Beginner's Mind

My students are busily typing away at an assignment I've given them. Which surprises me. Ordinarily, when I bring my classes to a computer lab, I have to all but beat students away from IM, Facebook, YouTube, or any of the other distractions I, too, would ordinarily have open in side windows. But either they're getting better at hiding their in-class extracurricular activities, or they're genuinely interested in getting some writing done. Better in class than at home, which is why I'm offering them the opportunity in the first place.

But it creates a kind of onus, I think, that I should write alongside them, and so here I am.

Worse, I once joked that I should tackle their assignments in order to set an example, and though I'm reluctant to do so while they're still working on a piece (I wouldn't want anyone to feel even subconsciously beholden to imitate me), I do believe in modeling as an educational tool. The good news: They've already turned in a much shorter version of this same assignment, so I will tackle it.

The assignment: To write a short credo about my views related to community. (I'm basing these assignments on suggestions from curriculum offered by the This I Believe series on NPR, but I've tailored it to my particular classroom project.)


Yesterday, I was writing in my online classroom site about the origins of the word community, because a student had made some guesses about the etymology and the intentions of "the founder of the word community." I promised I'd look into it, because I'm a geek and enjoy such investigations, and I did so that very evening. I discovered (thank you, OED) that the word stems from an early Latin noun communis, an abstraction meaning "fellowship, community of relations or feelings."

But this word in turn developed from the Latin roots that form our contemporary word "common." There are differing theories about how these roots originally combined, but I prefer the combination of com ("together") and munis ("bound" or "under obligation"), because it reinforces my belief that a community holds certain communal or social obligations, whether the whole is somehow obligated to assist its individual members or each of the members is obligated to assist the whole (why not both?).

And this is what I believe about community: that it is a group of people who, for whatever reason (and these are myriad) come together for mutual support and compassion, who understand each other to the best of their capacity and seek to help each other for the common good.

Or, this is what it should be.

My friend Beth Ann Fennelly has a new book of of poetry out, Unmentionables, which I've been salivating for since I finished her nonfiction book Great with Child a year ago. I haven't ordered it yet, but I've been thinking about the book, so to whet my yearning I've picked up an old favorite, her book Tender Hooks, to browse the poems there. If "browse" is possible--it's accidentally apt, her title, because while there's nothing "tender" about her poems (they are sweet, but sweet the way of baker's chocolate, sharp and honest and un-sugared), they do tend to reel me into them, to snare me so I have little choice but to read the next poem, and the next poem, and the next. She's a hell of an angler, Beth Ann.

Anyway, in reading the next poem tonight, I found all over again a section that reminded me that this is my first week back in the classroom, teaching--what else?--freshman comp. It's the second section of her disjointed but delicious poem "A Study of Writing Habits":

2. It's a Doggy-Dog World

for poets who grow up to be comp teachers
because our spelling is recked forever
so are our idioms and old wise tales

a student writes of the novel
that won "the Bullet Surprise"
it drives her "out of my mime"

It's good to keep a sense of humor
if your name sounds like "beta amphetamine"
and you find yourself thinking
when you're supposed to be sleeping
a bullet surprise would be fine

I've been neglecting this blog nearly all summer. That doesn't mean I've been neglecting my writing, of course: I've written reviews of the books I've read, I've typed up my journals from my trip to Scotland (and written a 20,000-word photodocumentary of the trip for friends and family), I've worked on stories and even started adapting my novel into a graphic novel. And since this blog is, presumably, for my students, I suppose I can excuse myself for writing elsewhere these past few months. But then, when I started this last September, I claimed I wanted to demonstrate writing practice, and when I end each academic year in the spring, I send my students away with the reminder that writing doesn't adhere to a calendar, so I also suppose, if I'm being honest, that I ought to extend this visible means of writing practice into the summer months myself. But I chose to write elsewhere.

So be it.

I'm back now, is all I know--here to begin anew, to rediscover Natalie Goldberg's "beginner's mind," to remember that "each time [I sit down to write] is a new journey with no maps." After a long and meandering hiatus, here I've wandered into this blog again. So I write on.

