Category: Teaching

Living · Teaching

Memory, the Mother of the Arts

Alison BakerLeave a comment

The Greek goddess Mnemosyne is the goddess of memory. She is the mother of the Muses. So memory gives us the arts.

The Muses are the goddesses of inspiration who bless mortals with the gifts of song, dance, and contemplation. There are muses of epic poetry (Calliope), of lyric poetry (Euterpe), of love songs (Erato), of songs to the gods (Polyhymnia), of history (Clio), of chorus and dance (Terpsichore), of tragedy and comedy (Melpomene and Thalia), and of astronomy (Urania).
All of these arts rely on memory. Creating and performing these works means holding lines of verse, tunes, and motions in your head, keeping them in order, delivering them with the grace of a goddess. If we don’t have good memories, we can’t be good artists.
For all its miracles, Google is not helping us in the memory department. Don’t get me wrong; Google is amazing and powerful. I once employed its virtuosic search engine to identify a particularly nasty bug in my bathroom. I typed “big-ass bug with too many legs” in the glowing bar, and it delivered image after image of exactly the thing: a house centipede. So I know its phenomenal capabilities.
What I worry about is how much people are coming to rely on it. Sometimes I feel like my students have very little impetus (beyond the fear of failing quizzes) to remember anything; they’ll just Google it. My partner teaches chemistry. He has seen students who know the molecular weights of elements Google the weight of a compound instead of simply adding the weights together.
This seems small, I suppose, but I think it’s probably… not small.
When we stop calculating, we slowly lose the ability to check Google’s responses. When we stop memorizing things, we forget how to. When we don’t have stories and details and random facts that we find cool stored in our heads, we have nothing from which to create new worlds and solve the problems of this one. Memory is the mother of creativity.
It behooves us, then, to increase our memory. We need to go to the mental gym, not just the muscle gym. Those things that help us remember things? They’re called mnemonics, from Mnemosyne. Here are a few that always work.
 
Tell a story. If you want to remember a fact or a lesson, give it a narrative. We love stories (as evidenced by the fact that squarely seven and a half of those muses work in words). If you want to teach children to stay away from strangers, you tell them “Little Red Riding Hood.” If you want to teach them multiplication tables, it works there too. (There’s a video called Times Tales that animates numbers with narratives and helps kids memorize even math facts with stories).
 
Make a list. When we group things together that are similar, we visualize them together and see how they connect to each other. We have a tremendous ability to remember lists, whether we make up jingles for them or see them in our mind’s eye. Thinking of things’ similarities helps us remember them.
 
Visit your Mind Palace. Long before the BBC Sherlock visualized his Mind Palace to recall things, medieval folks imagined mental cathedrals, slotting facts or story blocks or shopping lists in to the stained glass windows of a cathedral and imagining themselves walking through it, seeing the items in order.
There are many more. When I have my students create journals for my Myth as Literature class, I give them complete freedom to use whatever tricks they can to help them remember the stories. Some make elaborate family trees. Some draw comics of their favorite scenes. Some write Tinder biographies of all the gods. Some theme their whole journal around what drink a god or hero would order at Starbucks and why it’s appropriate.
We need to do more of this, not less. We need to figure out what method works for us individually and what has a good track record on the whole, and we need to start employing these tricks. I’m heartened by the resurgence in Commonplace Books and Art and Bullet Journaling;  there does seem to be a trend currently to write things down that we want to remember.
Whatever we do, we need to combat the tendency to offload all our knowledge in to data files and websites. Otherwise we risk not only losing our ability to be creative, but also our own stories, our own lives, in the waters of Lethe, the River of Oblivion.
Living · Teaching

The Case for Joy, or the Other Side of Job

Alison BakerLeave a comment

There is a significant thread in Chaucer’s Canterbury Tales considering the issue of the biblical “Book of Job.” “The Clerk’s Tale” tells the story of Patient Griselda, a folk heroine often likened to Job. The Wife of Bath, in her Prologue, casts herself as Job’s wife, telling her husband to curse God and die. Other tales make reference more obliquely, but it is clear that it is a running trope, and that Chaucer keeps bringing it up from different angles invites us to ruminate on the lessons it teaches.

