There’s a lot I like in his metaphor, and even more that I like about the process metaphors create. It often seems to me that my richest thinking comes by metaphor, and occasionally the metaphors are interesting enough that they serve instead of thinking. But like any metaphor, disaster is just around the corner if we push the vehicle a little further.

“But the cat burglar comparison suggests that the student loses something,” I tell him. “The pearl of wisdom winds up in the burglar’s sack, not locked away in the student’s mind.”

“All learning is loss,” he says in his guru-on-the-mountain voice. “Around adolescence we know everything, and more importantly, we know we know everything. From that point on, it’s learning what we don’t know that’s important.”

Well, ok. I’m not so sure engineering students develop the skills that result in a bridge over the Niagara River by discovering what they don’t know, but perhaps. My face must reveal my skepticism, though.

“Look,” he says. “What’s the breakthrough moment that all marriages reach and through which all successful marriages must pass?”

Clearly he thinks I don’t know, because he forges ahead: “The husband’s realization that he can never fully understand his wife’s thinking. And maybe the reverse happens with the wife; how would I know? But it’s this discovery of what he cannot know and never will that makes the marriage interesting and lively for 50, 60 years.”

“It’s the same with literature, with psychology, with science. The precious sum of all education is to comprehend what we don’t know, and not knowing it, embrace it.”  The Wallace Stevens in me loves this, but there’s a vaguely Aristotelian chatter in the back of my mind.

“And what about knowledge?”

“You look it up, kid. Ever heard of Wikipedia?” And he leaves for class, presumably to enlighten his students on what they do not know.

So ultimately, I give up the cat burglar as my image for the college instructor. Too often my students rooms have almost no furniture to nudge around, anyway. Plus, I stalled on figuring out how their not knowing what’s valuable is changed if what they don’t know is taken away from them…..

On the other hand, though the destination of this metaphor fails, how useful the path it leads us down is. More and more, I appreciate the metaphor as a pathway, especially with a topic like this: the philosophy by which I teach.

So Paragraph City faculty teach writing in the Mark Twain room, wearing linen suits and huffing on virtual cigars and dispensing curmudgeonly advice. That last part is surprisingly comfortable. The room has three doors, each supporting an April aphorism.

Over the oddly raft-shaped east door, facing Connecticut is, “Verbs carry the most meaning; scour your vocabulary to find the just-right word.” It seems to me I first heard this advice emerge from a pocketful of English teachers gathered around a yawning stone fireplace in a cathedral-like Morgan horse barn, one chill Vermont summer day. Ever since I have taken anything worth revising and squinted at every verb, trying to scrape off anything banal or safe or vague so the meaning would glint through.

It’s a good exercise, and I think Twain would approve.  In a letter to Emeline Beach, dated February 10, 1868 he wrote, “To get the right word in the right place is a rare achievement. To condense the diffused light of a page of thought into the luminous flash of a single sentence, is worthy to rank as a prize composition just by itself…Anybody can have ideas–the difficulty is to express them without squandering a quire of paper on an idea that ought to be reduced to one glittering paragraph.”

And I think every writing teacher has repeated his, “The difference between the almost right word and the right word is really a large matter–it’s the difference between the lightning bug and the lightning,” from a letter to George Bainton in October of 1888.

Over the north door, a weirdly medieval thing of rough oak and iron that might have opened onto King Arthur’s round table, students read, “Never write ‘In conclusion’ or ‘needless to say’ or any words that are for the sake of the words only and not their sense. Think hard about getting rid of ‘very’ too.”

I don’t approve of keeping on the payroll words that are not earning their keep. If they want to freeload and add nothing to the meaning, they can go work for a high school sophomore. I sack them. I don’t want them hanging around my vigorous, hardworking words, corrupting them. Have you ever known a word worth its salt that would hang out on the page next to a “very”? Not as bad as “needless to say” but still a bad influence. Twain knew: “Substitute ‘damn’ every time you’re inclined to write ‘very’; your editor will delete it and the writing will be just as it should be.”

The eponymous west door to the Mark Twain room is twelve feet high, with a stout riverboat bell attached. Above it is the third aphorism, “When you have finished what you’ve written and it’s looking pretty good, if you can cut it by 25 to 30% it will be better.” Some students take a while to discover the slovenly torpor that comes from all the clever padding they learned to do in previous institutions of learning. They need to learn they are writing crap if they are well into their second paragraph before they write a word which wasn’t handed to them in the assignment. Words, they discover, should convey meaning. In the Mark Twain room, we don’t take their Mountain Dews, bacon cheeseburgers, or deep fried Snickers from them, but we do require that they skinny down their writing to the boney truth.

