Walking on Water: Reading, Writing and Revolution

by Derrick Jensen

Overview

Remember the days of longing for the hands on the classroom clock to move faster? Most of us would say we love to learn, but we hated school. Why is that? What happens to creativity and individuality as we pass through the educational system?

Walking on Water is a startling and provocative look at teaching, writing, creativity, and life by a writer increasingly recognized for his passionate and articulate critique of modern civilization. This time Derrick Jensen brings us into his classroom--whether college or maximum security prison--where he teaches writing. He reveals how schools perpetuate the great illusion that happiness lies outside of ourselves and that learning to please and submit to those in power makes us into lifelong clock-watchers. As a writing teacher Jensen guides his students out of the confines of traditional education to find their own voices, freedom, and creativity.

Jensen's great gift as a teacher and writer is to bring us fully alive at the same moment he is making us confront our losses and count our defeats. It is at the center of Walking on Water, a book that is not only a hard-hitting and sometimes scathing critique of our current educational system and not only a hands-on method for learning how to write, but, like Julia Cameron's The Artist's Way, a lesson on how to connect to the core of our creative selves, to the miracle of waking up and arriving breathless (but with dry feet) on the far shore.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9781603580250
Publisher:	Chelsea Green Publishing
Publication date:	04/30/2005
Sold by:	Barnes & Noble
Format:	eBook
Pages:	232
Sales rank:	298,495
File size:	712 KB

About the Author

Derrick Jensen is the prize-winning author of A Language Older than Words, The Culture of Make Believe, Listening to the Land, Strangely Like War, Welcome to the Machine, and Walking on Water. He was one of two finalists for the 2003 J. Anthony Lukas Book Prize, which cited The Culture of Make Believe as "a passionate and provocative meditation on the nexus of racism, genocide, environmental destruction and corporate malfeasance, where civilization meets its discontents." He writes for The New York Times Magazine, Audubon, and The Sun Magazine among many others.  He is an environmental activist and lives on the coast of northern California.

Table of Contents

	A Nation of Slaves	3
	How to Not Teach	13
	Don't Bore the Reader	25
	Who Are You?	41
	The Most Important Writing Exercise	55
	Grades	71
	Love	87
	Thought	103
	Choices	113
	Significance	127
	Giving up Control	139
	Who Are You, Again?	153
	Clarity	161
	Falling in Love	179
	Revolution	187
	Walking on Water	201
	Acknowledgments	219
	Bibliography	221

Editorial Reviews

Writing teacher Jensen doesn't believe in the traditional grading system, which he calls "a cudgel to bludgeon the unwilling into doing what they don't want to do," so he opts instead to give his students at Eastern Washington University check marks: one check mark for turning in a piece of writing, four for editing that writing into perfection. For this opinionated offering on writing, teaching and the state of the world, Jensen deserves four checkmarks for courage. His ideas are always radical and often inspiring. He rails against the public education system frequently and with refreshing humor, telling students their papers "have to be good enough-interesting enough-that I would rather read them than make love." Drawing on his personal experience, he castigates what he sees as formal education's lack of creativity and flexibility for personal style. Jensen's strength lies in his honest, provocative, passionate approach. The rawness of his ideas is this book's virtue, but it's also its vice. When Jensen makes seemingly random forays into commentary on the demise of the environment or political consciousness (subjects he explored in earlier books like The Culture of Make Believe), his writing becomes long-winded and unfocused. He loses sight of his own seventh rule of writing, which he so dramatically relays to his students: clarity. But more importantly, Jensen's first, second, third and fourth rules of writing are "Don't bore the reader." In that effort, he succeeds masterfully. (Apr.) Copyright 2004 Reed Business Information.

Publishers Weekly

"As is true for most people I know, I've always loved learning. As is also true for most people I know, I always hated school. Why is that?" Jensen's book starts off with a bang and goes full throttle until the very end. He presents a strong case that public education results in people becoming inflexible and boring. He explains that most people love learning, but that they become defensive about education. In describing his experiences of teaching writing to college students and prisoners, Jensen stresses that there are few rules of writing, but the most important is that writers should not bore their readers. Through vignettes, Jensen describes writing exercises and how they have resulted in his students being able to freely express their creativity. The chapter titled "Giving Up Control" is especially intriguing because Jensen describes the Great Chalkboard War of 1995. It involved Jensen's written battle with another teacher via a chalkboard for several days because his classroom chairs were arranged in a circle instead of in rows. In one exercise, Jensen requires students to write about walking on water; some students stood in bathtubs while others walked across frozen ponds, and all were able to write about the experience. The author, who seems like a friend by the end of the book, presents his ideas in a humorous, radical, and upfront approach. Although useful for educators and librarians, this book is a true treasure for teens. It is highly recommended for public libraries, academic libraries, and budding writers. 2004, Chelsea Green, 226p.; Biblio., Ages adult professional.
—Sheila Anderson

VOYA

Jensen (Culture of Make Believe; Strangely Like War) has written a meditation on education using his experiences teaching writing to college students and prisoners as a vehicle to illustrate the well-trodden thesis that schooling and education are distinct-and usually disconnected-events. What sets Jensen's analysis apart from that of other critics is his contention that public education fails students precisely because it succeeds too well in its real agenda of creating a submissive, uncreative, and, ultimately, dehumanized citizenry. Through a series of edgy vignettes, Jensen presents portraits of disenfranchised people whose inability to give voice to their lives has been exacerbated by their classroom experience. Bearing some similarity to Robert Pirsig's socratic discourse with his students, recounted in Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance, the text seeks to tease out a long-dormant individuality from those who might otherwise be permanently relegated to the fringes of society. In so doing, he has a message for us all. Recommended for public and academic libraries.-Ari Sigal, Catawba Valley Community Coll. Lib., Hickory, NC Copyright 2004 Reed Business Information.

Library Journal

Publishers Weekly-

Writing teacher Jensen doesn't believe in the traditional grading system, which he calls "a cudgel to bludgeon the unwilling into doing what they don't want to do," so he opts instead to give his students at Eastern Washington University check marks: one check mark for turning in a piece of writing, four for editing that writing into perfection. For this opinionated offering on writing, teaching and the state of the world, Jensen deserves four checkmarks for courage. His ideas are always radical and often inspiring. He rails against the public education system frequently and with refreshing humor, telling students their papers "have to be good enough—interesting enough—that I would rather read them than make love." Drawing on his personal experience, he castigates what he sees as formal education's lack of creativity and flexibility for personal style. Jensen's strength lies in his honest, provocative, passionate approach. The rawness of his ideas is this book's virtue, but it's also its vice. When Jensen makes seemingly random forays into commentary on the demise of the environment or political consciousness (subjects he explored in earlier books like The Culture of Make Believe), his writing becomes long-winded and unfocused. He loses sight of his own seventh rule of writing, which he so dramatically relays to his students: clarity. But more importantly, Jensen's first, second, third and fourth rules of writing are "Don't bore the reader." In that effort, he succeeds masterfully.

"[Jensen]…deftly wraps his politics in humor, poignant teacher-student encounters and a clear passion for young minds. Jensen is an important, alternative voice of our times."—Mercury News

"The clarity and force of these ideas cut like a scalpel in the hands of a surgeon, preserving the vital, removing the diseased. Mr. Jensen burns sharp holes in the dark places of those rituals we have been tricked into believing are education. We owe him a debt of gratitude for these transformational insights. Read this book!"—John Taylor Gatto, author of Dumbing Us Down: The Hidden Curriculum of Compulsory Schooling

From the Publisher