Myles—
I wonder if there’s some way you can fuse the two parts of this together (the visit and the interview). You have so much description in the first half and it’s not until the second that that it really becomes interesting to me, that I really feel like I should care, and then it ends so quickly—I was just getting really into it and then it was over! So I’m wondering if you can find a way to get some of the context or quotes in earlier, break up the description a little bit (you may also be able to use less description, and then you could do more of the story). If you do that I think it could be a really great piece.
I’m also not sure that I like your voice in the piece. It might actually be a stronger piece if you take yourself out of it (and especially your friend). You can still say the same things, just don’t use the “I”—I think that it’s unnecessary, and might hurt the piece more than it helps. But we should still be able to get the same feeling about what the building is like.
Joel—
I feel like maybe I kind of know what your overall point is, but having a more clear structure might really help that. You have huge paragraphs and kind of jump from point to point without any logical progression, so I think your piece could really benefit from breaking it up and a greater structure.
I also feel like, though you have these large paragraphs, I know very little about the band or the people in it. There are a lot of points that I feel like you could make in fewer words, and that would help you add more to the piece. There are some key aspects that I really feel are missing: How many people are even in the band? What city are we in? How old are they?
I’m also a little confused by the opening—who is he taking the guitar from? You ? Someone else? I think that having that clarification could make it a stronger opening.
I think that they could be a really cool subject if you can break things up a bit and get more information in there. They seem interesting, but I think you just need to find a way to rework to piece a little bit.
Anna—
I almost feel like this last paragraph could be the intro—I feel like this is almost the heart of the piece, so to speak. There’s action here, and you encompass a lot, and this is where I really felt like there was something, like I knew what the piece was about. Before that, it was just these different areas of a building, and I didn’t feel very invested in what was going on there. You kind of bounced from place to place and there’s a lot of description and less about the overall, and it’s not until the end that I really felt like I understood—I want to understand earlier.
So, I think that if you can make the overall point clearer in the beginning (and this last paragraph might work, if you just tinker with a few things), then you could go into different areas of the building and how it’s all entwined, and also give information about the building itself. But I need to understand why I’m reading the piece earlier. This is a great subject, though, so I think that if you just rework some things your piece could be really cool. Great start!
Claire—
I like this piece. I think that it’s great that you went to all three places and talked to a bunch of people. I’m unsure how I feel about having your voice in the piece—I think it could work okay without it as well, I don’t know. You could be telling the same story without your voice, but I’m really just undecided about it—I can’t decide if it’s distracting or not.
But in general, there are two things I’m concerned about: transitions and take home message. Your transition from Waldo’s to The Strutt works well—I’m most concerned about the first one from Fourth Coast to Waldo’s because it’s so abrupt. You need to find a different/smoother way to get us from one place to the next.
In terms of take home message, I guess that I’m just not sure what I’m supposed to think about changes associated with the smoking ban after reading this piece. Is the message simply that they’ll get over it? You seem to be saying that at points, but it needs to be clearer. I think that you’ve got a really great start, though, and I’ll be interested to read this piece again after you revise it.
Tuesday, May 25, 2010
Monday, May 24, 2010
Writing Process - Explanatory Piece
So, I felt like I was writing a news article for this. Like, I figured out a structure and then just plugged everything in. And I think that's my biggest concern right now--that it reads too much like a regular feature, and that it's lacking in narrative. I'm not sure what would be an appropriate story to put in, though--sitting in Streeter's office, maybe, or getting an acceptance letter in the mail?
There's also so much that I could talk about in relation to Jon Streeter's process--what he requires them to do, how it's structured, everything that he's developed and set up for them. It's all really cool, and I can't decide how much of it is necessary for the piece within the word limit that's imposed.
I also want to talk to a couple more kids, so word limit might be a problem there as well. I'm trying to contact at least one kid who's going out of state (I'd really like to do the Harvard girl, or the Cornell kid), so that I have that kind of perspective to add. I might be able to cut down some of the quotes (though I really like the way Jon talks, I think that he's really amusing), and that oculd help make more space for such an addition.
I'm also unsure about the part I have in there about money--this might be an aspect that could be subtracted. I originally thought that it was important to note that though they don't have trouble getting in, they still do, like everyone else, have trouble deciding where to go due to financial concerns. But I'm not sure it really fits, and I was hesitant about that part.
So basically, it wasn't that hard to necessarily put the piece together--it felt pretty normal to me--but there's a lot I'm unsure about. So we'll see.
There's also so much that I could talk about in relation to Jon Streeter's process--what he requires them to do, how it's structured, everything that he's developed and set up for them. It's all really cool, and I can't decide how much of it is necessary for the piece within the word limit that's imposed.
I also want to talk to a couple more kids, so word limit might be a problem there as well. I'm trying to contact at least one kid who's going out of state (I'd really like to do the Harvard girl, or the Cornell kid), so that I have that kind of perspective to add. I might be able to cut down some of the quotes (though I really like the way Jon talks, I think that he's really amusing), and that oculd help make more space for such an addition.
I'm also unsure about the part I have in there about money--this might be an aspect that could be subtracted. I originally thought that it was important to note that though they don't have trouble getting in, they still do, like everyone else, have trouble deciding where to go due to financial concerns. But I'm not sure it really fits, and I was hesitant about that part.
So basically, it wasn't that hard to necessarily put the piece together--it felt pretty normal to me--but there's a lot I'm unsure about. So we'll see.
Sunday, May 23, 2010
Explanatory Narrative First Draft
Amidst Smaller Acceptance Rates, KAMSC Students are Still Getting In
By Jessica Maas
College acceptance rates may be down throughout the country this year, but the high school seniors at the Kalamazoo Area Mathematics and Science Center (KAMSC) had a secret weapon—Mr. Jon Streeter.
Streeter, who has been at the center since a year after it opened in 1986, has acted as the college consultant to KAMSC students for the last 14 years. He meets students in their very first semester and continues to interact with them until they make their college decision choices as seniors.
“If you come in as a freshman I give you a little monologue, I give you a little assignment which essentially is, ‘Where do you think you want to be 12 years from today? Go find a guy doing that—talk to him, pick his brain. ‘What’s your life like, what’s your job like, any chance I can shadow you?’” said Streeter, who continued that the students are then required to find undergraduate programs for that specific career. “So if you want to go to Yale, what do the other Yale applicants look like? Here’s the top quartile—gods, goddesses, people from other planets—here’s us, 25th to 50th, mainstream who they accept—that’s what you need to look like by the beginning of your senior year. If I can do anything—summer experiences, enrichment plans, travel, research teams, whatever we can do to make the field level aside from a decent GPA and some test scores, that’s what we’ll do, and you tell me that in your freshman year.”
Streeter knows the kids. And, maybe more importantly, he knows other people.
