Beth Kephart's Blog, page 251

Radnor High's Fourth Annual Girls' Night Out

I'll be spending part of tomorrow evening among those celebrating the Radnor High School Scholarship Fund's Fourth Annual Girls' Night Out. Wine, hors d'oeuvres, some 20 boutique vendors, a Lilly Pulitzer fashion show, raffles, and more are on the agenda.  With the event beginning at 4 and ending at 9, I'll be making my way to The Willows on Darby Road at 6:30 or so to talk about and read from some of my books.  I'll be sharing (briefly, I promise!) the ways in which my fiction—Undercover, House of Dance, Nothing but Ghosts, The Heart Is Not a Size, Dangerous Neighbors, and the forthcoming You Are My Only—provides windows into the life I've actually lived.  I hope to see you there. 



For more information, please click this link.

Mighty Writers: a haven amidst rising violence in Philadelphia's schools

The Philadelphia Inquirer is calling the series "Assault on Learning."  It is painful, beyond painful, to read the stories through.  There is, for example, the story of a young woman at work on an algebra test when a band of marauding students bursts through the classroom door and attacks—as the other students and teacher watch, helpless.  Her crime? Witnessing a fight that had broken out the week before.  Her warning?  The Vaseline these attackers had smeared on their face and the scarves they had tied to their heads.  "The ritual — well-known in Philadelphia schools — is intended to keep skin from scarring and hair from getting ripped out," reporters John Sullivan, Susan Snyder, Kristen A Graham, and Dylan Purcell tell us.



The reporters also provide these staggering numbers, which I quote from the story which can be found here: 

The Jan. 22, 2010, assault on Teshada, which left her bleeding and dazed, was the 2,095th violent incident the School District recorded in the 2009-10 year.




Within a few minutes, a video at the three-story school recorded violent incident No. 2,096, another attack in a hallway in a largely unused part of the building that teachers had complained about for months. Students rushed past a security guard as the fight erupted. Then, he waded into the fray, reaching down to help a girl who had been knocked to the ground and kicked and punched by her assailants.

By June, the district's total of violent incidents had grown to 4,541. That means on an average day 25 students, teachers, or other staff members were beaten, robbed, sexually assaulted, or victims of other violent crimes.



That doesn't even include thousands more who are extorted, threatened, or bullied in a school year.

This is terrible news and essential reporting.  This is one more evidence of devastation in a broken world.  What do we do about it?  How can we help?  We can start by knowing, which is what the Inquirer is enabling us to do. We can also give to Mighty Writers, a wonderful after-school, urban Philadelphia program run by Tim Whitaker.  This from a letter Mr. Whitaker sent today:

We don't think about violence much at Mighty Writers. Two years into the program, it isn't an issue, and we plan to keep it that way.



That's not to say there aren't days when kids come through our doors edgy from the school day, or that there isn't the occasional verbal dust up. We see hundreds of kids in a week; kids being kids, you'd be smart to expect disagreeable moments.



But those moments are few, and they pass quickly, and there are reasons for that. Kids at Mighty Writers come voluntarily--which means they've made a decision to find a way to get ahead, or somebody at home has made that decision for them. Either way, every kid's ongoing participation speaks volumes.



Plus, we pay close attention.



Learning to write clearly and meaningfully builds kids' confidence, self-esteem and self-respect. That's our particular truth. We see the proof. If you've been with us for any length of time, you know our mission is to turn city kids onto writing through innovative projects in safe and optimistic neighborhood centers. We want to make a difference in the lives of as many kids as possible.

Think about it.  Think about havens.  Think about words.  Think about kids who want to get ahead and how stories and language can help them.  I am about to head off to the post office myself.

What makes for a memorable literary profile?

In class today we'll be reviewing the possibilities inherent in the first-person literary profile.  How, for example, does James Baldwin both summon his father and reveal his own soul in "Notes of a Native Son"?  He had lived and died in an intolerable bitterness of spirit and it frightened me, as we drove him to the graveyard through those unquiet, ruined streets, to see how powerful and overflowing this bitterness could be and to realize that this bitterness was now mine.  



How much knowing lies behind Frederick Busch's words, about Terrence des Pres:  He had found what most writers searched for, consciously or otherwise, all their working lives: the subject that was metaphor for the interior strife that drove them to be writers. 



And what is Annie Dillard up to with "The Stunt Pilot"?  How is that she reveals herself, even when her seeming purpose is to help us see this plane and its magic-making driver?  The black plane dropped spinning, and flattened out spinning the other way; it began to carve the air into forms that built wildly and musically on each other and never ended. Reluctantly, I started paying attention.   Rahm drew high above the world an inexhaustibly glorious line; it piled over our heads in loops and arabesques.  It was like a Saul Steinberg fantasy; the plane was the pen.  Like Steinberg's contracting and billowing pen line, the line Rahm spun moved to form new, punning shapes from the edges of the old.  Like a Klee line, it smattered the sky with landscapes and systems. 



