Time to Write, Second Edition

John Sylvester Lofty

Description

"To read John's work is to take on the role of a patient listener … A book, like a piece of music, is scored for time, and I feel Time to Write is scored adagio.… I believe that Time to Write can be read as a critique of [the] time-chopping approach to education—and an argument for presence, for being fully open to experience, for being there … To do good work, we must enter something like 'island time' or what John calls 'existential time'—or what is sometimes called 'flow' when we lose, at least temporarily, a sense of clock time." — from the Foreword by Thomas Newkirk

Twenty-five years ago, John Sylvester Lofty studied the influence of cultural time values on students' resistance to writing instruction in an isolated Maine fishing community. For the new edition of Time to Write, Lofty returned to the island to consider how social and educational developments in the intervening years may have affected both local culture and attitudes toward education. Lofty discovered how the island time values that previously informed students' literacy learning have been transformed by outside influences, including technology, social media, and the influx of new residents from urban areas. Building on the ethnographic findings of the original study, the new edition analyzes the current conflict between the digital age time values of constant connections and instant communication, and those of school-based literacy. Lofty examines the new literacies now essential for students in a technologically connected world, both those who aspire to continue the traditional island work of lobster fishing, and for the many who now choose to pursue other careers and attend college on the mainland.
Foreword to the First Edition
Foreword to the Second Edition
Preface
Acknowledgments

ACT I: A Maine-Island Fishing Community in the 1980s
Introduction to 1992 Edition

1. Ways with Lobsters

2. Work on the Island

3. Fay: Time on the Threshold of Writing

4. Mark: Writing in Grade Six

5. Christie: Writing and the Future

6. Timescapes for Literacy

ACT II: Twenty-Five Years Later
Introduction to the 2014 Edition

7. Return to the Island

8. Writing in High School: On Paper-Online

9. Time and Being in School

10. Elementary- and Middle-School Foundations

11. Shoptalk: Teachers’ New Learning

12. Timescapes for Literacies

Appendix 1: Approach: Mapping the Timescapes of Literacy
Appendix 2: Student Writings
Appendix 3: School-Wide Expectation Assignments (SWEs)

Notes
Bibliography
Index

Sujets

• Secondary school
• Anthropology

Informations

• Publié par: State University of New York Press
• Date de parution: 10 février 2015
• Nombre de lectures: 0
• EAN13: 9781438455211
• Langue: English
• Poids de l'ouvrage: 6 Mo

Extrait

TIME to WRITE
second edition
The passing of time is something that civilized human beings have lost the power to feel. Creatures that have neither clocks nor books are alive to all manner of knowledge about time and the weather; and about direction, too.
—Richard Adams, Watership Down
TIME
to
WRITE

The Influence of Time and Culture on Learning to Write
SECOND EDITION
John Sylvester Lofty
Published by State University of New York Press, Albany
© 2015 State University of New York
All rights reserved
Printed in the United States of America
No part of this book may be used or reproduced in any manner whatsoever without written permission. No part of this book may be stored in a retrieval system or transmitted in any form or by any means including electronic, electrostatic, magnetic tape, mechanical, photocopying, recording, or otherwise without the prior permission in writing of the publisher.
For information, contact State University of New York Press, Albany, NY
www.sunypress.edu
Production, Laurie Searl
Marketing, Fran Keneston
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Lofty, John Sylvester, 1946–
Time to write : the influence of time and culture on learning to write / John Sylvester Lofty. — Second edition.
pages cm
Includes bibliographical references and index.
ISBN 978-1-4384-5519-8 (hardcover : alk. paper)
ISBN 978-1-4384-5521-1 (ebook)
1. English language—Composition and exercises—Study and teaching—United States. 2. Educational sociology—United States. 3. Time—Sociological aspects. 4. Literacy—United States. 5. Sociolinguistics—United States. I. Title. LB1576.L59 2015 372.62’3—dc23 2014013129
10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1
For the students and teachers in a Maine fishing community where I had the privilege of teaching English, and to my sisters, Janet and Susan, and to the memory of my parents, Marjorie and James
Sea smoke
Contents
Foreword to the First Edition
Foreword to the Second Edition
Preface
Acknowledgments
ACT I: A Maine-Island Fishing Community in the 1980s
Introduction to 1992 Edition
CHAPTER ONE
Ways with Lobsters
CHAPTER TWO
Work on the Island
CHAPTER THREE
Fay: Time on the Threshold of Writing
CHAPTER FOUR
Mark: Writing in Grade Six
CHAPTER FIVE
Christie: Writing and the Future
CHAPTER SIX
Timescapes for Literacy
ACT II: Twenty-Five Years Later
Introduction to 2014 Edition
CHAPTER SEVEN
Return to the Island
CHAPTER EIGHT
Writing in High School: On Paper-Online
CHAPTER NINE
Time and Being in School
CHAPTER TEN
Elementary- and Middle-School Foundations
CHAPTER ELEVEN
Shoptalk: Teachers’ New Learning
CHAPTER TWELVE
Timescapes for Literacies
Appendix 1: Approach: Mapping the Timescapes of Literacy
Appendix 2: Student Writings
Appendix 3: School-Wide Expectation Assignments (SWEs)
Notes
Bibliography
Index
There above the circle of pointed firs we could look down over all the island and could see the ocean that circled this and a hundred other bits of island ground, the mainland shore and all the far horizons. It gave a sudden sense of space, for nothing stopped the eye or hedged one in,—that sense of liberty in space and time which great prospects always give.
—Sarah Orne Jewett,
The Country of the Pointed Firs