“I’ve visited over 100 colleges, I’ve done over 175 visits over a 12 year period. And I know admissions people, I know who handles our applications, I know who runs the store, and I know what kids I have where, so if you’re a junior or senior Math/Science Center and Dartmouth is on your mind, I can hook you up with both of the women we have there, you can do a visit, you can follow them to classes, you can meet Dan Perish, the dean, you can meet Caroline Kur, the reader for Michigan—I can help,” he explained.
And his process works. So while “The New York Times” is reporting that the number of applications at some of the most selective colleges in the U.S. is going up and the acceptance rates at those same schools are therefore decreasing, the 68 high school students in this year’s KAMSC graduating class are still getting in.
One student was accepted to Brown, whose admittance rate this year was only 9.3 percent after a 20.60 percent increase in applications. Two students were accepted at Cornell, one was accepted at the University of Pennsylvania, and one is turning down Stanford to attend Harvard; all of those schools experienced increases in the number of applications this year, and the latter two each accepted less than eight percent of those.
In total, the graduating class received 213 offers of admission from 72 colleges or programs. And the Ivy Leagues were not the only elite schools offering—KAMSC students also had offers at academically well-known schools such as Emory College, George Washington University, Northwestern University, Oberlin College, University of Chicago, and Vanderbilt University.
But while the offers don’t seem to be an issue, deciding where to go can pose one. Streeter admitted that in-state schools currently look more attractive to families, given the current state of the economy.
“It is more difficult for a kid to spend 200 grand to go out of state than ever before,” he said. “I don’t care how well off your family is—that’s a challenge. You were just accepted to M.I.T.—I’ve had three of these in the last five years—‘$210,000 please. Shut up, write check. What do you mean merit? Everyone here merits money.’”
The numbers reflect this challenge. Of the 68 seniors, 52 of them are attending a school within Michigan, and Kalamazoo Central senior Radhika Sharma confirmed that, in many cases, money played a large factor in the decision.
“I know of a lot of students who stayed in-state for going to college if they had the [Kalamazoo] Promise simply because it was beneficial and economically suitable for their family to stay in-state,” she said.
Sharma will be attending Wayne State University’s MedStart program next fall, a program that already guarantees her acceptance to Wayne State University’s medical school in four years. Only 15 students in the nation matriculate into this program each year. She noted that having access to Mr. Streeter, who has office hours and gives students his e-mail and phone number, was much more beneficial than any conversation she had with her guidance counselor at Kalamazoo Central.
“My conversations with him were more in depth about where my next step would be, where I should apply, why I should apply, and it was more overall and in depth, whereas with my counselor at the home school it was more like, ‘Are you fulfilling the courses you need to fulfill?’ It was more getting me to graduation, whereas he was more taking me beyond and into college,” she said.
Streeter himself noted that though KAMSC students are forced to do a lot of outside work before their senior year—talking to people and writing papers, required college visits, resume prep, personal essay writing over the summer—most of them recognize the advantage of it when they actually start applying.
“Probably seven out of 10 seniors that walk in in the fall say something to this effect: ‘You know that thing you asked us to do Mr. Streeter when we were freshmen, and sophomores, juniors? Scared the crap out of me. I did a really good job, I did a whole new interview with everybody. Because if I had not evolved through that I would be here with my freshman list and I’d be dead just like my home school friends,’” he said.
The bottom line is simply this—Jon Streeter wants KAMSC students to be able to go where they want to go.
“My goal is, anyplace you say you want to be? I want you to have that as a choice,” he said. “You don’t want to go to Duke? Turn ‘em down.”
By Jessica Maas
College acceptance rates may be down throughout the country this year, but the high school seniors at the Kalamazoo Area Mathematics and Science Center (KAMSC) had a secret weapon—Mr. Jon Streeter.
Streeter, who has been at the center since a year after it opened in 1986, has acted as the college consultant to KAMSC students for the last 14 years. He meets students in their very first semester and continues to interact with them until they make their college decision choices as seniors.
“If you come in as a freshman I give you a little monologue, I give you a little assignment which essentially is, ‘Where do you think you want to be 12 years from today? Go find a guy doing that—talk to him, pick his brain. ‘What’s your life like, what’s your job like, any chance I can shadow you?’” said Streeter, who continued that the students are then required to find undergraduate programs for that specific career. “So if you want to go to Yale, what do the other Yale applicants look like? Here’s the top quartile—gods, goddesses, people from other planets—here’s us, 25th to 50th, mainstream who they accept—that’s what you need to look like by the beginning of your senior year. If I can do anything—summer experiences, enrichment plans, travel, research teams, whatever we can do to make the field level aside from a decent GPA and some test scores, that’s what we’ll do, and you tell me that in your freshman year.”
Streeter knows the kids. And, maybe more importantly, he knows other people.
“I’ve visited over 100 colleges, I’ve done over 175 visits over a 12 year period. And I know admissions people, I know who handles our applications, I know who runs the store, and I know what kids I have where, so if you’re a junior or senior Math/Science Center and Dartmouth is on your mind, I can hook you up with both of the women we have there, you can do a visit, you can follow them to classes, you can meet Dan Perish, the dean, you can meet Caroline Kur, the reader for Michigan—I can help,” he explained.
And his process works. So while “The New York Times” is reporting that the number of applications at some of the most selective colleges in the U.S. is going up and the acceptance rates at those same schools are therefore decreasing, the 68 high school students in this year’s KAMSC graduating class are still getting in.
One student was accepted to Brown, whose admittance rate this year was only 9.3 percent after a 20.60 percent increase in applications. Two students were accepted at Cornell, one was accepted at the University of Pennsylvania, and one is turning down Stanford to attend Harvard; all of those schools experienced increases in the number of applications this year, and the latter two each accepted less than eight percent of those.
In total, the graduating class received 213 offers of admission from 72 colleges or programs. And the Ivy Leagues were not the only elite schools offering—KAMSC students also had offers at academically well-known schools such as Emory College, George Washington University, Northwestern University, Oberlin College, University of Chicago, and Vanderbilt University.
But while the offers don’t seem to be an issue, deciding where to go can pose one. Streeter admitted that in-state schools currently look more attractive to families, given the current state of the economy.
“It is more difficult for a kid to spend 200 grand to go out of state than ever before,” he said. “I don’t care how well off your family is—that’s a challenge. You were just accepted to M.I.T.—I’ve had three of these in the last five years—‘$210,000 please. Shut up, write check. What do you mean merit? Everyone here merits money.’”
The numbers reflect this challenge. Of the 68 seniors, 52 of them are attending a school within Michigan, and Kalamazoo Central senior Radhika Sharma confirmed that, in many cases, money played a large factor in the decision.
“I know of a lot of students who stayed in-state for going to college if they had the [Kalamazoo] Promise simply because it was beneficial and economically suitable for their family to stay in-state,” she said.
