Re: Little Pollyana

[Richard Haswell <rhaswell@falcon.tamucc.edu>]

Latisha's "good news story" was a good reminder for me, since I have
been intending to send this list a last call for submissions to COMP
TALES.  This is the collection of oral stories that college composition
people tell (Latisha's is a real-life example!), to be published by
Addison Wesley Longman and edited by Min-Zhan Lu and myself.  Right now
we have collect a good sample of wonderful, spirited stories, but we
need lots more.

WE ESPECIALLY NEED STORIES FROM WRITING CENTERS.  We didn't get much of
a response last spring from this list, but I know you have good tales. 
You knock heads with people in writing centers, and stories, like
sparks, fly off.  Just write them down and send them e-mail.

The following call for submissions gives you information and some
examples.  There are two new items:

The new deadline is Nov. 15 (the book should be ready by next fall)
Authors of tales accepted for the book will receive a free copy of it.

Email me if you have any questions.

Rich Haswell


COMP TALES

Rich Haswell and Min-Zhan Lu are editing a book for Addison Wesley
Longman titled Comp Tales.  It will be a collection of the stories about
work that college writing teachers tell and retell.  Comp Tales will
gather together oral narratives from the field, stories that are
actually told in the classroom, in the halls, over the tutor’s table, in
committee rooms, on street corners, over the kitchen table, wherever.

The book will also contain reflection about the tale by the
story-teller, and some serious discussion about the role of
story-telling in our profession by the editors.  Currently contributors
have already provided us with a wonderful start of tales—spirited,
moving, poignant, inspirational, enlightening.  But we need more stories
to round out the collection.

Authors included in COMP TALES will receive a free copy.

These stories can evolve around students, courses, programs, teachers,
colleagues, departments, administrators, conferences, graduate school,
the public.  Topics can deal with anything connected with college
composition:  authority and authorities, adolescence, apprenticeship,
being othered, classes and class, comparative cultures, confidences and
confidentiality, ethnicity, gender, hierarchies and power, grading,
inspirational teachers and inspirational students, standards and
grammar, student mistakes and successes, teacher mistakes and successes,
technology, work demands and work rewards.

Obviously, we are not after just the kind of stories that emerge from
the coffee klatsch or the gripe session.  We want the whole range of
professional tales.  But they must be tales that you actually tell and
pass on.  That is the bottom line, the distinctive genre that will make
our collection unique.

So we would like for you to write the stories in the same way and in the
same spirit that you actually tell them.  Most of the tales we have
received are less than a page in length.  We would also like for you to
explain the customary context in which you tell the story—when, where,
to whom, and why you like to tell it.  This will be useful for exploring
how composition shapes and is shaped by narratives.  See over the page
for examples.

Deadline for submission is November 15, 1998

Your stories will be seen by only the two of us until publication, and
those not used will never be seen by anybody else.  You can name names
or use pseudonyms and circumlocutions (e.g., "a young comp researcher
once..." or "a large public university in the mid-west").  You can
remain anonymous if you choose.  In short, we are aware of the need to
protect everyone's privacy.  Send your tales to

   Rich Haswell:  <rhaswell@falcon.tamucc.edu> 
or 
   Min-zhan Lu:  <min-zhan.lu@drake.edu>

By regular mail, send to Rich Haswell, Haas Professor of English, Dept.
of Humanities, Texas A&M University–Corpus Christi, Corpus Christi, TX
78412

COMP TALES:  THREE EXAMPLES


1	My  first  full-time job was a soft money,  three-year  appointment as
a basic writing  teacher at an open admissions university in the
midwest.  During the summers, I served as director of the Writing
Center.  Near the end of my third year, the chair of the department told
me he had managed to have my staff designation changed from academic to
administrative so that they could keep me permanently on a year-to-year,
contract basis, teaching three sections of basic writing each term with
released time from one section to direct the center.  At the next
department meeting, the chair announced to my colleagues my change in
status, saying how pleased everyone was to have found a way to keep me
because I was such a fine teacher of basic writing, worked with
“remedial” students so well, etc.  Then in the next breath he said, 

“But, of course, we don’t all have the personality of a [my name]; she
can relate to them on their level.”  Everyone chuckled affectionately,
and then moved to the next item on the agenda.

