I'm reading A Language Older than Words by Derrick Jensen who is described by Wikipedia as an "anarchoprimitivist." It's kind of about a lot of things other than environmentalism; the best scenes for me are when he talks about writing, learning & education. His writing class sounds like a blast:
I walked in that first day of that first class, and the first thing I did was to change the name from “Principles of Thinking and Writing,” to “Intellectual, Philosophical and Spiritual Liberation and Exploration for the Fine, Very Fine and Extremely Fine Human Being.” Many of the students reached for their class lists to make sure they were in the right room. As I took the role, I asked each person what he or she loved. At first suspicious, they began to open up within minutes.
I soon realized I could not give grades: it would be immoral to ask someone to write from the heart, then give the writing a C. This created a problem, since the department required that I assign grades. I suggested assigning grades randomly, but neither the students nor the department liked that idea. So I suggested giving everyone a 4.0. This was fine with the students, but not the administration. My next plan was to give everyone a grade of 3.14159, or pi. Math majors in the class thought this was a hoot, but the administrators didn’t get the joke.
Eventually here’s what we (the students and I) devised. Because the way to learn to think is by thinking, we would spend more class time on open discussions of important issues: What is love? What is the difference (if any) between emotional, intellectual, spiritual and physical intimacy? Is there such a thing as a universal good? What do you want out of life? If you had only a limited time to live (which is of course the case), how would you spend your time? Is the universe a friendly place or not? (This last question, by the way, Einstein thought to be the most important a person can ask.) Irish students took it upon themselves to teach us about the Irish Republican Army, and African-American students taught us about their own experience of racism. A Samoan man told us of his earlier life in a gang. The sons and daughters of farmers told us what it was like to grow up on a farm. Volleyball players told us of volleyball and football players of football.
Similarly, the way to learn how to write is by doing plenty of it, so my main job in the classroom would be to cheerlead them into writing more. The students could, of course, write anything they wanted about anything they wanted. I would not judge any papers, but merely give the writers positive feedback and I would try to guide them wherever they wished to go in their explorations. I asked (not told, but asked) students to write about the thing they’d done in their lives they were most proud of, and asked them to write about that which caused them the most shame. We took the latter papers (mostly unread) into the hall and burned them, causing police to show up one quarter to question us about vandalism. One student, getting married the next summer, wrote her wedding vows as well as a letter to her fiancé, to be delivered moments before he walked down the aisle. Another, a wine salesman by trade, spend the quarter writing sales pitches. Many people explored their own abuse, some wrote fiction. For each piece of writing a person did, he or she received a check mark (longer pieces received more). The final grade corresponded to the number of check marks. If a person had thirty-four check marks by the end of the quarter, for example, the grade was 3.4. Simple enough. The people in the class wrote about five times as much as people in other sections, but loved the work because it pertained to their own lives. When people wrote pieces they particularly loved, we scheduled private conferences to go over these pieces again and again until every word was magic. In the context of sharing an important piece of themselves, suddenly even grammar became crucial: the bride, for example, didn’t want the pastor stumbling over her sentences or her groom wondering what the hell she was trying to say. Given the opportunity to express themselves, these people wanted to learn how to do that.
I asked each student to hand in a couple of pieces composed in different forms of expression besides writing. Many brought in food, some paintings, a few tape-recordings of their own music. A chef from Kuwait cooked us a seven-course meal and showed us pictures of his country. Another student brought a videotape of himself doing technical rock-climbing.
It took us a couple of quarters to realize something was still missing. Experience. It’s madness to think all learning comes from putting pen to paper. What about life itself? We decided that people would get check marks every time they did something they’d never done before. People went to symphonies, rock concerts, Vietnamese restaurants. They watched foreign films (“That Akira Kurosawa guy can be pretty funny”). They got in car wrecks (not for the check mark, but it having happened they may as well get credit). They got counseling (I hope not as a result of the class). One fellow told his father for the first time that he loved him (a big baseball fan, he watched the movie Field of Dreams over and over that day to psyche himself up).
Something else was missing. I still had too much control of the class. How to let go more? I didn’t know. Finally it occurred to me to break them into groups, and ask each group to run the class for one two-hour period (we generally met two evenings per week). They could do whatever they wanted. One group wanted to play Capture the Flag. I thought, “What does this have to do with writing?” But we did it, then wrote about it, and I felt closer to that class after our group’s physical activity than I had even after intense emotional discussions (besides, my team won).
