Thoughts on Conversational Writing

I recently came across this piece by Rob Jenkins making a “Case for Conversational Writing.” As someone who has more than once been both applauded for and accused of writing with a journalistic or conversational tone, I was very interested in what Jenkins had to say.

And I was impressed.

In response to those who believe we should teach students in college or even high school to write in an “academic” register, Jenkins responds:

Why should they? The fact that they’re students, and that they’re operating in an academic environment, does not make them academics. Nor will more than a fraction of them go on to become academics, thank goodness. The overwhelming majority won’t be writing academic prose in their professional lives, so why should we be teaching it to them in college, much less high school?

He then goes on to compare a piece of stereotypically obscure academic prose to something written by Malcolm Gladwell in his more conversational tone. Then he states:

What Gladwell does isn’t fancier or more difficult. Granted, it’s not easy to write as gracefully as he does, although he certainly makes it look that way. But the sort of conversational style he employs is, if anything, more natural and intuitive than what we spend years teaching students in high school and college.

I agree that Gladwell’s style is more natural and intuitive, but I would also argue that it is difficult — especially at first — to write well in a conversational tone for a couple of reasons.

First of all, most of the time most of us don’t have the most structured conversations. We hardly ever take the time when speaking with other people to organize our ideas like we do when we write. Sometimes my students mistake conversational tone with conversational structure which nearly always results in a rambling, incoherent mess. Whether the organization comes beforehand in something like a mind map or an outline, or after the first draft in the form of heavy revision, all good writing follows a well-thought structure. Depending on what I am writing, I might do one or the other. Sometimes, especially for very long pieces, it is vital that I have a roadmap before I get started. Sometimes, however, I just need to begin the conversation before I can actually see where it is going. In all cases, it takes a lot of time and effort to get things right in the end. Conversational tone should never be an excuse for poor structure.

The second reason it is tough to write well in a conversational tone is that most good writers, even people like Gladwell, who write in what we would call a conversational tone, do not write exactly like they speak. I know I don’t. Even if I nail the structure on the first pass (which rarely happens) my first drafts are usually far too chatty, and I spend much of my drafting process cutting out the cruft that is totally appropriate in conversation but that distracts in writing. The result (I hope) is something that feels natural to the reader, but is actually much more streamlined than everyday speech. This also takes time and effort and a willingness to fearlessly and ruthlessly use the delete key.

As a scholar and a teacher, I feel an ethical obligation to make the things that I write as clear as possible for my readers and the things I teach as clear as possible for my students. This does not mean dumbing down the material. It means taking the extra time necessary to understand my own message, organize it in a way that will make sense to my audience, and then present it as clearly as possible. I don’t always get it right, but I feel good about my effort and I will continue to improve.

Lessons about Writing from "Messi es un perro"

I really enjoyed watching much of the World Cup this year. I was proud of the way the US team played, and even though Spain completely laid an egg, it was just a great tournament.

Perhaps my favorite player in the world right now is the Argentine Lionel Messi. He’s quiet and plays with a fierceness that beguiles his small size. Maybe it’s because I’m sort of obsessed with dogs right now, but I loved this video that a friend recommended to me the other day. It talks about how Messi chases the ball and the goal like a dog after a bone.

This reminds me of some great advice I received from one of my good friends, the wonderful Catalan novelist Jaume Cabré. When I was working on my dissertation there were days when I just couldn’t seem to get the words out on the page. When I asked Cabré if this ever happened to him, he responded with this:

The thing about writing is that it goes as it goes. You go through phases. There are times when you get frustrated with something and you feel as if you were blocked. Then one fine day, the blockage starts to slip … I mean that you have to have patience, lots of patience … It’s just a matter of your winning and being more stubborn than the blockage.

The images from the Messi video show that he is almost always more stubborn than his opponents. I try to be like that with my projects. When times get tough and I'm struggling to get myself writing, it helps me to think about Messi, the dog, chasing after the bone.

This semester I’m going to have my students do a ton of writing. I hope that I can teach them to be this diligent, this focused, this passionate about their work. I'll keep you posted on their progress.

Autism and the Astonishing X-Men

Recently, I wrote a piece that has been published in an excellent collection of essays entitled The Ages of the X-Men: Essays on the Children of the Atom in Changing Times -- edited by my good friend Joseph Darowski. My chapter is called "Autism and the Astonishing X-Men," and it is a deeply personal exploration of the reasons I think the X-Men serve as a great metaphor for people with autism.

