On the Importance of Signing Your Babouches: Teaching First-Year Writing
By Arianna (Ari) Corradi
This is how the first day of the semester usually plays out for me. I wake up at 5:30 am after a sleepless night caused by fits of great anticipation; bike into school, get there on time despite not feeling very fit; around 10, I realize that I left my banana at home and feel sorry for myself. By noon, I lose my voice, possibly because I haven’t talked as loud or as much all summer, and wave my goodbyes in silence. Once home, I eat my banana wondering if a joke I cracked at 8 a.m. was funny (it was), and then I finally fall asleep and wake up again fourteen hours later. There is something so real about teaching: about being there, or about being there, depending on how you see it.
Then there are the occasional nights during a semester when I cannot fall asleep because I am bothered by a half-suppressed awareness that there is some kind of mistake in a writing prompt I added to my class slides for tomorrow. It is on those nights that I tell myself that maybe I should relax a little; why not read a novel before bedtime? So earlier this year I started reading My Year of Rest and Relaxation. It was a terrible choice, and I finished the book only because I couldn’t abandon the character without knowing for certain that she would turn out fine (she does) and that the moral universe would win, just like it wins in The Goldfinch, another good book that compromised my sleep. Oh, the pain one has to go through without having, from the outset, the certainty of a moral order! That is why, as a reader, I feel at my best and sleep better among the Victorians or among the detectives; only there I can relax in the humming of an omniscient design, in the guarantee of a resolution, in the sequence of eloquent claims of cause and effect given in clearly reasoned stages of logical inevitability and supported by realistic evidence.
I did not know this before I started teaching, but it turns out that as a writing instructor I need all the logos I can get, because only reason can counter the emotions (the joy, the fear, the hopes, the suspense, the terror!) that I see in all those eyes every other morning in my first-year writing classes. I mean, those eyes! You have seen them: their doubts, their second guessing, their efforts, their loose ends, their all-nighters, and the whole future in front of them. And me and you, also in front of them, maybe after a game day, uttering strange words like: literacy narrative.
A few years ago, I had to write my own literacy narrative as part of a graduate course taught by Dr. Sheila Carter-Tod, a brilliant professor who laughed liberally and contagiously. I took the project very seriously and mused for weeks about who taught me how to be a person (it is clear to me now that I willingly misunderstood the assignment). I wanted to write about my high-school English teacher who was Italian but who had acquired a self-deprecating British flair and a light-hearted way of going about presenting Macbeth’s chaos and disorder. One day, she brought in one of her child’s Playmobil® hard-hat men and seated him on the edge of her lectern, like a little divinity, and addressed him in desperation when the class became too unruly. We were unruly, but that was Italy in the early 2000s, a time when kids smoked cigarettes like there was no tomorrow, and nobody knew about the Myers Briggs test. A time when the national morale was one of Leopardian “cosmic pessimism” (a useful concept covered in the Literature class) possibly motivated by the fact that, in joining the Eurozone, Italian households saw their purchasing power halved. So I graduated high school without knowing that, as an INFJ, I would be suited to teaching.
I considered writing about my grandmother as well, who knitted away while watching old-fashioned romantic movies on silent, so that she could speak to the characters directly, informing them of perils they could not see, such as “Honey, are you stupid? He loves another woman!” or shaking her head as a young man proposed to the wrong woman: “Watch out sweetheart! She is after your money!” I learnt a lot about love from my grandma’s movies, from her voice over filled with premonitions and laughter. I think that she was carefree because she must have gone through so much poverty and worries in the 1940s that once the war was over and her five children found employment as mechanics or cleaners by the late 1960s, she probably said to herself: You know what? Now I am going to have a little bit of fun (until I die, in 2005).
She knitted all her life and made beautiful woolen bed socks or slippers, known as babouches. In her babouches she deliberately included little mistakes which she called with pride: her signature. I thought about this recently as I was learning to knit; initially my knitting was full of awful holes but with practice and repetition it became so neat that it looked almost machine-made.
I did not write about my grandmother in my narrative, however; I wrote about the knitters I met in the local yarn shop. It was there, sitting with a patient knitter on a little sofa, that I discovered that knitters use the pronoun “we” (as in “this is how we do it”) when they mean: this is how I’ve been taught to do it and it is what I am teaching you to do; we pass on the craft the way it reached us. Very soon, on that little sofa, I found myself part of a generous “we” simply by wanting to learn how to knit and purl (a lovely word). In that “we,” I put my “I” away and felt a certain relief; I was knitting in a particular way because that is how my teacher did it, or that’s how it ought to be done if we are following a purpose, a pattern. Or, as Iris Murdoch called it, in reference to learning a foreign language: an authoritative structure “which exists independently of me.”
In the above, you could swap the word “knitting” for “writing” and “pattern” for “genre,” if you wish. I do that sometimes; after all, we “read” a piece of knitting. There is no private language, just like there is no private knitting. But there are those little signatures, those little unforgettable idiosyncrasies. I remember my English teacher not because of her lesson plans or her writing prompts, but because she was really in the classroom; she brought her whole person to school—as well as the little Playmobil® hard-hat man. And because she was vulnerably there, in the same way we were vulnerably there, I admired her courage, her humanity, which transferred to her subject, literature, and from her subject to me.
If the semester starts with a sleepless night, it always ends with the anonymous student evaluation of teaching. The joke we tell is that there is always one (and by that we mean one rating, just one, that couldn’t be any lower). But I would like to suggest that we see it in the other way, the way my grandma would, turning off the volume to tell us a piece of wisdom that only an omniscient narrator like her can muster: there is always one person whom we have helped in ways we can’t even imagine; in ways that they themselves might realize only many years later, as they put together the pieces of a life to make order out of chaos, to remind themselves what is important and how they want to live.
Work Cited
Iris Murdoch. “The Sovereignty of Good over Other Concepts.” Existentialists and Mystics: Writings on Philosophy and Literature. Penguin, 1998, pp. 363-385.