Creative Reflection: "Body Language Arts"

Kelly pulled on the leash with her flimsy arms, the braided nylon burning against her clinched fingers. “Chompers!” she scolded, immediately flinching at the silliness of her dog’s name and at the absurdity of her yelling it sternly in public. The passing stranger only knitted his eyebrows in a way that said, “I’m sorry about my stupid dog, too” while he wrangled his bulldog. Kelly’s indignant little poodle persistently pulled with a strength that belied his size, firing his rapid and torturously high-pitched yaps, while the beefy bulldog echoed with measured and bellowing bawls. Foaming drool accented the corners of his perpetual frown.

After what seemed like an eternity, Kelly managed to move her dog beyond his fixation and they continued on their walk. Before she could get lost in her thoughts, she noticed another dog approaching, and tensed for the inevitable commotion. The lab bounced gracefully in time next to her owner. When the two dogs crossed paths, they expressed a mild interest in smelling each other’s rear ends, but no interest in killing each other. Dazed, Kelly absent mindedly wished the lab’s owner a good evening and wondered what secret cue her dog was detecting regarding the character of these dogs. Had Kelly failed to notice some most wanted poster that bore the bulldog’s slobbering face?

The two finally passed the edge of the park and entered a quiet neighborhood. The absence of dogs and people allowed both Kelly and her dog to relax and to assume a leisurely gait. Because Chompers wasn’t too much of a conversationalist, Kelly’s mind began to wander to her classroom. Lately, her attention, whenever not otherwise engaged, returned to Janet. It was still relatively early in the school year, but Janet and Kelly had already experienced enough drama to last until May. Kelly recalled that the discord began on their very first meeting.

Kelly stood at the door to her classroom, greeting students. Meeting a new class always electrified her with excruciating anxiety. She had come to realize that each class constituted its own unique sort of organism that had never yet been discovered. She knew that she would have to spend weeks hovering over a microscope before she would know anything about its shape and behavior. What would make it flourish? What would make it sick? These questions raced through her head as she wrung her hands and nodded robotically, a cracked smile resting beneath her overwhelmed gaze. It was this crazed and distracted countenance that met Janet as she approached her new English classroom.

“This where I’m ‘sposed to be?” she asked nonchalantly, her arms crossed defiantly.

“Hello, and nice to meet you too!” Kelly retorted, immediately second guessing her sarcasm.

Janet, in one second, managed a motion that involved unfolding her arms, transforming her hands into fists that she pinned at her sides, rolling her eyes, and sucking her teeth while cocking her head to the side. This girl was a master of sass. She stormed into the classroom and began interrogating another student about where she was. Kelly’s stomach sank. She knew right away that she should have just answered the girl’s question. She even knew it while she was talking to her. Why, then, couldn’t she have just stopped herself?

Shortly after the Janet encounter, the bell rang, and Kelly hurried into the classroom and shut the door behind herself.

“Good morning! How is everyone?” she asked.

She always marveled at how young and out of place incoming freshmen invariably looked. Most stared at her silently, unable or unwilling to speak. Their eyes virtually bugged out of their tiny little heads, the question marks that rattled around behind them plainly visible. One set of eyes, however, did not look scared. These eyes showcased a mixture of hatred, impatience, and superiority as they bore straight through Kelly and practically lasered the words, “You’re dead to me” on the marker board behind her. When Kelly’ eyes met Janet’s, she rested for a second, forgetting herself, before looking away and changing the subject to the class syllabus.

In the days and weeks that followed, Janet punctuated Kelly’ lessons with heavy sighs, bursts of random and disruptive laughter, and nearly constant eye rolling. Each day, Kelly nearly bit her tongue in half, curbing the knee-jerk inclination to send Janet into the hallway for these subtle stabs. After third hour let out, she sat in the solitude provided by her planning period and wondered exactly when and why Janet started revolting. Sure, Kelly had indulged one tiny little sarcastic comment upon their first introductions, but she had meant it in good humor. Was this really the source of such apparently bottomless resentment?

Just then, another dog walked its owner around the corner and came into view. Kelly noticed that the dog was anxiously pulling its owner, its ears jutting toward the sky, its tongue flapping laboriously as it emitted breathy complaints. Upon following the dog’s gaze, Kelly discovered that it was eyeing an ornery squirrel. She shot her glance downward at Chompers, who did not see the squirrel, but seemed to perceive the approaching dog’s body language as a personal attack.