Sharma will be attending Wayne State University’s MedStart program next fall, a program that already guarantees her acceptance to Wayne State University’s medical school in four years. Only 15 students in the nation matriculate into this program each year. She noted that having access to Mr. Streeter, who has office hours and gives students his e-mail and phone number, was much more beneficial than any conversation she had with her guidance counselor at Kalamazoo Central.
“My conversations with him were more in depth about where my next step would be, where I should apply, why I should apply, and it was more overall and in depth, whereas with my counselor at the home school it was more like, ‘Are you fulfilling the courses you need to fulfill?’ It was more getting me to graduation, whereas he was more taking me beyond and into college,” she said.
Streeter himself noted that though KAMSC students are forced to do a lot of outside work before their senior year—talking to people and writing papers, required college visits, resume prep, personal essay writing over the summer—most of them recognize the advantage of it when they actually start applying.
“Probably seven out of 10 seniors that walk in in the fall say something to this effect: ‘You know that thing you asked us to do Mr. Streeter when we were freshmen, and sophomores, juniors? Scared the crap out of me. I did a really good job, I did a whole new interview with everybody. Because if I had not evolved through that I would be here with my freshman list and I’d be dead just like my home school friends,’” he said.
The bottom line is simply this—Jon Streeter wants KAMSC students to be able to go where they want to go.
“My goal is, anyplace you say you want to be? I want you to have that as a choice,” he said. “You don’t want to go to Duke? Turn ‘em down.”
Wednesday, May 19, 2010
Profile Final Draft
Crossing Community Borders Led Barraclough to the Front of the Classroom
By Jessica Maas
Laura Barraclough begins her Urban Sociology class one Monday morning with a question: “What is an ethnic enclave?”
Her students take notes, and answer and ask questions throughout the lecture, but many of them may not know that it was a class similar to this one that answered so many questions for the second-year sociology professor and led her to want to teach others.
Born in the San Fernando Valley in California, Barraclough crossed community borders everyday, from the rural area she lived in to the suburban area of her magnet school and even beyond that to the nearby Los Angeles city she loved.
But these borders didn’t just represent population size; crossing those lines also meant interacting with different groups of people and, maybe more importantly, different ways of thinking.
Barraclough recognized the racial and attitudinal borders at a young age. At school, her best friends were Mexican, Peruvian and Korean, but at home she listened to a barrage of derogatory comments from her father and neighborhood friends; she can still remember going out riding and picking up on the way other children talked about Mexicans.
“And I didn’t have anything to say back to it, I just heard the tone and I knew it was wrong, I knew I objected to it because I had Mexican friends at school, but I had none of the knowledge to, like, ‘Hey, what are you doing, why are you talking that way?’ So the only thing I could come up with was ‘Hey, they’re not Mexicans, they’re Hispanics.’ That was it—that was all I had to say,” says the now thirty-one-year-old Barraclough. “So I convinced basically everyone I knew to stop saying Mexican and instead say Hispanic, but there was no content behind that, it was just, ‘Here’s something bad, and I don’t know what to do with it.’”
It wasn’t until she went to college that she really began to understand.
“I took this class called Ethnic Diversity in the City by Professor George Lipson, who’s my mentor to this day, and he just laid it all out, you know?” says the UC San Diego alumna. “In ten short weeks he explained to me and everybody else why my parents were this way, and how this persists, and it was the piece I’d be looking for—both the p-i-e-c-e and the p-e-a.”
Today, Barraclough works inside the classroom and out to help students understand systems of inequality like those she grew up surrounded by. She teaches classes like Prisons and Public Policy and Race and Racism; she guides senior students on capstone projects, including one on the school-to-prison pipeline; she helped two students put together a documentary on prison re-entry in Kalamazoo over the summer; and she’s been working with one student all year on an independent research project related to homelessness.
On one Friday, the five-foot-six brunette hesitantly interrupts her energetic Urban Sociology students to start class; the beginning is the only time she ever appears nervous at the front of the classroom, and may contribute to the initial impression that some students get of her.
“I thought that she was a little bit soft at first, like kind of a soft teacher you could get away with, and then we were reading this really cool article…and no one read this article, and she got so angry…and she was like, ‘If you don’t do my reading, please don’t show up in my class. I give you attention, why don’t you give me your time?’ And it was just, like, ‘Damn,’” says Dana Robinson, who took a class with Barraclough last year and is working on the homelessness project with her this year. “And then she was like, ‘If you haven’t done the reading, class is dismissed. Please take the time to do something fulfilling.’ And it was so scary and then everyone was scared into place and did their reading for the rest of the quarter…So she’s really nice, but she cuts you down when you need to be cut down.”
Though she always looks shy in the beginning, it quickly ends. As soon as she launches into her lecture about gender and urban areas, Barraclough’s in her element, gesturing animatedly with chalk in her right hand and typed notes in her left. Her dress usually tends toward casual, and on this day in particular she sports jeans, sandals, a yellow sweater layered over a yellow shirt, and a pair of her trademark long earrings that hang near her shoulders.
She talks for 40 minutes before splitting the class into small groups and handing them envelopes containing identical scenarios. Each group reads about a recently-divorced woman with two children and a very low income, and they are then asked to come up with a “plan” for the woman, including a new job, new housing, and a childcare situation; Barraclough encourages them to be creative. The options are presented on note cards, and the students talk in groups for about fifteen minutes before engaging in a whole class discussion and presenting their thoughts. One group states that they weren’t able to come up with a scenario, but that they understand the take-home message about the woman’s situation.
“She cares deeply about students, and works with them, and really wants to take them to a new place in their thinking and this critical place of understanding the world,” says Kiran Cunningham, Barraclough’s department chair. “She’s got a lot of passion that she operates out of that I think is infectious, and students come away from her classes just wanting to know more.”
For Barraclough, it all goes back to crossing borders and that one class she had in college with George Lipson.
“…that has driven me to this day, that one class. It’s why I’m an urban sociologist, it’s why I study the stuff I do, because I feel like there’s probably a lot of students who are having similar experiences like I was.” She pauses.
“And I don’t know if that’s true,” she laughs, “but I feel like if they’re out there, I want to make this available, you know?”
By Jessica Maas
Laura Barraclough begins her Urban Sociology class one Monday morning with a question: “What is an ethnic enclave?”
Her students take notes, and answer and ask questions throughout the lecture, but many of them may not know that it was a class similar to this one that answered so many questions for the second-year sociology professor and led her to want to teach others.
Born in the San Fernando Valley in California, Barraclough crossed community borders everyday, from the rural area she lived in to the suburban area of her magnet school and even beyond that to the nearby Los Angeles city she loved.
But these borders didn’t just represent population size; crossing those lines also meant interacting with different groups of people and, maybe more importantly, different ways of thinking.
Barraclough recognized the racial and attitudinal borders at a young age. At school, her best friends were Mexican, Peruvian and Korean, but at home she listened to a barrage of derogatory comments from her father and neighborhood friends; she can still remember going out riding and picking up on the way other children talked about Mexicans.