A painfully short summary of Job, so we’re all on the same page, is: Job is a wealthy man with a large family, and Satan tells God it’s only because of his many blessings that he is so devout; if God took away his gifts, Job would curse Him. God tests Job by having his crops fail, his children die, his body afflicted with sores—the works. His wife tells him to curse God. He does not. He does, however, question God, reporting that everyone around him thinks he must be pretty awful for God to be punishing him so. God even responds, and when He does, he explains that humans have too narrow a vision of suffering. It is not a result of sinning; it is character-building. God wins his bet, and Job gets everything back—even new kids.
Tonight it’s the narrow understanding of suffering that catches my attention. Do we need suffering to become our best selves? It certainly builds sympathy, but I like to think empathy can be developed through our imagination, not just experience. For tonight’s blog, my friends, you need to know that I am an incontrovertible happy-ass. (“Optimist” works too, but you lose the “happy,”and I’m not ok with that.)
I think we can imagine other people’s suffering and learn from it. Not as viscerally, certainly, but I don’t think we need to suffer everything to realize some things are terrible. I’ve never lost a limb, but I can imagine how that might change my life. I have had heart problems, but I don’t think I feel any more deeply for others with heart problems than for those who’ve lost limbs.
You can feel free to argue with me on this point, but if you wait, I’ll give you another one to argue. I want to consider the opposite conjecture tonight. We may have too narrow an understanding of suffering, but if so, we also suffer from an inadequate appreciation of joy.
If suffering builds character, joy defines it. The things that give us joy are the things that make us unique. You can’t choose what gives you joy any more than you can choose whom you love or whether or not you like brussels sprouts (I do—they make me feel like a giant Mopsy Rabbit raiding Mr McGregor’s garden), so we kind of identify and understand ourselves by those affinities.
When we feel joy, when we’re super giddy and delighted, we seem to sport a sort of shield against the world’s woes. When I’m on my way to class to teach a text I particularly love, I bounce a little and dance a little and smile really broadly. Mostly it’s infectious, but sometimes it’s disconcerting for folks. But that just entertains me more because I’m already in joy-mode, so my shield is up and other people’s lack of understanding doesn’t dim me at all. You know the geeks who get all goofy when they talk about what they love; that’s what I’m talking about.
There is power there.
The smaller moments of joy matter too—what the Danish call “hygge,” or cozy delight. They mean the warm, fuzzy feeling you get wearing warm, fuzzy slippers in front of a fire while drinking something warm and (not fuzzy) delicious. The point is clear. We use the metaphors because the physical feelings are so deep. That is joy too, if calm and simmering rather than bouncy and electric.
Another thing joy does for us, in addition to helping us understand how we are unique, is it allows us to make connections with other people. When we meet someone who likes the same things we do, we immediately feel a bond. English majors, for instance, how many of you form an instantaneous  attachment when you see someone in the wide world reading a book you love? I know best friends who have been besties for decades because they bonded over a particular book. If it speaks to both of you, you must be in some way the same.
We are, all of us–in lots of ways–the same.
When we find something that gives us joy and we meet someone else who also loves it, that’s enough to forge a connection. When we meet folks who love something we don’t really get, we can still react to the feeling, still sponge a little vicarious joy, and (ideally) encourage them to keep on loving it.
Joy produces joy. It also makes us healthier. There’s lots of research on this, some of which is summarized very briefly in the UC Berkeley Greater Good article linked at the bottom of this piece. But the evidence is piling up. If we don’t give enough thought to how suffering helps us, we also don’t recognize the profound impacts of joy. Maybe that’s ok. Maybe the point is just to feel it, not to analyze it to death. But if we understood it a little more, maybe we would make choices that put us in joy’s path more often. That seems like a good project.
Find what you love. Get it; do it; be it–boldly. Help others do the same. I’m off to read a book in my fuzzy slippers.
https://greatergood.berkeley.edu/article/item/six_ways_happiness_is_good_for_your_health
Also the cocoa picture is mine, but the picture of the young ladies, Mopsy, Flopsy, and Cottontail is, of course, from Beatrix Potter’s “The Tale of Peter Rabbit.”
Reading · Teaching