And so it goes. And so it goes. And so it goes. And so it goes goes goes goes goes tick tock, tick tock, tick tock, and one day we no longer let time serve us, we serve time and we are slaves of the schedule, worshippers of the sun’s passing,—bound into a life predicated on restrictions because the system will not function if we don’t keep the schedule tight.
—Harlan Ellison,
“‘Repent, Harlequin!’ said the Ticktockman”
FOREWORD TO THE FIRST EDITION
Writing against the Clock
In the world of language education, and in fact in the worlds of language and of education, there emerge few books that have an immediate and telling message. These books startle by the very simplicity and obviousness of what they say; they give us the shock of recognition. One can number among them authors like Mina Shaughnessy, whose Errors and Expectations , which shows how surface errors in writing are related to the writers’ perceptions about text and reader; or like Shirley Brice Heath, whose Ways with Words which shows how the practices of literacy in school can differ from that of the community, and thus how school can put some children at a loss.
Now, John Lofty has produced a volume that again is deceptively simple. In examining the ways in which student and school appear at odds in their attitudes towards writing and its production, he finds that one of the major differences is in the perception and use of time. School time is clock time-divided, industrialized, punchable through time clocks. In such an orderly world, writing becomes a matter of the clock, of fitting composition into neatly organized periods. As it is with writing, so is it with much of school learning: a science experiment cannot last more than a thirty-eight-minute period. Discussion of an issue like war cannot extend beyond the bell.
Against the world of the clock-and-bell school stands the world of the lobster fisher, the clam digger, the farmer, the cook, the writer, and the scientist. These are people for whom everything falls into its season, for whom the time to do things is not a regimented, divisible time, but a time that evolves from the nature of the task—and from nature—the movement of the earth on its axis and around the sun.
Lofty illuminates the fact that school writing is an unnatural act. School instruction in writing prepares students not to be writers in the grand sense of the term but functional writers, writing against the clock, meeting deadlines, preparing viable drafts, committing words to paper in order to get a job done, but without the commitment that constitutes the writer’s craft and art. Students like those in the community Lofty analyzes with depth and honesty perceive this anomaly and either opt out of school writing and school, or they take to it and turn towards the world of the school. The latter become successful students and will be successful scribes, those who have the craft of writing well enough in hand to use it in a variety of ways demanded by the information age.
But these people are not writers, not those who can worry over the nuance of a word, who see that writing is a “craft or sullen art.” School writing instruction leads people to become clerks and scribes, not to become writers. Many schools recognize this distinction and offer special courses called “creative writing.” This kind of writing cannot be done according to the clock; these writers work with the season and the day as do the lobster fishers. Theirs is a rhythm developed according to more natural patterns than that set by the school bell.
As Lofty points out, the attempt to establish the rhythms of the artist within the framework of the school clock as has been suggested by many of those who espouse process writing is to set up a contradiction. The cycle of planning, drafting, revising, and editing that marks the writer at her metier cannot be done by the clock. Time to Write admirably describes the anomaly.
It also presents what I see as a most humane way of dealing with that anomaly. One could see the book as another “critical” attack on schools as they are presently constituted; but, like Shaughnessy and Heath, Lofty is above that easy answer, and like them he writes out of love for all those he describes. The schools are a product of, a preparation for, and a reflection of a technological world that a large number admire and are unwilling to forego. That a number of students chafe and resist and drop out means not that either the schools or the students must change. Awareness of the differences and the anomaly is a first step towards the offering of alternatives. Just as we should not force everyone into the orderly world of the clerk, neither should we impose the creative model on all. We should be able to offer alternatives and to help our students become increasingly aware of the options, the benefits, and the risks of each alternative. Such, I think, is the view offered in Lofty’s four questions at the end of this volume. These questions cast no blame but open the possibility for dialogue between school and community, between teacher and student, that should, I think, be the aim of any educational endeavor.
ALAN C. PURVES
FOREWORD TO THE SECOND EDITION
I cannot pretend any objectivity toward this book, or its author. In fact I have spent almost as much time with it as John has. I read it as a dissertation, watched it transform into the first edition, reading versions along the way. I would talk to John frequently about the “island,” which he never identified for decades (you can trust this guy’s promise of anonymity!). He returned to the island on occasion and interviewed teachers for his book Quiet Wisdom —and now we have this second edition of Time to Write —which rounds out, and brings up to date, his thirty-six-year association, which started with his own attempts to teach writing in the local schools. This loyalty, persistence, and deep affection shine through in this new edition.
But there is another quality in this ethno