“And I didn’t have anything to say back to it, I just heard the tone and I knew it was wrong, I knew I objected to it because I had Mexican friends at school, but I had none of the knowledge to, like, ‘Hey, what are you doing, why are you talking that way?’ So the only thing I could come up with was ‘Hey, they’re not Mexicans, they’re Hispanics.’ That was it—that was all I had to say,” says the now thirty-one-year-old Barraclough. “So I convinced basically everyone I knew to stop saying Mexican and instead say Hispanic, but there was no content behind that, it was just, ‘Here’s something bad, and I don’t know what to do with it.’”
It wasn’t until she went to college that she really began to understand.
“I took this class called Ethnic Diversity in the City by Professor George Lipson, who’s my mentor to this day, and he just laid it all out, you know?” says the UC San Diego alumna. “In ten short weeks he explained to me and everybody else why my parents were this way, and how this persists, and it was the piece I’d be looking for—both the p-i-e-c-e and the p-e-a.”
Today, Barraclough works inside the classroom and out to help students understand systems of inequality like those she grew up surrounded by. She teaches classes like Prisons and Public Policy and Race and Racism; she guides senior students on capstone projects, including one on the school-to-prison pipeline; she helped two students put together a documentary on prison re-entry in Kalamazoo over the summer; and she’s been working with one student all year on an independent research project related to homelessness.
On one Friday, the five-foot-six brunette hesitantly interrupts her energetic Urban Sociology students to start class; the beginning is the only time she ever appears nervous at the front of the classroom, and may contribute to the initial impression that some students get of her.
“I thought that she was a little bit soft at first, like kind of a soft teacher you could get away with, and then we were reading this really cool article…and no one read this article, and she got so angry…and she was like, ‘If you don’t do my reading, please don’t show up in my class. I give you attention, why don’t you give me your time?’ And it was just, like, ‘Damn,’” says Dana Robinson, who took a class with Barraclough last year and is working on the homelessness project with her this year. “And then she was like, ‘If you haven’t done the reading, class is dismissed. Please take the time to do something fulfilling.’ And it was so scary and then everyone was scared into place and did their reading for the rest of the quarter…So she’s really nice, but she cuts you down when you need to be cut down.”
Though she always looks shy in the beginning, it quickly ends. As soon as she launches into her lecture about gender and urban areas, Barraclough’s in her element, gesturing animatedly with chalk in her right hand and typed notes in her left. Her dress usually tends toward casual, and on this day in particular she sports jeans, sandals, a yellow sweater layered over a yellow shirt, and a pair of her trademark long earrings that hang near her shoulders.
She talks for 40 minutes before splitting the class into small groups and handing them envelopes containing identical scenarios. Each group reads about a recently-divorced woman with two children and a very low income, and they are then asked to come up with a “plan” for the woman, including a new job, new housing, and a childcare situation; Barraclough encourages them to be creative. The options are presented on note cards, and the students talk in groups for about fifteen minutes before engaging in a whole class discussion and presenting their thoughts. One group states that they weren’t able to come up with a scenario, but that they understand the take-home message about the woman’s situation.
“She cares deeply about students, and works with them, and really wants to take them to a new place in their thinking and this critical place of understanding the world,” says Kiran Cunningham, Barraclough’s department chair. “She’s got a lot of passion that she operates out of that I think is infectious, and students come away from her classes just wanting to know more.”
For Barraclough, it all goes back to crossing borders and that one class she had in college with George Lipson.
“…that has driven me to this day, that one class. It’s why I’m an urban sociologist, it’s why I study the stuff I do, because I feel like there’s probably a lot of students who are having similar experiences like I was.” She pauses.
“And I don’t know if that’s true,” she laughs, “but I feel like if they’re out there, I want to make this available, you know?”
Tuesday, May 18, 2010
Week 8 Reading Response
It seems that this week I either really loved or really hated each piece we read. I LOVED George Orwell, but didn't really love at all/was pretty indifferent to Mark Kramer's "Access" and Joan Didion's "Slouching Towards Bethlehem."
I really enjoyed Orwell's whole piece. I thought that he had a really good narrative going for awhile that I was really interested in, and I also really enjoyed his transition into the four motives for writing--maybe because I identify with them, but whatever. I found them all to be really true in some sense--some more than others--but the way he writes is really engaging and, in some cases, amusing. I particularly enjoyed the last paragraph: "All writers are vain, selfish and lazy, and at the very bottom of their motives there lies a mystery. Writing a book is a horrible, exhausting struggle, like a long bout of some painful illness. One would never undertake such a thing if one were not driven on by some demon whom one can neither resist nor understand...And yet it is also true that one can write nothing readable unless one constantly struggles to efface one's own personality" (316). I love this. LOVE. It's just...true.
Mark Kramer, in contrast, didn't do a lot for me. I had a really hard time relating to his piece or even really understanding it--I felt like there was a lot of history or something that maybe I just don't know, and that was standing in my way. I just didn't...connect...with the piece, and had a really hard time figuring it out. I re-read the first few pages over and over again, thinking that maybe I just wasn't getting it or something, but I still found that I wasn't getting it. I don't know.
Joan Didion...I have really mixed feelings about. I wonder if I would've like it better if the intro had been different, but I felt like there was a really hard transition from the beginning and her just saying "When I first went to San Francisco in that cold late spring of 1967 I did not even know what I wanted to find out, and so I just stayed around awhile, and made a few friends" (85) to the rest of the piece. I mean, What? I was like, Really? Is that really all you're going to say about it? I was confused at first, and then I obviously figured out what the piece was about, but I just...was irritated, I suppose, with her beginning. There were brief moments of her piece that I thought were good/interesting, but for the most part I was just unenthusiastic about her piece.
I really enjoyed Orwell's whole piece. I thought that he had a really good narrative going for awhile that I was really interested in, and I also really enjoyed his transition into the four motives for writing--maybe because I identify with them, but whatever. I found them all to be really true in some sense--some more than others--but the way he writes is really engaging and, in some cases, amusing. I particularly enjoyed the last paragraph: "All writers are vain, selfish and lazy, and at the very bottom of their motives there lies a mystery. Writing a book is a horrible, exhausting struggle, like a long bout of some painful illness. One would never undertake such a thing if one were not driven on by some demon whom one can neither resist nor understand...And yet it is also true that one can write nothing readable unless one constantly struggles to efface one's own personality" (316). I love this. LOVE. It's just...true.
Mark Kramer, in contrast, didn't do a lot for me. I had a really hard time relating to his piece or even really understanding it--I felt like there was a lot of history or something that maybe I just don't know, and that was standing in my way. I just didn't...connect...with the piece, and had a really hard time figuring it out. I re-read the first few pages over and over again, thinking that maybe I just wasn't getting it or something, but I still found that I wasn't getting it. I don't know.