This spring when I presented on Autism in Popular Culture at the UVU Conference on Autism someone asked if I was there as a father or as a professional. I could only answer "yes." It's hard for me to separate these parts of my life, and I think that comes out in this essay. I've tried to write it for a broad audience.

The entire book is really good, and I hope lots of people buy it. Here are a couple of excerpts from my chapter:

Since my two oldest children were diagnosed with autism spectrum disorder (ASD) almost two years ago, it has been impossible for me not to notice how many recent fiction films, books, and TV series portray people on the autism spectrum. As a humanist interested in the crossroads of aesthetics and everyday life, I believe that these works have much to offer in the way of understanding both autism and the human condition in general. Recently, however, I have found insight into autism not in fictional representations of people with autism, but in the X-Men -- specifically in Gifted (2004), a collection of the first six issues of the Astonishing X-Men written by Joss Whedon and drawn by John Cassaday. Along with the great writing and beautiful art in this comic, I have gained understanding as I have looked at this story arc through the lens of autism. I believe that there are enough points of contact between the concerns of these Astonishing X-Men and those of people on the autism spectrum to make the comparison worthwhile, and enough difference between the two to know that we are not talking about the same thing.

By way of summary, Gifted is the story of how Dr. Kavita Rao develops a "Hope Serum" that "cures" mutants of their mutations. This is a huge relief to some mutants and humans but causes great alarm in others. Beast (perhaps my favorite X-Man) struggles more than the others because he feels that if he were "cured" of his mutation, he would be able to have better relationships with people. Wolverine challenges this notion as weak.

This is my conclusion:

As is the case with Beast and the Hope Serum, I have my own personal struggles whenever anyone mentions a cure for autism. One of the first things our pediatrician told us when he diagnosed our children with autism is that there is no cure for it. This is something we would deal with our entire lives. Not twenty-four hours went by, however, before well-meaning people started to tell us that the doctors are all wrong. That there really is a cure for autism. If we could just get them into the right school, or get them on the right diet, our children might be cured. If we eliminated gluten, or went completely organic, or if we get our children iPads, or if we did ABA therapy or floor- time, or used the right essential oils or eliminated electronics from their lives, our children could be cured.

The problem is that for every child who sees a dramatic reduction in autistic behavior after a certain therapy, treatment, or lifestyle change, countless children will see little or no improvement at all from any or all of these treatments. The result is often either resignation to the fact that nothing can be done or a frantic search for the next promised cure.

For me, however, talk of a cure always raises deep and intensely personal philosophical questions about what exactly is being cured. The DSM-5’s definition of autism focuses on the negative aspects of autism, but many people who work with autism, and many people on the spectrum themselves, choose to view autism not as a disease or even a disorder but simply a unique way of viewing the world -- a different ability rather than a dis-ability. They may struggle with some things that neurotypical people take for granted, but they also possess a level of intelligence, an attention to detail, an ability to focus on one single thing, a unique set of eyes through which they see the world -- and all of this comes not in spite of their autism but because of it.

Some people may see my exploration of this topic as too reductive, but that is exactly what I am advocating against. The benefit of exploring autism through the lens of something like Gifted is that, as is often the case with the best science fiction and fantasy writing, the distance between the text and the real world liberates interpretation. Because Whedon never explicitly mentions autism, I can identify the moments in which the comparison works and discard those comparisons when they break down. In Gifted, no one protests when Tildie is cured of her mutation. Likewise, one could come up with countless examples of people with autism who would absolutely benefit from some kind of cure because their autism makes it impossible for them to function in society. Some people on the autism spectrum suffer so much -- physically and emotionally -- or cause so much suffering in the people around them, that it would be unethical not to give them a cure if it were available.

In my own case, however, I find that I identify much more with Beast than with the mutants lined up outside Benetech. I have seen plenty of dark days when I would give anything to make autism disappear from my children’s life; but there are other times when, like Beast, I realize just how gifted -- even astonishing -- they truly are.

Book Report: El ángel perdido by Javier Sierra

A few years (yes I said years) ago I decided that I needed to read more fun stuff in Spanish. This might seem weird for someone who at the time was finishing a PhD in Iberian and Latin American Cultures, but I was working on my dissertation at the time, and I just wasn't reading. So I jumped onto the Casa del Libro website, and took a look at what was selling well at the time.

