Defining Fun And Seeking Flow In English Language Arts

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I see a colleague one morning stride into a local coffee shop, a young math education professor of nimble mind and quick wit.
"You'll be interested in an essay I'm writing," I tell him.
Todd raises his eyebrows. "It's about the importance of fun in teaching and learning."
"Fun?" Todd says, smiling exponentially. "That's easy: a rich mathematical problem."
"Fun for English teachers," I say, "and their students."
"Still easy," Todd says. "I've seen you teach. You love to have fun."
"I do. And I want students to enjoy my classes, but I've got some cognitive dissonance." "The problem?"
"Learning to be literate is serious business," I tell him. "I'm uneasy with fun."
"Ah!" says Todd. "You want fun, but you want deep fun."
"Yes! Deep fun! Like deep massage."

I've taught 34 years now, half that time in high school, half in college preparing future English teachers. I've had a grand time. But I must confess, what has been fun for me has not always been fun for students. I remember high school sophomores one August with their cramped hands raised in anguish; I had made them ...
... write nonstop for ten minutes after a summer of not touching pencils. I've prepped Tag Heuer Replica reluctant juniors to grapple with the labyrinthine-sentenced, super-vocabularied prose of William Faulkner, and then made them start reading. Some students sighed, some rolled their eyes, desperate to escape the classroom. I prevailed, though, and not with a laugh or a smile. I've conferred with college students about essays they thought were done. I showed them where I, a willing reader, didn't understand, hadn't followed their logic, wasn't convinced without examples. There was work to be done. I was there to help, but many students revised in resentful silence, decidedly unhappy.

The acts of literacy I pushed students to are great fun for me. I enjoy writing in my notebook to explore a memory, moment, or idea. I love reading something that challenges me and yields intellectual and emotional rewards. Little satisfies me more than revising a draft.

I want students to expand their notions of fun in learning. We'll smile and sometimes laugh along the way at piercing ironies, delightful characterizations, surprising plot lines, startling perceptions, adroit wordplay, and knee-slapping language goofs. We'll parse the politician's language when he says that you cannot believe what a suspected terrorist says because those people disassemble. I'll introduce students to the idea of cohesion in an essay by showing them a scene from a Marx Brothers' movie. We'll have fun with content; we'll have fun with my methods. But primarily, I want students to learn to have fun from the fulfillment of engaging in meaningful academic work. I want them to develop a productive, tenacious attitude toward such work and take it with them throughout their lives. My goal is to present students with a curriculum that will so absorb them that time accelerates. I am giddy when a student raises her head near the end of class, bewildered, and asks, "Is the period over?" In my students' learning, I'm after what Mi-haly Csikszentmihalyi called "optimal psychological experience" or, in a word, "flow":

We have seen how people describe the common characteristics of optimal experience: a sense that one's skills are adequate to cope with the challenges at hand, in a goal-directed, rule-bound action system that provides clear clues as to how well one is performing. Concentration is so intense that there is no attention left over to think about anything irrelevant, or to worry about problems. Self-consciousness disappears, and the sense of time becomes distorted. An activity that produces such experiences is so gratifying that people are willing to do it for its own sake, with little concern for what they will get out of it, even when it is difficult, or dangerous.

Flow is deep fun. Flow is what the rich mathematical problem offered my buoyant colleague. Flow is what I seek as I write this essay. I've seen students of greatly varying abilities immersed in optimal psychological experience—the linguistically sophisticated high school junior who writes an implicitly Tag Heuer Replica Watches emphatic fiction of the first day of school that reveals institutional insensitivity and peer treachery; the bemused sophomore transfer student to our writing workshop who has completed countless grammar worksheets over the years but rarely been asked to write his own vision. He finally catches fire when he writes three pages recommending a movie, three pages rife with usage, spelling, and punctuation errors, three pages driven by passion, detail, and evidence.
Students have fun with Facebook, MySpace, YouTube, and video games. They have fun text messaging, talking on cell phones, listening to iPods. They have fun at theme parks and hanging out with friends. As their teacher I want to introduce students to another kind of fun. This fun can be time consuming, rigorous, and fulfilling. It's the kind of fun critical to their academic success, their intellectual development, and their future as literate choice makers.