What's History: Inappropriate Beach Reads and Finding New Perspectives

A woman reading near a pool. 

This New Yorker article has thoughtfully laid out the qualifications for a good summer read, but I must admit that I have frequently broken these reading rules at the beach and/or pool. I'll go for some classic beach fare, sure-- an issue of Cosmopolitan, a book with a beach on the cover or centered around a "crustacean-centric eating party." However, I have historically (haha) also heavied it up with some hefty reading for research, teaching, or--horrors-- exams. I once memorably spent a day at the beach in Santa Monica reading A Short History of Reconstruction.

This is not because I am so darn studious but rather because the pleasant setting makes work more palatable. If I'm going to read, why not do it outside? The change of scenery works wonders for my mood and often my concentration, and the weird timelessness of lounging beside pool or ocean often stirs my brain to come at ideas in a more patient fashion than it might otherwise. Don't worry, there's always a backup magazine nearby in case of emergency.

So recently I took this approach to new heights. I printed out pages of the Michigan Hospital School Journal that I've been using for dissertation research and read them in the pool while on one of those floaty things (yes, they got a little damp). I was pleased with the success of my method-- I took a few notes on the pages and got through the day's reading rather quickly.

The next day I came across an interesting letter in an issue of this Journal. The Journal was published by a convalescent home in Farmington during the 1910s-1930s which reported on the goings-on of the institution, but it also had wider appeal as a passionate call for the education and rehabilitation of children with physical disabilities. Among other material, the editor frequently included letters from all sorts of readers-- state officials, children at the hospital-school, members of other progressive organizations, and disabled adults expressing support and encouragement for the Journal and its mission. 

The letter that so caught my attention was from Percy Angove, State Supervisor of Industrial Rehabilitation, published in the Nov-Dec 1922 issue. He began his note by saying:

I am on my vacation and my greatest enjoyment at the present time is looking through and reading articles in my treasured bound volume of The Hospital School Journal. This is the greatest compilation of its kind or anything similar that I know of…

"My greatest enjoyment at the present time"-- strong words! What a glowing review of a periodical called The Hospital School Journal, and which frequently featured items I find dry, hard to plow through, or repetitive. Surely the Journal has brought me joy as well-- some of the calls to action that editor Joe F. Sullivan delivers are still stirring almost a century on-- but sheesh! I had a sudden image of Angove sitting on a porch overlooking a Great Lake, sipping iced tea and thumbing through his hardbound volume with delight.

I realized this was not such a dissimilar image from what I had been doing the previous day. The combination of the letter and the laid-back setting helped me see the Journal from a perspective other than the straightforwardly critical lens that serves as default. I tried to put myself in the shoes of this Progressive-minded man on vacation, enjoying his recreational reading, taking a week away from supervising industrial rehabilitation to sit and read a magazine which is, at it's heart, about children's orthopedic treatment.

When I came back to the Journal, I thought about what might make the magazine so joyful in Angove's mind. Certainly a shared pro-rehabilitation leaning between reader and material was at play, but with my new frame of reference I could also appreciate how light the material could be-- notes on picnics and parties, photos of happy children, short poems and tidbits, and reader letters on a variety of subjects, which are interesting in the way that reading someone else's correspondence can be. The language of most of the articles is pleasantly straightforward. And of course, as the publication hoped to drum up support for what they called "crippled children's work" as well as reconstructive surgery and training more generally, the Journal printed plenty of stories of satisfied customers-- happy children who had grown into employed, articulate adults. This was probably also part of Angove's enthusiasm, akin to the human interest stories and videos which still capture public attention and make us feel hopeful about people.

As teachers of history, we focus a lot of attention on teaching students how to read "like historians"-- from a scholarly, analytical mindset. However, reading like historians also involves reading like historical actors, pulling out not just what we can see in a text but also what might have stood out to the people who read it when it was first produced. Perhaps our teaching could incorporate this more explicitly-- not just asking "what would X group say about this document?" after all have read it but also encouraging students to read documents with a particular mindset. I aim to explore, in future, how to incorporate multiple methods of reading sources into classwork, looking not only for what the text itself is saying but what might have provoked interest, pain, or--yes-- greatest enjoyment of its early readers. 