The Wife of Bath’s Experience

Alison BakerLeave a comment

Last week, as Americans and others watched testimonies before the Senate Judiciary Committee pertaining to a Supreme Court nomination, millions of people relived their own moments of traumatic assault and discussed why women fear they won’t be believed. And I taught “The Wife of Bath’s Tale.” In fact, we were discussing how survivors are treated (and were in the middle ages) at the same moment Dr. Christine Blasey Ford was under oath.

The Wife of Bath is, sadly in some ways, still screamingly relevant.
Her name is Alisoun and she is from Bath. Let’s start there. She is the only pilgrim among Chaucer’s Canterbury pilgrims whose prologue is longer than her tale, because in a very real sense her prologue is her tale.
She begins by establishing the basis for her authority, and it is not the standard. In the medieval period writers based their stories on previously attested, authoritative works.
People who wrote (and read) were overwhelmingly male, educated by studying languages and literature and theology–what Chaucer affectionately refers to as “olde books.”
Alisoun, traveling in a group of mostly men, of clergy and members of the lesser nobility, as well as tradesmen and middle class managers, asserts her voice and her authority and their basis in experience.
Her subject is marriage, or more precisely the relationship between married men and women. Really she’s interested in who has what she calls “maisterie” or “mastery” in the relationship. She has been married five times and is ready for a sixth; she describes herself as being of “five husbands’ schooling.” And she has a lot to say on the subject.
There are several remarkable things happening here. First, Alisoun is claiming authority for herself in an environment where it is both challenged (by the Friar, who tells her to leave off “preaching” and tell a nice story) and sought out (the Pardoner asks for tips, for her to teach him her “practice”—the same word you might use to describe work in law or medicine).
Second, her tale really is biography and a kind of testimony, where she explains how her marriages worked and gives voice to her experiences, some of which we would characterize today as abuse. She enters the masculine, patristic arena as she challenges St. Paul’s doctrine of chastity and the story of Jesus and the Samaritan, where Jesus tells the Samaritan her current husband is not her “real” husband.
Surely God gave us sexual organs, she argues, not just to purge urine, but also to make begetting children pleasurable. How many of the Samaritan’s husbands “counted,” she wonders aloud, and why would Jesus fix a number on marriages? She advocates for gentler rules—for acknowledging that the highest goal is virginity, but that people who do not maintain such austerity can be virtuous too. In a century of plague and a society with an outrageous mortality rate, she advocates for remarriage as a necessity, but also as humane.
When she’s done arguing, she recounts an overview of her first three marriages, but it’s structured as a laundry list of all the anti-feminist ideas circulating among scholars at the time. She knows these stereotypes and biases, and she manages to turn them back on her husbands, gaining mastery—of her husbands and their finances. These are all the accusations she’s had levied at her since she first married at the age of twelve.
The last part of her story recounts her fourth and fifth husbands, one of whom kept a mistress, and the other of whom beat her regularly, but these two were the ones she loved. That was the problem, she deduces.
Chaucer has done something here. He has let a woman speak, validated her experience, and given her a full, flawed, beautiful character. She explains herself on her own terms and enters a discussion that has not been designed for her presence.
We literally haven’t gotten yet to the Tale she tells about a rapist knight whose life is forfeit to the queen and who is rehabilitated when he discovers that all women want authority over their own lives. Today we don’t need to.
What we need to do is hear Dame Alisoun’s story. We need to believe her. We need to learn from her not exactly what she says, but what she shows—that these problems are centuries old, and it’s past time to fix them.
Living · Reading · Teaching · Uncategorized

Ode on a Shortened Summer

Alison Baker2 Comments

The most glorious myth of academic life is the summer vacation. People who don’t teach sometimes assume the summers are one long, three-month margarita party. That’s never the case, of course, although some may start out that way.

