jay's museum of college writing

Jay's HAIR YEAH! Post - The Beatles Appearance on Ed Sullivan - They Changed the World! - Summary of Research Article Below

  In The Dead Straight Guide to the Beatles, author Chris Ingham explains how the Beatles appearance on the Ed Sullivan Show in  in February 1964  changed world forever.  Before Ed Sullivan, few people in  this country had ever seen or heard the Beatles. This was before the internet.  Television at the time offered maybe three to four channels. Ed Sullivan was a variety show.    Every Sunday night, families gathered around the television set to watch Ed Sullivan introduce his comedians, juggling acts, tap dancers, stuff like that.  But, on this night, more than 73 million people were tuned into the show, the largest audience of all time. This was New York City.  Many call this place "the media capital"  of the  world.  This is where you can find some of the most important newspapers, largest publishing houses, biggest record companies, and most prolific television studios in the
world. The Beatles gave viewers something to dream about.  John, Paul, George and Ringo were poor boys from Liverpool. They started with nothing, and they made it big.  Boys and girls, men and women, that’s all they wanted from the time they saw them on the Ed Sullivan show, to be Beatles.   Almost 60 years later, and the Beatles are still HUGE.   John and George are dead, but not forgotten.  Paul and Ringo are still selling out concerts, and they are in their eighties.  Today, many of my students listen to the Beatles and write essays about them.  Whatever they meant to their fans back THEN, there are plenty of fans that feel the same NOW.

---

This week I'm doing TWO THINGS:  I'm teaching my students how to summarize research articles, and I'm reading the behind-the-scenes look at the Beatles' rise to fame in a book called 150 Glimpses of the Beatles by Craig Brown. Of course, there are more than  a few glimpses of the Ed Sullivan show.  From the moment Ed Sullivan announced the Beatles to a live studio audience, it was PANDAMONIUM.  The screams of the audience members nearly drowned out the music.  A writer on the scene from the New York Herald-Tribune compared the sound to the "terrible shriek the BMT Astoria train makes as it turns east near 59th Street and Seventh Avenue." [ Four years later, the Beatles called it QUITS on touring - They could no longer hear themselves sing above the roar of their own crowds.] In this book, many of my  favorite musicians share where they were and how they felt seeing the Beatles for the first time. Seeing the Beatles on Ed Sullivan changed their worlds. Crissie Hynde, aged twelve, who would become lead singer of the Pretenders, said "It was like the sex, but without the sex."  Tom Petty remembers how within weeks of the Ed Sullivan Show,  a wave of new garage bands, hundreds, spread across his native city, Gainsville, Florida.  My favorite quote from the book, comes from a rock star I grew up listening to in San Francisco, Greg Kihn. He says on the Friday before Ed Sullivan, he left school with his hair greased back like Dion, but on Monday, he and everybody else who saw the show, arrived at school with their hair ungreased and brushed forward: "That's how quickly it happened." The Beatles Revolution.

---

In my next classroom workshop, I will attempt to teach my students how to create a SUMMARY of their selected RESEARCH ARTICLE.  Jay's Note:  There is no ONE WAY to write a summary. Below I provide them  a SUGGESTED model for arranging their ideas.  I chose to summarize a Beatles article I came across an anthology of my shelves here in Mexicali.  I summarize the night the Beatles appeared on the Ed Sullivan Show..

First , I will encourage my students to understand the use of SUMMARY:

*  Second - Let's Read the Carefully :

            1. They will need  to decide amongst themelves, What is most IMPORTANT to their RESEARCH ARTICLE?

                 * Answer the FOLLOWING QUESTIONS:

* Third - Let's use the following table to arrange the most significant Ideas in our research articles:

* In the table  below, answer 5 Ws and 1 H.  Each student should be responsible for contributing 50 to 100 word, insightful response in the space of each box. 

