Introduction to Expository Writing

One of my favorite poems by former Poet Laureate, Billy Collins, is "Introduction to Poetry." 

I love the vibrant and clear images in the first five stanzas, as the speaker describes the many ways he wants his students to experience a poem. The speaker guides his students to "waterski / across the surface of a poem," and to "drop a mouse into a poem / and watch him probe his way out." I love how, in a poem exploring the difference between inhabiting a poem, and seeking the 'answer' to a poem, Collins's meaning is delightfully unambiguous.

"Introduction to Poetry" turns on the word 'but' in the sixth stanza, sharply contrasting the whimsical images found in the poem's opening with images of torture and violence in its conclusion. The poem closes with the image of students beating a poem with a hose.

It makes me chuckle every time I read it.

I thought it would be a fun exercise in creativity to write a poem of my own, emulating both the structure and the imagery of "Introduction to Poetry." However, I chose to steer the ending of my poem, "Introduction to Expository Writing," in a different, more hopeful, direction.

I had a lot of fun with this exercise. It is definitely a work in progress, and I have a feeling I'll keep fussing with it in the weeks to come, but I thoroughly enjoyed looking at the act of teaching First-Year Composition through the lens of poetry.




Introduction to Expository Writing


I ask them to take an idea

and roll it out before them

like a map of the world



or thump its melon hide

and listen for signs that it's ripe.



I say build a tree house, and view an idea

from above the canopy,



or shape an idea into a sandcastle,

and see what happens

when the tide rolls in.



I want them to chart a course to the heart of an idea,

using the constellations as their guide.



But they eye me with suspicion and ask,

"How many words

does this have to be?"



And then they pick up their tools

with uncalloused hands

and begin to chisel.

What Would LMM Do?

What Would LMM Do?

6x6 #1

This year, I've found inspiration in an unlikely place: Twitter.

Twitter was once a place where I popped in for the politics, but stayed for the cat videos. Twitter can often feel like a place where everyone's anger dial is permanently turned up to 11and there is only one way to spell the word 'your.' However, it is here that I recently found a guru of positivity, and a champion of grit. I have found inspiration as a teacher in the 140 character bursts of genius from the composer, lyricist, playwright, singer and "former substitute teacher" Lin-Manuel Miranda.


It is 6:30 AM on a December morning, and I am standing, bleary-eyed, in my kitchen. Putting off the morning's more pressing tasks, I am dumping heaping scoops of coffee grounds into the percolator while simultaneously scrolling scrolling scrolling through my Twitter feed. I settle upon the following tweet, and, suddenly awake, I yell out "Yes! YESSSSS!"

The animals at my feet who were hoping for food scatter into the shadows.

As a teacher of writing, it is this concept that I am forever trying to impress upon my students. Rewriting IS writing.

Lin-Manuel Miranda not only tweets about the fact that revision is the beating heart of writing, but he also shares his writing in its various stages--something I think takes a lot of guts and vulnerability. He reminds me that sharing my own writing with my students, and talking with them about my own (laboriously slow) writing process, can make a greater impact on my students than a presentation on the five steps of the writing process ever will.

~~

Despite the fact that Miranda has been awarded a Pulitzer Prize, an Emmy Award, three Grammy Awards, three Tony Awards, a MacArthur Fellowship, and a star on the Hollywood Walk of Fame, he has built a warm and welcoming community in his corner of the Twitterverse. He regularly replies to those who tag him in a tweet, chatting amicably, thus breaking down the barrier between celebrity and fan. Once, he even formed a book group dedicated to reading the works of Shakespeare with his followers.

He connects with his followers as one human being to another.

Teachers are far from celebrities, but the traditional collegiate classroom does still retain a bit of a hierarchy, forged over centuries of teacher-student dynamic. Is it my role to stand at the front of the room, imparting what I know unto a sea of students? Or maybe I am a writer, communicating with a room of writers, who happen to just be starting out on their journey?

I can connect with them, as one human being to another, and I can help create a community in my classroom, one amicable chat at a time.

~~

Lin-Manuel Miranda is relentlessly positive and supportive of his 2.75 million followers. He dishes out inspiration like my mom dishes out sheet cake at a family gathering. (Take it! It's for you! You want ice cream with that? Of course you do. Here.)

I assume that from time to time, an unkind comment pops up in his feed, or that he spots some questionable grammar in the comments section of a post. If it bothers him, if Twitter ever makes him worry about the future of humanity, you'd never know it. He carries on, tweeting out one little poem of positivity after another.

As a teacher, it can be too easy to look at a stack of essays and sigh. We can be quick to spot the misused first-person point of view, to deflate when noting the gaps in the grade book, or shake our heads at the empty chairs in class on a Thursday morning, but it the costs me nothing to choose to believe in the ability of each of my students to do truly great things anyway. I can emulate Lin-Manuel Miranda and remind my students, every time I see them, that today is a new day, and another chance to built their future.
~~
Finally, I find inspiration in Lin-Manuel Miranda because the characters he writes about share so much with the students in our classrooms here at GCC. His characters come from diverse backgrounds, and face a host of obstacles that they may feel are insurmountable.

In Miranda's debut musical In The Heights--which he wrote during his sophomore year of college, a feat in itself--the character Nina Rosario is the first one in her family, and the first from the barrio, to go to college. However, in the first act, she wrestles with how to tell her parents that she has dropped out of school. She found the pressure of college to be too great, and her support system to be too far away.

In Hamilton: An American Musical, in the beginning of the play, Alexander Hamilton is a nineteen-year-old "young, scrappy and hungry" immigrant from the Caribbean, trying to finish college early and go make his mark on the world.

These are the stories of so many of our students at Glendale Community College. A large population of our students are far from the country they call home, and are trying to navigate not just American culture, but the expectations of college as well. Many of our students are first-generation college students, whose family may not know how best to support them, or even have the resources to do so.

The work of Lin-Manuel Miranda keeps fresh in my mind the very real struggles faced by the students in my classroom, like my student who writes everything in Vietnamese, then translates it into English, but who also regularly visits my office hours to make sure she's on track. Or my student from The Gambia who wrote a beautiful piece about the conflict back home in one blog post, and about his favorite West African coffee (Cafe Touba!) in another.
~~
Much of Twitter may be loud, angry and riddled with trolls, but I've found lovely little corner filled with art, encouragement, and community in the tweets of Lin-Manuel Miranda.