Carson McCullers's "We of Me"

A Facebook quiz (i.e., time waster) recently prompted me to read Georgia author Carson McCullers's book The Member of the Wedding. I'm ashamed to say I never picked it up before; the vivid images she evokes through her description of simple, everyday objects and events in the life of a Southern girl should be shared. Her description of the grape arbor took me immediately to the days of my childhood when I stayed at my Granny Jewell's home in Shawnee, Georgia:

Frankie was too tall this summer to walk beneath the arbor as she had always done before. Other twelve-year-old people could still walk around inside, give shows, and have a good time. Even small grown ladies could walk underneath the arbor. And already Frankie was too big; this year she had to hang around and pick from the edges like the grown people. She stared into the tangle of dark vines, and there was the smell of crushed scuppernongs and dust (1946, p. 7).

I was also impressed by her manipulation of grammar, specifically her use of pronouns. I should look more often for examples to show my students of how a writer understands grammar so well that she or he can manipulate it so effectively. Here is one such excerpt. Frankie, the protagonist, is thinking about her brother and his bride-to-be who have traveled back to Winter Hill:

The darkening town was very quiet. For a long time now her brother and the bride had been at Winter Hill. They had left the town a hundred miles behind them, and now were in a city far away. They were them and in Winter Hill, together, while she was her and in the same old town all by herself. And as she sickened with this feeling a thought and explanation suddenly came to her, so that she knew and almost said aloud: They are the we of me. Yesterday, and all the twelve years of her life, she had only been Frankie. She was an I person who had to walk around and do things by herself. All other people had a we to claim, all others except her. When Berenice said we, she meant Honey and Big Mama, her lodge, or her church. The we of her father was the store. All members of clubs have a we to belong to and to talk about. The soldiers in the army can say we, and even the criminals on chain-gangs. But the old Frankie had had no we to claim, unless it would be the terrible summer we of her and John Henry and Berenice--and that was the last we in the world she wanted. Now all this was suddenly over with and changed. There was her brother and the bride, and it was as though when first she saw them something she had known inside of her: They are the we of me. And that was why it made her feel so queer, for them to be away in Winter Hill while she was left all by herself; the hull of the old Frankie left there in the town alone (p. 35).

Frankie wants so badly to belong, which McCullers emphasizes just by the stylistic use of personal pronouns. Something to think about: Who is the we of me?

BBs and Cafeteria Toast

My 11-year-old daughter is in her second year of 4-H Project S.A.F.E. BB program competition. We've practiced every week since September, and today is the day: State Competition.

My husband and I are in the scoring room for the duration. This year, the program has grown to 580+ 5th-8th grade shooters. Which means we have to score almost 2400 targets (24,000 bullseyes)! The number of participants this year is a record. Of course, we won't be scoring these alone. Plenty of parent volunteers will be scoring. Thank you, volunteers! Keith is the "Chief Statistical Officer," and I'm the data-entry clerk. We both enjoy the jobs, but we won't see our daughter shoot; I think she prefers this. She never wants me on the line with her during competition, and I can live with that. Instead the team coach will be on the firing line with her.

I walked over to the new dining hall at 7:15 this morning for some Rock Eagle toast. It is a beautiful building featuring stone and copper siding. I'm going to go back later today to take a picture of the copper siding while it is still the color of new copper. In time it will turn green, and of course that is appropriate for the 4-H camp! By the way, the toast is still hard and good. No one else likes it, but I do. I suppose that's another reason why I am a teacher--I love cafeteria toast.

Participatory Technologies in the English Classroom

Remember when your students did not know how to create a PowerPoint presentation or Publisher document, save to a computer disk on the a: drive, a network folder, or, later, a jump drive that fits in the USB port?

Even my students who do not have a computer at home know how to do those basic functions on a computer now, but I remember a time not very long ago when my students were confused when I asked them to save their work to a disk so that it could be recalled again the following day.

Ten years ago, I began asking my students to participate in electronic exchanges via BreadNet, the online, private computer network of the Bread Loaf School of English. I was fortunate to receive a DeWitt Wallace-Reader's Digest fellowship in the summer of 1999 to study at Bread Loaf and become a part of the Bread Loaf Teacher Network. I met other teachers at Bread Loaf with whom I began planning online electronic exchanges. In these exchanges, my students would be paired with a partner or a small group of students from another school somewhere in the United States. The teacher of those far-removed (geographically) students and I would prepare a collaborative learning opportunity usually centered around a common text, theme, or genre our students were reading.