Mark Twain’s way of saying it: “The time to begin writing an article is when you have finished it to your satisfaction.  By that time you begin to clearly and logically perceive what it is you really want to say,” and he said it wreathed in cigar smoke.

Above the door is the April aphorism about reading: Read all the time. Read everything. Ask yourself why the author wrote it this way. Mentally revise everything you read and see if it gets better.

So in my writing classes we read Anne Dillard and Malcolm X and Brent Staples and Amy Tan and E. B. White and George Orwell and talk about the decisions they made in writing. Sometimes the discussion is at the word level, like the way “Once More to the Lake” was written so the last word would be “death.” Sometimes we map the organization, as in the way “Mother Tongue” zig zags around a series of scenes. “Why not chronological order,” I ask. “What would be lost?” Of the million choices a writer makes, he may be intently conscious of a couple dozen, but we students can learn some interesting lessons by thinking about the choices that the writers may not have thought so much about.

But as for Hart Crane, we don’t read him, except occasionally for this one sharp quote from a lost source, “One must be drenched in words, literally soaked in them, to have the right ones form themselves into the proper pattern at the right moment.”

In fact, excuse me for a moment while I go read “The Snowman” again. You can too, here (http://www.writing.upenn.edu/~afilreis/88/stevens-snowman.html) and you can read where Jay Kerser on NPR called this poem the best short poem in English, “bar none” here (http://www.npr.org/templates/story/story.php?storyId=5031535).

So in this place where we talk about writing, I walk around the room saying “What you leave out is important. Know what to leave out. With any topic, figure out the essential things to include and the essential things to exclude, too. You’ve got to know the difference and leave out the right stuff.” Pretty soon students know I’m talking about more than just getting error out of the writing; there are ideas, facts, conclusions, observation, good stuff all on its own but stuff that just isn’t right for the one particular essay coming out of them.

A little more of this and students start thinking about what the trick is to knowing the things to leave out. I talk about how glad I am to not be reading the stuff that was left out of good essays. Around the room, little floating light bulbs appear above heads. If they have a plan, they can get a bunch of material and use what suits the plan, leaving out anything ill-fitting.  That clever, precise tangential description, that digressionary metaphor, those pretty little irrelevant details: if the thesis god doesn’t know them, they get packed away for some other day, some other god.

Then one of the light bulbs becomes green and one turns purple with green rings and another goes yellow with blue rings and one is just strange, and I know they think about how the really good life they want to live will be good because some common, pale, plain things that clog up many lives will never be theirs. The moment smells a little of Zen, and from across the room where he sits on the old oak book case, the bust of Wallace Stevens smiles, looking for all the world like he just sold one terrific policy.

Ever the slave to fashion, this spring I find myself spouting the following dozen axioms in my writing classes. So much so that this April the only graffiti found in Paragraph City consists of these twelve statements. We see them emblazoned in bright, balloon letters on freight cars in the Paragraph City rail yard and on subway walls. It’s redundant, actually, that stonemasons have chiseled them in the granite lintels over the writing classroom doors.

1. What you leave out is as important as what you include.
2. Judge every word on what effect it will have on the reader.
3. The first paragraph is a promise that the body of the essay lives up to and the conclusion must honor.
4. If you want the reader to remember something, show it by speaking to the reader’s senses.
5. Find your own fresh wording. Repeating packaged phrases isn’t safe; it’s numbing.
6. Verbs carry the most meaning; scour your vocabulary to find the just-right word.
7. When you have finished what you’ve written and it’s looking pretty good, if you can cut it by 25 to 30% it will be better.
8. Read what you’ve written aloud. Trust your ear. If something you’ve written sounds odd, re-write it five different ways and choose the one that sounds best.
9. Write from richness. Have more than you can use – more facts, more comparisons, more explanations, more examples – so you can pick the best to use.
10. Never write “in conclusion” or “needless to say” or other words that are only for the sake of the words and not of their sense.  Think hard about getting read of “very” too.
11. Pay attention to what your words are saying. If you don’t, they’ll go off and say something idiotic.
12. Read all the time. Read everything. Ask yourself why the author put it this way. Mentally revise everything you read and see if it gets better.

If all this sounds much like Strunk and White, well, they started it.

• You will teach the student how to think, including such fundamentals as whole thoughts/whole sentences and the observation that perfectly chosen verbs and adverbs and adjectives require. You will teach reflection by teaching narration, and in cause-effect you will set in motion in your student the great philosophical “Why,” including the why that others ask but also the why that the self asks, painfully and curiously and thankfully. You will make possible the Other and the Mirror by teaching your student to make comparisons and to contrast. You will require the student to have ideas, to organize information and emotions around him, to identify questions worth the unraveling. You will insist the student has a self, that this self has a unique voice, and that one human voice written down into words can change this humanunkind.