The top seller was a book by Javier Sierra called El ángel perdido. I picked up the Kindle version so that I could read it on my devices, but I had a really hard time getting hooked.

Here is the basic plot:

Julia Álvarez is an expert on Gothic architecture, and she is working on a restoration in the Cathedral of Santiago de Compostela. Then her husband, to whom she is currently separated, is kidnapped in the mountains of Turkey. The reason Julia and Martin (her husband) are separated is because he is obsessed with these urim and thumim-like seer stones that have been in his family since the time of the Elizabethan mathematician and alchemist John Dee. Julia finds out that the kidnapping is related to the stones, which are actually the way that God or the Gods have given humans (or the fallen angels who intermarried with humans) to communicate with them. So she gets swept up in this adventure where she is finding out about the stones (particularly their relationship to Noah and the flood) and trying to find her husband.

Like I said, it took me years to get hooked on this book. A couple of weeks ago, I decided that I had to finish it, so I started plugging through it. Then I actually got hooked and finished it pretty quickly.

So what did I think in the end?

I have actually always been a sucker for Dan Brown-ish stories that take art, history, religion, alchemy, etc. and weave them together in interesting ways. The Noah's ark angle was interesting because when I was a kid I was taught that the ark had a glowing stone in it and that that was possibly where the Brother of Jared in The Book of Mormon had come up with the idea to put glowing stones in his own barges. As a matter of fact, there is a pretty lengthy (a couple of pages) discussion in this novel about how John Dee was not the last person to speak with God through a seer stone, but Joseph Smith was.

Oh, and when I was a kid I was captivated by a documentary about people who have searched for (and possibly found) Noah's ark on Mount Ararat. This novel made lots of references to the Ararat Anomaly and expeditions that have gone in search of the ark. It was all pretty interesting for me and reminded me of that feeling of wonder that I had as a kid watching that documentary.

I don't know what to say about the novel from a literary or even cultural standpoint except to say that there were nothing horribly wrong with it. It isn't Javier Marías or Rosa Montero, but it was readable. There is some interesting stuff about the Cathedral of Santiago and the church in Noia, but I honestly don't think that anyone is reading this book for its literary quality. I think people read this book because they want to suspend disbelief and have a good time. Perhaps it is just because of my interest in seer stones and Noah's ark, but in the end I actually enjoyed reading this book, and I would recommend it to students as summer reading if they are interested in something light.

Loving Literautas.com

I came across this website the other day that has already proven very helpful and I'm sure will play a role in my composition class this fall. The site is called literautas.com. It is run by Iria López Teijeiro, a Galician novelist who has a real knack for boiling down creativity and writing into steps that I'm sure my students will be able to latch onto. I look forward to digging deeper into the website over the next few weeks.

How Much Is 50 Pounds of Writing?

I really enjoyed this article by Chanporry Rith (who apparently designed Gmail for iOS) that I found via macademic.org about the how important it is to simply produce when we are trying to be creative. Rith recounts the following story from Art and Fear:

The ceramics teacher announced on opening day that he was dividing the class into two groups. All those on the left side of the studio, he said, would be graded solely on the quantity of work they produced, all those on the right solely on its quality.

His procedure was simple: on the final day of class he would bring in his bathroom scales and weigh the work of the “quantity” group: fifty pound of pots rated an “A”, forty pounds a “B”, and so on. Those being graded on “quality”, however, needed to produce only one pot”albeit a perfect one”to get an “A”.

Well, came grading time and a curious fact emerged: the works of highest quality were all produced by the group being graded for quantity. It seems that while the “quantity” group was busily churning out piles of work”and learning from their mistakes”the “quality” group had sat theorizing about perfection, and in the end had little more to show for their efforts than grandiose theories and a pile of dead clay.

I have been going over this story in my mind, thinking about the “Advanced Grammar and Composition Course” that I will be teaching this coming fall, and asking myself: How much writing is the equivalent of 50 pounds of clay pots? I have thought about a semester total of words, a weekly, bi-weekly, or even daily blog post. I’ve thought about letting students write for the beginning of the semester work on free writing and moving toward more structure as the semester moves on. I’m not sure where it all will go, but I’m confident it will be an adventure.

So what do you think? How much is 50 pounds of writing?

