A Tutoring Conference Proposal

I work at a Writing Center as a tutor. Here is my workshop proposal the Pacific Northwest Writing Centers Association.

St(Fun P)art Here:

Non-Linear Organizational Techniques

Writing is linear, thinking is not. We leap from idea to idea when we are doing our best thinking and it is our best thinking that we should be writing about. Traditional methods of organizing do not nourish the naturally radiant thought process. The "Roman numeral" outline does not encourage a holistic understanding of a writing topic. Non-linear and whole brain approaches to organizing, like mind-mapping, unlock the strictures that cause writers stress and encourages them to make connections that would not otherwise be apparent. At the same time, a mind map can make clear the inherent structures in a complex of ideas and allow writers to understand where they are going with a piece of writing, what the main ideas are, what are the constituent parts of an idea, and how ideas and parts of ideas interrelate.
Every reasonably adept tutor can recognize disorganization and suggest how to reorder an already written piece, but how do you teach the skill of organizing? In this workshop, we will work from the assumption that the fundamental unit of organization is association, the association of parts of a subject with the whole and with each other.

The workshop will be 10% presentation, 90% participation, and 100% cheesy...I mean, FUN!
An initial collaborative exercise will illustrate to workshop participants the infinite capacity of association and the basics of mind-mapping. I will relate my experience using the techniques of mind mapping in tutoring sessions, particularly at the pre-drafting/brainstorming stages. The workshop will focus on eliciting ideas and connections between ideas by using visual thinking and non-linear organizational schemes. We will discuss the advantages of non-linear, whole brain, organizational techniques over traditional Roman numeral outlines. Finally we will discuss how we can grow a non-linear outline into an orderly paper...just like these three paragraphs grew out of this:

What the hell is Globalization?

The two big ideas that seem to be connected most closely with the word globalization are almost opposite in terms of morality. The first, and, in my circles, most common big idea is the capitalist exploitation of the majority of the world's non-white people and their land by the minority of whites. This exploitation seems often to wear the clothes of the more moral connotation of globalization - the great equalizer. Globalization, according to this view, is making the world flat, bringing wealth to the poor, cell phones and internet, factory jobs and Coca-Cola. Of course, most intelligent people I know realize that the philanthropic motives that greedy corporate PR campaigns profess are bullshit, but this does not mean that globalization is all bad. There are benefits to interconnectivity, even if the West seems to invade native cultures like a virus, we can still offer impoverished societies ideas and resources to inoculate themselves against the chaos of growth.

This is just a long intro to a few pieces of media that I have come across lately. Most of them reinforce the depressing reality that us rich folk (...face it, if you're an American with a computer, you are rich. Rich, rich, rich.), are living on the backs of the rest of the world. But some of these pieces offer some optimism and maybe even a hint at what the hell we are supposed to do about the mess we are complicit in making.

The Story of Stuff is a lecture by a smart and eloquent woman named Annie Leonard accompanied by some cute black and white animations. It explains how our production and consumption patterns work. Some dreary, and some uplifting highlights, the toxicity of today's breast milk, the concept of "externalized costs", and a list of things you can do to move the planet another way.

Less practical, except insofar as having a clearer concept of what the world of people looks like is practical, is the website Gapminder.org.

"Gapminder is a non-profit venture promoting sustainable global development and achievement of the United Nations Millennium Development Goals by increased use and understanding of statistics and other information about social, economic and environmental development at local, national and global levels."

...or some fucking amazing graphs that animate and illustrate global trends like, population, mortality rates, internet use per capita, or birth rate. The thing that got me hooked was this lecture by Hans Roslings, titled optimistically, "The seemingly impossible is possible." He uses graphs of UN statistics to breakdown a lot of misconceptions about the so -called "third world."

Last night, I fell asleep listening to an article from a 2005 issue of The New Yorker about a character by the name of Jeffrey Sachs, who has been popping up everywhere. He is an economist who espouses the optimistic view that we can eradicate poverty in our lifetime. He also loves capitalism and has been criticized for introducing harmful economic practices to developing nations, and changing his tune when he began to see some of these negative consequences. (I downloaded the article from a promising website called AssistiveMedia.)

He is mentioned as well in an episode of one of my favorite radio programs, Open Source with Christopher Lydon. Julia Buxton is the only guest and she brilliantly analyzes the fallacy of "free-market cures for Latin economies." In 2006, they did a show with Jeffrey Sachs as a guest. I haven't listened to that one yet.

There is an amazing article that appeared in Vanity Fair. It is about "feral zones" in developing countries, in particular it examines the amazing power and organization of Brazil's largest prison gang, the Primero Comando da Capital (PCC).


Homo Faber

What was Hannah Arendt talking about again? Speaking of Hannah Arendt...and again.

Why?

Why start a blog?

First, the short answers: To unload. It is fun. So my friends can see how I am doing.

Things get lost. My memory is especially untrustworthy, and no matter how many times I hear someone say that "it's all still up there" in my head, I do not become more hopeful. Thick tracts of my experience are lost to the vagaries of recall. Memory is not a file cabinet of snap shots. It is a pile of sketches, mildewing in the attics of houses, scattered on the streets of a dark city. Recall is a compass without a map. I think senior year is north a few blocks...

Hence, the first reason for "unloading." Otherwise, memories will never get out of the dark city in my head.

The second reason, perhaps the more important one, is to commune with you, my reader. I do not know who you are, but I will assume you are a friend. Even if the only reader is my future self, there is something of an element of communion there. Paradoxically, the idea of no one is somehow similar to the idea of everyone. Dear readers, you are everyone.

There is another paradox here. This telling, so ego heavy: today I looked at myself in the mirror and was so glad at what I saw...The exploration of how I feel about things, about what I did all day, about what I think is pretty, what bands I like, is an indulgence. Yet, it seems like such a grounding effort, a labor even, that satisfies some moral requirement. Strike down on this digital tombstone an epitaph, thousands of lines long...

Then there is a more selfless reason for blogging. I want to share the beautiful things that fly at me each day, so fast and fleeting...how, somehow, a song is perfect. Right now, for example, Paul Simon appears on shuffle and I am reminded of how long music has gone on and it was only a second ago when my cousins and I danced to my mother's copy of Graceland and in a few more seconds my post-apocalyptic grand nephew will listen to it again. The song that triggered this digression, by the way, is "Obvious Child" from The Rhythm of the Saints.

Then there are other things I want to share, that are not beautiful, bad shit that happens. I work as a lobbyist for public college students in Washington state. I work as a writing tutor at Evergreen college as well. My growing awareness of political realities is a constant source of rumination for me. The big question, the great problem, for me, is how do I act politically. Even inaction has political repercussions, so I would like to be as intentional as possible. Acting politically does not just mean participating in my caucus or writing a letter to my legislator, it infiltrates every action of my life, and yours. I am beginning to ramble about this. I have few answers. As a reason for blogging, a big question is a good one.

Life seems to move faster than ever. Events of significance pile up each day by the hundreds.
In this blog, I hope, I will preserve, uncover, share, and solidify the significance that I float through each day: the beautiful things, the problems, the ways of seeing, asking, answering, hearing and rocking out.