Tag: teaching

Murray’s Daybook and the Intellectual Seed for Love on the Big Screen

William Torgerson Donald Murray Write to Learn Love on the Big Screen
An Important Book to Me: Donald Murray's Write to Learn

Let me start by giving the writer and teacher Donald Murray props for introducing me to the Daybook in his fantastic research for writing and teaching, Write to Learn.  Along with Stephen King’s On Writing, Murray’s book was a text that caused me to think being a writer was something I could actually accomplish.   For me, the daybook (think black and white Mead composition notebook) is something I use day-to-day in my life and entice (force?) my students to use during the length of the time we work together.  What I love about the daybook is that it enables me to capture many of the intellectual seeds that would otherwise drift into my thinking and then go scattering off into oblivion.

I’m sure a lot of ideas still come and go, but with the daybook, I’m able snag at least a couple and jot them down for later use.  Many of my ideas (especially for teaching, writing, and reading) come while I’m working on something else:  I’m reading student work and I’ve got an idea for next semester or something I need to share with the class.  I’m reading a story and I have an idea for a story of my own or a lesson for class or something I want to tell my wife.   Pre-daybook, the idea would come and go and be forgotten.  With the daybook, it’s down on paper fastened to a place where I can come back to it and take action.

William Torgerson Love on the Big Screen Dead Poets Society
Remember Knox Overstreet's poem to Chris?

As for Love on the Big Screen and Murray’s daybook, one day while writing with my students, I wrote the following sentence:  “Everything Zuke knew about love he got from the movies.”  That was the seed that led to Love on the Big Screen.  Of course there is a lot of me in this book, but it became an act of the imagination as soon as I accepted the mental premise that Zuke did things because of movies he’d seen.  That became a hook that might sell a book and something that would be a great pleasure for me to write.  I’m thinking of two immediate reasons:  (A) I could revisit all those movies I loved as a teenager and (B) once I made the decision to set it at a fictionalized Olivet Nazarene, I got to use my college experiences as an imaginative catalyst for a plot and characters that caused me to recall many moments I’d long forgotten.  The moments go through a sort of truth to fiction converter once I give them to Zuke’s story and the controlling premise that he does things because of the movies he’s seen.  For myself, back when I was making lots of love mistakes, I certainly had an overly romanticized view of love (who doesn’t?) and I was unconscious of all the influences (media and others) that had helped shaped my romantic paradigm.  In fact, it wasn’t until I wrote the book that I realized what a number films such as Say Anything, Dead Poets Society, Sixteen Candles, and When Harry Met Sally did to my expectations for romance.

Love on the Big Screen and Illustrator Keegan Laycock’s Work

Flabby from William Torgerson's Love on the Big Screen by Keegan Laycock
"Flabby" from Love on the Big Screen

Keegan Laycock was in one of my first seventh grade classes back in the mid to late nineties at North Miami High School in Indiana.  When I was teaching back then, I mostly gave assignments.  I assigned stories and students answered the questions at the end.   I went over grammar rules and students worked exercises.  We even had this book where the students faced a grammar question, worked it on their own paper, and then they turned the page to see if they got it right.  I gave the students credit for doing the work, and I remember not knowing the answers to quite a bit of the questions.  Did anyone else ever work out of a workbook like that?  Each page looked like a big chart with different shades of white and gray. Boring!!!

Cowboy from William Torgerson's Love on the Big Screen by Keegan Laycock
"Cowboy" from the novel Love on the Big Screen

As bad as a teacher as I remember being, Keegan’s father once sort of suggested that possibly one of the reasons Keegan would want to be an English teacher was related to a not awful experience in my class.  This I didn’t think possible.  I guess if I did anything right, I was at least nice to people.

It had been at least eight years or so since I’d seen Keegan when he sent me a note on Facebook, and one of the first things he wrote to me about was that he remembered a comment I’d left on one of his essays:  “Funny.”  I wrote it next to some clever phrase he’d applied to the  NHL penalty box. (can’t remember what he called it)  I think even though I didn’t know what I was doing, I somehow knew to respond to people and not texts.  I wrote little personal comments more than I was someone who would write “-5 sentence fragment.”