My New Favorite Music Service: Amazon Prime

Over the past couple of years I have bounced around between a few different music services. I've tried Pandora, Spotify, iTunes Radio, and even Beats music.

Pandora was good for a while, but I find that I tire of the stations they give me. iTunes Radio is even worse. Their stations repeat the same songs over and over. Spotify is fantastic, but I don't really like paying for the lack of ads and Spotify is far less interesting without the ability to download the songs to my iPhone. I got a free three month trial of Beats, and it has really great human-curated playlists, but there is no desktop app, and the website is buggy. It often freezes up and I just hate having to log into the website every time I want to listen to music.

Then the other day I got an email saying that Amazon Prime was now offering music. I've never really been into Amazon itself for digital movies or music, but I LOVE Amazon Prime. For about the price of Netflix I can get free shipping (often 2-day shipping) on everything I buy from Amazon. I also get a video service that rivals Netflix for quality and selection and now music. They have a good video app for iPad, and I find myself going to Amazon at least as much as Netflix when I have a free evening (and I'm not watching the World Cup).

So I’m excited about the idea of music through Amazon Prime. I've only used it for a bit today, but I like it. They don't have as wide a selection as Spotify, and their playlists aren't as good as Beats, but they have plenty of great music, and good iPhone and Mac apps, and the best thing is I'm already paying for it. I look forward to lots of great music in the days to come.

Fighting the Darkness

Over the past few years I've noticed a disturbing trend in many of my classes. Most of my students do well. They understand what is expected of them, and they handle the adversity that inevitably comes in college by sticking it out and doing their best.

Some students, however, seem much more fragile. When the dark times come they buckle. It seems like every semester I have a few students who just give up on the semester. The craziest thing about this is that I can never guess who these dropouts will be. Often I am caught by surprise because I assume that they are doing better than they are.

Anyway, I have spent a lot of time over the past year or so thinking about these students. I know that as long as I challenge my students I will have some that will fall by the wayside, but I want to make sure that I am doing what I can to help students have confidence that they can succeed.

This is why I was so impressed with an article that I just read from the New York Times called "Who Gets to Graduate?". It tells of some really interesting work being done at the University of Texas-Austin to help identify and help students to fight through the dark times and to stick with it. Since UTA has made these few small adjustments they have seen big increases in student retention. I still haven't figured out exactly how I am going to do it, but I want to have a better plan in place to maintain a better relationship with my students so that I can stand by their side when the darkenss comes and help them stave it off.

Balancing Home and Work

I really appreciated this article by David M. Perry about his experiences being a working dad in the academy. I had four kids during graduate school, and two of them have special needs I write about our experience with them on my other blog. I have always been grateful to be able to work in places where I felt like my position as a father was not just tolerated but appreciated.

In fact, I remember there was a time when I was at Stanford and feeling particularly overwhelmed. I spoke with one of my advisors and he told me: “Look. You are a husband and a father and nothing that you do will ever be as important as that. So you will never be the guy who does everything. It’s just not going to happen. You need to pick one thing and do it better than anybody else and you will always be fine.”

I’m sure that not everyone has had the good fortune of working for and with people like that, but it’s nice to know that there are people out there who value family and are willing to help their students and colleagues to find the proper balance.

What Batman Teaches Me about Teaching

Several months ago, Comixology had a great sale on Batman comics. I hadn’t ever read much of The Dark Knight, so I decided to spring and get a few collections. First, however, I consulted with my good friend and comics expert, Joseph Darowski, who teaches English and Pop Culture classes at BYU Idaho. Given my limited budget and the collections that were on sale, Joe recommended that I pick up The Long Halloween, The Dark Knight Returns, and The Court of Owls.

I started with The Long Halloween, and at first it took me a while to get into it. The art is highly stylized, and (as is often the case with comics) it was hard to jump right in. But later things started to pick up and once I got hooked I was able to finish it pretty quickly. Next I read The Dark Knight Returns. Again, I had a hard time with the stylized artwork, and I found both Frank Miller’s prose and the layout to be quite jarring. I would say that for me DKR was fine but not great. Now I am reading The Court of Owls, and in my mind it’s the best of the three. Greg Capullo’s art is much more down my alley, and Scott Snyder’s tone is perfect.

