Nothing happens

Nobody comes. Nobody goes.

(Can anyone identify the above quote? Or why I might be writing it?)

Sobering thought from AP lit leader

In the article found here, in which an AP reader interviews Jim Barkus, the head of AP reading for the literature section, are the following sobering statistics. They should give pause to those of us who use only objective tests to measure student learning. (I’m talking about non-comp faculty. We writing teachers have to assign and read multiple papers.) It should also give English departments that place writing students based entirely on a test like the Asset or the Compass something to think about.

Questioner: How would you describe the correlation between the objective portion of the test and the discursive essays?

Jim Barkus: Well, the correlation is what it is. We don’t have any ideal number there, because each year objective items change, and the free-response items change, and on any given set of questions the correlation may be higher or lower than another year. We think, however, that we ought to be somewhere around a 50% correlation. That is, if you just think about your classroom, about 50% of the time the good students who do well on the objective part of your examination will do well on your essays. And those students who are struggling will usually not perform well on either section. We have those other students who can’t take an objective exam. They really struggle, and yet, when they sit down with a piece of paper and a pencil, they write excellent essays. We don’t look for a one-to-one correlation. We’re more concerned about students’ performance.

Many faiths, one heart

Seen on a fountain in a garden at the Cathedral of the Assumption today. I’m frustrated I didn’t bring my camera. “Many faiths, one heart. Cathedral of the Assumption Foundation.”

I’m done…. Flying out of Louisville tomorrow early. It was a haul, exhausting and sometimes hilarious.

• “I don’t know what syntax is, but that isn’t going to stop me talking about it.”
• The characters in this story are really really complicated and so the writing is really complited and so is the syntix and the details.
• The father is a simple man, and so he speaks in really short sentences.
• The syntax is just a bunch of really long runon sentences that go on and on and signify how the father and son really are detached from each other and even hate each other.
• The rod has really pretty letters on it, beautiful wingdings. (It’s meant to be windings.)
• The rod is married. “The ‘beautiful weddings’ on the rod signify it’s singificance to the father and the son.

Gads.

But I’m done. I read over 1000 essays in seven days. I ate a lot of greasy overcooked food, so much that today I just stopped eating. My body said “enough already,” and now I’m hungry because it’s the next day and I’m finally winding down.

I met a postcolonialist from India too late to get a really good conversation going, and I’m sad because we had similar reactions to being expatriates. I’d like to know more about Calcutta.
Bed time.

Juxtaposition: World churches

Just one big soul:

My college has committed to assigning a college-wide text, Steinbeck’s The Grapes of Wrath, next year. I’ve signed on, so I’m reading it here in Louisville, Kentucky, between reading scores of papers on Dalton Trumbo’s Johnny Got His Gun. It’s been a good 20 years since I last read Steinbeck’s classic, but I’m enjoying the experience, as I did the first time, and I keep thinking of the chapter where Tom Joad meets the Reverend Jim Casy again and Casy tells him about the doubts that have led him to give up preaching, and the epiphany he had about God:

“I figgered about the Holy Sperit and the Jesus road. I figgered, ‘Why do we got to hang it on God or Jesus? Maybe,’ I figgered, ‘maybe it’s all men an’ all women we love; maybe that’s the Holy Sperit–the human spiret–the whole shebang. Maybe all men got one big soul ever’body’s a part of. Now I sat there thinkin’ it, an’ all of a sudden–I knew it. I knew it so deep down that it was true, and I still know it.”

And I love what he knows, and the deep down conviction of it, and the truth in it: Buddha nature, Christ in everyone, the kingdom of heaven is in you, all that.

Cathedral of the Assumption, Louisville, Kentucky:

(Sunday evening): After today’s reading, I found myself unexpectedly hungry for Mass. One of the RCIA leaders told us once that his favorite thing to do when traveling is to attend Mass at the local church, and I understood this afternoon as I left the reading room. I wanted to find a church and enter it, to partake of the Eucharist, that moment of grace, and to feel the lightness and clarity that comes with it.