Joan Didion...I have really mixed feelings about. I wonder if I would've like it better if the intro had been different, but I felt like there was a really hard transition from the beginning and her just saying "When I first went to San Francisco in that cold late spring of 1967 I did not even know what I wanted to find out, and so I just stayed around awhile, and made a few friends" (85) to the rest of the piece. I mean, What? I was like, Really? Is that really all you're going to say about it? I was confused at first, and then I obviously figured out what the piece was about, but I just...was irritated, I suppose, with her beginning. There were brief moments of her piece that I thought were good/interesting, but for the most part I was just unenthusiastic about her piece.
Tuesday, May 11, 2010
Week 7 Reading Response
To begin with, I thought the piece by Gay Talese about Frank Sinatra was really impressive for someone who never talked to the man. It does make me wonder about certain things, though--like, can Talese really say that Sinatra was worried about something, or upset about something? These are all things that he would've had to get secondhand, and so is it really something Talese can rely on without attributing to the specific people (which would obviously disrupt the narrative)? Is this ethical? Does it not deceive the readers?
In terms of the piece itself, though, there were parts that I liked and parts that I thought were rathet boring. I'm not sure about the effectiveness of the opening, for example--it didn't seem all that catchy to me, and I'm not sure I would've kept reading if I didn't have to. But I thought the sections with his parents were interesting, and also the scenes of him doing the two different tapings (the first when he had a cold and didn't finish taping, and the second when it went really well). Despite my maybe-lack of enthusiasm about the piece as a whole, though, I can see how it would've been a really big deal at the time, considering the man himself and the fact that Talese didn't actually interview him. So in that regard, I think he did a really great job with the piece; I'm just not all that fascinated with it.
I really liked the Ted Conover piece in the Literary Journalism book, though. I was again unenthused about the beginning, but I really came to find the story about their perspective of AIDS to be really interesting. There were parts that the narrative slowed, I thought, but overall Conover did a really good job with scene and dialogue, and just with conveying all the misconceptions and lack of concern about AIDS by the people there. There was one line that especially stuck out to me: "'You know Ted,' he had said, touching my arm, 'how you kill is how you will die'" (337). I'm not sure that Conover actually included this scene for the reason it sticks out to me (the fact that all these people are killing other people through AIDS, and that's also how they themselves are going to die), but it really stuck out to me. Overall, I think that the piece is a really good expose, so to speak, of the attitude in Africa about AIDS and how it relates to the trucking profession.
In terms of the piece itself, though, there were parts that I liked and parts that I thought were rathet boring. I'm not sure about the effectiveness of the opening, for example--it didn't seem all that catchy to me, and I'm not sure I would've kept reading if I didn't have to. But I thought the sections with his parents were interesting, and also the scenes of him doing the two different tapings (the first when he had a cold and didn't finish taping, and the second when it went really well). Despite my maybe-lack of enthusiasm about the piece as a whole, though, I can see how it would've been a really big deal at the time, considering the man himself and the fact that Talese didn't actually interview him. So in that regard, I think he did a really great job with the piece; I'm just not all that fascinated with it.
I really liked the Ted Conover piece in the Literary Journalism book, though. I was again unenthused about the beginning, but I really came to find the story about their perspective of AIDS to be really interesting. There were parts that the narrative slowed, I thought, but overall Conover did a really good job with scene and dialogue, and just with conveying all the misconceptions and lack of concern about AIDS by the people there. There was one line that especially stuck out to me: "'You know Ted,' he had said, touching my arm, 'how you kill is how you will die'" (337). I'm not sure that Conover actually included this scene for the reason it sticks out to me (the fact that all these people are killing other people through AIDS, and that's also how they themselves are going to die), but it really stuck out to me. Overall, I think that the piece is a really good expose, so to speak, of the attitude in Africa about AIDS and how it relates to the trucking profession.
Sunday, May 9, 2010
Profile for the Week
This is the link to my profile choice for the week:
http://www.nytimes.com/2010/05/09/theater/09meriwether.html?ref=todayspaper
I picked this piece for a couple different reasons. One, it's only 1,004 words. Let's be clear, though--I didn't pick a piece that short so that you all would have less to read, but because there were a lot of people last week who said that they didn't think that they could adequately convey a person in only 1,000 words. Personally, I think that excuse is lame. Is it hard to convey someone in 1,000 words? Yes. But is it possible? Of course--it just depends on how hard you're going to work at it.
In Part V of Telling True Stories, Jon Franklin writes the following: "While the writer must draw a true portrait of the character, it can't ever be a complete one; no writer can capture a whole person. Every person is involved in many parallel, consecutive stories...The reporter usually ends up choosing just one facet of a person's life" (127).
Is this the best profile I've ever read? No. But I do believe that it is a good example of a short profile that does what Franklin is talking about--it highlights one facet of Elizabeth Meriwether's life (the chaotic-ness of her career) and yet seems to also convey a sense of her personality (at least as it relates to this). I also think that there are certain aspects of it that are really strong: the beginning does a good job drawing readers in (with the reference to being fired from Obama's campaign--now, everyone wants to know why), and it gets across general aspects of her life (age, alma mater, what she wears/looks like) in a way that isn't boring. While there are parts of it that seem a little promotion-like, I do think that it remains very focused on her, and that overall it does a good job of illustrating this one section of this woman's life (I do begin to feel like I know her, to an extent).
http://www.nytimes.com/2010/05/09/theater/09meriwether.html?ref=todayspaper
I picked this piece for a couple different reasons. One, it's only 1,004 words. Let's be clear, though--I didn't pick a piece that short so that you all would have less to read, but because there were a lot of people last week who said that they didn't think that they could adequately convey a person in only 1,000 words. Personally, I think that excuse is lame. Is it hard to convey someone in 1,000 words? Yes. But is it possible? Of course--it just depends on how hard you're going to work at it.
In Part V of Telling True Stories, Jon Franklin writes the following: "While the writer must draw a true portrait of the character, it can't ever be a complete one; no writer can capture a whole person. Every person is involved in many parallel, consecutive stories...The reporter usually ends up choosing just one facet of a person's life" (127).
Is this the best profile I've ever read? No. But I do believe that it is a good example of a short profile that does what Franklin is talking about--it highlights one facet of Elizabeth Meriwether's life (the chaotic-ness of her career) and yet seems to also convey a sense of her personality (at least as it relates to this). I also think that there are certain aspects of it that are really strong: the beginning does a good job drawing readers in (with the reference to being fired from Obama's campaign--now, everyone wants to know why), and it gets across general aspects of her life (age, alma mater, what she wears/looks like) in a way that isn't boring. While there are parts of it that seem a little promotion-like, I do think that it remains very focused on her, and that overall it does a good job of illustrating this one section of this woman's life (I do begin to feel like I know her, to an extent).