Moon from William Torgerson's Love on the Big Screen by Keegan Laycock
"Moon" from the novel Love on the Big Screen

Thinking back to my own high school days, I remember my sophomore or junior year that Ms. Stone of Winamac High wrote, “Not your best effort.”  It’s a comment I think was excellent for who I was and the amount of work I’d put into the assignment.  I remember that instance being one of the first times I realized that when I turned in work there was somebody on the other end of the words actually reading the sentences.   I’m not saying that my other teachers didn’t read my work; it was just the first time I’d considered that people were actually looking at the assignments. This revelation is probably akin to the shock sometimes students show when they see their teachers out at a grocery store or, heaven forbid, out to eat. If you’re a teacher reading this, do you let the students see the human side of you?

So Keegan is tackling the job of doing some illustrations related to my novel.  What I’ve especially enjoyed about this is I convinced him that it would be fun for me (and I hope some of you) to watch the drawings come to life.  As someone with a regimented writing process, it’s interesting for me to watch his drawing process.  I asked him what he thought about drawing one scene with the boys paying their respects to–among other people–Cyndi Lauper.  Rather than draw them all at once, he began by sketching them one at a time to get a feel for who they are.  He’s just doing a little work, posting what he’s got, and then doing some more drafting.

Keegan and I don’t really know what we are going to do with these, if anything, but he’s enjoying the drawing, and I’m watching the characters take on a life of their own independent of the text of Love on the Big Screen.

"The Brothers in Pursuit" from William Torgerson's Love on the Big Screen by Keegan Laycock
"Share" this post if you think your friends would enjoy the pictures. Click this picture to see more of Keegan's art work.

My Notes and Thoughts on Reading Cynthia Selfe’s “The Movement of Air…”

Formatted Document – ProQuest.

It’s Daniel Keller’s oral essay, “Lord of the Machines…” that really does it to me:  gets me as excited for what the writing classroom could be, as excited as I was the first day that I realized that all I really had to do to to get students interested in the class was to allow them to read and write and share their own words with their classmates.   I wonder how old Daniel Keller is, not enough to look this up, but I see a lot in his oral essay that appeals to who I am, including clips of dialogue from an old favorite movie of mine, Office Space. There’s a lot else in Keller’s essay too:  music that must come from what he knows and loves, more movie cuts, and funny and surprising research that states 33% of people admit to having assaulted their computers and 70% of people admit to swearing.  I have sworn at my computer many a time but so far no assaults that I can remember.

What’s so exciting for me is to consider all that could go into a piece in the spirit of the oral essays Selfe shares.  What does each student care enough about that they would pursue knowledge on the subject, figure out how the subject connects with who they are (for example, wherever it was that Keller tapped into his knowledge of The Office), and bring together all that thinking into a multimedia/multimodal text.

With my excitement comes the dampening thought of all the problems I already face when it comes to the writing and thinking my students and I do that doesn’t happen in a Word document.  Okay, my students use Windows Movie Maker for a project.  Where should we put this video?  On You Tube?  I can’t require students to make their work public.  It could be dangerous, an invasion of their privacy.  And how will I collect all this work as artifacts of our writing and thinking and my teaching?  The hard drive on my computer is already too full.  I’ve already transferred kilos and kilos of bits onto an external hard drive, but now I can’t access that material unless I drag it along with me.  I am vaguely aware of the notion of cloud computing, which means to me that I can have storage “out there,” accessible to me from anywhere, but at the moment I don’t know how to make that technology work for my students and me.

I could go on about these problems; surely fill pages and pages with what I know how to do but can’t bring to my students because of one obstacle or the other.  I think I can sum up a lot of my troubles in this way:  okay, I can do that (insert sound, video, oral essay, etc) but where am I going to put it?  How are my students and my students only going to access it?