The guidebook pointed me to the Cathedral of the Assumption, only a few blocks from my hotel, so I walked there, wondering if it would be possible for me to slip in quietly and sit in the back, as Mass was well underway by that time. I entered a side door and climbed stairs to the sound of joyous singing. Before I got to the top of the stairs the door opened and a man beckoned me in, then pointed to a chair. It was just moments before the Eucharist, and so I was able to partake and then to kneel and feel the stillness flow through me, still surprised by it. A different church, unfamiliar people, and yet the same liturgy, the same quiet ritual, the same icons, and an overwhelming sense of being home.

Afterwards I looked around at the beauty of the architecture in this 1852 church, and at the light flowing through the stained glass over the altar, a light that was echoed minutes later outside, as it streamed in long silvery rays from behind gold-tinted clouds.

Reverend Casy again:

“Before I knowed it, I was sayin’ out loud, ‘The hell with it! There ain’t no sin and there ain’t no virtue. There’s just stuff people do. It’s all part of the same thing.”

All part of the wonder and the joy and the silence and the mystery. Every moment. Being Catholic and loving Buddhism, having a childhood dog named Shiva, and a Kuan Yin statue on my shelf. All part of the beauty. Inscape.

**Images taken from the website for the Cathedral of the Assumption in Louisville, KY.

AP funnies

Amendment:

The passage the students read for this year’s AP question in the prose section is a short piece where Joe (Johnny) from Dalton Trumbo’s Jonhhy Got his Gun is camping with his father and chooses for the first time in eight years to take off and go fishing with a friend rather than with his dad. His father, while clearly disappointed, gives Joe his treasured fishing rod to use, so Joe can give his own rod to his friend, who has none. The prompt asked them to consider what literary devices Dalton used to characterize the relationship between the Joe and his father, and gave as examples the use of details, point of view, and syntax. The responses were hilarious at times.

• Joe from Dalton Trumbo’s Johnny Got His Gun is “like a black widow spider, going from mate to mate.”
• “It would have been better if there’d been a gun in it.”
• The excerpt is written from the “third person limited omnipotent” perspective.
• Or the “impotent” perspective.
• Or from the second person to the third person to the first person and back again. (Which it is not. Trumbo eliminates quotation marks on dialogue, which I suppose leads inexperiences student writers to assume he’s flipping into first person.)
• “There are lots of details. Good details. The details are overwhelming. That’s what makes them good.”
• “In 1939 fishing was used for bondage a lot.”
• “Trumbo’s syntax is reprehensible.”

There’s something else, something a bit disheartening. A run of essays, all with either ones (lowest score for someone at least making an attempt to address the prompt), or with dashes (page left blank). All from the same school. At lunch one of my colleagues told me that some states require all students to take AP English, and to take the exam. Some states use taxpayer money to pay the ($85?) reading fee for students who couldn’t otherwise afford it. “It makes Bush look good,” my colleague said. “He can cite the increasing numbers of students who are taking AP English. No child left behind, right?” I don’t know if he’s right, and I hope he’s not. If so, I think of those students, all from the same school, who will get dishearteningly low scores, who are being presented as success stories when they are in fact sinking, all for ideology.

In contrast, I got a run of essays from the same area (different schools, same area or district, I think). All high-scoring essays, ranging from 6-8. Is it just the quality of the teaching that makes the difference, or students coming from privilege where all aspects of their lives are shaped towards success?

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I didn’t tell you…

…about the heron. I saw it some weeks ago, flying above the walkway. It was early in the morning, after we’d fought about the paper route. You were disappointed in yourself for not waking up. I knew you couldn’t help it, pulling all-nighter after all-nighter to finish your thesis as one does in graduate school. You were dead to the world, to phone calls and window-banging in the pre-dawn light. But still, I felt let down, having to call my friends and tell them their substitute paper boy wasn’t going to make it, and so I was cold to you, and you were upset. I walked the dogs with tears on my face, feeling terrible about my anger towards you, knowing that you felt bad enough anyway. I didn’t want to hurt you. But I wanted my friends to like you. You’d been a secret for so long, and afterwards, you’d been the man who broke my marriage. I wanted you to be part of my world, to fit in it and be accepted, and this not-showing-up, this flakiness, didn’t look good to professionals, to me.