WHO?  Who or what is the main focus of this scene/article?	When the Beatles appeared on the Ed Sullivan Show in  in February 1964  they changed world forever.
WHAT?  What is the scene/article about?  What is the "Who" doing?	Before Ed Sullivan, few people in  this country had ever seen or heard the Beatles. This was before the internet.  Television at the time offered maybe three to four channels. Ed Sullivan was a variety show.
WHEN? What is the timeframe for the action taking place.	Every Sunday night, families gathered around the television set to watch Ed Sullivan introduce his comedians, juggling acts, tap dancers, stuff like that.  But, on this night, more than 73 million people were tuned into the show, the largest audience of all time.
WHERE?  Where is the location mentioned.  What details are important to the setting?	This was New York City.  Many call this place "the media capital"  of the  world.  This is where you can find some of the most important newspapers, largest publishing houses, biggest record companies, and most prolific television studios in the world.
WHY?  Why is "this" happening.  Why is "this" important to the characters?  To the novel?	The Beatles gave viewers something to dream about.  John, Paul, George and Ringo were poor boys from Liverpool. They started with nothing, and they made it big.  Boys and girls, men and women, that’s all they wanted from the time they saw them on the Ed Sullivan show, to be Beatles.
HOW?  How did "this" happen.  (Think Cause and Effect? ) How will "this" affect the story?

Fourth - Putting It All Together.

Jay's Sample Summary - I tried to follow my directions as closely as I could - I combined 5 important points from my table - It works. 

* Please note:  I chose to begin my summary by identifying where I found the information.

In The Dead Straight Guide to the Beatles, author Chris Ingham explains how the Beatles appearance on the Ed Sullivan Show in  in February 1964  changed world forever.  Before Ed Sullivan, few people in  this country had ever seen or heard the Beatles. This was before the internet.  Television at the time offered maybe three to four channels. Ed Sullivan was a variety show.    Every Sunday night, families gathered around the television set to watch Ed Sullivan introduce his comedians, juggling acts, tap dancers, stuff like that.  But, on this night, more than 73 million people were tuned into the show, the largest audience of all time. This was New York City.  Many call this place "the media capital"  of the  world.  This is where you can find some of the most important newspapers, largest publishing houses, biggest record companies, and most prolific television studios in the world. The Beatles gave viewers something to dream about.  John, Paul, George and Ringo were poor boys from Liverpool. They started with nothing, and they made it big.  Boys and girls, men and women, that’s all they wanted from the time they saw them on the Ed Sullivan show, to be Beatles.   Almost 60 years later, and the Beatles are still HUGE.  John and George are dead, but not forgotten.  Paul and Ringo are still selling out concerts, and they are in their eighties.  Today, many of my students listen to the Beatles and write essays about them.  Whatever they meant to their fans back THEN, there are plenty of fans that feel the same NOW.

I hope this helps!

Reply

Jay's GREEN PANTS Post - Sandra Cisneros - "Geraldo No Last Name" - In-Class Annotation Workshop

Here is the sentence that resonates with me this semester: “Geraldo in his shiny shirt and green pants.”

I love this story by Sandra Cisneros because she says so much with so little.  What do we know about the young boy who died?  What do the characters know?  Not much except the color of Geraldo’s pants.

But, I mean what does Sandra have to tell us?  All of us already know Geraldo or people like him who comes to this country to make a better life.  They work long hours and live in shabby apartments.  They get up early and come home late.  They have little free time for us to get to know them.  But every so often, they are able to escape from their rat race, and we might see them at a party or a dance.

They are human lest we forget.  “Just another wetback,” Sandra writes.  We know their work, but we ignore their hopes and dreams.

That’s why I like the image of the green pants in the first paragraph. The green color represents hope, man.  Despite the hardships and challenges our immigrants face, they hold on to their dreams

The green pants says to me “green light.”  Geraldo, just keep going.

I think that’s what makes the story so sad.  Certainly Esperanza, the narrator of House on Mango Street, understands the pants.  Her name translated into English means “hope.” Marin, the last person to see him alive, must understand.  She spent hours and hours in the hospital waiting for someone she didn’t even know.