Alas.
Instead, those who work at state universities, at least in my experience, spend a significant chunk of summer doing the research or creative work they don’t have time to do during the school year. Then there’s the planning of next year’s courses. This year that was dramatic and demanding, as my school converted from a quarter system to a semester system, so even people who have been teaching the same things for some time had to reconceive their syllabus, reading lists, and teaching strategies.
There’s also a very real need to rest one’s head and do something different for a bit, so you can come back strong. I try to reserve time to read things I will never have occasion to teach. I wrote a beautiful list and made a stack of books at the beginning of summer. In addition to three more novels in my lovely, pulpy, mystery series, I intended to read twelve books, mostly fiction, one a re-read of a book I haven’t read since college (Kamouraska by Anne Hebert).
This year’s haul from Solvang. The Book Loft always has the best new fairy tales.
Looking at my list now, I only read four, started four more, and don’t know exactly what happened with the others. I never even pulled the mysteries off the shelf. I did, however, read a tall stack of new fairy tales I bought on a trip with my daughter, write a handful of blogs and a pitch for a children’s novel, and now I am plowing through three non-fiction books I just HAD to read before school starts.
I guess what I’m realizing that what’s valuable about summer for me is the ability to plan and then pitch the plan entirely.
From September to June everything has to be very carefully orchestrated. I keep list after list and plan and organize, so that all goes well in my classes and professional life. Summer is a welcome rest for my brain not just because I’m not prepping, teaching, or grading, but because I can afford to go unscripted for a while. It’s very liberating.
This summer, because we are shifting from quarters that ended in June to semesters that start in August, our summer is about seven weeks instead of eleven. And scripted or not, it has been jam-packed. We’ll be ready, because we must be, but we might all be starting out a little tired, which we usually don’t, I think.
I resisted this conversion for a long time. I voted against it. I grumbled when our vote was ignored, and we were simply told to convert. But now, staring down the barrel of my first week, I’m not worried. I’m glad I’ll have sixteen weeks instead of ten to get to know my students better. I’m glad to have more time to go deeper in the texts I teach and to assign more writing and more revision. I’m part of an academic family, so I’ll be glad to have more holidays match up and have some more time off in the winter. Mostly, though, I’m just always glad to go back. That’s the real perk of this job—not the summer break, but the fall return.
Teaching

Never Trust a Vowel

Alison BakerLeave a comment
 
Vowels are shifty things. I teach literature, and when people have trouble making out words in the text that they haven’t met before, I ask them to try and take them apart to see if they recognize the parts; then they can guess at the word’s meaning. I teach medieval lit, so sometimes students are looking at Middle English or another older form of English, but just as often, it’s a Modern English word that’s flummoxing them, and the rules don’t change.
 
My reasons for not trusting vowels are:1. Vowels can vary from language to language, so if we know the roots of words, we can see why the vowels are what they are. For instance, Latin “e” often corresponds to Greek “o” as in English “dentist” and “orthodontist.”

 
2. Vowels can vary to denote tense in English. Now if we invent a new word, we just slap an “-ed” on the end of it to make it past tense, but older forms of English had elaborate systems of vowel gradation, some of which we still have (“sing/sang,” “fly/flew,” etc.). So sometimes if a word has a funky vowel in it, you just aren’t familiar with its old past form.
 
3. Regional accents change the vowels mostly. Occasionally there will be a consonant difference, like the b/v variation in dialects of Spanish, but usually it’s vowels. The “You say potato; I say potato” song/joke/aphorism makes this pretty clear. It’s not potato/potaco (although I’d be willing to try a potaco). It’s all about the vowels.
 
So if you’re trying to deduce what a word means, there’s a process I advocate, and vowels figure absolutely last, the treacherous little buggers.
 
