivisible, with liberty and justice for all if we are all to live the lives, enjoy the liberties, and pursue the happiness we all seek amidst the beautiful complexity that is our country, a country the novelist Ralph Ellison called "the great experiment."

Who's on your team?

People in various industries---music, movies, food, fashion, even just regular business---speak of their "crew," their "team," their entourage. These are the people who help make it happen, the support crew, the ones whose names roll near the end of the credits but are no less a part of the production. 

So who is on your crew, your team? Who is essential to your production? Teachers put on five shows a day, five days a week, for as many as 200 kids in some cases. Maybe your crew is your hair stylist or you sister, your spouse or your spiritual advisor. But they count. They make it happen for you so you can make it happen for your students, who, in turn, make it happen for you on their best days. 

These people are the gifts in our lives. So take time in the coming weeks to realize how much they contributed to the productions of the last year and give thanks for them, let them know the difference they make. Because the new year is coming and, with it, so too are a whole range of new projects you will make happen, but never alone. 

After all, even Santa needs the elves and the reindeer. Oh, and Mrs. Claus, of course.

2011: Next Steps

This is not so much a blog as a public promise to myself---and you, too, of course---to streamline my online content for greater ease of use and access. But also to create a more public learning space for myself where I can post more easily in one medium (words, images, video, audio) or another as the situation demands (or I desire!). 

To that end, I am working toward consolidating my English Companion website and my blog into one site where I can do everything I have done on both but now do it all in one space. I feel this is a reflection on the evolving space of the web: why pay for and host and have to maintain ec.com and ec.blog (not actual URLs, just what I call them for purposes of reference) when I can synthesize them, along with other emerging projects into one space where I can more effectively share ideas, resources, and information with you.

So nothing should change in the coming month other than design and location. www.englishcompanion.com will always work, though. I am working intensely on an entirely new edition of The English Teacher's Companion, due out (I hope) in spring 2012.

See you soon.

Jim