Mapless or not, I've been thinking of setting myself certain goals this semester, at least related to this blog. So, for myself, here's what I hope to do:

• I'll try to post at least once a week.
• I'll try to keep tabs on the writing I'm doing, even if I'm not doing that writing here.
• I'll occasionally comment on the teaching craft, perhaps as a means of developing an idea I've had for a book on teaching.
• And, because I enjoy the stupid things, I'll keep tossing in any meme I find related to reading or writing or creativity in general, because, well, why not.

At least, that's the plan. But now that I've made the map, I'll go ahead and throw it away, because frankly, I often find wandering more fruitful, when I have the time to do so.

How can I resist? Some friends of mine in another blog site have been passing this around, and though it's nothing new, I can't help but participate:


1) Look at the list and bold those you have read.

2) Italicise those you intend to read (as in the book is bought and sitting on my shelf).

3) Underline the books you LOVE.

4) Strike out the ones you thought SUCKED.



1. Pride and Prejudice - Jane Austen

2. The Lord of the Rings - JRR Tolkien

3. Jane Eyre - Charlotte Bronte

4. Harry Potter series - JK Rowling

5. To Kill a Mockingbird - Harper Lee

6. The Bible (also, may I please add The Dhamapada? the Tao Te Ching? the Bhagavad-Gita? the Qur'an, which, though I've not yet finished it, is so far glorious?)