Golden Lines from Selfe’s Article and Thoughts if I’ve got them:

  • “Writing as Not-Speech” (Selfe 627). At the moment, all my courses are first year writing courses.  This course is required of just about all the students.  I already do everything I can think to do to say that writing isn’t just writing; writing is thinking. I give examples such as, “Okay, there’s someone you’re romantically interested in.  You’ve spoken to them.  They are looking at you.  Your opening has got you at least that far.  Now what?”  My examples aren’t contained to what could sound like a pick up line.  I tell my students about my phone calls to the state of New York about my denied tax refund.  I had to think about structure, purpose, and audience.  I’m surprised how much time Selfe has to spend showing that there is more to a composition class than sentences written onto a piece of paper or typed into a Word document.
  • “Digital networks, for example, have provided routes for the increasing numbers of communications that now cross geopolitcal, cultural, and linguistic borders, and because of this situation, the texts exchanged within such networks often assume hybrid forms that take advantage of multiple semiotic channels” (Selfe 636-37).  I do my blog post.  I see on my map that people from several continents read my post.  How did my blog collect that information?  Is this an invasion of privacy?  I copy and paste an image from Office Space I find online into my post.  Have I committed copyright infringement?  If I write only text, don’t I lose a lot of potential readers?  Aren’t most online readers drawn to links, pictures, and video?  Isn’t it amazing, that I write a reflection on the documentary Food, INC and the next day I get a comment from a farmer who defends the way soybean seeds are protected by seed companies?  It’s so much to manage.  It’s so invigorating and overwhelming.
  • “Aural Composing Sample 4:  Daniel Keller’s ‘Lord of the Machines:  Reading the Human Computer Relationship'” (Selfe 640). I show my students a clip of a documentary on the big screen in front of the class.  I ask them to consider audience, purpose, structure, and payoff.  By “payoff,” I want them to ask, “What is the reward supposed to be for watching this film?”  What rewards are there supposed to be for reading what I write?  What rewards should their be for me when I write?  For some reason, my computer overheats and shuts down after about ten minutes.  I want to use my computer because all my browser favorites are on there.  I know about “Delicious” (probably spelled wrong), a social bookmarking tool that would enable me to access my online “favorites” from any computer and even share them with others.  Delicious is a Yahoo thing.  I have an old Yahoo account but I can’t remember the password.  Should I get another email address so that I can use the Yahoo related social bookmarking tool?  Just how much time am I willing to spend managing all my accounts and passwords?  I think Mozilla, my preferred browser, might remember my passwords for me.  Now how does that work?
  • “I do want to argue that teachers of composition need to pay attention to, and come to value, the multiple ways in which students compose and communicate meaning, the exciting hybrid, multimodal texts they create–in both nondigital and digital environments–to meet their own needs in a changing world” (Selfe 642). Students needs?  I keep forgetting to put in there that I often have to push (such an ugly word) students to consider what they want to know and what they ought to think about.  This was done for me countless times!  There was/is so much that I haven’t thought of.  My teachers (both in person and in the form of texts) showed me that there was more out there worth knowing about than I had imagined.  The main reason I blog and try to learn about multimodal texts isn’t so that I can be the best teacher.  I do this because I think of myself as a writer, and as a writer I imagine us heading deeper into a world where readers sit with laptops glancing at texts, or else fidgeting with some sort of controller, maybe a wireless keyboard, looking at their television screen and alternately watching videos and clicking on texts they want to read.  I’d like to have a voice in that world, even if it’s a voice that convinces them to take a break, go find a quiet place, and crack open a novel written on paper or lie under a tree and load up a digital novel on their Kindle.  (or whatever all those are called today)  When is my WordPress editor going to stop telling me that “multimodal” is misspelled?

Copy and Pasted from “Son of Citation”:

Selfe, Cynthia L. “”The Movement of Air, the Breath of Meaning: Aurality and Multimodal Composing.” CCC. 60.4 (2009): 616-663. Print.

Here are the online essays Selfe gives readers to check out.


NCTE asks, “What are some of the most important changes you have seen in teaching and literacy education?”