• You will teach the student how to listen, largely by being the listener. You will read what your student has written and what she wanted to say but didn’t and what she didn’t know she had to say, and in doing so you will hear her in ways that she may have never been heard before. You will tell your student what you hear when you read him, and ask him to think about how close to the truth he has come, or could come.

• You will instill in the student an unending dissatisfaction with everything she will ever write, and those who understand writing properly will come to realize that perfection is ahead of them, ever beyond the next rewrite, and that life is optimistic, always available to be made better in the next revision.

• You will teach your student that she can discover what she has to say in the act of writing it. That this marvelous, supple, infinite mother tongue is the most powerful tool a mind can have, so much so that when writing well it seems the mind serves the language as often as the language serves the mind.

• Your lessons will show your student that we are lonely, isolated, distant beings all adrift like leaves on a stream, and that our words are all we have to bring our lively, thoughtful lives together. You will tell him that being understood is a miracle of multiple dimensions, waiting to be enacted between his words and his reader.

However, recent experience has brought the section on behavior, particularly post-punishment behaviors, to my attention at the moment. Our anonymous pamphleteer identifies five reactions the plagiarist displays when she (I am using singular pronouns randomly when gender is irrelevant) is caught and the necessary discussion takes place.

For background, in my courses I break the bad news to student plagiarists by returning their papers (electronically usually, most often that’s the way I collected them) with the plagiarized portions highlighted, the source they used identified, and a not unfriendly but terse note that they have failed the course and if they wish to talk they can email me or stop by during office hours. Since I don’t force an exchange, the most common response I receive is the first one named in the pamphlet.

Disappearance. This response has a lot to recommend it: no scene ensues, nobody weeping (on either side), no challenge of evidence leading to an appeal before a higher power. The student either fails the course or, if it’s early still, withdraws and I imagine his shame as he mentally recounts all that his gambit has cost him and vows never to cheat again. Of course I’m wrong, but the illusion is comforting.

Excuse Leading to Forgiveness. Students taking this tactic face two problems: there usually is no excuse and the forgiveness almost never includes rescinding the F grade. Excuses are always some variation on “I didn’t know I was plagiarizing” and are often accompanied by “Nobody ever taught me what plagiarism is” and “This is how I have written all my other papers and it was OK with those profs.” This is a difficult product to sell, especially my most-visited-by-plagiarism course, where I define it in the syllabus, remind students they learned what it was in a pre-requisite course, require a reading assignment on it, mention it again in each assignment, and emphasize that course failure is the penalty for it.

However, when accompanied by tears, multiple explanatory notes to a higher power, and affidavits of the student’s earnestness and honesty from the student’s advisor and counselor, that “I didn’t know” can build a pretty good head of steam in some administrative offices. And in fact, parts of what is said is probably true, considering how the student has ignored reading assignments, skipped classes, misunderstood plagiarism, and received wonderful grades on previous plagiarized papers. So for this gambit, every faculty needs to know whether they are really going to stand behind “Ignorance of the rules is no excuse” or not. So does every “higher power.”

Anger.  While I’ve encountered very little of this, I have seen it, both online and in the wilds of the classroom. It’s been brief: “Well that sucks! That really sucks!” accompanied by considerable floridity, a dramatic slam-dunk of the offending paper, and a failed attempt to slam the classroom door.”

Denial. I have seen denial only twice, both from rather quiet students performing quite well in the course in every way. One met me in the hallway and said, without making eye contact and in a rush of words said, “I understand how you would think I plagiarized that paper and I accept the consequences but I did not plagiarize the paper” and walked quickly away. I was so taken back that I went back for a third check on the plagiarism, finding the entire paper, minus the introductory paragraph, online, posted there some time before the course had even begun.

Acceptance. One online student plagiarist, associated with law enforcement, wrote simply, “I guess I underestimated you,” which is more than the acceptance folks usually say. More often it’s “OK” or “Eyupp.”

Apology. An apology might accompany other responses, but usually it comes along with an excuse, mostly as a way to sell the excuse. Just an apology by itself is rare. But nice. An apology recognizes that there’s a human side to those student-teacher exchanges and plagiarism trashes that; an apology puts it right. The student still fails, but we could work together again, and maybe we will.

