Focus is Frightening
I wrote last week about using prompts to give students agency. I wrote last month about using Wikipedia positively in the classroom.
When I use prompts as assignments, I leave it open to students to show me what’s possible. The best students expand on each lesson, but so do struggling students. Skill level has little to do with creative potential and creativity can often turn student weaknesses into strengths.
A past student who wrote under the penname @SylvieBergerome, was one of the first to succeed with the wiki prompt. Her experience also illustrates a great example of an instructive type of fear.
She was a veteran newspaper reporter who’d returned to Quinnipiac to study the Internet as a full-time frontier for communicators and a part-time nemesis to journalism.
She was also an avid researcher, historian, and documentarian. A local Connecticut story about the back-to-back hurricanes of 1955 had inspired her in the same way another Connecticut story—the story of con man Philip Musica—had inspired me.
When it came time for the Wikipedia module, @Sylvie rewrote the shoddy existing Wikipedia article about those Connecticut storms and sourced every line. It’s not only a well-written encyclopedia entry of standing knowledge, but also a shining example of what the assignment is about—research and citation.
That @Sylvie could call up and consolidate the best sources of information on this story from years of going through archives and recording oral histories is a largely uncelebrated and invisible technique of the best writers. Every time she needed not just a sentence, but a fact, she had something even better—a specific reference or quote from a firsthand account.
That’s good writing built on good source selection.
People need this ability to select or “curate” trustworthy and well-written sources to survive the modern Internet. Nothing illustrates how to separate truth from bias quite like a classic bibliography in the form of a modern Wikipedia article.
Wikipedia’s international team of 12,000 volunteer editors barely touched @Sylvie’s entry, save a few adjustments for formatting. These editors are typically eager to show off their superior communication skills at the drop of a comma. But they didn’t rewrite her entry because it held up to their standards.
@Sylvie also used the course to make some decisions about her capstone project—our graduate program’s multimedia version of a thesis. Another interest she wrote about during her time in class was information graphics, specifically the award-winning infographics design team at The New York Times.
She considered taking her Connecticut flood research a step further by turning it into a poster that would explain the 1955 catastrophe in one single glorious graphic design.
But just as quickly as she though of it, she hesitated. It would mean devoting another two semesters of her life to this story. Again, I recognized her thought process. I’d asked myself numerous times in libraries, at historical sites, and in the middle of interviews: what the hell am I doing chasing Philip Musica?
Focus is difficult for us. It’s a clear choice and every choice is a risk. You get one go around in this life and you’re going to spend it on a distant catastrophe or a dead criminal?
We are afraid of details because they represent limits. When someone defines us well or surprisingly, we retort, “You don’t know me!” Of course, people do know us, particularly the more we focus ourselves on something tangible.
Passion is a limitation. From the outside, creativity only looks like possibility. Yet very quickly possibility is fulfilled, and defined. Over time, creative artists become very aware they are one film, one book, or one song.
Someone without passion has to make even more of a choice. It’s almost better if an editor assigns you a beat. As a reporter, Sylvie could understand that. It’s only when she followed her passion that she realized how much of a choice it meant and how little choice she had.