Susan Muaddi Darraj

Last week, I attended a conference on teaching pedagogy and strategy, which was generally uneventful and filled with such in-the-box phrases as “thinking outside the box” and “we must empower students.” During one panel, a tutoring center director spoke passionately and earnestly about college students who are “at risk” – presumably, they are at risk of failure, of flunking out of college, of spending their lives working at Target or living in their parents’ basements.

But this woman intrigued me. I was impressed by her lovely, multi-slide PowerPoint, filled with dense text and colorful graphics, but even moreso by her slinky black outfit and patriot-red lipstick. (Wow. I mean, I hope that I can look like that when I’m 60 too. Hell, I’d like to look like that when I’m 40.)

But I digress.

She described these at-risk students as kids who typically “lack a stick-to-it-iveness” (swear to God). They are also “non-persisters.” She was far too polished and professional to have typed “lazy” into her glittery PPT, so instead she wrote that they demonstrate a “tendency not to follow through with assignments and appointments.” That was the next bullet point.

By the time her presentation ended (she cleverly allotted 20 minutes for Q&A – I almost asked her if she does pilates), every college professor in the room was in full distress mode. These poor students, these lost children of Generation Y, these Millenials who were never stimulated in high school and who were pushed through anyway, these kids who are struggling with part-time jobs, peer pressure, and uncertainty about academic majors – what can we do to help them?

I kept quiet during the Q&A. I don’t want to rain on everyone’s liturgy. But in my head, I’m thinking: we’re a little late to save this essay. The paper deserves an F. You can get it to a C. Maybe. But not to an A. Because the only thing that could have done that, could have made sure that the non-persisters developed a “stick-to-it-iveness”, is active parenting.

Oh, you’ve heard this one before? Humor me.

Let me say, first of all, that I’m not a Tiger Mom.  Remember her? Professor-I-Hired-a-Violin-Teacher-on-a-Family-Vacation-Thereby-Disrupting-Vacation? (Yes, I read the entire memoir, instead of just gasping about it.) But, a confession: I thought, in the end, that she really was a dedicated mom, not a tyrant.  She wanted to make sure her kids were achievers, and that they understood that success is the result of hard work, not natural genius.

Here’e the opposite of the Tiger Mom, someone that many of you will recognize as a typical “mommy”: a few years ago, I walked into Borders Bookstore (God, do I miss Borders), and held the door open for a young mother pushing a baby stroller. An older boy, maybe 4 or 5, held onto her shirt. She perkily thanked me, and we exchanged that weary “Boy, isn’t mothering hard work!” look.

But then, as she entered a pool of sunshine on the sidewalk, she turned to her older boy and said, “Oooh! Look!  Look! Our friend the sun! The bright yellow sun. Say hello to the sun, honey!”

Yes, I know.

And yet, seemingly used to obeying such bizarre demands, her boy dutifully called out, “Hello sun!” He giggled. She giggled too, missing the fact that he never looked up into the clouds at his pal the sun. “Good job, sweetie,” she said.

What did he learn, then, from his attentive mom? That being cute is enough. Effort not required. It’s an example in action of the current mantra in American parenting and education, that “trying is half the battle.”

The problem is that, of course, it’s not true. “Knowing” is actually half the battle (according to what I learned from GI Joe cartoons as a kid).  Trying is nice. It’s necessary. But it’s the eventual knowledge and success that counts.

The problem is that kids are cute. But their cuteness also hides a dark side: they use it as a shield to cloak their real interests. Simply put: they try to get away with the craziest things. It’s their job. How often they are shown what borders and boundaries look like will determine what kind of adults they turn out to be. And yes, I know it’s hard to do that when you have a job, other children, dinner to cook, four baskets of laundry to fold…

For example, my five-year-old son, who knows that the Wii is only played on Saturday mornings in our house, once tricked me: he turned off the volume and shut the door to the playroom while I was upstairs cooking dinner. I caught him and reprimanded him. He did it again the next day. The third time he did it, the Wii disappeared for a month.

Harsh? But that month was harder for me than it was for him, believe me. I had to hear, the first Saturday, that initial scream of disbelief: “What!? But… but… Mawwwwm! Pwease!”

Pause for ten seconds, then repeat. By noon, I was searching on Amazon for earplugs and express shipping.

My steady, soothing stream of replies included things like: Here’s a puzzle.  Here’s a ball and bat. Here’s your bike helmet. Have fun doing something else. But no Wii. This is called a consequence, honey: c-o-n-s-e-q-u-e-n-c-e. Say hello to it.

He hated me. His five-year-old mind found me completely revolting and horrible. I wasn’t happy about that, but as I pitched him the ball and we talked, he was fine. At least, for an hour or so. But after a mere six days, he barely talked about it.  He’s followed the rules ever since. He will grow up, I hope, to be a persister.

