Day 2 Answer: Aaron (a super long example for answering my question!).

I was born in Charleston -- West Virginia's capital city. As I've met many people who can't locate us on any size map, I'll just mention it's east of Kentucky and definitely in "The South." I grew up in a region where many folks are plagued by mindsets mired in rampant and vicious bigotry. For example, my great-grandfather was in The Klan when he was younger. Though, as my mom disclaims continually, there were (and still are) so few African-Americans on Elk River, my great-grandfather wouldn't have recognized an African-American if she or he had walked up and handed him a crisp, new, shiny dollar bill. Spectrums of ignorance and hatred flourish in such impoverished places. Some of the “real” rednecks I grew up with wore KKK themed t-shirts to school and scraped horrid words into their desktops with their pocket knives. I remember one popular t-shirt that featured four or so white-hooded men surrounded top-and-bottom with the slogan "The Real Boys in the Hood.” Not unlike LeAlan and Lloyd from our text Our America, I hated where I grew up. I wanted out, just like they did, but I also have a strange pride, a love, for that place, just like they did.

Through my '93 freshman and 95' junior years, I attended Herbert Hoover High School. Needless to say, my being a die hard anti-racist punk kid with pink hair, baggy clothes, and a skateboard didn't wash well with most students and staff alike. Fights were a weekly occurrence, and I was suspended and nearly expelled for myriad shit more times than are worth remembering, though now I am. Those years were rough on my family, no doubt.

Herbert Hoover High lies on the banks of the Elk River near the fringes of Clendenin, a town that according to the year 2000 census had a population of exactly 1, 116 folks. We spent the first eight or so years of my life up in Clendenin, living a little red brick house right on the Elk. My mom kept a garden in the backyard where she grew tomatoes and sunflowers. Down in our basement she kept a mason jar of sugar-coated lemon drops on a shelf above the dryer, which I loved. My folks were eager to move us to better schools, so we followed the Elk ten miles downstream, crossed over the Elkview Bridge, and on along the river for a couple more miles. There my Dad, Uncle, and Grandfathers had huge hands in building our two-stored, blue vinyl siding house. That was over twenty years ago. I grew up in that blue house near the Elk in Elkview. Follow the Elk for ten more miles downstream and you'll be dumped from its mouth into the much larger Kanawha River, right in lower-left ventricle of Charleston's barely-beating heart. So, there it is. For my entire life, I've felt as if I were the middle point on a twenty mile stretch between the country and the city. Every person in every car that passed me by snagged and caught my imagination under its tires. They wore me thinner and thinner, over the years, like a hobo's boot heel.

I can explain my wish to escape through the following notion, maybe. The 2000 census shows that Charleston had a city population of 53, 421. 53, 421 divided by 1, 116 equals 47.9. That equation is maybe a ratio – 49:1 – for how I felt, then, about my potential as a worker/artist. I guess I always felt like, if I could just get the hell off Elk River, I could maybe become 49 times the worker/artist that I would be if I got stuck on Elk River. Forever.

I do have love for Elk River – my Elk River, the West Virginia of my family and friends – even with all its faults. We have some strong history. We were home to hardcore Abolitionists like John Brown, and throughout the 1900s West Virginia coal miners and labor organizers continually fought the United States Army and ruthless mine guards over issues of mine safety and fair hourly wages. And they won! Since around 1820 I’m the only male on my dad’s side of our family who has never stepped inside of coal mine, so facts like those tend to make me feel a deep, though conflicted, sense of pride.