First, try and figure out the root word. Take off anything that looks suspiciously prefixey or suffixey, like “-ey” or “pre-.” Then look at the root in terms of the frame of consonants, not really looking at the vowels.  So if we’re trying to deduce, say, podiatrist, we’d first remove the “-ist“ which is a clearly a suffix. It indicates a person who does the thing at the beginning of the word (like artist or philanthropist). Next we cut off the “-iatr” from Greek iatros, meaning “doctor” (as in psychiatrist), and we are left with “pod.”
 
Pod. Pod. So how’s your Greek? English speakers are usually better guessing Latin than Greek because English borrowed so much from Latin directly, as well as from French, Italian, and Spanish. But Greek “pod” means ‘foot.’ In Latin it was “ped.” Never trust a vowel. English has more common words with ped-, like a bicycle pedal or a gas pedal, or different animals being bipedal or quadrupedal. But “pod,” not so much. Cephalopod. Arthropod. (These are literally head-footed things, like squids, and joint-footed things, like crabs or ladybugs. But we were talking about vowels.)
 
And now we’re done. But consider next time you have trouble understanding a person’s accent, just relaxing your head when it comes to hearing vowels. When you don’t recognize a word you read on the internet or in a newspaper, try it with different vowels, and see if you can figure it out. I think adopting a playful, puzzler’s attitude toward language is a recipe for easier understanding, less frustration, and maybe even compassion.
Reading · Teaching

Life, a User’s Manual

Alison BakerLeave a comment

A friend asked what he said was a Dante question—what are the seven deadly sins, and was that Kevin Spacey movie right.  I started explaining the difference between the Seven Deadlies and the levels of Dante’s Inferno, and it got me thinking about life, the universe, and everything.

The Seven Deadlies as most modern folk think of them (including the crazy serial killer Kevin Spacey plays in the film Seven) are Pride, Anger, Envy, Greed, Gluttony, Sloth, and Lust, and that list has been in use for centuries, deriving from medieval patristic sources, the earliest of which was probably Pope Gregory I.
As the Middle Ages wore on, penitential handbooks were produced that offered models of the sins growing out of one another (the “concatenation” of sins). Medieval manuscripts show the sins as the fruits of a tree, the root of which, in the Gregorian tradition, was Pride. From pride all other sins proceeded one from another, like fruit on branches. Later medieval authors would argue greed was the root, as the Feudal System crumbled and the working class argued for wages.
Penitential handbooks were like the rules to get to heaven.They explained what kind of penance was appropriate for particular sins.They outlined the seven deadlies and gave corresponding virtues that one could practice to combat a tendency toward sin.
We have a number of different examples of these handbooks with varying specifics, but the point was that we could fight our sinful nature. Sin may damn us, but virtue might save us. The oldest set of virtues were the four Cardinal Virtues (inherited from the classical tradition) of Prudence, Temperance, Fortitude, and Justice, plus the three Theological (read: Christian) virtues of Faith, Hope, and Love.  Penitential handbooks drew out the smaller divisions of these big sins and virtues, and offered solutions almost like a doctor would prescribe a remedy—practice humility if you want to avoid pride, and so forth.
Dante used these sins and virtues to structure his Divine Comedy, but he had more circles to fill and more axes to grind. He made use of those subdivisions in the penitential handbooks (like separating pride in to hypocrisy, fraud, despair, and others), and then he took them even further.
Fraud was the worst for him—a purposeful misuse of our God-given reason. Simple fraud (stealing, seducing, counterfeiting, and others) is punished in the 8th circle, but the 9thcircle, where Satan himself resides, includes treacherous fraud—purposeful, planned deceit of family, of countrymen, of benefactors, of God.  Dante’s Purgatory and Paradise, of course, have corresponding virtues, in probably the most elaborate extension ever of the ideas in those penitential handbooks.
The idea that we can combat the evils of the world and in ourselves remains attractive. And the idea that there are always rules to follow (I think also of Apollo’s Creed, that people should “Know themselves” and have/do “Nothing in excess” as well as the Golden Rule or the Ten Commandments–heck, even Little Red Riding Hood’s rules of “Stay on the path,” and “Don’t talk to strangers”) means that we’re pretty consistent about wanting things spelled out for us.
There is comfort in knowing there is a remedy. And there is comfort in knowing that the evils you see have a name. That is old, old power—naming something so you can control it.
As usual, I find we haven’t changed much over the millenia. We still find strength in identifying evil, naming it, and working to undo it. We still work efficiently with rules to follow; it’s just that the rules shift some with new contexts and culture. We still try to improve on certain scales—practice gratitude to be happy (that’s a splinter of humility, by the way); cultivate a practice of generosity by volunteering and donating; practice, defend, and enact justice.
People haven’t changed, really. I find that comforting too.
(I stole the title for this post from Georges Perec’s novel, but I expect it’s been used elsewhere as well; it’s all connected. And the image is a creative project for my Epics class this spring–a pinata depiction of Satan’s head as described by Dante. It was glorious.)
Teaching