“Bar-ra-ra-ra-ra-ra-ra-raaa!” he yelled at the other dog, who suddenly dropped its ears and wagged its tail apologetically.

Kelly chuckled to herself at the misunderstanding she observed but could never explain to her beloved friend.

“Now,” she thought, “where was I? Oh yes. When did Janet decide that I was the bad guy?”

Laughing at Wordsworth: Promoting Social Invention in the Classroom

A couple of semesters ago, I took British Writers II, a class that spent an inordinate amount of time cramming William Wordsworth down my throat.  I don’t hate Wordsworth or anything, but his general attitude about writing always struck me as downright disingenuous.  When reading his Preface to Lyrical Ballads, I choked on his description of the writing process as a “spontaneous overflow of powerful feelings” that “takes its origin from emotion recollected in tranquillity [sic]” (Prefaces).  This assertion portrays composition as less a process and more as a solitary activity in which one simply records personal insights verbatim on paper.  Couple this idea with Wordsworth’s claim that “Tintern Abbey”, with all its complexity, was written in one sitting and without revision, and you may get a bit of a complex about your own creative abilities.

"I'd better get this perfectly formed poem out of my head before it explodes."

In reality, I find the writing process to be extraordinarily messy, full of stops and starts.  I find that my ideas change during my drafting process, and in fact because I am writing.  Additionally, many aspects of my writing process are social: I spend hours talking in class about novels before I start to conceive of a paper thesis; when writing, I relate literary characters to my own social experiences; I chat with professors and my husband about what I’m working on, bouncing ideas off of them.  Perhaps this is why I scoffed at Wordsworth’s caricature of the writer as a figure who wanders off into the woods, opens up her head, and dumps its contents out.  Furthermore, perhaps this is why high school students are so intimidated when their teachers make comments like, “I want to hear your own, original ideas” as they assign individual writing assignments.

In her essay “A Platonic View of Rhetorical Invention”, Karen Burke LeFevre argues that Western societal ideals have fostered the prevalence of the unrealistic image of the inventor as a solitary and self-sufficient character. This standard bleeds into the classroom, particularly where composition pedagogy is concerned. LeFevre makes the case that creating the illusion that students are singularly responsible for producing and organizing original ideas causes harm, in that it turns students off to the task as a whole. Not to sound too glib, but, DUH.  This sort of approach teaches the student that there exists some sort of “it factor”, and if they cannot think of something groundbreaking, then they don’t have “it”.  I can scarcely think of a more intimidating academic exercise.

In addition, when a teacher employs this model, a significant portion of the learning potential becomes lost.  Writing should first and foremost be approached as a learning activity. When teachers support a pre-process writing model, which places all attention on the product of composition, students will in turn adopt the attitude that they are confronting a one-off exercise. LeFevre explains that, “In the composition classroom, we as teachers make inquiry a private matter. We give assignments to individuals and look for evidence of invention in a text that is ‘owned by’ an individual. Our students naturally enough come to assume that invention is an episode that is finished when a paper ends—when it received a grade” (12-13).  With an emphasis on singular ideas and on grades, the student is blinded to the value of the texts that they produce in the context of the texts that they are reading, and in the context of the overarching concepts of the unit and class as a whole.  They may consider the matter to be closed, and may see their ideas as fixed rather than ever-growing.

How can I combat these Western, romanticized delusions regarding the lone inventor?  How can I put my students at ease in sharing ideas, which will sharpen important literacies outside of writing a paper?  Thankfully, my mentor teacher fosters a lot of in-class discussion, and consistently encourages me to do the same.  During shared readings, we pause frequently and discuss our thoughts and feelings about the text in pairs and as a class.  We hold philosophical chairs, where students explore issues surrounding literary texts by discussing them together.  In these ways, I feel that my students are being served well.  As my students’ first essay writing assignment looms, I hope to remain hyper cognizant of their instilled apprehensions; I aim to alleviate their anxieties by remaining transparent about my own laborious and social writing process.  Someday, they’ll be laughing at Wordsworth, too.

Works Cited

LeFevre, Karen Burke. Invention as a Social Act. Carbondale: Southern Illinois UP, 1987. Print.

Prefaces and Prologues. Vol. XXXIX. The Harvard Classics. New York: P.F. Collier & Son,

1909–14; Bartleby.com, 2001. www.bartleby.com/39/. [21 Sept. 2015].