The green lets us see the invisible.

---

In today's class, I introduced the process of creating effective annotations:

We are writing RESEARCH PAPERS.  I used Sandra C's "Geraldo No Last Name" like a PRACTICE BOARD. I asked students to work in groups of THREE. Each group was required to create a table of SIX annotations.    They could either create thier  annotations on STICKIES.  Or they could collaborate on a TABLE in WORD.  Like this:

GREEN PANTS AND SATURDAY SHIRT:  Geraldo seems like a guy who works all week.  Green might mean "Go."  Like, for a few hours on the weekend he finally  feels free.  I remember the "Green Light" from the Great Gatsby. It represented the American Dream.	Just Another Brazer:  This word sounds YIDDISH to me.  Something I might hear from my grandmother.  But, my students may have heard the word from their grandmothers.  Their MEXICAN grandmothers.  It sounds like BRACERO.  Many of my students come from hard-working farmworking families	They never saw the kitchenettes. They never knew about the two-room flats and sleeping rooms he rented…  Who is “THEY?”   THEY are US!  We see a lot of Geraldos walking the streets at 3:00 in the morning, but we don’t look. We don’t know anything about them.   We don’t care.  It’s like they are INVISIBLE. The workers at the Emergency Room don’t care either.
THEY MET AT A DANCE: I know Marin from reading Sandra Cisneros's The House on Mango Street.   She's a beautiful girl.   She probably has many boyfriends, but this guy for some reason touches  her heart. Like Geraldo, Marin is from an immigrant family. She probably knows more about him than is provided in the story.

When we completed our GROUP WORK, I showed the class how to create their annotations online directly into a word document.

This skill is going to come in HANDY when we begin annotating FOR REALS with our own research articles.  Below I practiced with "Geraldo No Last Name" on the big screen in front of class. I tried to follow my own instructions - DO THIS - NOT THIS - the best I could.

For the next class, I've asked my students to bring THREE research articles for their COMMUNITY PROFILE project.

In the classroom, I will have laptops at their disposal.  If they feel OLD-SCHOOL - like me - they can create their annotations by hand. Below I provide a few models from past projects.

 I hope this works.  For me, I feel I DON'T LEARN ANYTHING unless I WRITE DOWN WHAT I READ.  I offer my students the skill to annotate to use as their own SECRET WEAPON for their own learning.  Today, my students looked ENGAGED!

 

 

Jay's ACCORDION CRIMES Post - Annie Proulx - La Sonora Dinamita - The American Dream

  I suppose you can call this novel an "Accordion Memoir."  Annie Proulx arranged her book into a series of immigrant stories.  The common denominator is a green accordion created by a poor campesino in Italy, maybe 130 years ago.  I don’t know much about accordions, but this one is a beautiful piece of work.   I will emphasize the word “Dreamer” here:  this accordian is created by an Italian artesan dreamer who plans to take his accordian to America and sell it.  In his mind, he will make more like this one to sell – and build a better future for his family.  The butttons of this  accordion are made of polished bone. Small oval mirrors in the surface of the instrument reflect rivulets of light. This Italiano carved a design of peacocks and olive leaves into the grill with a jeweler’s saw.   The accordion maker knows what he’s doing.  His instrument sounds better than it looks. Over time he has become an expert in reeds, bellows, and valves.  Annie P. describes the music that pours out of it this way:  “hoarse and crying, reminding listeners of the brutalities of love. Of various hungers. The notes fell, viting and sharp; it seemed the tooth that bit was hollowed with pain.” This guy is going to leave his wife behind and journey to “La Merica” to make it big.  He'll send for his wife when he has the money.  The world is a staircase, he says. In America,  he will take his family upwards.