Then somewhere in the middle of all of this reading, I came across this article about “Batman’s Traumatic Origins” by Richard A. Warshack, and it impressed me for a couple of reasons. First of all was the close reading. Warshack is a clinical professor of psychiatry at the University of Texas Southwestern Medical Center, and he obviously knows his psychiatry. But he is also an excellent reader of literature and art. I wrote recently about how I feel like as a literature professor I (like many of my colleagues) tend to slip away from close reading in favor of theory, and when I read Warshack’s article I thought: “I hope my students can have these kinds of thoughts about the media they consume after having been in my class.” Maybe they won’t write them up and publish them in The Atlantic, but hopefully they will connect the stuff they read and watch to the world they live in.

Anyway, reading Warshack’s article, along with all of these Batman comics, has got me thinking about what I like about Batman, especially considering the fact that because they are so dark I don’t necessarily enjoy reading Batman comics as much as some of the lighter stuff from Marvel. But the more I think about it, the more I realize that I like Batman because of what he teaches me about teaching.

First of all, Batman, when done right, is first and foremost a detective. Detective Comics had existed for a couple of years before Batman appeared in 1939. But once he came on the scene, Batman, also known as “The World’s Greatest Detective,” was the face of that series. After a several mergers, the Superman and Batman titles came to be housed under the same publishing roof — first called Superman-DC and then later simply as DC.

Why does any of this matter? I believe (and I often talk to my students about this) that detective fiction is many times a metaphor for artistic interpretation. The murder — macabre as it may sound — is a work of art designed to elicit an emotional response in the viewer. A good detective can only find the killer after they have placed the murder in context and found motive or meaning behind it, and the only way they can do that is by paying close attention to all of the clues. Batman is fine as a superhero, but for me he is great because of his detective abilities. I prefer far more the scenes in The Long Halloween or The Court of Owls where Batman is analyzing things in his lab and trying to piece together a mystery than I do those in The Dark Knight Returns where he is duking it out with Superman. I love using the art-as-crime metaphor with my students because I think that they get it. It isn’t hard to get them to pay attention to details and then to sift through the details to find out what is important if they feel like they are “literary detectives.”

Secondly, as Warshack points out in his article, Batman is important because of his traumatic origins. I suppose the same could be said for many superheroes, but few of them are tormented like Batman. Perhaps this is another reason I like Court of Owls, in which we get more insight into Bruce Wayne’s childhood — including the fruitless search for the Court of Owls that was his first case. But what does trauma have to do with teaching? I believe that one critical element in teaching is compassion. Sometimes, in the confines of the classroom, I can forget that we are all damaged goods. Like Bruce Wayne, we all carry around a ton of emotional baggage. It’s easy to try to pretend that none of that exists, but I think that I am a better teacher when I realize not just that I’ve got stuff going on in my own life but my students do in theirs.

Along with trauma comes the idea of vulnerability — perhaps Batman’s most endearing trait. He is very smart and strong and a good fighter (and he has a ton of money), but he has no special mutation, no healing factor, no spider sense, no invulnerability. He feels every blow and he carries the scars of every encounter. (I wrote a bit about this on my other blog a few weeks ago). When Batman enters any engagement he has no assurance that things will turn out well. Knowing this helps me to remember my own vulnerability. After teaching the same class a couple of times and receiving good feedback from students, I think it is easy to start to feel like I have all of the answers. When I start to feel like that, I need to take a step back and realize that I am Batman, not Superman. I have been given not just a great privilege as a teacher but a huge responsibility, and I owe it to myself and my students to prepare carefully and to approach class humbly.

So while Batman is still not my favorite comic to read (The X-Men will probably always hold that place in my heart), I must admit that these three classic Batman titles have reminded me of some important just some of the reasons he has been such a huge success for so many decades.

Delighting in the Details

Close Reading

I believe that one of the rare qualities of people in my profession, and one that I hope to improve on in the future, is the ability to perform a close reading of a text. With the importance of applying theories to everything it can sometimes be too easy to forget just how important it is to sit down and really dig deep into the primary text.

That is why I was so impressed with this article by Dave Addey at typesetinthefuture.com about a film I have never seen: Moon. There is really no theory behind this detailed reading, just a careful attention to detail. Addey’s creative and well-written post does one more thing: it draws attention to the fact that the creators of Moon were very careful as well with detail. They didn’t throw this thing together. To take a phrase from Shawn Blanc, they took Delight in the Details. Reading Addey’s examination of Moon made me remember to be more careful when I read, and to be more careful when I create. I need to not get lost in the theory and remember to delight in the details.

