The last eight days haven't been great.  Early last week Mohamed developed a summer cold--first a sore throat, then a runny nose, and then most persistently a cough.  There isn't really much you can do about a cold except let it run its course, but we got some OTC medicine, and it seemed for a day or so that the cold was improving.  We were mistaken, and it came back with a vengeance.  Despite my belief that after 45 years of students' coughing and sneezing on and at me I am virtually immune to colds and despite our best efforts not to share the cold, by Wednesday or Thursday, I had it too.  I missed the sore throat, but the cough has been really bad.  At least, thanks to NyQuil, we've been able to sleep.  Colds aren't terribly serious, but they really are tiring and frustrating--and they can hang on.  Yesterday we both were still coughing, but felt somewhat better.  We stopped taking the medicine, but I coughed a lot in the night (and I hear Mohamed coughing even as I write this), so I re-started the pills this morning. 

I've been lucky so far in not suffering nausea as a side effect of the chemo--or at least I had been lucky.  But a couple of night's ago, I got about four bites into a burger, when suddenly I was overcome with nausea.  And then last night, just as we were getting ready to go out for dinner, I became nauseated just at the thought of food and had another bout of vomiting.  At any rate, we haven't been very active or social for a week or so. 

Without much to report, I'll fall back on another dream; the ones I recounted a couple of blogs ago elicited lots of I-have-that-dream-too responses from current and former colleagues.  Last night, I had a different sort of academic dream: I was sitting alone at a huge table covered with books and a manual typewriter.  I was writing articles on African-American authors, something I did with regularity when I first started teaching.  The key was that the articles had to be 5% better or longer or something (it wasn't at all clear in the dream what) in order to be accepted.  I had just finished one on Ishmael Reed and was turning my attention to Richard Wright.  And unlike in the previous dreams, this time there was no anxiety because Wright has always been one of my favorite writers and his Black Boy a book I taught as often as any other.  Until the last decade when I had some released time for administration, like almost everyone in our department, I taught four courses a semester, two of them composition.  During one period of eighteen years, I chose to do developmental English for my comp courses, and although most of my colleagues didn't understand the choice, I loved teaching those classes.  The students often came in with a chip on their shoulders: they didn't like writing, they had been told they didn't write well, and now they had to take nine hours of composition instead of six as the majority of students did.  But after some initial resistance, they (well, most of them) were willing to learn, and they often formed a cohesive group.

Most of the texts available for remedial classes seemed to me insultingly simple.  After some searching, I found one I liked with essays of at least moderate length.  It had a series of photographs, and we'd spend time analyzing the photos and trying to move beyond focusing only on content and think about some of the techniques involved.  And then, we'd always go to the Mulvane Art Museum at Washburn to generate a comparison/contrast essay about two works there.  It was almost always the first time any of the students had gone to an art museum, and their reactions were fascinating.  I could never predict which students would choose realistic works, which had an obvious content and were probably easier to write about, and which would choose completely abstract or expressionistic works.

I wanted to supplement the anthology with a longer book, and I'm not sure how I first chose Wright's Black Boy, but once I had found it, I used it semester after semester.  Getting the students to write, even getting the students to get involved in grammar--those weren't hard.  Getting the students to read was another matter.  But every semester, I'd assign the first chapter of Black Boy and by the next period the students would have read halfway through the book.  The first few semesters I didn't believe it (but after years of hearing it, I realized that it was true), but student after student would tell me it was the first book s/he had ever read.  In addition to its compelling content, Wright's autobiography had wonderful stylistic features.  As is common in much African-American political and religious rhetoric, Wright loves parallelism.  There are three very long passages where Wright stops the narrative entirely for parallel lists of imaginative comparisons through similes.  I've read lots of lists that colleagues have written that make me wince because of their lack of parallel construction--here an infinitive, there a gerund; here a verb, there a sentence.  So the students could work not only on avoiding faulty parallelism but also see how a master could use the technique and how they could imitate it for rhetorical effect. 

Even though Wright's work is autobiographical, he uses patterned and resonant imagery to enrich and structure the work, particularly hunger, fire, and optics.  It was always exciting to watch the students discover the patterns and then to analyze them and their effects.

I looked for another work to complement Wright's work.  My most disastrous choice was Catcher in the Rye, which spoke to the students not at all.  In the last section of developmental English that I taught, more than 50% of the students had been or were in the prison system; they hardly needed Holden Caulfield to tell them that the world is full of phonies.  What I finally found that worked is going to sound surprising, but Carson McCullers's Member of the Wedding, as gauzy and poetic as Wright's work is gritty and hard-edged, for some reason always engaged the students.  One of the pleasures of teaching was always how unpredictable, how unaligned with rubrics and percentages students and material could be.

So I fulfilled my dream's assignment and wrote something on Richard Wright.  I just hope it's 5%...