Thursday, May 6, 2010
Other Profile Responses
The responses for those people who posted their profile late:
Simona—
There’s so much going on in this piece! I think you need to narrow the focus—my original understanding was that the piece was about The Strutt as a place (and part of the writing reflects this), but you spend a lot of time talking about the individual characters involved, especially Kelly. You need to decide what/who the piece is about and go from there. If the piece is about Kelly, make it about Kelly (and The Strutt would obviously be part of that, but you need to set it up differently than it is now); if the piece is about The Strutt, you need more about The Strutt—what does it look like on the inside, what kinds of people go there, how do they interact?
Regardless of that, I think that you need to become concise and decide what the most important details are to the piece—you have some HUGE paragraphs that readers will get lost in, and these could easily get condensed. We don’t need to know everything you’ve learned about these people in the last two weeks, just what is most important to the narrative you’re telling. I think that once you do these things, the piece could turn out really well.
John—
I think that the one thing your piece is obviously missing is a scene from inside the barber shop. How do these people really interact, in your eyes? What is the atmosphere like? All the background details that you put in about the owner and how he got to where he is today are really interesting (though I’d be interested to know if he regrets anything—not going to school, for example—is he still happy with the choices he made?), and you do a good job describing the neighborhood, but I want more about the shop—and the customers. Can you talk to any of them? What do they have to say about the place? Why do they keep going back, or why did they come to begin with? And what about co-workers? What are they like?
I think that you could easily streamline some of the earlier stuff in the piece (especially the stuff about him), and work in some stuff about the shop. I think that he’s really interesting, but now I want to know about the place itself? This is a really cool subject, and I look forward to reading the final version of your piece!
Steven—
This is a cool subject—she has an interesting background story, and that, integrated with the program itself, makes for an interesting piece, I think. There are a few areas that could be strengthened, though. For example, I think that I could use some more fleshed out details about what she’s like as a person—I need to know not only what she looks like, but what makes her an individual? And the biggest thing is that this piece just seems really wrapped up to me, bow and all, as if she suddenly just had an epiphany one day and now everything is great. Is it really that simple? Was it as easy as just having a conversation with her parents? I need more about what was going on—event-wise, and in her head. Is she really perfectly happy now, or is she just trying to convince herself that she is?
I also think that we need more voices in this story. Get Katanski, maybe even try to get her parents or one of her closest friends—we just need someone else in this piece. Good job, though, so far—I look forward to reading the finished piece!
Simona—
There’s so much going on in this piece! I think you need to narrow the focus—my original understanding was that the piece was about The Strutt as a place (and part of the writing reflects this), but you spend a lot of time talking about the individual characters involved, especially Kelly. You need to decide what/who the piece is about and go from there. If the piece is about Kelly, make it about Kelly (and The Strutt would obviously be part of that, but you need to set it up differently than it is now); if the piece is about The Strutt, you need more about The Strutt—what does it look like on the inside, what kinds of people go there, how do they interact?
Regardless of that, I think that you need to become concise and decide what the most important details are to the piece—you have some HUGE paragraphs that readers will get lost in, and these could easily get condensed. We don’t need to know everything you’ve learned about these people in the last two weeks, just what is most important to the narrative you’re telling. I think that once you do these things, the piece could turn out really well.
John—
I think that the one thing your piece is obviously missing is a scene from inside the barber shop. How do these people really interact, in your eyes? What is the atmosphere like? All the background details that you put in about the owner and how he got to where he is today are really interesting (though I’d be interested to know if he regrets anything—not going to school, for example—is he still happy with the choices he made?), and you do a good job describing the neighborhood, but I want more about the shop—and the customers. Can you talk to any of them? What do they have to say about the place? Why do they keep going back, or why did they come to begin with? And what about co-workers? What are they like?
I think that you could easily streamline some of the earlier stuff in the piece (especially the stuff about him), and work in some stuff about the shop. I think that he’s really interesting, but now I want to know about the place itself? This is a really cool subject, and I look forward to reading the final version of your piece!
Steven—
This is a cool subject—she has an interesting background story, and that, integrated with the program itself, makes for an interesting piece, I think. There are a few areas that could be strengthened, though. For example, I think that I could use some more fleshed out details about what she’s like as a person—I need to know not only what she looks like, but what makes her an individual? And the biggest thing is that this piece just seems really wrapped up to me, bow and all, as if she suddenly just had an epiphany one day and now everything is great. Is it really that simple? Was it as easy as just having a conversation with her parents? I need more about what was going on—event-wise, and in her head. Is she really perfectly happy now, or is she just trying to convince herself that she is?
I also think that we need more voices in this story. Get Katanski, maybe even try to get her parents or one of her closest friends—we just need someone else in this piece. Good job, though, so far—I look forward to reading the finished piece!
Tuesday, May 4, 2010
Writing Process - Profile
Profiles are not my favorite thing to write. It's possible that they could be, I suppose, but I'd need to have years to work with one person and a guaranteed income. People fascinate me, I've known this for years; I can meet someone (or even not meet, but simply observe a person), and know almost instantly whether or not he or she is intriguing and complex, whether or not I want to know more. I feel like, then, a profile should be a good outlet through wish to do this, but I just wish that I had more time, from every angle.
I always have the worst time with opening a piece--it's something that I ponder for days, tossing ideas around and around in my head, and regardless of whether the initial introduction is the one I end up using, it needs to inspire me in some way, or I can't write the rest of the piece. Obviously, this can be a problem. With this piece, I don't know how I feel about, because the intro I ended up using turned the piece into something different than I originally thought it was going to be about. And that could be okay, for now--I don't know if I have enough about what I originally thought I was going to write about, I need to ask her more questions, but I feel like the piece as it is is kind of boring. I don't know why anyone would want to read it, and that's what I'm most struggling with at the moment.
I always have the worst time with opening a piece--it's something that I ponder for days, tossing ideas around and around in my head, and regardless of whether the initial introduction is the one I end up using, it needs to inspire me in some way, or I can't write the rest of the piece. Obviously, this can be a problem. With this piece, I don't know how I feel about, because the intro I ended up using turned the piece into something different than I originally thought it was going to be about. And that could be okay, for now--I don't know if I have enough about what I originally thought I was going to write about, I need to ask her more questions, but I feel like the piece as it is is kind of boring. I don't know why anyone would want to read it, and that's what I'm most struggling with at the moment.
Workshop Two Responses
For the two in my group who have posted their profiles:
Andrea—
I think this is a really fascinating story and you’ve got a really good start. I’d like to see more detail in some places—you pass through the marriage/divorce really fast, for example, as well as the post-divorce, and I think you could make it more individual to her. I also think that breaking up the description and quotes will help the piece aesthetically, and maybe you could shorten some of the quotes in order to free up more words. I also had some confusion about timeline stuff—like, you call the guy her ex-husband before they’ve actually been divorced in the story, and I think you could just refer to him as “this guy she knew from earlier whom she started seeing.” That’s easy to fix, though. And also just remember to vary the words you use to begin sentences—there are times you repeat them a few times, and that can make it harder to read.
