A ray of hope in COM 209

Communications 209 is our basic newswriting class at SCI, and I've assigned some of my COM 209 students to write up a class they're attending ... if they can't get out of it to cover a presentation on campus by the Springfield Election Commission at the same time, they can do a story on the class. Think it's impossible? Well, Julia Keller, cultural critic for The Chicago Tribune, is taking a 400-level English lit class at DePaul University and writing it up for Tempo, the newspaper's lifestyle section. Here's how she begins her story about a typical class on the 18th-century writer Jonathan Swift:

The sky was garbage-can gray, a dirty, depressing shade that made the prospect of a three-hour-and-fifteen-minute class on a long-dead but somehow still long-winded author downright grim.

For the first five classes, the commute from downtown Chicago to DePaul's Lincoln Park campus had generally occurred under cheerful skies and mild temperatures. Last Wednesday, however, winter finally cracked the whip. Snow fell with a vengeance. The chilly air had a defiant bite to it. And the steps down into the Red Line tunnel at Grand Avenue were awash in that sloshy-sloppy-soppy-soupy mix of water, salt and the darkly undifferentiated crud that adheres indelibly to trouser cuffs.

You should understand that I've always been unduly susceptible to the portentous implications of weather. I regard it as a personal omen.

Clear skies obviously mean the mission is destined for success. Relentless snow, scimitar winds or excessive rain can only be interpreted as signs that I should give up, turn back, go home.

So Keller dreaded going to class. Sound familiar? You don't have to have sunny skies and a perfect day at the beach to make a story interesting. Ordinary, crummy winter weather will do.

Now, watch how Keller sets up the rest of the column:

So on I trudged, emerging from the Fullerton stop to make my weary way to McGaw Hall. My backpack grew soggier by the second. My mood was disintegrating even more rapidly. Had you leaned close to me, you would have heard a muttered, slightly insane-sounding chant: Jonathan Swift, who needs ya? Jonathan Swift, who needs ya? Jonathan Swift . ...

And yet, at the risk of turning this into a morality tale so neat and prim and predictable that it makes parents swoon and kids grimace, honesty forces me to report: Once I got to class, once Professor Todd Parker started his typically enthralling lecture on the vivid particulars of Swift's world, the old educational magic reasserted itself and even wet socks were forgotten.

The class, she says, "was pure enchantment." Yet it wasn't Parker's lecture that got to her. It was a chance remark that sent her on her way thinking the class was worth fighting the "el" in winter weather. Keller says it was:

... one of those classroom moments -- rare, splendid, unpredictable -- when the professor went off-road, as it were, and leaned back in his chair and gently hitched the 18th Century to the 21st: "As a professor of the humanities, I work in the one college that produces nothing useful." There were a few chuckles. Parker continued: "The humanities don't produce products. They produce individuals. Other colleges -- engineering, computers -- create instrumental knowledge. But the college of arts and sciences creates the context that makes that instrumental knowledge meaningful."

Emerging from McGaw Hall just after 9 p.m., we discovered that the winter weather wasn't quite so menacing anymore. Snow descended in great, wet, fat, fairy-tale flakes, like an earnest benediction, and the world seemed both very, very old and very, very new.

Keller, by the way, has won the Pulitzer Prize for feature writing. It's with writing like that she did it.

PLEASE NOTE: If you're in COM 209 and don't have a class at 2 p.m. Tuesday, March 7, your assignment is still to cover the presentation on the city's new voting machines in Becker Library.

UPDATE (March 2): The assignment is off ... turns out I have a standing meeting of the faculty Assessment Committee Tuesday afternoon, so I won't be able to attend the Election Commission's presentation. (The theory, of course, is that assessment is part of instruction and doesn't get in its way. But that's a topic for another day.) You're still urged to cover something -- including maybe Tuesday's dog-and-pony show -- before the end of spring break.

UPDATE ADD 1 (March 3): The event is now rescheduled for 12:45 p.m Wednesday, March 8. As far as I'm concerned, the specific assignment is still off. But you still need to write a feature story over spring break.