So I cried and walked the dogs and then saw, above me, the soaring silhouette of the heron. He was far off, his wing span massive against the pale sky. I thought at first he was an eagle, but his shape against the blue looked wrong. His back end was too long, the motion of his wings distorted. No, his long legs trailed behind him, and his wings lifted and fell in long, cumbersome flaps, heron flight.

He circled me, encompassed me, drew a line around my place in the world, and then flew back to the river. As he left, attenuating down and down till he was just a dot and then nothing at all, the tears dried.

Still, it could have been a coincidence. Sometimes I feel bad, feeling comforted by the heron like some sentimental, superstitious, irrational, stupid person, but he always shows up at the times I need him most. I think of all the milestones: His presence on the deck for my mother’s dying; his flight overhead during the burial of her ashes at Hedgebrook; his quiet vigil for weeks on the beach after her death, perched on the house itself; his appearance on Thanksgiving day, when he turned and bowed to me from the roof, and then flew away; the way he landed not five feet from my daughter and her friend on the beach, talking to them as they talked back; the way he and my mother’s dog, Shiva, would call to each other in the early morning over Christmas. I think of the way, in the years since my mother died, he has showed up on meaningful days; anniversaries and birthdays and deaths (rustling out of the darkness and crying out from just a few feet away the night Ruth May lit candles on the deck for Shiva’s death). Another time he showed up at dinner the night she was preparing to walk in the 3-Day-Walk-for-Cancer. She was sick, coming down with a nasty cold, coughing and miserable and dreading the next day when she would set off on the walk. The heron perched outside the restaurant where she and my father and Rachel ate, regarding her calmly. The next day, she was fine, strong and healthy again, and she finished the walk three days later in good time.

It is not, of course, the same heron. It has appeared hundreds of miles away from the site of the original heron. It has even flown by in Ireland, intent on distant dreams. But it holds my memories. It holds the spirit of my mother, manifest in the birds she loved. It comes out of light, shedding light in the darkness. It circles me, and the air warms, drying tears, flooding me with stillness.

Yesterday it flew by again, as we were sitting in the grass by the walkway. “Look,” you said. “A heron.” And then I told you about seeing it all those weeks ago.

And then I am reminded that what I wrote yesterday, about loving you because of the texture of the world, and because what we have together feels possible in this world only, is a lie, the way everything is always both the truth and a lie. It is only true under the world of tangibles and textures. But there is another world, where what is true here holds a different kind of truth that becomes a lie viewed from there. It’s the truth of Nagarjuna’s Two Truths,** the conventional truth rather than the ultimate truth. In the world of conventional truth, I love you because the world has texture and you are part of the texture. But in the world of ultimate truth, you and I are the same. The texture is irrelevant. The stories we tell about love are just stories, convenient for a moment and ultimately meaningless.

From the first day I met you, something broke through from that place, carried on the back of the heron. We glimpsed it together, and you have given me permission to recognize it as real. There is no word for it, but there is a feeling, one that can be spoken in a word. Faith. Faith is what you have given me. It is why I love you.

**And even what I know about the Two Truths comes from you. It’s not like I’ve read the Mulamadhyamakakarika myself, except the bits and pieces you’ve shared, except the parts I’ve read in your thesis, in your exploration of three different translations of The Fundamental Wisdom of the Middle Way. I have to take what you say about the Two Truths and Emptiness as an accurate interpretation — that is to say, a meaningful one. And for me, it is meaningful, because it lies in accord with what I’ve experienced, and so I shall take it as a conventional truth that works for me, here, now. And more.