I wonder if there’s a way that you can re-create some earlier scenes from her life—a scene from their marriage and how it wasn’t working, something with her kids, etc. I don’t know how easy it would be to get that from her, but if you can, that’d be cool. Great job so far, though!
Myles—
I LOVE this piece—you do a wonderful job carrying the reader through it, and keeping it interesting. You’re obviously going to have to streamline parts, since you’re 500 words over the word limit, but what you have right now is a really great start.
I wonder if there’s some way you can slip in more about his personal life. It obviously isn’t central to the piece—and it shouldn’t be—but if you could just slip in a few details here or there, I think that would help to make him more than one-dimensional. The other thing I’m wondering about is the use of “me” in the fifteenth paragraph—I think it’s the only time that you put yourself in the piece, and I don’t think that you need to, I think that it stands really well on its own (and the one-time use of it is kind of abrupt and causes the reader to pause).
The ending and the beginning are both really powerful, for which I applaud you—they can be the most challenging to write, in my opinion, and you do them really well in this piece. I can’t wait to read the final draft of this!
Andrea—
I think this is a really fascinating story and you’ve got a really good start. I’d like to see more detail in some places—you pass through the marriage/divorce really fast, for example, as well as the post-divorce, and I think you could make it more individual to her. I also think that breaking up the description and quotes will help the piece aesthetically, and maybe you could shorten some of the quotes in order to free up more words. I also had some confusion about timeline stuff—like, you call the guy her ex-husband before they’ve actually been divorced in the story, and I think you could just refer to him as “this guy she knew from earlier whom she started seeing.” That’s easy to fix, though. And also just remember to vary the words you use to begin sentences—there are times you repeat them a few times, and that can make it harder to read.
I wonder if there’s a way that you can re-create some earlier scenes from her life—a scene from their marriage and how it wasn’t working, something with her kids, etc. I don’t know how easy it would be to get that from her, but if you can, that’d be cool. Great job so far, though!
Myles—
I LOVE this piece—you do a wonderful job carrying the reader through it, and keeping it interesting. You’re obviously going to have to streamline parts, since you’re 500 words over the word limit, but what you have right now is a really great start.
I wonder if there’s some way you can slip in more about his personal life. It obviously isn’t central to the piece—and it shouldn’t be—but if you could just slip in a few details here or there, I think that would help to make him more than one-dimensional. The other thing I’m wondering about is the use of “me” in the fifteenth paragraph—I think it’s the only time that you put yourself in the piece, and I don’t think that you need to, I think that it stands really well on its own (and the one-time use of it is kind of abrupt and causes the reader to pause).
The ending and the beginning are both really powerful, for which I applaud you—they can be the most challenging to write, in my opinion, and you do them really well in this piece. I can’t wait to read the final draft of this!
Monday, May 3, 2010
Profile Draft
Professor Laura Barraclough has seen a lot in her life, but before she moved to Michigan almost two years ago, she’d never seen a “Deer Crossing” sign.
“My husband had her and her partner out to our place for dinner soon after they arrived, and they talked about coming out there and on the way out—we live in the country kind of in some woods—and on the way out they saw one of those “deer crossing” signs, you know, and they were talking about how they didn’t know what to do about it—like does that mean they should slow down because, like, a deer is going to go across the road; does that mean they need to wait for deer to cross?—they weren’t sure what to do with this deer crossing sign,” says Department Chair and Professor of Anthropology and Sociology Kiran Cunningham.
The California-native hadn’t even wanted to come to Michigan. Though she longed to leave her teaching position at a college for nontraditional students and the job description for an urban sociologist at Kalamazoo College seemed written specifically for her, she underwent each step of the application process without any intention of actually taking the job.
“At every stage of the interview process it was like, ‘Yeah, I’ll do the phone interview, but I’m not going to move to Michigan,’ you know? ‘Yeah, I’ll go on the campus interview, but I want to stay in L.A.’—that was the whole thing, and I think that actually helped me to relax and do well on my interview,” said the thirty-one-year-old Barraclough. “So the day after I returned from my interview from here, I got the phone call with the offer, and then I was like ‘Oh, crap, now I really have to, like, take this seriously.’ Because I hated my current job, here’s the perfect job in a place that I would not ever have considered.”
With the help of her three-year partner Emerson, though, she decided to take the leap, and found herself loving the seasonal beauty of Michigan in her next visit to look for housing in June. Though she admits to initially feeling out of place at the small, private liberal arts institution—where she grew up, everyone went to large universities—and being so nervous in her first quarter that she couldn’t eat before teaching, it isn’t obvious from her teaching now.
She maintains a quieter, more relaxed reign over her students than some professors, but is clearly in charge nonetheless. On one Wednesday afternoon, she wears a white blouse and jeans as she looks at her students from behind black-rimmed glasses and gestures with her typed notes in her left hand and chalk in her right. Her black earrings, which dangle so far they almost touch her shoulders, sway a little as she begins by outlining the differences between race and ethnicity on the chalkboard for her Urban Sociology class. It’s less than 20 minutes into her interactive lecture when she realizes that most of the students haven’t completed the reading, and she decides to continue for a few minutes in spite of that, before she stops again upon completing a section.
“I don’t know how much further to go because I don’t know if I’ll just be talking to myself up here,” she says. “Cortez and Manning also have critiques of labor market segmentation, and theory, but, if we haven’t all, if we’re not all on the same ground about what that is, um, and what the critiques are, I’m not sure, I mean, how should we should we handle this, that we’re in uneven state here with the reading? I know you all are really busy, but now, how do we use this time? What would you like to do?”
Six seconds of silence pass before she speaks again, outlining what her original plan was and how it isn’t going to work now, and then asks them again what they would like to do. Twelve seconds pass then before a suggestion is made, and Barraclough continues her lecture briefly before attempting the revised version of her plan. Five minutes in, she rejects it as well, and tells the students to go home, do the reading before Friday, and they will pick up with the subject then.
“It’s something I have to do with almost every class every quarter—there’s always a day where nobody has read, and so I was actually surprised that five people had read,” she says later. “I always just have to, you know, abandon whatever I had planned, and I usually end up letting the class go early, because there’s just nothing you can do.”
That flexibility, though, isn’t needed often. On another day, she lectures about gender and urban areas for about 40 minutes before splitting the class into groups of four or five and handing them envelopes containing the same scenario. Each group reads about a recently-divorced woman with two children and a very low income, and they are then asked to come up with a “plan” for the woman, including a new job, new housing, and a childcare situation; Barraclough encourages them to be creative in their ideas. The options are presented to the students on note cards, and they talk in groups for about fifteen minutes before engaging in a whole class discussion and presenting their thoughts. One group states that they weren’t able to come up with a scenario, but that they understand the take-home message about the impossibility of the woman’s situation.