I am not a perfect mother, but my children do not say hello to the sun. Instead, they look at it to try to figure out what time of day it is based on its position in the sky – they think that the ancient way of telling time is “super cool.”

I think it’s super cool that they think it’s super cool.

But then, of course, all children are intrigued by learning. To them, the coolest thing of all is whatever their parents are doing in that moment – if mommy is talking on the phone, they want in on the action. If dad is gardening, they want to yank out some weeds too.  If mom and dad struggle with something, but keep at it until they succeed, that becomes a habit too. Rewards for “effort” or accolades for being cute result in young adults who are “at risk” for coping with reality.

When Tom McAllister introduced keynote speaker Stewart O’Nan at Barrelhouse’s Conversations & Connections conference on September 22nd, he began by explaining how he first met O’Nan (at a very rainy Philadelphia Book Festival). Tom said (and I’m paraphrasing), that he was struck by the fact that not only was O’Nan a very successful writer, but also a genuinely nice and warm person. He used the word “empathetic” — which made sense, he argued, because a person who shows such empathy and caring for his characters on the page might also, reasonably, behave that way towards real people in the real world.

O’Nan, the author of 14 books, including A Prayer for the Dying, Last Night at the Lobster, and Emily, Alone, read two brief excerpts from his novel, The Odds, about a couple whose marriage is fraying and whose future is unclear. Their emotional pain was clear, capturing the attention of the 150 people who listened. O’Nan then offered the audience of writers some comments and thoughts about the writing process — displaying that empathetic and generous nature to which Tom had alluded. What impressed me was O’Nan’s candor: yes, he agreed with some audience members, writing is hard. Yes, writing takes patience. Yes, writing is a lonely endeavor. And? We still choose to do it. If you don’t want to do it, he said frankly, do something else — set your own priorities.

He told the audience that, on difficult projects, he often tied his ankle to his chair as a reminder to remain in his seat. He quoted Robert’s Frost’s famous advice to “apply the seat of one’s pants to the seat of one’s chair.” And slowly, slowly, you accumulate pages, and those pages start to get better and better.

O’Nan’s talk was just one of the highlights of the conference. 2012 marks the Philadelphia debut of Conversations & Connections, which has been held annually in Washington DC since 2007. It was held at the University of the Arts campus on Broad Street, a beautiful space in a great location. Panels and workshops ranged from fiction to freelance writing to poetry to essay writing, on specific topics such as “Ghost Forms: Using Traditional Forms in Your Contemporary Poem” (led by poet Katie Ford), “Fearless Flash Fiction” (led by Randall Brown), and “Money for Writing? Grants, Fellowships, and Funding” (a panel discussion with Dan Brady of Barrelhouse, Asimina Chremos of the Pew Charitable Trusts, Don Ehman of the New Jersey State Arts Council, and poet Catie Rosemurgy).

The “jewel in the crown” of Conversations and Connections is always the “Speed Dating with the Editors” — a mid-day event that we usually describe as “controlled chaos.” Basically, writers get to sit with literary magazine editors and publishers for individual, 10-minute sessions. The editors represented journals like StoryQuarterly, The Painted Bride Quarterly, The Common, Artichoke Haircut, The Gettysburg Review, The Three Quarter Review, The Believer, Philadelphia Stories, and many more. The noise level in the room is — well, it’s just plain loud, and yet most people hurry back to the front desk to buy more tickets. On Saturday, as I was helping organize the line of people that snaked down the 17th floor hallway in Terra Hall, I noticed some people who had already been through the line three, four, five times.

Almost everyone commented on how helpful it was to show an editor your work and have him/her offer feedback right on the spot. And I thought, “Isn’t it?” Seriously — to have writers and editors sit down together and talk in a focused way is one of the things that almost every other writers’ conference lacks — and it’s the element that we love to emphasize at Conversations & Connections. Maybe it’s that empathy thing all over again — as writers ourselves, we know how hard our job can be, and so we designed a conference that helps an emerging writer feel connected, encouraged, and supported.

Hopefully, everyone on September 22nd left feeling encouraged. At least, I know many of them left happy: they were armed with feedback from editors, with a free subscription to a local literary journal of their choice (choices included Ploughshares, The Gettysburg Review, Barrelhouse, Big Lucks, Cobalt, Painted Bride Quarterly, and many others), a free book by a featured author, and several others things they had picked up — Philadelphia Stories and StoryQuarterly had handed out free copies of their great journals, The Spiral Bookcase and Vouched were on hand to sell books and hand out information, and more.

“Make sure you come back next year, ok?” I said to one attendee as she pushed the button on the elevator.

“Are you kidding!” she burst out, grinning. “I’d be crazy not to!”