Students would begin by introducing themselves, their schools, and their communities in a short writing assignment that they would then save to a floppy disk (eventually we moved to a folder on our school network). My students were responsible for writing a response to a common prompt on the text and ending with a question for their exchange partners to encourage a conversation. Once the discourse began online, students would receive postings from their partners and respond. Their writing was created in a word processor and then saved in a file to a floppy disk which I would then take, open and read, and post into one or two single files on BreadNet, forwarding the writing of all of my students to the teacher whose class was participating in the exchange with us.

The technology we used then to conduct our exchanges (floppy disks, a: drives, early versions of Word, early version of First Class) are obsolete because of software improvements or developments in computer technology.

(ASIDE: I could go on and on about what happens within exchanges (my dissertation work), but that is not where I'm going with this post.)

Students are tech savvy, at least in the sense that what I would have to explain step-by-step ten years ago they can do without any instruction today. My students can easily create a PowerPoint with sound and animation. They can design a newsletter on Publisher. Some create videos and others can record podcasts. So what technologies do I need to be utilizing in my classroom today? What are important skills my students will need to utilize after high school? What technology can we incorporate within the English curriculum that will make our students better engagers, collaborators, discourse creators, learners?

I just started reading Literature and the Web: Reading and Responding with New Technologies, a new book by Robert Rozema and Allen Webb, in hopes that I will find some direction. I also hope that I will find affirmation that what I already do with technology in my classroom improves student learning. I also am constantly reading about and searching for new Web 2.0 applications and trying them out myself. What are you doing to utilize participatory technologies in your classroom?

Does Twitter Change the Concept of Audience?

My students turned in reading journals today, some using twitter as their medium for the first time. I haven't had time to read through all of them but am excited about one in particular that I have seen. One young lady decided to twitter a conversation between herself and Walt Whitman. She read (and struggled to understand) "Song of Myself." I'm interested in reading her questions to Whitman and how she answered them through his persona.

While I was quickly scanning her twitter page, I was drawn into other twitters I have received over the past day or so. By the way, can I actually say I receive twitters? Do those tweeters actually intend to write only to me? I have no idea who will read my twitters at any given time, and I have no inkling of who will decide to follow me today or tomorrow; therefore, I am not writing to a particular audience. So is Twitter changing the concept of writing for a particular audience. How do you know who will read your tweets? Hmmmm.

I have some other twitter questions, but this one is at the forefront of my mind at the moment. What motivates us to choose the people we follow on twitter? For whom do we want to be an audience? I have chosen others in my profession, a couple of friends who are online and tweet, and some people I think have their fingers on a pulse point of our American society.

I ran across Bill Gates' Twitter today and decided to follow him to see what he talks about. (I do question whether or not Bill is actually Bill or if someone is writing as Bill.) Then I decided to see who he follows. He's influential; he's wealthy; for better or for worse, he is a notable American. He has 17,824 people following him on Twitter. So who does this American icon follow? He only follows 45 people/organizations/groups! They include many names I do not know or recognize, Macworld, Iphone Game Play, Scott Hanson (Sr. engineer at Dell), JeanPaulSatre, Darrell Jordan-Smith (VP with Sun Microsystems), and my personal favorite, Darth Vader. What does this say about Bill? What does this say about Twitter users' choice of audience? What does this tell me about how technology is changing the concept of audience for me as a writer?

Transcendentalism and Twitters

One class of college prep students is studying Transcendentalists this week. I've done some creative planning to get this study into my schedule before they take the Georgia High School Graduation Tests next week.

While reading postings on the EC Ning , I saw an idea from Jim Burke that I decided to adapt to my classroom. He highly recommended Stanford's Encyclopedia of Philosophy, so I divided the information between collaborative groups and had a conversational round table as an introduction to the Transcendentalists. Then I chose nine different reading selections from Transcendentalist writings (particular chapters of Walden, "Self-Reliance," portion of "Song of Myself," Prelude to Leaves of Grass, "Civil Disobedience") and had each group choose which section they would read for a short round of literature circles. (See initial assignment.)

As part of their individual reading, I asked them to do transactional reading journals and gave them 10-15 options for writing their journal entries. I also wanted to encourage students to incorporate technology into this study, so I gave them the option of creating a blog for the journal assignments or creating Twitter postings. I did adapt the writing options for the Twitter postings.

Yesterday when I gave students time in class to work on their journals, two students tried to access Twitter at school. I can access Twitter when I log in, but unfortunately, the powers that be that control our system's technology must have decided that Twitter is not acceptable for students to access and have thus blocked its use on campus. Thankfully these two students are quite savvy and are willing to do this from home, but I just hate that my students cannot use these technologies at school!