Resources

by Jordan Davis

Daniel Kane interviews Jordan Davis on his experience running an IRC chat in Doris Parker’s 6th-grade class at the Ralph Bunche School and a First Class chat in Marianne Melendez’s 6th-grade class at School for the Physical City. Both schools are located in Manhattan.

DK: What is an IRC Chat ?

JD: IRC stands for “Internet Relay Chat.” It’s a live asynchronous conversation zone on the Internet. You need a program such as “Homer” or “Netscape Chat.” IRC Chat is a standard feature of a lot of Internet service providers such as AOL. In a chat room, which is provided by Internet servers and looks like a constantly scrolling play script, people talk to each other “live.” There’s an online name for each keyboard user, something brief like “foh.” You type a line and it shows up on the screen:

foh: What spanking opossums of sneaks are caressing the routes!

And then the next person’s line shows up. After watching people do IRC on the Internet, it felt to me like seeing play scripts evolve in front of my eyes. Furthermore, it struck me that people really like to write this kind of thing, even if it’s only “hey, what’s up,” “hey, how are you,” “hey,” “hey.” Scrolling up the screen, I saw that if the participants gave themselves the tiniest literary distance from what they were doing—that is, if they thought of it more as creating a play and less as crowding onto a party line—they might say something like “Skydiving killer whale” to each other, among other more standard possibilities. When Teachers College of Columbia University came to T&W and talked about setting up a computer residency in writing at the Ralph Bunche School, they wanted to know what we thought networked computers could do differently in the teaching of imaginative writing. For me, the main thing was to allow a group of people to collaborate on the same work simultaneously in real time. Without a computer, of course, you can have a teacher standing in the front of the room writing down lines as people call them out, but I’ve found this is slow and different from ordinary writerly excitement. I thought using IRC Chat could make my students excited about writing in a new and different way that was different from what they had already known.

DK: How did you get your students ready for this kind of work?

JD: We started by doing a number of collaborations using standard e-mail, using the “Reply to All” and “Paste Entire Message” command functions. A student would write one line of a poem and send it to a list of people using the “to:” and “cc:” lines of an e-mail message. The students who received this line would then add on one of their own lines. Then they’d send the new lines through e-mail to everybody on the original list. A poem would grow this way, line by line, through e-mail.

DK: Were your students already familiar with e-mail?

JD: These students were sixth-graders at the Ralph Bunche School in Harlem who had been online since 3rd grade, and they were very proficient typists and network computer users—they would start up the system and make sure that all the computers were working and then they would go. At one point there were about 250 poems floating around the classroom. Many of them were almost the same. Because we were using standard e-mail functions, it was a different, more repetitious version of what happens in an IRC chat, and the poems often ended up sounding very much alike.

DK: So all the students were in the same physical space? One student wasn’t sitting uptown, one student in the Bronx, another one in Yonkers?

JD: Right. For this class we worked only in one room with everybody networked to the same server at Columbia University. This was important to me, since IRC has a kind of sleazy reputation—a lot of people going online to say a lot of nasty, inappropriate things. There’s a lot of stuff that you wouldn’t want kids accidentally going to, and a lot that you don’t want people accidentally stumbling in from. Since Columbia University’s IRC was relatively unknown at the time, the chance of that kind of activity going on in front of the students was much less likely to happen. Even in this very restricted setting that we had through Columbia University, though, we did get a couple of people pop in—I had to encourage them not to stay. At the other school we were working in, School for the Physical City, there was something in place called a first-class server. This is a local network, with local e-mail capabilities, and local chat capabilities. At the School for the Physical City, there were about 6 or 7 computers, and at different points in the year anywhere from 12 to 22 students. If you have two students to a terminal, they can collaborate before they send their lines, which was actually what we found to be the most productive method, the best thing in both schools. The students at School for the Physical City excelled at one-on-one collaborations instead of large-group collaboration on one big work like a play or a poem. The students would pair off and they found that—because their typing wasn’t as advanced as the students from the Ralph Bunche School—it was more comfortable somehow. A lot of the poems were written by two students sitting at a terminal, just sitting with each other and figuring out and responding to other lines that they’d seen written by other people on the screens. Actually, at both schools, some people asked “Can we do a collage?” since we’d done this in the class. I said “Sure!” I had some newspapers a Chinese-language newspaper, a Wall Street Journal, a New York Post…

DK: So you were doing cut-ups like William S. Burroughs and Brion Gysin?

JD: Well, they did mental cut-ups. They didn’t actually cut and paste. They were typing words at random. At Ralph Bunche School, some students wanted to use the dictionary, some students wanted to use Goosebumps books—scary stories designed for children that are published by Scholastic. It sounds a little crazy, but I think what the students wrote was very advanced writing. I had talked a little bit about T.S. Eliot, so the students knew that they could use song lines and whatever they wanted in their poetry, and as long as it sounded good, it would be OK. That was the main thing to listen for—that is, “Does it sound alright?” The sense would sort itself out, probably, if it sounded good, and then they’d figure out what it meant. With this kind of collaboration, you’ll find that the sense will get way out of hand almost instantly, because the tendency when you’re sitting in front of the screen is to finish other people’s thoughts, or fly completely off. Just as an example, listen to this:

<BSC>		We eat delicious rockets at the jazz club
<RBS10>		SKY-DIVING KILLER WHALE
<New>		Oh no, back to school again
<RBS10>		SKYLARKRICH
<mystery>		Kinky
<ren>		"piano lessons can be murder"
<S>		The egg was covered with ugly blue and purple veins

They were paying attention to some of the same things, but one student would find a word he liked in the dictionary and another would find a word in the New York Post that she liked. “Sky-diving killer whale” came about that way, as did “delicious lion” in another section of the text. So, what this kind of technology does is that it yokes together a lot of different desires, a lot of different things that the students want to do, and puts them all in the same place. I think it’s possible that if you separated out each of these monologues, they would be interesting on their own, but I think they’re more interesting integrated into this sort of choral poem. We planned a reading of the work and when the students performed the group poem, one person from each team stood up in front of the room and they read it in sequence. One woman in the audience said she wanted to take the show to an off-Broadway theater—nothing came of it, but it was a nice offer.