Related Links:

For more on Sullivan and the Michigan Hospital-School, see Brad Byrom's work in Disability Discourse, Children with Disabilities in America: A Historical Handbook and Guide, and The New Disability History: American Perspectives.

Enough About Me: Embracing Options

A row of white doors. They'll all get you where you're going!

Whenever I am struggling to gather my thoughts about a project, I like to attend a workshop or a lecture. Though one often goes to a talk to hear about the presenter's thoughts on the subject presented and learn something new (a good reason to go, as a rule), I find that they are also useful for reminding me of things I've forgotten or have neglected, and for giving me the space to think over a problem. By taking in new arguments and information, I have the chance to look at new things in a new way, and am often inspired to look at an old thing I've been turning over in my mind in this new way as well. 

Sometimes I gain a new understanding of what I want to say; sometimes I realize something I've already been expressing, but which has remained opaque to me. One of the most amusing events in my academic life was attending a wonderful talk on campus by Natalie Lira and not only learning quite a bit of historical information but also coming to some realization about my project (I've now long forgotten exactly what it was). When I told my advisor enthusiastically, she said, "Yes, I knew that's what you were doing." It was apparently clear in my writing, but it wasn't clear in my head until I'd had the chance to reflect on it from a different angle. 

An Example: A UIUC Writers Workshop Workshop

So, after a difficult spring, I found myself in an hourlong presentation held by the UIUC Writers Workshop: "Staying on Track With Thesis and Dissertation Writing," facilitated by Logan Middleton and Adrienne Pickett. You can probably imagine what this sort of thing consists of-- a discussion of the various stages of writing (from research and organization to prewriting and drafting to revision and writing groups), some recommendations about writing consistently, some sharing stories around the room about how we organize our notes, how we sit down to write, how we deal with feedback. It had all of the ingredients that you might expect, and little information that was brand new to me.

If I wasn't confronted by wildly revelatory information, why did I find the writing workshop so helpful? Some brief factors:

• It's sometimes necessary to be reminded of things you kind of know already because as humans our memories are short. Anyone who's discussed anxiety with a professional knows that they should do their breathing techniques in times of struggle; anyone who's tried to manage anxiety over an extended period knows the feeling of sheepishness they get when reminded that breathing is an option available to them which they have rudely cast aside.
• Several organizational choices made by the facilitators were also a key factor: beginning the workshop with time to reflect on our own struggles with or approaches to writing; the opportunity for attendees to engage in conversation about each topic as the program proceeded. These tactics created a casual but engaged atmosphere.
• It's also nice to devote some time just thinking about the process of a large task you need to do, to have some outside confirmation that the strategies you are using are considered worthwhile by others.

But these are all preludes to the main topic I want to discuss here. More than any of these other aspects, I was heartened by the ways in which Pickett and Middleton offered options about writing, rather than prescriptions for writing. 

What do I mean by this? Let's take the portion on drafting the dissertation as an example. The facilitators suggested that one should consider scheduling a time to write, and that one should try to schedule more frequent short periods to write rather than fewer long stretches of time. They gave specific examples of this concept: try two hours of writing time four days per week, rather than eight hours on Saturday-- same number of hours, but more spread out. Additionally, they advised setting "small achievable goals"-- for example, 300 words per day; or an hour revising the introduction.

Set goals based on time or words; be consistent-- this is advice that is common, yes, but is also commonly given like this:

• "Oh, you have to write first thing every day if you want to get anything done."
• "You need to write 500 words per day. Every day. Even if you are going to Disneyland."

In other words, many offer prescriptions for what exactly you must do to achieve your larger goal. They take the specific application of a general principle and make it the sole factor in success. Without doing this one weird trick, you'll never make it! (Weirdly, the one weird trick is different for basically everyone in its specifics, and yet everyone persists in believing that theirs will work for everyone else.) This kind of thing always stresses me out more than it motivates me to try it because I can already envision the many ways in which I could fail to carry out the maxim. Middleton and Pickett, conversely, offered parameters for what those goals can look like, which gave us the tools and the freedom to determine our own goals.