Postmodernism is Medieval, and How My Students Rock

Alison BakerLeave a comment

I have often observed that Postmodern literature is very medieval. But this is the first year I have had trouble separating my pride in training up some medieval lit lovers and coaching the next generation of postmodern writers.

Let me back up. Postmodern literature (literature written after World War II—technically the literary movement that follows Modernism) is characterized by a sense of upending the rules of literature. In novels it can mean disregarding or breaking away from the Grand Narrative tradition—telling a story from a different perspective, or out of order, or with a narrator who is self-reflexive to the point of discussing how the book is progressing with the reader. Julian Barnes’s History of the World in Ten and a Half Chapters tells the story of the great flood from the perspective of a woodworm. Italo Calvino’s If on a Winter’s Night a Traveler breaks up a self-reflexive narrative arc (where the Reader is a character) with ten other narratives– aborted “books” the Reader is trying to read.
Essentially, writing fiction becomes play.
How is Postmodernism medieval then?
Many of the tricks Postmodern authors use–playing with order of events, perspective, and amplifying the treatment of relatively small subjects—are all outlined as tricks to help one write in the blindingly contemporary (c. 1200-1215) Poetria Nova, The New Poetry of Geoffrey of Vinsauf. And Geoffrey says he got his best stuff from the Roman rhetorician, Cicero.
Geoffrey advocates taking a small subject like the love affair of one of the lesser known Trojan princes and telling that story as its own narrative. Something that got maybe four lines in The Iliad turns in to the Old French Romance of Troy, then Geoffrey Chaucer’s Troilus and Criseyde, then William Shakespeare’s Troilus and Cressida. This is how medieval authors came up with new material.
It’s also how Postmodernists do the same thing.
It’s also how a significant number of my senior literature students made me particularly proud this quarter.
I taught an Introduction to Folklore class this spring. It had a pretty sweeping scope, from the “depth” text of the medieval Welsh Mabinogion, on which we spent nearly three weeks, to the “breadth” of an anthology of folktales from The Arabian Nights to the 20thcentury. Along the way I have students write an analytical paper, so they can figure out how these tales and conventions work well enough to explain it to others, and then they can choose to write more analyses or to write their own “folk tale,” since they know all about how it works.
What I got in several cases far exceeded my expectations. I got stories that made use not only of the folk motifs we studied in this class, but the literature and conventions some of them studied in other classes with me earlier in their careers. Some reused characters from Ovid’s Metamorphoses and Old Norse myths. Some borrowed scenes from the Odyssey  and Volsunga Saga. One told a tale (including Ovidian characters and fairy tale motifs) using tarot cards, a trope used by Calvino in his Castle of Crossed Destinies. One wrote a fairy tale for her second paper and then an analysis of her own tale for her final paper.  Without my prompting, students took my assignment and ran with it in all manner of cool directions.
I am overjoyed and so very impressed. I am grateful. I am giddy. I am never going to stop giving students creative options. This kind of work means they’re not just learning the stories—they are—but they are also learning techniques, internalizing values, making the literature of the past their own. Nothing gives me more hope for a bright future than students who create boldly, applying what they learn to their own world, and ultimately imagining new worlds.
The kids are going to be ok, everyone. I promise.
(The image is the promotion image from the 2005 Terry Gilliam film The Brothers Grimm, which is also a Postmodern pastiche of multiple fairy tale sources, and this class’s last text.)
Living · Teaching