“Why is it so small?”
“Whatsitmean, it’s nonreusable?”
“Is it supposed to have these holes in it?”
“Not very stretchy, is it?”

The safety nets they used in high school might extend across an auditorium, bounce dropped grades like bowling balls on a trampoline, and convert a History D- to a B+ as easily as a Geometry 66% to a 94%. Certain nets, by Addidas or Nike, would catch multiple grades simultaneously and only start to show signs of wear into the Junior year of high school. And if by some chance an English teacher didn’t failure-proof his class, fine mesh Kevlar nets were amply available from principles, guidance counselors, school boards and even parents in helicopters. By the time Commencement arrived, even stumble-drunk, blindfolded bozos with clown shoes and vertigo could ride unicycles on tightwires 15 feet above the gym hardwood.

All of which doesn’t prepare people too well for our single use disposable, pocket handkerchief sized, college-ruled safety nets.

But so far everyone has managed and the ways students work together with the wiki to produce a single piece of writing proves pretty interesting, with lots of opportunities for my instruction along the way.

However, what I wanted to say is that they are changing their name and taking “guesses” (I suspect they are really suggestions) for their new name. In the process, they’re giving away t-shirts. Interested? Go here: http://blog.pbwiki.com/2009/04/21/official-announcement-were-changing-our-name/

(Lest you are thinking of runways and Gisele, an excursion: This is modeling. When I talk with a class about writing, I try to take the students into my head as I pull at a topic, find an entrance point, gather a couple buckets of ideas, splash them on the floor and start to sort, find words that communicate, and so on. When we look at a poem I talk about taking a sidelong glance at it, my usual dance steps, why a window in the poem would open for me here, what associations I’d make with the images, and again, so on. I admit, there’s a “look-at-me-be-like-me-think-like-me” quality to it that troubles me, and yet it’s a cornerstone for the way I have learned.

Like all strategies, modeling doesn’t work for everyone, or to put a more positive spin on it, modeling works really well for some students. So then I go on and try something different, looking for an approach that harmonizes with other students’ minds: small groups, independent research, free writing, conversation, games. I don’t have a big bag of tricks, and not enough cool gizmos, but then the semesters are short.)

Here’s the trouble (which is to say the interesting part): we don’t really know that the point we think the modeling sends out is the point the students pick up. I’m using semaphore flags and students are reading nautical flag code; I’m saying “I feel around to find the central emotion in the poem” and they’re hearing, “Be dorky-girly-moany-groany and wear baggy pants.” Or something like that.

Yet it’s not like we can’t model. That’s like trying to avoid making a first impression. Even our students most talented in being mentally and physically absent see in us a model of something. I’m wondering if we can really tell what that something is.

This particular question has been gnawing at my leg for a couple of semesters now, ever since an exchange with an adjunct (let’s call her Professor Collie to maintain the dog-bone image). About a dozen of us who teach the first year seminar were talking about approaches to the course. Someone mentioned almost all faculty complain that students who most need to be in classes are the one who cut them most often. I think of these as my Ginsu students, but that’s one of many things I try not to say at such meetings.

“This is the sort of thing we should address in the seminar, right?” my friend Jack Russell, who is running the meeting, says. “So how?”

Jack has a way of killing a roiling conversation with a pertinent question, and that’s what happens now. Then Collie pipes up.

“Well I base 50% of my course grade on attendance, so my students know from Day One how important coming to class is.”

Is that what this policy communicates? Doesn’t it rather tell the student that college is way easier than high school ever was, that thinking or writing or studying is unnecessary, that being near knowledge is the same as knowing things? Yet there it is, my dear old modeling strategy put to use, writ large into a syllabus. A domino row of questions click down:

• So how would you model the importance of class attendance?
• In fact, how do you teach anything which seems so basically obvious?
• Is this really college subject matter? Imagine the final exam question. “Should students come to class? ____ Yes     _____No”
• Is that 50% attendance grade of such a different ilk as a requirement for students to read a textbook? We send students near knowledge and later test to see if any has adhered to them.

At the bottom of this matter, I’ve decided there’s a professorial force in me that functions like gravity – irrational and unexplainable but inescapable – which says this just isn’t something you do if you respect your students. You don’t tell them with your actions that you think they are so incapable, so hopelessly worthless, that they should earn college credit for simply being alive and breathing in the proper locale.

Yet that’s the crux of the matter with modeling, for it turns out that this is exactly what I think a 50% attendance grade communicates. Collie would surely say something like, “A grade immediately and clearly tells a student what you think is important. I am telling my students how important it is to me that they be in every class.”

Dog-gone if perhaps she’s right, but it just doesn’t smell that way to me.