David Sedaris “Me Talk Pretty One Day”

“Me Talk Pretty One Day”  By David Sedaris
From his book Me Talk Pretty One Day

At the age of forty-one, I am returning to school and have to think of myself as  what my French textbook calls “a true debutant.” After paying my tuition, I was issued a student ID, which allows me a discounted entry fee at movie theaters, puppet shows, and Festyland, a far-flung amusement park that advertises with billboards picturing a cartoon stegosaurus sitting in a canoe and eating what appears to be a ham sandwich.

I’ve moved to Paris with hopes of learning the language. My school is an easy ten-minute walk from my apartment, and on the first day of class I arrived early, watching as the returning students greeted one another in the school lobby. Vacations were recounted, and questions were raised concerning mutual friends with names like Kang and Vlatnya. Regardless of their nationalities, everyone spoke what sounded to me like excellent French. Some accents were better than others, but the students exhibited an ease and confidence that I found intimidating. As an added discomfort, they were all young, attractive, and well-dressed, causing me to feel not unlike Pa Kettle trapped backstage after a fashion show.

The first day of class was nerve-racking because I knew I’d be expected to perform. That’s the way they do it here – it’s everybody into the language pool, sink or swim. The teacher marched in, deeply tanned from a recent vacation, and proceeded to rattle off a series of administrative announcements. I’ve spent quite a few summers in Normandy, and I took a monthlong French class before leaving New York. I’m not completely in the dark, yet I understood only half of what this woman was saying.

“If you have not meimslsxp or lgpdmurct by this time, then you should not be in this room. Has everyone apzkiubjxow? Everyone? Good, we shall begin.” She spread out her lesson plan and sighed, saying, “All right, then, who knows the alphabet?”

It was startling because (a) I hadn’t been asked that question in a while and (b) I realized, while laughing, that I myself did not know the alphabet. They’re the same letters, but in France they’re pronounced differently. I know the shape of the alphabet but had no idea what it actually sounded like.

Mike Rose’s “I Just Wanna Be Average”

“I Just Wanna Be Average” by Mike Rose

Mike Rose is a teacher and scholar who, for more than two decades, has argued quite effectively for the real potential of students often neglected and undervalued by society.  “I Just Wanna Be Average” is a chapter from Rose’s award-winning book, Lives on the Boundary (1989), about the challenges to and potential of underprepared students. Rose, himself the child of working-class Italian immigrants, argues for the unrealized abilities of many students not well served by our society.  Having overcome in high school his own inadequate preparation and intellectual neglect, Rose gives us insight into the lives of nontraditional students (often working class and minority students, ones who have been labelled “remedial”) and helps us reconsider our assumptions about them.

It took two buses to get to Our Lady of Mercy. The first started deep in South Los Angeles and caught me at midpoint. The second drifted through neighborhoods with trees, parks, big lawns, and lots of flowers. The rides were long but were livened up by a group of South L.A. veterans whose parents also thought that Hope had set up shop in the west end of the county. There was Christy Biggars, who, at sixteen, was dealing and was, ac­cording to rumor, a pimp as well. There were Bill Cobb and Johnny Gonza­les, grease-pencil artists extraordinaire, who left Nembutal-enhanced swirls of “Cobb” and “Johnny” on the corrugated walls of the bus. And then there was Tyrrell Wilson. Tyrrell was the coolest kid I knew. He ran the dozens¹ like a metric halfback, laid down a rap that outrhymed and outpointed Cobb, whose rap was good but not great-the curse of a moderately soul­ful kid trapped in white skin. But it was Cobb who would sneak a radio onto the bus, and thus underwrote his patter with Little Richard, Fats Domino, Chuck Berry, the Coasters, and Ernie K. Doe’s mother-in-law, an awful woman who was “sent from down below.” And so it was that Christy and Cobb and Johnny G. and Tyrrell and I and assorted others picked up along the way passed our days in the back of the bus, a funny mix brought to­gether by geography and parental desire.