My Technology Policy

Recently I went to the Red Rock Great Teaching Retreat in Kanab here in Utah. It was a really nice weekend. I loved how practical it was. We spent much of the time in breakout sessions talking about specific problems we have in the class and helping each other to think through those problems.

One of the issues that came up several times was how to deal with distracted students in class. Our discussion about appropriate student use of technology in the classroom got me thinking about my own technology policy. This is what I include in all of my syllabuses:

I believe that the use of electronic devices including smart phones, tablets, and laptops can make class more engaging and delightful. I encourage you to bring these devices to class and to use them to engage in class. You might use your device to look up words or references in class, take notes, or make comments on Twitter. This is a privilege I expect will not be abused. Headphones, texting, making or answering phone calls, Facebook, gaming, checking email and other tomfoolery is disrespectful to me and to your fellow students will result in a penalty to your participation grade.

Now that I look at it, I'm pretty sure that I owe the part about tomfoolerly to one of my mentors from whom I certainly plagiarized part of the policy. But regardless of that, I'm really happy with my policy. Are there students who occasionally check or send a text message or updat their Facebook status during class? I'm sure that they do. But it has never been a problem for me, and I truly believe that having students connected can make class much more interesting for them and for me.

This became very clear to me the other day when I was watching my history students play the 1600s RPG. This is what I saw:

These students are not using their devices to waste time. They are using it to enhance class. Some are consulting and updating the Google Docs that they spent weeks creating in order to understand the historical context or the rules of the game. Others are using dice apps like Pip or the elegantly named Dice-Roller Simulator instead of physical dice. Others are consulting the internet to find out where was Cervantes was on a certain date so that they can go and save him from the time terrorists.

I understand that not every class is the same, and on the rare occasions that I do turn off the lights and put up a presentation I'm sure that there are some students who take advantage of the moment to check their social networks, but generally speaking my students are far too engaged in class to be "distracted" by technology.

It isn't the foundation of what I do, and there will be courses where it really won't play a factor (I'm currently planning a very tech-light composition course for the fall), but I believe that when students feel trusted and they are given ways to use their devices to enhance class -- it can all be quite delightful.

Another Timeline Update

I spent last night cruising through another big chunk of Iberian history. I am really learning a lot from this project. In fact, I can imagine another version of this class where the assignment is for the students to build this timeline -- make it interactive, etc.

The file is now officially too big to export as a PDF -- so from here on out it will have to be a giant JPG.

León Arsenal

A few weeks ago we had a really special visit to class. I can't believe it's taken me this long to write about it, but that's just how things go sometimes.

Last semester, I found out that the Spanish writer León Arsenal would be visiting campus. He has written a number of historical novels and science-fiction pieces as well as historical essays and other works. I decided to have my students read one of his more ambitious historical novels Última Roma, an epic-scale adventure story about the Visigoths (under Leovigildo) and the Romans in Iberia at the end of the 6th century. We all read the eBook version because the print version is so hard to come by in the US, but the print version is about a 700 page book, written in a tough style, with a sprawling cast of characters. I challenged my students to read it, told them I'd give them 14000 points in our game if they could finish the book and come up with a good question for the author before he got to SUU. Most of them did!

For many of my students this was what in the gaming community is called an epic win -- a moment in which you surprise yourself by your ability to accomplish something you never thought possible. If I had just told my students at the beginning of the semester "Oh, and we'll be reading well over 1,000 pages during the semester -- on top of all of the writing you'll be doing," I'm pretty sure I would have had a mutiny. This truly may have been one of the toughest (if not the toughest) academic assignments these students were ever given. Because I folded into the game framework, gave them a clear goal and taught them some reading skills so that they could start to believe that it was possible, suddenly I had a class of super-readers.

Arsenal's visit was great. He visited our class and gave us a quick but very informative and engaging outline of the history of the Visigoths and the Romans in the peninsula. He talked about military tactics, social hierarchy, and daily life -- even clothing. The novel is good as a novel and absolutely astounding as a piece of imaginative historical storytelling. When Arsenal finished teaching us, he opened it up for questions, and I was impressed by the depth of the questions my students asked. They really took this seriously and it became an epic win for all of us -- truly something none of us will ever forget.