One Of These Things Is Not Like The Other (Sort Of)

Earlier this summer I got to be part of the beta test team for a MOOC here at the College of Knowledge titled Thinking Like A Writer. It was developed by the Writing Rhetoric and American Cultures Department and as far as I know was their first foray into electronical pedagogtiatin' in a massively multiplayer format.. Our job was to walk through the first assignment and make sure all the pieces worked, the flow made sense and developed in a way that was supportive of the process. The assignment itself was to think about a skill we've developed and to think about how we learned to write and see where it went from there.

It was a good assignment because it had just enough structure at the beginning to support writers initially, but was vague enough at the end to allow for built up momentum to take you wherever it would. It was also nice to write in a group (which I seldom get to do these days) and ping pong ideas and suggestions back and forth in those little instant communities that develop around a common goal and a common interest. Comfortable maybe is a better word. That's good for students writers...well, all writers really. Anyway, a good time was had by all and I was kind of pleased with the results, even though it was just a toss off exercise to test the system. I hope I didn't disappoint my group and without further ado, I present Fred the student writer:

The first thing that comes to mind is learning to ride motocross was a lot more painful than learning to write, or perhaps it would be more accurate to say they were painful in different ways--for me anyway. People think learning to ride a motorcycle in the dirt is like learning to ride a bike, and I suppose that’s true—if you learned to ride a bike by being strapped to the seat and pushed down a hill with a 30 degree slope. Then, when you were about halfway down your instructor shouted, “Hey, forgot to tell you how to brake. My bad.”

Learning to write, on the other hand, is injurious only to your mental health. First, of course, are all the rules, many of which I didn’t even know were rules until after I broke them. I’m not talking about spelling and grammar, those two spinster sisters of writing that used to scowl at me from their perch on the classroom bookshelf between Webster’s New Collegiate Dictionary and Strunk and White’s Elements of Style. No, I’m talking about the whole point. I mean, thesis, topic sentences, the sacred five paragraphs and the holy 500 words. What’s it all for? It seemed to me purpose of writing was so we would be quiet while our teachers read the paper.

When learning to ride motocross, each lesson has immediate implications. Don’t want crash in that turn? Better learn how to decelerate correctly. Learning to write was much more amorphous, much more diffuse. Want to get a good job some day? Better learn what a summary close is. I never saw the point of the “you’ll thank me for this in twenty years” pedagogy.

However, there comes a point in the acquisition of any new skill when it suddenly makes sense, a sort of eureka moment, and you think “I’ve got this.” That is a very dangerous time.

In motocross it’s called muscle memory when you finally stop thinking about what you are doing and just feel it. That’s when you become one with the bike, and the course. For me that happened on brilliant June day at a place called Red Bud Trails in Buchanan, Michigan. The Red Bud track was a fairly complex one with a lot of hills, twisty terrain, woods and even a small creek. It had been kicking my butt for months, but that day I was on fire. I went through the turns like I was glued to the track. On the straightaways I could feel the front wheel coming off the ground, a sure sign I was a rocket. The trees that lined the track became a green blur as I tore past them.

Now, they say we all have a dual nature which is usually characterized as good and evil—angel and devil if you will, sitting on opposite shoulders, but I think it’s more basic than that. I think our natures are made up of the part that thinks we’re going to live forever and the part that knows we’re going to die. It was probably that latter aspect of my nature that wrested control away from the former long enough to inform me as I sped down the track that mere inches from my body were FREAKIN’ TREES, MAN!

And that’s when I had another eureka moment. I had convinced myself I was an expert at something, but had failed to factor in the price of this new found confidence in the face of the unyielding laws of physics. Additionally, I learned that muscle memory is also about my body carrying a grudge when I treated it disrespectfully.

There comes a point when you feel one with writing as well. When you stop thinking and just feel the piece, a time when the trees become metaphorical, but no less painful. I learned that in my 12^th grade literature class, presided over by one Otto L. Holt Jr. a classical scholar of Jamaican heritage who sometimes became so overwhelmed with the beauty and majesty of the literature he would stand on his desk and “declaim” Homer from memory.  Junior (we called him Junior because we were a bunch of incredibly sophisticated and urbane 17 year olds) was diligently trying to teach us to write like the masters, and we were resisting him with equal fervor. It was during the unit on Donne that I decided rhyming was no big deal and attempted to join the pantheon with my own version of Ode To A Flea.  As I had been one with my bike that day on the track, now I was one with the muse so I knocked that baby off in about three minutes. On a whim I passed it to Elizabeth Arden with whom I was deeply, passionately, eternally in love that semester. She read it and she laughed…she laughed! And suddenly I knew what writing was for. It was for impressing girls.

The jocularity attracted the attention of Junior who confiscated my effort, glowered his way through it, then ordered me to the front of the class to “perform” my piece. One didn’t simply read out loud in Junior’s class, one “performed” the piece one was assigned. After five or six attempts, during which Junior’s face, as I was to learn in another English class, “could not unfrown itself,” and my classmates became increasingly raucous, he was finally satisfied I had given the piece an appropriate delivery and I was dismissed to the Principal’s office to repeat my performance.

Later, in detention, as I was reflecting on the wide range of responses to my poem, from Elizabeth’s encouraging giggle to the Principal’s stern lecture on the seriousness with which I obviously was not taking my studies, it occurred to me that just as I had overlooked the inviolable laws of physics that day at Red Bud, I had overlooked an important element of writing when I had come to the conclusion that I knew what it was for, and that element was audience. It was at that moment that I became a rhetorician, which in the long run proved to be a much better choice than motocross racer.