Wow!  I dig this book.  Each and every one of the characters in this book come to America with similar dreams and ambitions, but they learn the life here is not always going to be a reasonable affair. The accordion maker was Italian.  In the chapters to follow, we will are introduced to Mexicans, Poles, Africans, Irish-Scots, Franco-Canadians.  They just keep on coming.  These immigrants come to America seeking a better life.   Most of my students come from immigrant families.  They write about the struggles and complications for their families to make it in this country. Fortunately, they write with Hope and Vision.  Not so much, the characters in this book.  They all run into bleakness and despair.  Racism.  Corruption. HATE.  Most if not all meet painful ends. I cant see myself reading this novel in any of my classes. It's relelntlessly  Dark and Vilolent.  It makes me think why would anyone still want to come to this country.  The answer, I believe is that they have romantic souls.   They wake up in the middle of the night with visions of a new life. Some of them flee their native countries to escape dire poverty and persecution. But others are driven by the idea to work hard and make something of themselves. 

Early in the novel, the author quotes another poor Italian immigrant: “I came to America because I heard the streets were paved with gold. When I got here, found out three things: First, the streets weren't paved with gold; second, they weren't paved at all: and third, I was expected to pave them.”  I’m not going to tell you what becomes of the accordian maker, but over time, the accordion changes hands, cultures, countries, and crimes.

---

But, I’m not writing a book report here; I mean that would be too hard.  The people and families that populate this novel come from different places under different circumstances.  The only constant is the little green accordion that shows up in every chapter. Instead of giving you a chapter-by-chapter, play-by-play account of the action – THAT WOULD BE BORING ON MY PART – Here, I choose to focus on a new cumbia group I discovered through Accordion Crimes.  The name of the band is Sonora Dinamita. They hail from Colombia, but they now make their home in Mexico. I have to assume that Sonora Dinamita is BIG on the use of accordions in their act.  I came across the mention of Sonora Dinamita in a chapter called  “Spider, Bite Me.”  It’s the sad story of a musical family that lives near the Texas/Mexico border during the1930s and 40s. Abelardo Relampago Salazar, he’s the old-school, macho Mexican father, whose life changed when he bought a little  green accordion  that he saw for sale in a barbershop window.  He becomes obsessed with the rhythms and sounds he learns to make and soon begins  playing a combination of jazz rumbas and Mexican polkas  at high-school and church dances; bars and cantinas; birthday parties and weddings;  for anyone who would pay a few dollars. He’s married to Adina who grows tired being treated like a second fiddle to a new accordion.  She’s sad and lonely for her life in Texas: “I have not had a night’s sleep since we came her,” she tells her baby [Felida]. “I have the luck of a dancing dog.”

I’m not so sure Abelardo is any more important or interesting than any of the other characters in the novel, but he’s the guy I will want to share with my students in some type of classroom disussion.  He’s Mexican Old-School.  My  students will be well familiar of this type from what we have read in class.  He encourages his sons to join him on the road with their accordions.  Together they form a banda.  The women are left behind left at home.   I’m not sure that Adina cares to go, but his daughter shares the same passion for music as her father.  Yet Abelardo scoffs at her: “A woman cannot play the accordion.  It is a man’s instrument.  A woman cannot get other musicians to play with her, nobody will hire you, your voice is not strong enough.  Your character is bad, you are disobedient, you have no future in the musical field. This goes without saying:  Felida grows up feeling NEGLECTED and INVISIBLE.  Her story make me forget all about the posionous spider that bites and kills her dad in his drunken sleep.   WHAT ABOUT HER STORY?