We'll talk about all this and more, then get back to the business of critiquing student memoirs.

Academically Adrift: Limited Learning on College Campuses/Richard Arum and Josipa Roksa: Reflections

When you pull back the heavy curtains of my classroom at the University of Pennsylvania (an old room in an old once-house), you find yourself face-to-face with this fine addition to the Wharton School.  I survey this scene, before my students arrive.  I wonder what I can do, what I must do, to prepare my sixteen for the world. 



It's the perpetual, perpetuating question.  Richard Arum and Josipa Roksa's new study, Academically Adrift, raises the ante.  Across the nation, according to the authors, students enrolled in U.S. universities and colleges aren't reading enough, aren't writing enough, and aren't learning enough.  The country that needs them to reflect seriously, analyze well, and write coherently falters and corporations lose hope (or hire overseas talent for the harder tasks).  This country's future is at risk, thanks to grade inflation, easing standards, and a willingness, on the part of many, to look the other way as students party more and study less.  And very little, the authors argue, is being done to fix the problem, for few see the situation as a crisis:  "No actors in the system are primarily interested in academic growth, although many are interested in student retention and persistence," write Arum and Roksa.  "Limited learning on college campuses is not a crisis because the institutional actors impicated in the system are receiving the organizational outcomes they seek...."



The students enrolled in the authors' study reported spending only 12 hours per week studying, while 37% of students, the authors say, spend less than five hours per week preparing for their courses.  A shockingly low percentage of students are expected to read more than 40 pages a week or write more than 20 pages over the course of a semester.  And yet, "[s]tudents' lack of academic focus at today's colleges... has had little impact on their grade point averages and often only relatively modest effects on their progress towards degree completion as they have developed and acquired 'the art of college management,' in which success is achieved primarily not through hard work but through 'controlling college by shaping schedules, taming professors, and limiting workload.'"



I, for the record, refuse to be tamed.  I recognize, as this study also does, that a teacher can matter in the life of a student—that, while, it might be easy and more popular to let a good student stay merely good or to glance away from another student's struggles, while it might be nice to slack off now and then from the more than the 30 hours I spend each week preparing for and teaching a single course, I cannot and will not slack off. The measure of my achievement at Penn is certainly not my adjunct professor salary and certainly not the evaluations the students choose to give me at semester's end.  Ultimately I must be measured by how effectively, how purposefully I have insisted that these students commit to and exhibit actual growth—greater competency, deeper knowing, enriched capability.  I make my students read—a lot—and I read to them.  I require my students to write each week.  I believe in my students, and sometimes that belief is demonstrated by perhaps unwelcome requests:  Do it again, and do it better. And after that, do more.



Does this make me popular?  I don't know.  Does it make me rich?  Not in the least.  Can I write (which is equivalent to research for the science/math crew) while I am teaching?  I cannot.  It would be easier to do this another way, but these are our students, this is our future, this is our shot to get it right. I read Academically Adrift nodding my head and shaking it, too.  I read it hoping that someone will listen.  That teaching the way teaching must be done will be rewarded in a fashion that will attract those who can do it well.



Because I work in corporate America when I am not on that Penn campus.  I see what colleges are graduating.  I see the erosion of the English language, I see how utterly inconvenient logic and grammar have become.  If we can't fix what is happening on college campuses, we will not save ourselves.  Teaching has to matter; it has to be supported.

Sing, City! 3: Red Dot Dreaming/in which my student and her many take the stage

My husband and I (yes, my husband and I, for I'd somehow persuaded this lifelong-will-not-attend-musicals-under-any-circumstances citizen) traveled to the Penn campus last evening, walked the wide streets to the Penn Museum, and waited with hundreds of others for the door to the Harrison Auditorium to open.  We were there in that old-world space to watch "Sing, City! 3:  Red Dot Dreaming," a musical that my student Rachel both directed and co-wrote.



"Once every two years, Club Singapore's members set aside their books, come together and put up a musical that attracts Penn Students and Singaporeans from all over the East Coast for one night only," the promo had explained, and that's about all I knew when those doors swung open and I was rushed, within the crowd, toward the stage.  It might have been a rock concert or a celebrity jam. It might have been another country.  Rachel Rachel Rachel, hundreds (it seemed like hundreds) were chanting, chanting the names of the other actors, too, the names of the musicians and the dozens of students who had worked for months to put on this self-parodying show.  What is a Singaporean?  What is a Singaporean Penn student?  Over the next few hours, those questions would be answered in a smartly choreographed and well-paced theatrical spectacular that had Rachel Rachel Rachel laced through its every original song, its well-told tale.



