Kids these days do "just enough"....

Since 1:45 this afternoon, I've been focusing on my writing students' papers and progress in class. Yes, it's been sporadic, so it's not been a whole 12 hours straight of calculating and essay commentary.  After all, I had to catch up on a couple of hours of sleep that I lost yesterday in the midst of throwing a sleepover birthday for my ten-year-old (which could be a whole post of its own).

By midnight, I was completely wrecked in spirit by this class.  They're sucking the life out of me this semester by their overt disinterest in learning anything.  Turn in homework? No. Work through the online lab component? No. Write an essay without 42 glaring grammar errors?  Impossible.  I've lost my mind over it, so I got in bed.  Then I decided to write after the nagging thoughts wouldn't leave me alone.

Ultimately I've come to the realization that students will do "just enough" to get by.  I just don't operate that way.  I don't find it worth the trouble. I complained to M,  "What is the point of half-ass doing something? It's a waste of time!" If you don't do it the way you are capable of doing it, spend the time elsewhere (doing something you'd get something out of). For example, I asked one of my more intelligible students to rewrite his 5 paragraph essay based upon my comments of his first draft. FIVE paragraphs.  He whined and complained, asking if he could just make the edits on the page rather than rewrite it.  Another student asked, "Since I already received a passing score on one of my 3 required essays, I don't really have to write anymore, do I?"  These students are going through the paces without paying any attention to the wisdom and growth that comes with applying themselves and.... actually learning something.  

Oscar Wilde once wrote, "Suffering is one very long moment. We cannot divide it by seasons. We can only record its moods, and chronicle their return. With us time itself does not progress. It revolves. It seems to circle round one centre of pain. The paralysing immobility of a life every circumstance of which is regulated after an unchangeable pattern, so that we eat and drink and lie down and pray, or kneel at least for prayer, according to the inflexible laws of an iron formula: this immobile quality, that makes each dreadful day in the very minutest detail like its brother, seems to communicate itself to those external forces the very essence of whose existence is ceaseless change."

I see the connection he makes to the monotony.

I get the repetitious choreography of life's dance, but I still enjoy the movement.  It's fascinating to me that although each day could be the same, there's a way of looking at the world that makes one search out the differences.  Not only search them out, but also being attentive to what those difference are trying to tell us. The closer I listen, the more in tune I feel that what I'm doing is happening as it should. 

This type of life comes from learning what it means to observe and live in a world, not of perfection but of practice.  When we do yoga, we call it our "practice." No one perfects yoga, nor does one perfect life.  But we should actively, always mindfully, practice.  Life is too short to do "just enough."

Writing for what?

I turned 39 yesterday, and although that isn't quite a milestone, I'm happy to be done with 38.  Granted, I'm blessed to have rounded the corner past some serious events: separation, divorce, cancer. I really can't be anything but happy and blessed when look back on last year.  Glad to be alive. Healthy. Cancer Free.  Happy. Happy. Happy.

I've got writing on the brain lately.  I assisted two of my close friends this past weekend at a writer's convention.  I met various aspiring hopefuls there.  Part of me wished these strangers had come with dust jackets representing the books they'd written.  I found the group to be a curiously strange collection of housewives, retirees, and shut-ins.  Perhaps they weren't, but my one day exposure to their idiosyncratic writer brains really sent me home questioning how I would truly fit in.... whether it was a group that I could eagerly provide feedback and wondering -- could that relationship be in any way symbiotic?

I've come to several conclusions about my writing:
There is casual writing (this blog fits that category).  If I make the time, this comes easily to me.  It's cathartic, and I write about what I know to be true.

Then, there's "thinking about seriously writing."  It's like thinking about being in a relationship.  Do I want to really put in the time?  Do I have enough life material (am I enough)?

When I graduated from the University, one of the professors suggested I wait to go to grad school.  She said I should get some actual "life experience" first.  I took her advice, and it was the worst advice ever.  I wandered so far away from my original academic path that it was rather difficult to find my way back.  I'm still struggling.  Screw the life experience.  Now I am into decades full of life experience and back at working on my graduate level courses.

There's also what we call "academic writing":
I use that term with my Developmental Writing students all of the time.  I just, moments ago, emailed my third academic writing of the semester to my professor.  The course I'm taking covers some of the classical literature from ancient Greece and Rome, from plays to philosophy. It's a broad course that covers basically everything classical.  Though I've made A's in all of my previous graduate level courses so far, with this one I'm destined to earn a B. I've accepted it as my fate though I'm rather pissed about it.  Dr. R assigns a multitude of readings which we must summarize over the course of the week, give our analysis, post on discussion boards our various questions pertaining to the text, and then, every couple weeks or so, we write an argumentative paper on one of the texts.  I painfully crafted my first paper on the absence of Achilles' guilt in The Illiad. I followed Dr. R's very specific instructions and STILL got an 83.  With little hope, I submitted my second paper only to receive an 89.

The conclusion I've drawn is this:
In no way over the course of a discussion and a reading is any student going to match the breadth and depth of knowledge of this professor: this man that visits Greece, Italy, Rome, at least twice a year.  This man that has been teaching this class for 20 years expects us to synthesize over the course of a week or two, the body of knowledge that he has been repetitively teaching for the last two decades.  There is no better way to learn than by teaching. He certainly drills us for specific details that we might've missed in our papers.  I find it an impossible task.

I argue (ha) that it's not a fair judgement on his part.  I love to learn, but I am a slow absorber.... like that of a generic paper towel.

And so it goes.... For now I write my casual blog. That is, I write my casual blog until Aristotle's text comes in the mail tomorrow. Ugh.