Sonora Dinamita is known for their sensual cumbias.  Their sound and rhythms may have begun with black slaves, imported to Colombia in the 1800s, who were forced to drag their feet when they walked, for their legs were CHAINED.  This movement became a shuffle.  According to what I have read, this shuffle inspired feelings of liberation.  The slaves  began to sing while they walked. This was the beginnings of the Cumbia we know today.  Here is the connection I try to make:  In Accordion Crimes, Abelardo and his sons play their  for a small audience in an empty theatre in Minneapolis. They were struggling to build their audience. This is 1955 or so. Like all the characters in this book, Abelardo must feel his dream fading and his life sliding down a slippery slope. He and his sons have no money, nowhere to spend the night.  The only thing they have, it seems, is a "thousand mile drive against blinding truck lights back to Texas, burning eyes, yawning and stopping for coffee."  And all for what?  This is what has become of their American Dream. Annie P, however, has created a pattern of time shifts in her book to give us a glimpse of the future. " In brackets, she shares what happens forty years later in the same house with a packed audience.  Sonora Dinamita takes the stage with their accordions, and their fans go WILD.   Much of the music Abelardo played on his little green accordion,was once means of liberation for slaves and with time it has become a means of freedom for everybody.  You probably won't realize it until you finish all the book, but Annie P  emphasis appears to be the role that immigrants played in making America the vital place it is today.

Most of my students in class have their roots in Mexico.  My  grandparents came to the U.S to escape Jewish persecution in Eastern Europe.  I mean, we are all immigrants. Everybody is an immigrant from somewhere, yet we have a presidential candidate that calls Mexican immigrants RAPISTS and CRIMINALS.  He boasts of his plan to deport thousands of young Mexicans who came to this country with their parents.  Reading novels like Accordion Crimes  forces us to examine our own thoughts and opinons on race and illegal immigration.  Trump’s hatred for people of color is not unique.  There is plenty of people like him that move in and out of our lives.  They say one thing, but they feel another.  They are dangerous. They are frightening.  THEY VOTE. 

Some day, I will share a passage from Accordion Crimes with my classes. This week we are reading Sandra Cisnosa.  Next week, it will be another prominent Latino writer, Alex Espinoza. By the time we complete the semester, we will have read a novel, Paradise Travel,  about two teenage lovers who journey to New York City to make a better life for themselves. From these readings, I’m happy to see many of my students research their own family immigration experience.  I feel their writing  valuable.  In their research,  they touch upon important historical an political issues regarding Imperial Valley.  In their family interviews, they drew out raw emotion. Their writing documents  the impact of social movements in their lives.  Many of them have become the first college students in their family.  In their community profiles, they give their family members a voice where previously there wasn't.

 

Jay's SANDRA CISNEROS Post - "Only Daughter" - Strong Women Fall Kick-Off

 In the first or second week of each semester, I share Sandra Cisneros’s “Only Daughter,” with my composition classes.  My students often connect with Sandra’s background.  She beat the obstacles of racism, sexism, and poverty in her world to become both an influential writer and  activist.   

Sandra’s childhood experience of being “the only daughter” proved to be a great training ground for a writing career.  In fact, it was her feelings of isolation and abandonment from her fathers and brothers that pushed her towards reading and writing. When she grew older, her skill for transferring her plight to the page enabled her to enter UC Berkeley and later become a powerful voice in American literature.  Her  House on Mango Street, for example, reflects many of the same childhood frustrations she describes in her essay.

One story after another boasts the voice of a poor young girl struggling to make sense of her loneliness.  When she writes in “Only Daughter” that she values her mistreatment from being an only daughter, I believe her. She learned how to convert her pain and confusion into beautiful, meaningful stories. In my opinion, her anger is her juice.

I bring “Only Daughter” into the classroom to provide a nice change from what my students are used to in their
English courses.  I want to give them material they can relate to.   I mean diversity speaks, but you don’t have to be a Mexican or a woman to enjoy Sandra’s stories.   At the end this narrative when Sandra returns  home to her family home in Chicago, something special happens between father and daughter, and everyone recognizes  and responds to the dynamic.   Before the father dies, he is able to communicate his deep sense of pride for what the daughter has become.  We break it down in  matters of culture or tradition,  but it’s not black or white or brown.  It’s all about the struggle to be loved.  It’s solid gold.

Who needs writing prompts when you read something like that?