Every imaginable Singaporean stereotype marched onto that stage and then devolved or evolved, became more. Every imaginable Singaporean joke (it seemed to me) was elevated and exploited, delivered by actors having contagious fun and underscored by clever multimedia titling.  All the while, behind me, sat those hundreds, that crowd, cheering the actors on—talking out to them or back to them, shaking hand-made signs, calling out awwwww in unison, as if those who had come to watch had rehearsed their lines just as religiously and vigorously as those who had come to perform.



Rachel Rachel Rachel, we all called out, when it was done, and then those on the stage took to tossing this petite, extra-special, she-can-do-it-all-and-so-she-will (Rachel, I know you don't think much of hyphenated of language, but heck, I keep using it here) student into the air.  I've never seen anything like it. I might not again.  But oh, was it something to leave my world for awhile to enter hers.



A final note:  My husband admitted to having had a fine time.  I have proof.  I saw him laughing.

Maybe writing can't be taught, but it can be learned

Having spent this morning grading student memoirs, I am in possession of invincible proof. 

In which a kidnap victim finds, decades later, her way home

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You Are My Only, my young adult novel about a kidnapped child and the mother who loses her (due out in October from Egmont USA), is a story imagined, a story built on images and then on research.  But today, watching this story of a real life kidnap victim who fought for years to be returned to her proper home, I realized that tears were streaming down my cheeks, that sometimes you can imagine much and still be broken when the imagined proves itself to be nearly real.  It took Rhonda Patricia Christie decades to find her rightful mom and dad, and she found them just, as the beautiful and sensitive Ann Curry says in this piece, in the nick of time.  But why did it take so long?  How can this happen?  Why aren't our children better protected?  Why did no one believe this little girl's story?  Why didn't the police help her stolen-from mom?

This touched me

Paths cross.  A blog post finds a blog reader, and the writer finds the reader, and a friendship begins.  Melissa is one of the first people I met out here in the land of blogs, and she has kindly become a real presence as well, finding me at talks or blogger conventions, stepping into the quiet chaos of my world.



This post, on her wonderfully eloquent The Betty and Boo Chronicles, touched me deeply.  She called it, "I've Been Seeing Beth, In All the Most Surprising Places."  It returned to me some of my past.

The Duke of Deception/Geoffrey Wolff: Reflections on one of the best memoirs I've ever read

I could go on about this; I won't.  The Duke of Deception is one of the best memoirs I've ever read.



I speak as one whose shelves are overflowing with the form, as one who has attempted the beast more than a few times herself, as one who teaches this dastardly, presumptive first-person art, begging emerging writers to think harder about scenes, longer about story, more purposefully about what any of it means.  Leave the right things in, take the right things out, be scrupulously honest without ever being dull, learn and let the reader learn with you, do not summarize your past, evoke it, avoid the scold and the didactic and the exhibitionism, be only yourself, grant your work the possibility of reach and stretch, write for the right reasons.... It's all here, all the lessons I've ever laid out, urged toward.



Duke is a father-son story.  It's a forgiveness story.  It's an adventure.  It's a lesson.  Geoffrey Wolff's father hardly ever told the truth, and he was a wreck, and he wrecked things, and he was a shameful disappointment, and he died ignoble, and yet every word in this breathtaking book is written from a place of love.  Like this:

I was harder on my father after I had the goods on him than he had ever been on me.  He had always had the goods on me.  And he never made cruel use of them.

Like, also, this:

My father's vocabulary was a schoolboy's vocabulary because among us he was among schoolboys.  He was a chameleon.  He gave his clients what he thought they wanted:  companies got his constipated management jargon, headmasters got piety, car salesmen got bank references, car mechanics got engineering lore.  He was a lie, through and through.  There was nothing to him but lies, and love.

No excuses.  Read it.

Taking a walk through Powelton Village

As an undergraduate at Penn, especially in the early big-classroom years during which no teacher knew my name, nor where I sat, nor if I was in attendance, even, I did my dutiful work, then roamed—across the bridge and east toward the Delaware sometimes, but also north, into Powelton Village.  The streets there were wide and tree-lined; the architecture was broken Victorian.  There were children in school yards and churches that doubled as walking-tour destinations.  There was a raw edge, the percolating possibility, always, of trouble.  Once home to Philadelphia's wealthy, this part of the city became, in time, home to the so-called "bottom gangs" and, years later, the birthing ground of the radical group, MOVE.  Today Powelton merges, not always easily, with Drexel University, which has moved residential buildings and fraternities into the area and shifted the cultural and social dynamics of the place.



Yesterday, before class, I went walking there—remembering the poems I'd write on Powelton street corners, images I stole from laundromats, the names that would rise up, out of kitchen windows, like the steam off of cobbed corn. The skies were gray, and I had an early student appointment, but for a long time I walked.  At last responsibilities called and I headed off toward Penn.  I stopped at this tile installation on the grounds of University City High School and read.  It's worth reading, if you can.