Once More to Graduation

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This weekend ended my sixteenth year at my current position. That’s a lot of graduations, really, but I never get tired of it.

I never get tired of seeing people reach their goals, sometimes after many years, and so all the more richly appreciated. I never get tired of families shouting the names of their young folks (and some not as young) as they cross the stage. I never get tired of hearing the stories of graduates as they thank their families and loved ones for helping them get there.
Ok, I’m a sap. But it’s the best day of the academic year.
In a very real sense, it’s the reason we do our jobs. It’s the reason the university exists—to give students a solid foundation in learning that they can apply the rest of their lives. To open the doors to the universe and see where they will go.
This weekend’s graduation was spectacular again—so many wonderful students crossed that platform; so many hands to shake, so many wishes to share.
And then there was one more.
All weekend long, there was commencement after commencement, from Friday evening through Sunday evening. The one I attended was Sunday afternoon. But I was back this morning, because in the most ruthlessly, beautifully efficient use of resources, the high school my kids attend–which happens to be annexed to my university campus–used the still-erected stage and already-wired sound system for their own graduation. And my oldest child marched down that aisle.
His hat didn’t fit and kept sliding to one side. His medal was twisted around to reveal a 20-sided die from Dungeons and Dragons taped to the back, as if that were his award. He looked uncomfortable, but also excited, anticipating. He was perfect.
I just sort of assumed my graduation stance and cried. I kept seeing him as a baby, as a kindergartner, as a miserable middle-schooler, and none of that fit with the vision of the tall, handsome young man he was walking down from the stage, diploma in one hand, doofy, ill-fitting hat in the other. He didn’t care about the hat. He was over it–moving on. He was happy.
That’s why graduations are great. No matter what happened on the way, they are crystalline moments where we get to pause and just be happy. Yes, tomorrow will bring more work, and we’ll have to set new goals and carry on. But to pause and recognize good work, to be content for a moment and celebrate success with those who have the most vested interest in your happiness, to breathe in a sweet breath of completion and accomplishment and not worry about what comes next for a little while: that’s worth a lot.
And to share in that feeling with hundreds of people at the same time—that’s some powerful magic.
Congratulations to the Class of 2018. We’re ready for you.
Reading · Teaching

Slow Reading: How What We Read Becomes Who We Are

Alison BakerLeave a comment

I went to my annual conference last week. I have spent twenty-two long weekends in May in Kalamazoo, Michigan at the biggest annual international medieval conference in North America. Coming from the West coast, I always think it should take me half a day, and the last few years it has taken upwards of 16 hours. This time I pretty much decided I’ve had a good run, but I don’t have time for the chaos of travel.

So it was important that I got good stuff out of what might be my last run. So the universe obliged me. This time I came home thinking big thoughts about Slow Reading.
As my university converts from a quarter schedule to semesters starting in the fall, we are all thinking about how our courses will change. Mostly, as a literature instructor, I’m looking forward to adding some texts back in to my syllabus. I certainly took things out when I moved from fifteen-week semesters to ten-week quarters.
But as I think about my Chaucer class, and as I met with Chaucerians and other folks who teach literature (I went to a particularly great session on teaching literature in translation), I think I won’t add text so much as add depth. I’m going to embrace, model, and flex my Slow Reading skills.
My session was a workshop on pronouncing Chaucer’s Middle English. We spent 90 minutes on 220 lines of the Wife of Bath’s prologue. It was awesome.
With that much time, you can figure out what everything means, then figure out how reading it different ways changes that meaning. You can talk about performance issues—tone, pacing, what words you stress or scumble, and what all that does to build an understanding of the character.
I’m just getting my head in to this mode, but since a recent article tripped across my social media feed reminding us that “slow reading” helps us think deeper and cultivate empathy, I started a list of things I want our slow reading to do.
Here’s the preliminary list.
Slow Reading is:

Knowing what every word means and does;
Looking at connotations in double entendres;
Understanding the context of the work;
Reading with attention to sound and visual rhyme;
Reading for musicality;
Reading for voice/persona;
Knowing your language;
Knowing your lit;
Knowing your history;
Knowing your shit.

Ok, I got a bit carried away at the end. It’s a work in progress. But it’s important, and I’ll keep thinking about it and working on it. This is how the words become a part of us. Skimming doesn’t do it. We need to read some things really deeply and let them change us. We cannot overstress the importance of the process of reading.
I’m starting to get really excited about semesters.
(The article I was referencing above is “Reading Literature Makes us Smarter and Nicer” by Annie Murphy Paul, published in Time, and available here: http://ideas.time.com/2013/06/03/why-we-should-read-literature/)
Living · Teaching

A Post for Teacher Appreciation Week: In Praise of Teachers

Alison BakerLeave a comment

I didn’t plan on these two weeks going together, but I like that they do. This week is Teacher Appreciation Week, so my Facebook memories are full of notes about my favorite teachers from my childhood and my kids’ childhood. Ok, I’ll bite. Last week I was singing praise for students, but of course, it’s all connected.

I was a pretty good student. I liked learning stuff. I wanted to be smart. But I didn’t want to be too smart. I didn’t want to be The Smart Girl. First, I knew they didn’t have many friends, and second, I really didn’t think I was Smart, not with a capital S. I kept high grades, but not straight A’s. (If Mom-Alison knew Kid-Alison, we’d have a talk, by the way, but we didn’t, not for years.)

Third grade was a banner year. It was the only year until grad school, probably, that I got straight As all year long. And the reason was Mrs. Jeanne Mayer.
Mrs. Mayer made us buy a composition book. We brought it in every day, and we copied down the Riddle of the Day and the answer to yesterday’s riddle upside down underneath it. This was brilliant. I learned to write clearly; she explained that we’d want to keep it, so we should do our best. Eight-year old me bought that, hook, line, and sinker. In fact, I still have it. I doubt she meant us to keep it that long.

As a mom I learned what a big deal 3rd grade was. It’s the last real primary year, the bridge to “upper grades,” and a crunch year, making sure kids have mastered their multiplication tables and have “learned to read” (so they can “read to learn” in 4-6). As a child, I felt none of this.I thought 3rd grade was a blast.

We learned cursive that year, and this was the most painless practice I ever did. They were dorky jokes, but I loved it. I looked forward to hearing the answer the next day. It started our day, so we always started out laughing, and I learned school was fun.
That was huge.
I got straight A’s that year because I couldn’t bear to do less than that for her. There was a group of us who got to go out for pizza at the end of the year with the vice principal, so I wasn’t the smart girl; I was one of several.
But that wasn’t the carrot for me. I did it for Mrs Mayer.
She was kind and funny and smart and wanted us to learn how to be good people as well as good students, and in her class those overlapped considerably. From that point on, I loved school, and I kept loving school.
When I went to grad school, it wasn’t because I had a Brilliant Plan in place; it was because I couldn’t bear to stop taking classes. When I decided on a career, I found one that took that in to account—as an educator, part of my job is to keep learning, and it was the only way I could figure to get paid to keep going to class. And in a very real way, I owe the flicking of that switch in my brain to Jeanne Mayer.
So here’s to teachers! For the hard work they do shaping humans, flicking switches, lighting fires in minds and hearts. Happy Teacher Appreciation Week. Hug a teacher, y’all.
(And there’s a “Reflections” shot of me as a third-grader. The 70s were hard on all of us.)