Entrance to school brings with it forms and releases and assessments. Mercy relied on a series of tests…for placement, and somehow the results of my tests got confused with those of another stu­dent named Rose. The other Rose apparently didn’t do very well, for I was placed in the vocational track, a euphemism for the bottom level. Neither I nor my parents realized what this meant. We had no sense that Business Math, Typing, and English-Level D were dead ends. The current spate of reports on the schools criticizes parents for not involving themselves in the education of their children. But how would someone like Tommy Rose, with his two years of Italian schooling, know what to ask? And what sort of pressure could an exhausted waitress apply? The error went undetected, and I remained in the vocational track for two years. What a place.

Sherman Alexie’s “The Joys of Reading & Writing: Superman & Me”

“Superman and Me” By Sherman Alexie

The following essay appeared as part of a series, “The Joy of Reading and Writing” published by the LA Times. This essay is also printed in The Most Wonderful Books: Writers on Discovering the Pleasures of Reading and various anthologies including 50 Essays edited by Samuel Cohen.

I learned to read with a Superman comic book. Simple enough, I suppose. I cannot recall which particular Superman comic book I read, nor can I remember which villain he fought in that issue. I cannot remember the plot, nor the means by which I obtained the comic book. What I can remember is this: I was 3 years old, a Spokane Indian boy living with his family on the Spokane Indian Reservation in eastern Washington state. We were poor by most standards, but one of my parents usually managed to find some minimum-wage job or another, which made us middle-class by reservation standards. I had a brother and three sisters. We lived on a combination of irregular paychecks, hope, fear and government surplus food. (1)

My father, who is one of the few Indians who went to Catholic school on purpose, was an avid reader of westerns, spy thrillers, murder mysteries, gangster epics, basketball player biographies and anything else he could find. He bought his books by the pound at Dutch’s Pawn Shop, Goodwill, Salvation Army and Value Village. When he had extra money, he bought new novels at supermarkets, convenience stores and hospital gift shops. Our house was filled with books. They were stacked in crazy piles in the bathroom, bedrooms and living room. In a fit of unemployment-inspired creative energy, my father 

It’s Summer Solstice! Welcome Summer 2010!

Today June 21 is the first day of summer. I embrace the solstice, the longest day of the year, and the waxing moon with open arms–and a busy schedule!

The first day of summer is also the first day of summer school 2010 at Ventura College and I will be teaching two 5 unit classes. That’s more than full time. That means I will be in the classroom for almost 3 hours a day for each class, in a split shift, and then I will have a LOT of papers to read!

The classes are FULL, but I always make room for students who really want to make a difference in their writing and in their world. If that’s you, let me know.

I am also teaching classes this fall and at Bell Arts and coaching clients to help them with their writing projects when I can fit them in. What are YOU doing this summer? Reading any good books? Got any good writing  projects going?

3 Steps to Take BEFORE You Start A Blog

So you want to start a blog for yourself, for business, or for school? Here’s 3 steps you should take BEFORE you register your blog.

Step 1: Gather materials

Gather materials for your new site. These may include written text documents, jpgs, youtube videos. Collect everything including links you think you might want to put on your website to tell the story you want to share.  If your blog is for a business, and you have a business plan, bring that.  I recommend you put everything you think you might use onto a portable drive. In particular, you’ll want a mission statement about your business or about the purpose of your blog plus a brief biographical statement about yourself written in third person (don’t use “I”).  If you already have a website, you will be able to get material from it (and link it to your blog). So you’ll want to drafts and bring these materials.

Step 2: Research your URL

Use Google and other search engines to see if anyone has “your” name and variations of it online.  As you search, note what else comes up.

Step 3: Go to http://wordpress.com

At WordPress.com, explore some of the “freshly pressed” sites.  Take a few notes on how they are organized.

–Which ones do you respond to positively?
–What don’t you like about some sites?
–Which names catch your attention?
–“Theme” names (at the bottom)

Learn more about blogging, social media and writing workshops by visiting the The Write Alley. We offer monthly workshops at Bell Arts Factory.

NOTE to my Ventura College English 2 Summer School students: Do the first three steps (gather materials, research and determine the name of your blog, look at some examples) by Tuesday June 29 when we will go to the lab to start our blogs.

How To Do Academic Research: UW Librarians Go Gaga

What else is there to say except this is a great introduction to library research AND to grad school shenanigans.