Dakota Writing Project

By Greg Dyer, University of Sioux Falls

Eisenhower Hall. Kansas State University. Late 1980s. Advanced Composition. Donald Stewart sits cross-legged at a student desk—near the door, as if blocking our departure. He attempts to explain a chapter from the textbook, a chapter on Grammar B. (Though the term “Grammar B” has stuck in my memory and shaped my tastes for nearly thirty years, I could not have defined it for you until I pulled the textbook—The Versatile Writer, written by Stewart—from the shelf after starting this reflection.)

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Romano, Tom. “Breaking the Rules in Style.” Writing with Passion: Life Stories, Multiple Genres. Portsmouth, NH: Boynton/Cook Heinemann, 1995. 74-92.

—–. “Evolving Voice Through the Alternate Style.” Writing with Passion: Life Stories, Multiple Genres. Portsmouth, NH: Boynton/Cook Heinemann, 1995. 93-108.

Stewart, Donald C. The Versatile Writer. Lexington, MA: D. C. Heath, 1986.

Weathers, Winston. An Alternate Style: Options in Composition. Rochelle Park, NJ: Hayden Book Company, 1980.

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Like most days, I sit on the left side of the classroom, along the bank of windows. Three of my classmates write “Dear John/Jane” letters on the chalkboard. It’s not you. It’s me. There is no good way to say it. There are plenty of bad ways, however. We laugh a lot, and I don’t nod off once.

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A crot (crots, plural) is an obsolete word meaning “bit” or “fragment.” […] A basic element in the alternate grammar of style, and comparable somewhat to the “stanza” in poetry, the crot may range in length from one sentence to twenty or thirty sentences. It is fundamentally an autonomous unit, characterized by the absence of any transitional devices that might relate it to preceding or subsequent crots and because of this independent and discrete nature of crots, they create a general effect of metastasis—using that term from classical rhetoric to label, as Fritz Senn recently suggested in the James Joyce Quarterly, any “rapid transition from one point of view to another” (Weathers).

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I write an essay using lines from a Langston Hughes poem as an organizing structure. (Having just dug the paper out of a file, I find Stewart’s end comments have been lost. Having read roughly a thousand essays in first-year composition courses, I see that the organization was the only distinguishing feature of the essay. ) It was the first time I felt like a writer.

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In Caney, Kansas, I sit behind the teacher’s desk as the high school students in my advanced composition class work on a meditation essay. The assignment is pulled straight from Stewart’s The Versatile Writer. (Most of us teach like we were taught, after all.) A year later, after teaching junior high for a year, I submit my resignation and return to graduate school, where I will discover that I learned nothing about writing pedagogy when I was an undergrad. Sitting along the bank of windows, I saw everything through the lens of a student. Sometimes the lens of a writer. Never a teacher of writing.

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A Dream Deferred

What happens to a dream deferred?

Does it dry up
like a raisin in the sun?
Or fester like a sore–
And then run?
Does it stink like rotten meat?
Or crust and sugar over–
like a syrupy sweet?

Maybe it just sags
like a heavy load.

Or does it explode?

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A new graduate student, I walk into the office of Gay Lynn Crossley, whose comments during the practicum sessions for graduate teaching assistants consistently strike me as insightful and generous. Opening up possibilities in student papers that I did not perceive. Having no vocabulary for talking about writing in ways similar to Gay Lynn, I can only ask her what I should be reading. She hands me a five-page bibliography that continues to occupy a prominent space in my desk drawer.

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Berthoff, Ann. Forming, Thinking, Writing: The Composing Imagination. Rochelle Park, NJ: Hayden, 1978.

Elbow, Peter. “Closing My Eyes As I Speak: An Argument for Ignoring Audience.” College English 49 (1987): 50-69.

Gass, William. “On Talking to Oneself.” Habitations of the Word: Essays. New York: Simon & Schuster, 1985. 206-216.

Macrorie, Ken. Telling Writing. Rochelle Park, NJ: Hayden, 1970.

Murray, Donald. A Writer Teaches Writing. 2nd Edition. Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1985.

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From a letter of recommendation written last week, for a recent graduate seeking a position in a nearby high school:

As a writer, RecentGradA is the best with whom I have worked. Her versatility, her work ethic and her voice are distinct and unique. She sets her standards high, but is willing to take risks in order to grow as a writer, a thinker, and a person. Many of us who teach writing have heard ourselves assert that a writer “needs to know the rules before breaking them.” Seldom, however, do we gain the opportunity to work with writers who have reached that point in their development. RecentGradA is one who provided me that opportunity. I truly believe she could have a career as a writer, and I have—selfishly, I admit—often desired to see her undertake that pursuit.

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I’d like to encourage everyone who reads this reflection to do two things:

First, I invite you to use the commenting function connected with this post to share a crot or two from your own development as a teacher, a scholar, a writer.

Second, given that most methods courses at the undergraduate level can allot little more than a week to the teaching of writing, I hope you’ll look around your school and invite new teachers to apply to the Dakota Writing Project’s Invitational Summer Institute. If the 2008 deadline has passed by the time you read this piece, start lobbying for the 2009 summer institute. While I’m exceedingly grateful to be teaching at a university, I can’t help but wonder how much more rewarding—how much more effective—my teaching in Caney, Kansas, might have been if Mrs. Faulkenberry or Mrs. Sullivan had been able to welcome me into a community of “teachers teaching teachers.”

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DWP 2006 Summer Institute Successful

by DWP Summer Institute Co-Directors Nancy Kampfe and Michelle Rogge Gannon

Dakota Writing Project teachers from around the state participated in the 2006 Summer Institute, from June 6th through June 29th, 2006. With us—institute co-directors Nancy Kampfe and Michelle Rogge Gannon—leading the way, this able group presented demonstrations, wrote daily, did research, and experimented with various forms of technology, including weblogs, digital storytelling, and the NWP E-Anthology.

Karen Rahn organized the group into writing teams to take digital photos for writing news stories, while Annie Christain helped participants to understand the Beat Poets better and, also, to write poems based on their work. Krista Bruggeman treated us to cookies and more cookies as we evaluated them and shared our “test” results; we also created our own cookie concepts, with clever posters advertising these creations. Carmen Graber asked us to read a story and write endings beyond the actual end of the story. Carla McMurry-Kozak got us all thinking about gratitude when we wrote, in many instances, some profound thank-you notes to various people in our lives. Rick Moore showed us alphabet books and inspired to write our own informal versions, with some of us turning them into poems. Stacy Hawkins helped us to dig into character when we observed people on campus and transformed them into characters for fiction. Connie Jensen gave us paper puppet-masks that we decorated; we then wrote skits, using these puppet-masks and writing some mighty snappy dialogue.

Here, we see this lively group of teachers on the last day of the Institute, after enjoying a celebratory lunch at the Buffalo Run Winery in Vermillion. Pictured are Karen Rahn (Rutland Public School), Nancy Kampfe (Bennett County High School), Michelle Rogge Gannon (University of South Dakota), Annie Christain (University of South Dakota), Krista Bruggeman (Lennox Public School), Carla McMurry-Kozak (Canton Public School), Rick Moore (Rapid City Gifted Education K-8), Connie Jensen (Gayville-Volin), Stacy Hawkins (Sioux Falls Roosevelt High School), and Carmen Graber.

After the Institute ended, each teacher received a CD containing some of their writings from the Institute, pictures, and a few digital stories. This was the first time that we had created such a CD. Some of the pieces published on the CD have also been published here on the DWP weblog.