DK: Did the students respond to the technology in a way that you found surprising or particularly amenable to the creation of imaginative writing? Was the technology in some sense more responsible for the type of writing that came out of the class?

JD: The kind of writing students produce usually has a lot to do with what the writer is telling them to do. There are always students who will write what they were going to write, and that’s great. There are other students who wouldn’t write anything if the teacher didn’t say “Try doing this.” The ease with which the students take to the collaborative writing we did at the Ralph Bunche School varies according to the experience they’ve had with computers. Until there’s continuous speech recognition—technology which will automatically key in words as the computer user speaks them—keyboarding is going to be this thing that people have to think about and get over. I should mention something about the Ralph Bunche School. It’s sort of a public school that thinks of itself as a private school. The students wear uniforms, they walk in single file down the halls, the teachers are strict, and keyboarding is learned in grades 3 or 4. There’s just no lip about it—you get it done, and the students are all capable, and they’re all capable of doing research projects on the Internet by 6th grade. IRC is exciting to students, because its like talking, sort of cutting loose during class. It’s a kind of freedom that they don’t ordinarily get, and freedom as we’re told is a pretty good thing for writing.

DK: I’m interested by the idea that here we have a whole group of students writing very surreal and experimental types of texts. What about the effect that this kind of writing has on their reading? Does IRC help promote reading of surrealist or difficult poetry in a way that you hadn’t seen before among a younger readership?

JD: I found this to be true more at the School for the Physical City. I found that the SPC students became more interested in seeking out poetry in general, including surrealist-type texts. For example, students were seeking out work by Ron Padgett and Kenneth Koch. Also, one of the assignments during the year was to do a research project on a poet. Generally speaking, a number of students went on to read a lot of work by the writers they were researching. One in particular took to her poet—Langston Hughes—to the point that she memorized a lot of his poems.

DK: Would the poetry your students read end up as models for influencing their writing—would you perhaps start with a “professional” poem, maybe read it aloud, and then have the students discuss it and see what ideas they could get from it?

JD: Yes. The idea—and this is an idea that if it weren’t public property by now I’d have to say I stole from Kenneth Koch—is to transfer the excitement that you get from reading a great poem to the excitement you get from writing a poem. I guess that could be looked at suspiciously as a Freudian idea, that you can transfer that energy, but sometimes it works very well. Again, I think it really varies, and there are students for whom you accelerate a process they would go through anyway, given a library card and seven years. With the computer systems, this is a process that can start to happen faster. Also, I don’t parse the meaning of poems out so much—I don’t usually ask “What is this poem about?” or “What is this poem saying?” Sometimes I’ll ask, “What is this word doing here—this doesn’t seem to make any sense,” but generally if that’s the case with sixth-graders, you’ve probably chosen a poem that’s too hard. Usually, the poems that I teach in 6th grade are simple in diction and clear in intent. One poem that’s very successful with sixth-graders is Ron Padgett’s “Nothing In the Drawer.” It’s a sonnet, and it goes like this:

NOTHING IN THAT DRAWER

Nothing in that drawer.
Nothing in that drawer.
Nothing in that drawer.
Nothing in that drawer.
Nothing in that drawer.
Nothing in that drawer.
Nothing in that drawer.
Nothing in that drawer.
Nothing in that drawer.
Nothing in that drawer.
Nothing in that drawer.
Nothing in that drawer.
Nothing in that drawer.
Nothing in that drawer.

This is apparently a very clear poem, but it was frustrating and unclear to sixth-graders at first. With this poem, I had a group of students prepare a Hyper-studio project. “Hyper-studio” is a multimedia presentation program that Apple strongly recommends to teachers. There are probably better programs out there, but this is the one that I was trained in, so it was the one I used. I had a group of students do a lovely multimedia presentation of all these clothes flying out of a drawer—there being, of course, nothing in the drawer. Other poems…most of the poems in Kenneth Koch’s Rose, Where Did You Get That Red? are appropriate for sixth-graders. I was trying to bring the energy from the poetry to the writing, but I did see some of it going back the other way.

DK: To wrap things up, what are the benefits you see in writing collaborative poems using computer technologies, especially in the context of learning to enjoy poetry, both the reading and the writing of it?

JD: Getting over the idea that poetry is beyond you. Getting over the idea that a poet is a great mysterious person who has done something that you will never know anything about. Poetry is pretty famously a lonely art. That’s why a lot of people feel collaboration can’t be reconciled with that prized loneliness. I think I agree with Ezra Pound, though, that poetry should be something like the best conversation of our times. Collaboration (secretly?) opens up the possibility of making writing into a constant conversation—with others, and with ourselves.