Next class period we talked about the relationship between shared physical activities and feelings of intimacy. Another group had us eat popsicles and watch cartoons then draw pictures from our childhood with our opposite hands (it broke my heart when one fellow shared his picture with the class: “This is my father taking me out in the woods to smoke my first vial of crack”). In the same group we played Duck Duck Goose and Hide and Go Seek in the basement of the near-empty building. Many of the people were continuing students and thus were older. Looking back, I don’t know how anyone could possibly say that he or she has successfully run a writing class without having played Hide and Go Seek with overweight old men, twenty year olds, middle-aged mothers of five, and a half-dozen men and women whose native language is not English, all of them dead serious about finding or not being found. One group taught us how to do the Country and Western dance, the Tush Push. This was especially difficult for me, a confirmed nondancer. Because the room was too small, we did this in the building’s central courtyard. Mid-way through one of our times pushing our respective tushes, a couple of the department’s most humorless administrators walked by, evidently having worked into the evening. I smiled and waved. Even this class taught me much. I had been working on letting go in my writing for years by this point, and I sometimes became frustrated at the baby steps many students were taking toward manifesting their passion in words. But when it came to me attempting to let go in dancing, I suddenly comprehended their inhibitions: I would push my tush only three or four inches, while many who were too shy to open up in words were wildly swinging their hips (including a fifty-year-old sheriff’s deputy I never would have pegged for a tush-pusher). In another class we made marshmallow figures representing our hopes and dreams. One fellow, a bow hunter, made a big marshmallow buck with toothpick antlers and a huge toothpick arrow jutting from its chest; mine was a broken marshmallow dam with marshmallow salmon swimming in a river of marshmallow (surprise, surprise). We played blindfolded soccer in the classroom, with four people at a time blindfolded, being told where to move by sighted partners (“Left, left,” my partner shouted as I ran into the wall. “Oh, sorry, wrong way”). We broke into groups, each group picking out of a hat the rough plot for a screenplay (our group was to come down from a mountain to find that everyone else in the world had disappeared), and then each person in the group picked from a different hat a character to be played in the drama (I was to play the actress Sharon Stone), after which we had an hour to write our scripts, to be performed and videotaped in what we later dubbed “An Exercise in Embarrassment.” For Halloween, we plopped sleeping bags on the floor, sat around a flashlight surrounded by small pieces of wood (simulating a campfire), ate s’mores and told ghost stories. For Valentine’s Day, we wrote stories about first loves, and memories of hearts broken or overflowing. Mainly we had fun.
I did assign one topic each quarter that the people in class had to write on. It was the final paper. The assignment was for each of them to walk on water, and then write about it. They had to decide to do something impossible, do it, and then describe what it was like. A few people filled their bathtubs with a quarter-inch of water, walked across that and considered themselves done. Others walked across frozen lakes. But one quit smoking, another ended an abusive relationship, a very shy woman asked a man out (he said yes), another woman for the first time admitted her bulimia and sought help, one man told his parents he did not want to be an accountant but instead an artist.
The people in my classes, including me, did not need to be controlled, managed, nor even taught. What we needed was to be encouraged, accepted, and loved just for who were were. We needed not to be governed by a set of rules that would tell us what we needed to learn and what we needed to express, but to be given time in a supportive space to explore who were were and what we wanted with the assistance of others who had our best interests at heart. I believe that is true not only for my students but for all of us, human and nonhuman alike. All we want, whether we are honeybees, salmon, trash-collecting ants, ponderosa pines, coyotes, human beings, or stars, is to love and be loved, to be accepted, cherished, and celebrated simply for being who we are. Is that so very difficult?
Otherwise I'm OK. One of the things I'm doing to procrastinate on a whole buttload of schoolwork is going through my life's reading list (everyone should make one). Last week I read The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-time (awesome) and Vikram Seth's The Golden Gate (also awesome). I'm working my way through A Wizard of Earthsea for the nth time-- I still think this book can't get enough props. It flips the script on Eurocentered fantasy novels because magic works like Taoism, all the characters that count are black and it's also set in this cool historical other world that reminds me of a snowy Southeast Asia.