Ron's "It's Been So Long, I Don't Remember Anything" post

Finally!! I did my WAC online thing! Actually I did my project quite some time ago, and am just getting around to writing about it. To be continued because my home desktop computer is going so slow, I can't stand it. Wednesday, October 24, 2007: First, here is a testament to the usefulness of first writing a "thought letter" on an assigned short story, then responding to other students posted essays on WebCT. For this purpose, I had assigned students to do an active reading and two page TL on Donna Tartt's "The Ambush," from 2007 Best American Short Stories. This is one of the most positive posts, but there really weren't any negatives. Message no. 62Posted by Jared Lowell (lowellj) on Tuesday, September 25, 2007 3:43pmSubject: Jared Lowell's Reflection Doing this assignment was an easy task for the most part. The only trouble I had was putting some of my thoughts together to write the essay. The essay was a good piece of literature to read and write about. Posting my essay online for all my to read and comment on was a great experience. Once reading their responses to my essay gave me ideas of how I could improve my writing skills. I also enjoyed reading their essays and giving feedback to help them out as well. This is going to help me build my writing skills to help me be successful throughout college and the rest of my life :) Now, here is a typical thought letter analyzing and interpreting Tartt's "The Ambush," as practice leading to my student's more formal critiques of self-selected short stories from the BASS collection.

Dan Melville
College Writing 1
Professor Drogy
19 September 2007
The Ambush
When some unfortunate even happens, there are often negative effects on people who were involved. This could range from someone missing class and not passing in their homework to a message between naval submarines being misinterpreted and starting a nuclear war that destroys the world as we know it. When people witness an unfortunate event and come into contact with the “victim” of the situation, feelings of sorrow and sympathy are often felt. When this happens, it is not uncommon for people to try to help by providing support in any way they think will be effective. This is understandable considering how much better the world would be if everyone was compassionate and sensitive to others needs, but if this gets out of hand, it could make the situation worse than it already is. This is demonstrated exceptionally well in the short story “The Ambush” by Donna Tratt when a boy that lost his father in the Vietnam War is given no parental boundaries by his mother or grandmother; this is illustrated by his bad behavior and his automatic innocence in any situation.
Tim is the poster boy for brats. He bosses his mother and grandmother around like he owns them and never does what they say. He appears angry when they talk to him as if they are speaking out of line. If he is told to do something that he doesn’t want to do he screams at the parent or simply ignores the command. This is not entirely his fault, it’s mostly his grandmothers fault because she always let him do whatever he wanted. Instead of reprimanding the young child when his conduct was poor, she gave in and let him do as he wished. He never had any boundaries; he thought because his father died, he will be given special treatment for the rest of his life. The one time his mother calmly asked him about all the noise he was making in the yard, she was shut up by his grandmother.
Another way Tartt established the negative effects of this type of extra attention was the fact that he was never guilty of anything, even if that meant someone else had to shoulder all of the blame. When Tim and Evie were sneaking around out in the yard trying to scare whoever came down the steps, they succeeded and caused Tim’s grandmother to slip and fall. She cut her arm badly and Tim bend down beside her to treat her, like he did to Evie when they replayed his father’s death and she got shot, while she went to go call 9-1-1. On her way, she was stopped by Tim’s mother who grabbed her, screamed at her, smacked her in the face, and then blamed the whole situation her, also saying “This boy was never bad a day in his life.” All of the blame that could have been put on Tim was transferred to her, along with the responsibility for his actions since the first time they met.
Tim’s mother and grandmother brought Tim up with special privileges because they felt bad for him because he lost his father. These feelings are acceptable but they way they helped him, trying to compensate for the loss of a father with a lack of rules, is not. This did not help Tim at all as he used his father’s death to his advantage to get whatever he wanted from his mother or grandmother. This gave him a false sense of reality, in which he is free to do as he pleases, which will later become a disadvantage for him as he tries to adapt to reality and find his way in the world by himself. He is going to be lost without his lifelines and will need real help.

After reading and writing a thoughtful analysis/interpretation of the Tartt story, each student chose a short story from the collection on reserve, read it actively (margin noting, highlighting, note-taking in journal) and then wrote a three page analysis/interpretation of the story. Then I had students work in small groups to write "advice-centered" reviews, based on the directions in John Bean's Engaging Ideas. Next, each student revised his or her critique and then conferenced with me. Based on our discussion, each student then did a second revision of his or her critique, and turned it in to me about two weeks ago. I am about to return the thought letters on "The Ambush" for students to do an optional revision, which will be followed by a final draft of the formal short literary analysis. I have found this project to be very challenging and intense for most, if not all, of the students in my two College Writing I classes. I believe they have been well immersed in reading and criticizing short stories, a genre that may have escaped their attention altogether. I think they have found there is great value to reading short stories, especially when they are too busy to take on full-length novels.

The next FAWP in our fall curriculum, FAWP being a formal academic writing project, is personal narrative. My intent in taking on short literary analysis first was to immerse students in excellent narrative writing strategies and techniques, in the fictional mode, which they can then apply to writing their own true life narratives. We are in the middle of that process now, as nonfiction narratives (short ones by Angelou, Tan, Dillard, and Alexie) have been read and analyzed, again through the writing of Thought Letters, and first drafts have been written and critiqued. I will soon be reading the first drafts and revisions of those essays, which are posted on WebCT. Students are now working on revisions, with editing to follow. Next week students will share their tentative, finish products, reading aloud in class, and "final drafts" willl be posted on WebCT accompanied by cover letters, and open to additional online peer response.

I use this same basic process for each new formal writing project. I particularly enjoy the early phases of immersion into a new genre and and then the collaborative analysis of what really makes a narrative a narrative, or an argument an argument Thought letter are great to use as a low to medium stakes form of intellectualizing and communicating what is being discovered. Posting on WebCT makes the writing very accessible and easy for me to check on, especially by compiling shorter discussion postings like thought letters and reader responses.