I left Herbert Hoover in the first month of my senior year and graduated from Hurricane High School in 1996. Down in southern WV we pronounce that "Her-uh-cuhn.” After graduating, I spent three semesters at a community college outside of Charleston, worked the counter at McDonald’s for like a month, but mostly I just skateboarded, went to punk/hardcore shows all over the east coast, worked as a janitor at a Donut Connection and as an Emergency Room Registration Clerk, got tattooed a bunch, lived in my parents' house, and spent a ton of time having no fucking clue what I wanted to do with my life other than not live on Elk River and be a janitor, forever. A few days after my nineteenth birthday, I moved to Morgantown, WV, which is on the banks of the Monongahela River, a whole 142 miles north of Elk River. From fall 1998 to the end of fall 2001, I was enrolled at West Virginia University (WVU), where I completed a double Bachelor's in Journalism and Sociology. While there, some friends and I started a non-profit, Positive-Youth Foundation, based out in Greencastle, PA. We guided and supported kids nationwide whom were organizing against the bigotry they encountered in their own communities and schools. I spent all my free time outside of school traveling two hours, about the exact same distance between the Elk and the Mon Rivers, over Interstate 68 between Morgantown and Greencastle to work in our warehouse. When I wasn’t there, I was touring to promote our cause/non-profit with bands like Green Day, Rancid, AFI, No Doubt, Hot Water Music, Blink 182, Alkaline Trio, Bad Religion, and many others. We also tabled and toured on numerous festivals and festival-style tours, like Lollapalooza and the Vans Warped Tour. I also spoke in front of meetings and gatherings as diverse as the Washington State Women Voters' Caucus and the North American Anarchist Gathering. Through our non-profit work, I traveled through every province of Canada and every state in the USA but Hawaii and North Dakota. I lived and/or spent tons of busy days and rawkus nights in big cities like LA, Seattle, Portland, DC, Baltimore, Philly, and all the boroughs of Manhattan and Brooklyn. I always loved Chicago the most though. At times these memories are near suffocating, and after all this so-called "living" I found myself still a touch lost, but I was off Elk River.

After disagreements with a friend, I left PYF in the summer of 2003 and was feeling pretty much like a waster. I’d quit my dream, a successful one at that. Broke, I took a job at Ticketmaster taking phone-in ticket orders for a couple months back in Charleston, moved back to Morgantown, as quickly as I could, and re-enrolled at WVU to study English and Creative Writing. I always knew, if I ever quit PYF, I would eventually return to university to study poetry. I love to write, as you can see.

Three years later, summer 2006, I’d finished another Bachelor's degree and moved during another August to yet another city, Chicago. Finally. I've spent two years completing my MFA in Poetry here at Columbia. I finished up my degree almost a year ago this week. This is my third year teaching in our Bridge program.

All these ramblings, however, still leave the following unanswered though: am I forty nine times the person I would be if I'd remained on Elk River? Frankly, I hope so, but I don't know. I can tell you, though, that I've started pondering a new ratio for my possible potential – Chicago's population of 3 million divided by Clendenin's 1, 116 equals 2,688.2. 2,688:1 = big numbers.

Well, if you made it this far, thanks for reading all of this. If you skipped down to here from somewhere even in the middle, can't say I blame you. Regardless, I'm excited to get to know all of you. Remember, remember, remember, remember x 2,688.2, I'm here if you need anything.

Day 1 Blog Introduction: Aaron.

Here’s some quick thoughts you'll want to keep in mind as we begin our work:

1. Welcome, everybody! During our morning sessions this blog, along with our classroom workshops, will act as one of our main forums of interaction. It's important that you push yourself to answer the questions, which will be posted here daily BY YOU, with as much intellectual and imaginative honesty as you can possibly muster. The quality of your posts will be judged not on grammatical precision but on brain power. We are all complex humans with complicated opinions, beliefs, and emotions. Your task is to reflect your own intellectual complexity in as much detail and texture as you can, period. This to say, if you want to pass Bridge, don't half-ass this or anything else.

