The Hammock Papers: Building.

15 August 2016

Building.

[T]here is danger is in accepting "lockstep instruction" as a replacement for creative writing in the classroom. With too many formulas, we lose a major piece of what fosters good writing and, as a result, innovative thinking. Through my work with students and teachers at 826 Valencia, a San Francisco-based nonprofit tutoring and writing center, I have seen firsthand that creativity is a direct and necessary precedent to analytical writing.

Started by an author, Dave Eggers, and a teacher, Nínive Calegari, 826 Valencia helps students gain skills and confidence by providing one-on-one tutor support and publishing their finished work. Strong proponents of analytical writing instruction might shudder at the sound of most of what we publish: personal narratives, memoirs, stories, and poems rooted in the students' realities. But these are the important building blocks for critical thinking, not the soft anti-essays that those craving a return to 1950s grammar drills oppose.

Only when students know that their voices will be heard can they truly make an argument of their own. This crucial understanding cannot happen with a curriculum built solely on formulas and recipes for linking words and sentence structures. Reluctant writers, like many students in schools such as New Dorp or Downtown, may not engage readily with the text they are reading. The assignment to analyze it looms dauntingly in front of them. But when they can first identify a theme and then write about how that theme connects to their own lives, they can start to enter the world of the text and a more critical discussion of it.

Celebrating personal connections and self-expression alone does not make for successful writers. The tutors at 826 Valencia push students not only to relate what they are learning to their own lives, but to use these links to create the highest quality of work. What students can learn through rigorous creative writing instruction is that writing is a process -- that hard work and attention to detail, not magic, help one complete the piece.

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WOLFGANG AMADEUS MOZART

"When I am, as it were, completely myself, entirely alone and of good cheer – say travelling in a carriage or walking after a good meal, or during the night when I cannot sleep – it is on such occasions that my ideas flow best and most abundantly. Whence, and how, they come I know not ; nor can I force them. Those ideas that please me I retain in memory and am accustomed, as I have been told, to hum them to myself. If I continue in this way, it soon occurs to me how I may turn this dainty morsel to account, so as to make a good dish of it. That is to say, agreeable to the rules of counterpoint, to the peculiarities of various instruments etc. All this fires my soul, and, provided I am not disturbed, my subject enlarges itself, becomes methodised, and defined, and the whole, though it be long, stands almost complete and finished in my mind, so that I can survey it like a fine picture or a beautiful statue at a glance. Nor do I hear in my imagination the parts successively, but I hear them, as it were, all at once. What a delight this is, I cannot tell."

MARCUS AURELIUS

"Is your cucumber bitter? Throw it away. Are there briars in your path? Turn aside. That is enough. Do not go on and say, 'Why were things of this sort ever brought into this world?' neither intolerable nor everlasting - if thou bearest in mind that it has its limits, and if thou addest nothing to it in imagination. Pain is either an evil to the body (then let the body say what it thinks of it!)-or to the soul. But it is in the power of the soul to maintain its own serenity and tranquility."

VINCENT van GOGH

"What am I in the eyes of most people? A nonentity or an oddity or a disagreeable person — someone who has and will have no position in society, in short a little lower than the lowest. Very well — assuming that everything is indeed like that, then through my work I’d like to show what there is in the heart of such an oddity, such a nobody. This is my ambition, which is based less on resentment than on love in spite of everything, based more on a feeling of serenity than on passion. Even though I’m often in a mess, inside me there’s still a calm, pure harmony and music. In the poorest little house, in the filthiest corner, I see paintings or drawings. And my mind turns in that direction as if with an irresistible urge. As time passes, other things are increasingly excluded, and the more they are the faster my eyes see the picturesque. Art demands persistent work, work in spite of everything, and unceasing observation."

DAN CAMPBELL