Not so long ago, I was very content as my students and I wrote together with pens on paper in what Donald Murray called the daybook.  If some of my administrators hadn’t encouraged me to integrate technology, I don’t know if I ever would have tried to weave it into our writing.  The students and I are still after intellectual seeds on paper, but we’re all also typing up our drafts into blogs, customizing the looks of the virtual pages we publish, and we have much easier access to each other’s work.  Students who used to write just for the teacher now write for an authentic audience:  at least their classmates or if they choose, for thousands on public blogs or in their Facebook posts.   It used to look like the world was gravitating towards a seat on the couch watching television or playing video games, and now many of my students are daily, sometimes obsessive, writers.  I’m excited and also anxious about what all this will mean for literacy.

Hey English Teachers and Writers, any suggestions for a class that looks like this?

When I begin to write a syllabus for an upcoming class, I usually first think about the course’s goals and what the assignments should be.  Once that’s decided, I try to plan a schedule that will help us reach the objectives.  As I began this process for my upcoming summer courses, I was feeling kind of bummed out thinking about diving back into that same old work.  Class never ends up much like my ideal writing day, and so I’ve decided to mix up the structure for how I think about planning a course.  I’m starting with what is closer to an ideal writing day for me, and using that routine to give the class structure.  Here’s what I’ve got so far.  I’d love to hear what you think.

Daily Course Structure for Prof. Torg’s Composition Class

For me, to be a writer and thinker means to live within a mass of habits. I believe there might be as many ways to write and think as there are people engaged the acts.  By living in this routine three days a week for six weeks, I hope you’ll begin to think about how to craft your own routine for thinking, or it might be that you’re more of a person who will create an anti-routine.

(20 minutes)    Writing Studies / Annotating a Text

Let’s see what other people have to say about writing.  When I say annotate, I mean that I want you to try and have a conversation with the writer on a copy of their text.  After that, let’s practice using MLA guidelines to integrate the thoughts of others into our own texts.

(5 min)           Warm Up with Rich Language (I provide or you choose?)

Read something that will challenge your intellect, the sort of text that might introduce you to a new word.   Log the word, the context, the title of the work and the author into your daybook.  I think I’ll start you with Poetry magazine.

(10 min)          Teacher as Text.

This is like the first twenty minutes, but you’ll do this on your own with a text of your choosing.  Read something that you’d say is among the best of the sort of text you are trying to write.  I recently adapted my novel and so early each morning I tried to challenge/inspire myself by reading from Alan Ball’s American Beauty and Diablo Cody’s Juno. Look for one writerly observation of which you might make use.  Log the example in your daybook.  Make sure you take good enough notes that you could quote from this text and cite it in a works cited entry for your Writer on Writing Paper.

(20 minutes)    Write a Draft of Something you Need to Write.

Most, if not all of us, write on a computer screen with lots of distractions.  Here, we’re going to try something different:  we’ll write on paper ignoring our cell phone, instant messages, and the latest email to come dinging into our inbox.

(20 minutes)    Small Group Workshop.

Here’s something you might not be used to:  a real audience.  You can share what you just wrote or something that you’ve written and brought in.  It’s best that we all have a copy, but it is also fine if we don’t.  Readers should annotate the text:  underline phrases that get your attention, challenge the thinking, explain what you learn, and ask questions of each other and the writer.

(10 minutes)    A Lesson From Prof. Torg. Usually, there’s something coming up that I need to explain.

(10 minutes)    Work on Your Group Technology Project.

Your group is to make a movie and write a paper that focuses on one aspect of writing studies.

(5 minutes)      What happened worth mentioning today?

Let’s hear from a couple of the writers in the room.  What happened today that you can share?  Is there something you’ve written or read that you are willing to read to us?

(10 minutes)    Prof. Torg on a Text for Grade.

For this portion of the class, I want to show you the best I can what goes on in my head as I read a text written by someone I’m going to have to give a grade.

(10 minutes)    Research at Work.

I’m going to show you clips from a variety of documentaries and/or the work of previous students.  I see these films/texts as examples of those who are asking meaningful questions and pursuing answers.