2. Every morning in the computer lab two of us will post rhetorical questions that the rest of us will need to answer. These response questions should and will act as prompts that will extend our class discussions, your own reading of your text, our future reading group discussions, the lectures you’ll hear and the museums you’ll visit, and the afternoon post-lecture, post-museum discussions you’ll participate in with Katrina. The central task of college level analysis is to produce fruitful rhetorical questions that complicate what we believe we are sure of, that challenge us to take hard looks at our identities and the culture(s) that surround us, as both are filled with parts that we both love and hate. As we all will agree and disagree on those parts, the important point that we must always remember is that it is simply not enough for us to pose simple questions that yield simple answers. We will be working to pose rhetorical questions for one another. Rhetorical questions are open-ended questions. They are often irresolvable and only yield partial answers, but these partial answers can lead to what we call a line of inquiry, a kind of path of investigation, if you will. We follow such paths not knowing what word to type or sing next, what chord to play next, what computer code to write in or innovate, what fabric to choose, what lens or f-stop to select, where to block our scenes on a stage floor, track our camera shots, or how to say a line for an audience in a way that reveals a character to them in gripping and surprising ways. With college level inquiry your rhetorical questions will often only yield yet another question as an answer, but that new question will be sharper, less general, and more revealing than the question that preceded it. The best art, songs, video games, web and graphic designs, dress silhouettes, etc and so on, hold the following in common: they reveal endlessly urgent, necessary discoveries both to their creators and to their audiences. This in mind, many of the responses and prompts you’re professors will pose, along with every good paper you’ll write for your Writing & Rhetoric classes and other classes here at Columbia, will be born from complex rhetorical questions. Always.

To help you, here is an example of the type of rhetorical question you’ll basically be producing by the end of Bridge (notice how I’m basing my question in a connection from one of our texts. You’ll use whichever you’ll read.):

In Persepolis Marjane Satrapi offers us descriptions of numerous incidents that took place in her Tavanir neighborhood in Tehran, the capital of Iran. These descriptions center on how Iran’s oppressive Islamic regimes negatively impacted the lives and communities of many Iranians. In the chapter “The Trip” she describes the difference between “The Fundamentalist woman” and “The Modern Woman” by illustrating two styles of dress which are separated by vastly important differences (75). I’m thinking about one of our rhetorical lenses, local/global, when I ask if you can describe an incident or incidents, positive or negative, that occurred in your community which you feel are representative of how we as Americans need, practice, glorify, exploit, and/or use religion to either include or exclude others from our communities? Please explain through clear analysis just how and why you understand your own incidents, from any point in your life, as being representative of American culture in vital ways. Also, extend your thinking to include how and why your experiences are either similar or different from Satrapi’s in important ways.

3. Here are some important technical and stylistic points that you'll need to keep in mind for our postings.

a. You must click "New Post" up in the screen's top right hand corner before you may post a response question or answer. If "New Post" isn't there, you haven't signed in yet. To post a comment under a new post, click "Comments," which will always appear in super tiny font directly beneath the post, right next to the poster's name, etc.

b. If you are due to post a response question, title it as follows: “Day 6 Question: Aaron.” Obviously you’ll change the day, not to mention the name. You must type and post your question as soon as we enter the lab. Don’t waste time. Katrina will always be here to review your questions along with you before you post them.

c. Everyone will post a question on two separate occasions. Your questions should always reflect the rhetorical lenses we’ll begin discussing on Day 2: insider/outsider, personal/ political, local/global, individual/community, self/culture, all of which overlap each other.

d. If you are posting a response answer, a similar model to above is necessary: “Day 6 Answer: Aaron.”

e. Each day you must post an answer, within our allotted lab time, to one of the two questions that will be posted for you. You won’t need to state specifically which question. Those posting questions will post responses in the COMMENT SECTIONS of others’ answers during lab time, NOT AS “NEW POSTS.” Each of your answer posts must surpass a MINIMUM of 250 words. You cannot work on these outside of our lab time; however, feel free to comment on others’ posts whenever you like, just be sure to do so in the comment section only.

f. Lastly, though only after you’ve finished writing and revising, use Google image (or whatever) to find and add an image to your question and answer posts. Always do this, please. Think of this image as a text, meaning it’s “readable.” These images you’ll choose should display a deep connection between itself and your writing, a revealing association between the written and the visual that will enhance your analysis. Think of it this way –the two will be “read” together by others as comprising a single finished piece. ALWAYS spend your time writing first and then search for an image. Incomplete posts are a very bad thing.