“She cares deeply about students, and works with them, and really wants to take them to a new place in their thinking, and this critical place of understanding the world,” says Cunningham. “She’s got a lot of passion that she operates out of that I think is infectious, and students come away from her classes just wanting to know more.”
Barraclough herself grew up in a state of confusion about the world: at home, her father and friends frequently made racist and politically incorrect remarks, but at school, her best friends were Mexican, Peruvian, and Korean. She knew that something was wrong, but it wasn’t until she went to college that she really began to understand the contradictory messages.
“I took this class called Ethnic Diversity in the City by Professor George Lipson, who’s my mentor to this day, and he just laid it all out, you know?” she says. “In ten short weeks he explained to me and everybody else why my parents were this way, and how this persists, and it was the piece I’d be looking for—both the p-i-e-ce and the p-e-a. So that has driven me to this day, that one class. It’s why I’m an urban sociologist, it’s why I study the stuff I do, because I feel like there’s probably a lot of students who are having similar experiences like I was.”
She pauses. “And I don’t know if that’s true,” she laughs, “but I feel like if they’re out there, I want to make this available, you know?”
Though she’s comfortable in Kalamazoo now, there are still moments when she’s surprised that she’s here.
“To some extent, I still walk around this campus and think, “What? This is…what? Red brick?’ You know, like, this is supposed to be concrete, and cheap paint—whatever paint the UC people had free that year, you know?” she says. “It continues to be a culture shock.”
“My husband had her and her partner out to our place for dinner soon after they arrived, and they talked about coming out there and on the way out—we live in the country kind of in some woods—and on the way out they saw one of those “deer crossing” signs, you know, and they were talking about how they didn’t know what to do about it—like does that mean they should slow down because, like, a deer is going to go across the road; does that mean they need to wait for deer to cross?—they weren’t sure what to do with this deer crossing sign,” says Department Chair and Professor of Anthropology and Sociology Kiran Cunningham.
The California-native hadn’t even wanted to come to Michigan. Though she longed to leave her teaching position at a college for nontraditional students and the job description for an urban sociologist at Kalamazoo College seemed written specifically for her, she underwent each step of the application process without any intention of actually taking the job.
“At every stage of the interview process it was like, ‘Yeah, I’ll do the phone interview, but I’m not going to move to Michigan,’ you know? ‘Yeah, I’ll go on the campus interview, but I want to stay in L.A.’—that was the whole thing, and I think that actually helped me to relax and do well on my interview,” said the thirty-one-year-old Barraclough. “So the day after I returned from my interview from here, I got the phone call with the offer, and then I was like ‘Oh, crap, now I really have to, like, take this seriously.’ Because I hated my current job, here’s the perfect job in a place that I would not ever have considered.”
With the help of her three-year partner Emerson, though, she decided to take the leap, and found herself loving the seasonal beauty of Michigan in her next visit to look for housing in June. Though she admits to initially feeling out of place at the small, private liberal arts institution—where she grew up, everyone went to large universities—and being so nervous in her first quarter that she couldn’t eat before teaching, it isn’t obvious from her teaching now.
She maintains a quieter, more relaxed reign over her students than some professors, but is clearly in charge nonetheless. On one Wednesday afternoon, she wears a white blouse and jeans as she looks at her students from behind black-rimmed glasses and gestures with her typed notes in her left hand and chalk in her right. Her black earrings, which dangle so far they almost touch her shoulders, sway a little as she begins by outlining the differences between race and ethnicity on the chalkboard for her Urban Sociology class. It’s less than 20 minutes into her interactive lecture when she realizes that most of the students haven’t completed the reading, and she decides to continue for a few minutes in spite of that, before she stops again upon completing a section.
“I don’t know how much further to go because I don’t know if I’ll just be talking to myself up here,” she says. “Cortez and Manning also have critiques of labor market segmentation, and theory, but, if we haven’t all, if we’re not all on the same ground about what that is, um, and what the critiques are, I’m not sure, I mean, how should we should we handle this, that we’re in uneven state here with the reading? I know you all are really busy, but now, how do we use this time? What would you like to do?”
Six seconds of silence pass before she speaks again, outlining what her original plan was and how it isn’t going to work now, and then asks them again what they would like to do. Twelve seconds pass then before a suggestion is made, and Barraclough continues her lecture briefly before attempting the revised version of her plan. Five minutes in, she rejects it as well, and tells the students to go home, do the reading before Friday, and they will pick up with the subject then.
“It’s something I have to do with almost every class every quarter—there’s always a day where nobody has read, and so I was actually surprised that five people had read,” she says later. “I always just have to, you know, abandon whatever I had planned, and I usually end up letting the class go early, because there’s just nothing you can do.”
That flexibility, though, isn’t needed often. On another day, she lectures about gender and urban areas for about 40 minutes before splitting the class into groups of four or five and handing them envelopes containing the same scenario. Each group reads about a recently-divorced woman with two children and a very low income, and they are then asked to come up with a “plan” for the woman, including a new job, new housing, and a childcare situation; Barraclough encourages them to be creative in their ideas. The options are presented to the students on note cards, and they talk in groups for about fifteen minutes before engaging in a whole class discussion and presenting their thoughts. One group states that they weren’t able to come up with a scenario, but that they understand the take-home message about the impossibility of the woman’s situation.
“She cares deeply about students, and works with them, and really wants to take them to a new place in their thinking, and this critical place of understanding the world,” says Cunningham. “She’s got a lot of passion that she operates out of that I think is infectious, and students come away from her classes just wanting to know more.”
Barraclough herself grew up in a state of confusion about the world: at home, her father and friends frequently made racist and politically incorrect remarks, but at school, her best friends were Mexican, Peruvian, and Korean. She knew that something was wrong, but it wasn’t until she went to college that she really began to understand the contradictory messages.
“I took this class called Ethnic Diversity in the City by Professor George Lipson, who’s my mentor to this day, and he just laid it all out, you know?” she says. “In ten short weeks he explained to me and everybody else why my parents were this way, and how this persists, and it was the piece I’d be looking for—both the p-i-e-ce and the p-e-a. So that has driven me to this day, that one class. It’s why I’m an urban sociologist, it’s why I study the stuff I do, because I feel like there’s probably a lot of students who are having similar experiences like I was.”
She pauses. “And I don’t know if that’s true,” she laughs, “but I feel like if they’re out there, I want to make this available, you know?”
Though she’s comfortable in Kalamazoo now, there are still moments when she’s surprised that she’s here.
“To some extent, I still walk around this campus and think, “What? This is…what? Red brick?’ You know, like, this is supposed to be concrete, and cheap paint—whatever paint the UC people had free that year, you know?” she says. “It continues to be a culture shock.”
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