But I was left wondering why this good news had suddenly made me feel so
bad.  It took me a while to realize that I felt bad because, before I
could even savor my compliments, they had been taken away; my ability to
work so well with the students in my classes became a result of my
personality, not of my intellectual and pedagogical skills.

[Reflection] I tell this story now in order to talk to the teaching
assistants I work with about how it is important to remember that
teaching well is the result of hard work, reflection, and serious
intellectual labor—not just a matter of being upbeat and perky.

2	Once when I was directing a writing program, one of my TAs told me
this story, laughing  the whole while. He had been getting after his
first-year comp students all semester to look up words they did not
understand in the anthology of readings.  “Use the dictionary,” he kept
telling them, “That’s what it’s for.”  Then late in the semester he was
conferencing with a student over a first draft of a research paper. 
Clearly the student was very competent with the topic, but had not
considered the plight of lay readers.  He had indulged in much technical
jargon with no explanation of the terms.  
“I have no idea what these words mean,” said the TA to the student.  
“Look ’em up,” said the student to the TA.  

[Reflection] The story comes readily to mind when faculty start
complaining about how badly students read academic prose.  The last
time I told it was during a WAC seminar, after a professor in the
business school had protested that he couldn't be expected to evaluate
papers written for other fields, like biology or engineering.  Everyone
laughed except him.

3	Wendy showed up in one of my sections of ENG 100  about ten years
ago.  She was a pleasant, well dressed  18-year-old whose writing was
garbled and hopelessly incoherent. Even in a basic writing class, she
stood out as far worse than anyone else. Although I had been teaching
these classes for about twenty years, I couldn't understand how a
sophisticated looking teenager could end up this undeveloped as a
writer. Then she told me her story.  For the first few years of
elementary school, she loved school and loved reading. Then in the
fourth grade, the teacher began handing out reading books with different
colored covers. Wendy hoped that she would get the purple one, because
she liked that color, but instead got the ugly orange one. Then the
teacher explained the meaning of the colors. When Wendy found out that
she had been categorized as "a dumb non-reader," she was devastated. She
was stunned all day, and went home crying. This one experience destroyed
all her interest in academics, and she turned off to the intellectual
side of school completely, until her junior year of high school, eight
years later. For whatever reason—she didn't inform me—she suddenly got
interested in studying and reading again, and tried to catch up. When I
met her she had been at it about two years. And indeed, her writing
looked like that of an elementary school student.  
Her story has a second part. I told her to use the Writing Center for
all her work in my class and all the writing she had to do for her other
classes. She did so. In fact, she became one of those people who "live
in the Writing Center," known to all the tutors, eating her lunch there,
stopping by to hang out even when she had no work to do. My office is in
the same complex and I saw her there and in the word processing lab,
which I ran, for years. Then one spring day I noticed her in the word
processing lab, papers and books spread out, obviously writing a
research paper at her terminal. I wandered over and said hello to her,
and asked if she were graduating this spring. She was. Then I quietly
lingered behind her for a moment. I wanted to see what her writing
looked like. The fluent prose she was producing on the screen was above
average for a college senior. I was very impressed. This young
woman—”who wrote far worse than any student in this class,” I say to my
students”—survived in college and became a competent writer. I don't
insult her by saying that if she can do it, anyone can. It's not a
matter of having or lacking some strange ability—it's a matter of
wanting to.  

[Reflection] I tell this simple, true story to my basic writing students
on the first day of class in a short lecture on how to survive in
college while they are getting their bearings.  It's a little corny,
perhaps, but I believe in its message.