7. Wuthering Heights - Emily Bronte

8. Nineteen Eighty Four - George Orwell

9. His Dark Materials - Philip Pullman

10. Great Expectations - Charles Dickens

11. Little Women - Louisa M Alcott

12. Tess of the D'Urbervilles - Thomas Hardy

13. Catch 22 - Joseph Heller

14. Complete Works of Shakespeare (most of the plays)

15. Rebecca - Daphne Du Maurier

16. The Hobbit - JRR Tolkien

17. Birdsong - Sebastian Faulks

18. Catcher in the Rye - JD Salinger

19. The Time Traveller's Wife - Audrey Niffenegger

20. Middlemarch - George Eliot

21. Gone With The Wind - Margaret Mitchell

22. The Great Gatsby - F Scott Fitzgerald

23. Bleak House - Charles Dickens

24. War and Peace - Leo Tolstoy

25. The Hitch Hiker's Guide to the Galaxy - Douglas Adams

26. Brideshead Revisited - Evelyn Waugh

27. Crime and Punishment - Fyodor Dostoyevsky

28. Grapes of Wrath - John Steinbeck

29. Alice in Wonderland - Lewis Carroll

30. The Wind in the Willows - Kenneth Grahame (I need to re-read it)

31. Anna Karenina - Leo Tolstoy

32. David Copperfield - Charles Dickens

33. Chronicles of Narnia - CS Lewis

34. Emma - Jane Austen (Why are the Austens separate?)

35. Persuasion - Jane Austen

36. The Lion, The Witch and The Wardrobe (how is this distinct from the entire series?--see #33)

37. The Kite Runner - Khaled Hosseini

38. Captain Corelli's Mandolin - Louis De Bernieres

39. Memoirs of a Geisha - Arthur Golden

40. Winnie the Pooh - AA Milne

41. Animal Farm - George Orwell

42. The Da Vinci Code - Dan Brown [I'm proud I haven't read this!]

43. One Hundred Years of Solitude - Gabriel Garcia Marquez

44. A Prayer for Owen Meaney - John Irving

45. The Woman in White - Wilkie Collins

46. Anne of Green Gables - LM Montgomery

47. Far From The Madding Crowd - Thomas Hardy

48. The Handmaid's Tale - Margaret Atwood

49. Lord of the Flies - William Golding

50. Atonement - Ian McEwan

51. Life of Pi - Yann Martel

52. Dune - Frank Herbert

53. Cold Comfort Farm - Stella Gibbons

54. Sense and Sensibility - Jane Austen

55. A Suitable Boy - Vikram Seth

56. The Shadow of the Wind - Carlos Ruiz Zafon

57. A Tale Of Two Cities - Charles Dickens

58. Brave New World - Aldous Huxley

59. The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-time - Mark Haddon

60. Love In The Time Of Cholera - Gabriel Garcia Marquez

61. Of Mice and Men - John Steinbeck (I've forgotten most of it--I should read it again)

62. Lolita - Vladimir Nabokov

63. The Secret History - Donna Tartt

64. The Lovely Bones - Alice Sebold--part of my dissertation!

65. Count of Monte Cristo - Alexandre Dumas

66. On The Road - Jack Kerouac

67. Jude the Obscure - Thomas Hardy

68. Bridget Jones' Diary - Helen Fielding

69. Midnight's Children - Salman Rushdie

70. Moby Dick - Herman Melville

71. Oliver Twist - Charles Dickens

72. Dracula - Bram Stoker

73. The Secret Garden - Frances Hodgson Burnett

74. Notes From A Small Island - Bill Bryson

75. Ulysses - James Joyce

76. The Bell Jar - Sylvia Plath

77. Swallows and Amazons - Arthur Ransome

78. Germinal - Emile Zola

79. Vanity Fair - William Makepeace Thackeray

80. Possession - AS Byatt

81. A Christmas Carol - Charles Dickens

82. Cloud Atlas - David Mitchell

83. The Color Purple - Alice Walker

84. The Remains of the Day - Kazuo Ishiguro

85. Madame Bovary - Gustave Flaubert

86. A Fine Balance - Rohinton Mistry

87. Charlotte's Web - EB White

88. The Five People You Meet In Heaven - Mitch Albom (should I really admit to having read this? oh well--it was almost part of my dissertation, but I found a way to get rid of it)

89. Adventures of Sherlock Holmes - Sir Arthur Conan Doyle

90. The Faraway Tree Collection - Enid Blyton

91. Heart of Darkness - Joseph Conrad (are you reading this, Grey!?!?!)

92. The Little Prince - Antoine De Saint-Exupery--and in French, no less!

93. The Wasp Factory - Iain Banks

94. Watership Down - Richard Adams

95. A Confederacy of Dunces - John Kennedy Toole

96. A Town Like Alice - Nevil Shute

97. The Three Musketeers - Alexandre Dumas (I started it; I need to finish it)

98. Hamlet - William Shakespeare (again, how is this distinct from the complete works?--see #15)

99. Charlie and the Chocolate Factory - Roald Dahl

100. Les Miserables - Victor Hugo

I've been going through my students' online discussion posts this semester, looking at the statistics, and I think I'm about ready to collapse.

So far this semester, I've written 276 discussion posts. Many of them are short replies to questions or comments on other posts, but several have been lengthy essays. But that's not the part that hurts my brain.

I have also read 1,218 posts this semester.

Of those, a full 999 were formal response essays, and while the average of all my classes was well below the required 600 words per essay, the posts did average around 400 words a pop, which is roughly a single typed page, double-spaced. That means, had I been reading these on paper, as if my students had turned them in during class, I'd have read almost 1,000 pages this semester.

And that's only counting response essays. It doesn't count the slew of questions, workshop group discussions, and pop-culture commentary my students also posted. It also doesn't count their formal research papers.

If I count only the papers I received and read, and I assume an average of 3 pages per short paper and 8 pages per long paper (which is about what the averages were), I also read 1,124 pages of research.

And then there were my students' research portfolios, full of abstracts and outlines and bibliographies and notes.

And their e-mails, sometimes as many as a dozen a day.

On top of all that, I also judged our campus Creative Writing contest, which added another 400 pages or so of reading, and I've been working with a student creative writing group (though I admit, I don't always find time to read all their work), which has added another few dozen pages.

With all this, somehow I've managed to also stay on top of my New Yorkers, half my Shambhala Suns, and a few of my issues of One Story; squeeze in three books this semester; and regularly read several blogs and news articles, as well as every word of every issue of our student newspaper.

No wonder I've finally had to start wearing reading glasses once in a while.

I ought to put this on a stamp and keep it on my desk, so I can just slap it on a paper whenever I find cause:

"Typos are very important to all written form. It gives the reader something to look for so they aren't distracted by the total lack of content in your writing."
~ Randy K. Milholland, Something Positive Comic, 7-3-05

(This, courtesy of my dad. Was he trying to tell me something?)