I don't mean to suggest that this workshop is the only place to get an option-based approach to writing, or that one can't find success with a prescriptive approach. But it did inspire me to reflect on what I found compelling about the style that the facilitators used and reflect on how I could incorporate this into my own teaching. 

What's the Point? 

It should be no surprise to any consistent reader of this blog by now that in many ways, I teach by learning; that is, my first step is to consider how I have learned and try to mimic that process. Fortunately or unfortunately, variety is a big part of how I learn-- switching settings while writing or studying, typing some notes and handwriting others, coming up with new ways to read or annotate when I have tired of the old ones midway through a semester. 

I tend toward emphasizing variety in my teaching as well. I like to switch between different types of sources to see how something looks different as told through different media or by different types of people. I don’t like to do small group work often because it tends to fall into the same types of patterns, preferring instead the random observations that tend to come out of large class discussions or paired conversations. 

So obviously I liked this idea of emphasizing options rather than prescriptions about completing assignments-- it certainly offers variety! It's hard to provide writing support in our classes because writing is such a solitary activity, and there's something endlessly mystical about it. How does something get written? How does a good something get written? The answer, of course, is that there are as many ways that this happens as there are people who write good somethings. 

When teaching first- or second-year level courses, we are also confronted with the idea that part of our goal is to teach good processes for writing and other forms of analytical work so that students can maintain them for the duration of their lives. How can we encourage the divergent work processes of people who haven't necessarily developed an effective work process yet? Faced with the enormity of this, we tend to double down in our teaching on the things that we can know or declare: we want thesis statements, we want topic sentences, we want evidence and analysis. The only thing we say about the process is, "Don’t start it the night before! We can tell!" 

Incorporating Options

So, how do we lean toward options rather than prescriptions in our classes, while still maintaining clarity about expectations and assignments? 

Outside of Class

I've talked about this a bit before in terms of assigning unstructured research time-- offering students an "excuse" to spend some time thinking over a topic without the pressure of creating some artifact for grading. In a course with a big final paper or a consistent smaller written assignments, this could be broadened into an assignment which encourages students to reflect on what kind of goals might work well for the writing assignments they intend to complete and the time they have to work with. If there is a paper due every other Friday, a student might make a goal to spend fifteen minutes jotting down the main points of every reading after completing it so that she can remember them. Another student might focus on the actual drafting of each paper, committing to have a page written by the Wednesday before the due date each week. And another student might wish to focus on actually having time to edit the paper, and resolve to commit an hour on Friday mornings for a final readthrough. 

This process should also incorporate a continual renegotiation of those goals based on changing circumstances. For example, the student who wished to focus on editing may realize a month into the semester that his work schedule or his other courses never allow an hour for editing on Friday, and so he may wish to alter his goal to be more achievable.

Inside of Class

As far as in-class activities go, lots of teachers do this by spending time on prewriting strategies. Prewriting is perhaps the most wiggly step of the writing process and there are a lot of good resources out there about the many ways that one can prewrite-- brainstorming, freewriting, journaling-- a lot of these are really just fancy words for "starting to write and seeing what happens," which in my experience isn't so far removed from "drafting an undergraduate paper." There are also approaches that diverge from these, like clustering, which is a bit more graphical; and outlining or journalists' questions (what we used to call the 6 w's-- one comes at the end, see?). I like presenting these as options for beginning an independent writing project, and I also like the idea of fostering the opportunity for students to dabble in several of these in class and discuss how each worked for them. Perhaps it doesn't come naturally for someone to cluster (it certainly doesn't to me), but it’s a wonderful thing to try in class when you're not actually scrambling to get the paper done right at that moment.

However, I must admit that I remember finding these sorts of activities only minimally helpful when I've been in classes where they've happened, and I think much of the difficulty there is timing. You've gotta talk about prewriting early, while people have time to benefit from it before they really should be writing the paper, but it's also hard to do prewriting before you've done any research, which I had rarely done at that point. So, I think a spirit of experimentalism is best-- ask students to use prewriting activities to brainstorm a hypothetical paper based on something you've all already discussed together in the course, and talk about the results. 

How do you balance options and prescriptions for writing, as a teacher or a student?