Observation #1: Writing teachers know less about the
teaching of
writing than they'd like to admit.
- We don't, for instance, know very much about how to teach students
to find good ideas. (We talk about "heuristics" and tell students to
keep notebooks and free write and diagram and make spider graphs and issue
trees (I have a special faith in "academic plans" like "yeah/but" and "it
depends") but
who knows if any of that stuff really works? Certainly, we have faith in
such
techniques or we wouldn't tell students to use them, but deep down, I
suspect finding good ideas has a lot more to do with
genetics, sweat, experience, buttwork, luck, total immersion, and theft
than it does with a
conscious process of
"idea-finding." (We also, unfortunately, know very little about "good ideas"--
what makes them good, inspiring, new, and/or valuable.) (And
unfortunately, we know very little about what makes "good" evidence,
too--how
much good evidence we need,
what constitutes "good" evidence," how persuasive such
evidence really is--or how students can dredge up such evidence
themselves or separate it from all the other less-good evidence they run
into.)
- Ninety percent of teaching involves persuasion--we
persuade students
to trust us, to value our beliefs, to give up old beliefs, to risk making
mistakes . . . yet we don't know a lot about such persuasion. (If you look at
the various journals for teachers of writing, they mostly deal with "what to
teach"--not "how to teach" or "how to change other people's opinions." We
teach something called the "persuasive essay" but we don't even know if
such "persuasion" works or how to measure our success.)
- Much of our advice about writing is oversimplified and passed on to
us
by tradition. (We say, for
instance, that we use apostrophes to signal "possession"--but what exactly
does it mean to "possess" something? (When we say "John's leaving irritated
Thelma," does John actually possess his leaving?) We say that
writers use three dots (ellipses) to signal omissions, but we don't agree on
how to space those dots.) We tell students to "be consistent with your
tenses" but we don't exactly know why they should be consistent--and when
we check out what good writers do, we find that they vary
their tenses a lot more than we tell our students. We tell our students how
to write "compare/contrast" papers--but professional writers seldom write
pure school-type
"compare/contrast" papers.
Observation #2: Textbooks for beginning writers suck.
It's no fluke that textbooks haven't changed or
improved much in eighty years. Textbooks are designed to make publishers
money--not necessarily to teach college students how to write. They're
fat, expensive
compendiums of ritual knowledge, folklore, common sense, and exhortation.
(Take
a look at a whole bunch
of these and see how many times they begin with something about "Why Do
You Write?" Compare what they say about "connotation" and "denotation";
check out what they say about "audience"; check out the bloodless examples
and humorless assignments. About thirty years ago,
textbook writers started to talk about
the "writing process"--and even though no one knows what the "writing
process" really
is, textbook writers still exhort their students to "understand the writing
process." One of the oldest models for writing textbooks is James
McCrimmon's Writing with a Purpose (1950)--a book that textbook
makers have been cloning for half a century. (I personally
think the 1950 version
is better than many of the more recent clones.) The basic design for
handbooks goes back to around 1919
when the first Heath Handbook came out--and the format has
remained basically the same ever since.
In this context, take a look at my collection of no
duh comments in English textbooks.
Observation #3: Teaching is a Confusing Activity.
For one thing, teaching involves power and control. We assert our
power when we give our students assignments; we exhort our students to
work hard, to behave themselves, to
put their thesis statements in the right place, to vary their sentences, to be
"creative," to rewrite what they don't ever want to look at again. . . and
while we do that, we exhort our students to be "free," "risk something," "be
honest," "write for yourselves." (I suspect the only people who miss the
irony are writing teachers themselves.)
Teaching also involves magic, mystery. If, in fact, teachers know less than
they want to admit about writing, how do they keep control? They claim
special, privileged knowledge. In fact, as long as writing
teachers can
convince their students that only the faithful, the obedient and true will
ever taste the mysteries of "style," or beauty or creativity or personal voice,
they can
keep their students
from
asking embarrassing questions (like "What is voice?" "What
is
creativity"?), challenging their power or devaluing their
knowledge.
People in power often invoke the mysteries of tradition, too--
respect for elders, respect for famous people who must know what they are
talking about. So writing teachers quote famous people who say important
things like "Writing is hard work" or "Always spend time rewriting" or "Pay
attention to your audience" or "I write to discover what I'm saying."
Hemingway tells us that we must write that "one true sentence," and if
Hemingway says it, then it must be true, even though Hemingway himself
may never have known what a "true sentence" really is.
Observation #4: Sometimes, Writing Teachers Can't Write
Themselves.
All you have to do is look at what writing teachers publish to see the
problem. Here's a passage published in one of the most prestigious
scholarly publications for writing teachers:
The real legacy of the 1960s seems not the radical takeover
of American institutions, but the persistent invocation of a specific version
of the events of that decade that precludes completion of the unfinished
projects of affirmative action and cultural transformation. By debating the
values of open-handed rhetoric, by contending with the terms and conditions
of a pedagogy of democratic citizenship, a pedagogy in which learning to
write is an act of acquiring the skills and attitudes necessary for complete
participatory citizenship, composition studies reproduces and reiterates, at
the same time that it transforms and critiques, the larger struggles of
contemporary American life as these are fought out through social
organizations that distribute power and authority according to race, class,
and gender.
What does it mean to "preclude completion of the unfinished projects of
affirmative action and cultural transformation"? How can "composition
studies" "reproduce" and "reiterate" and "transform" and "critique" the "larger
struggles of contemporary American life"? Who knows what those struggles
actually are? Pollution? Over-population? Ennui? Water rights? How
will "composition studies" "reproduce" overpopulation and the struggles we
have over water rights? How will it transform over-population and ennui?
What will it "transform" them into?
Here's another from a different essay in the same issue:
As the dominated members of the dominant, teachers can use such
representations to negotiate their own interests and those of their students,
as I have shown above, establishing by traditional measures of academic
worth a legitimized place for basic writing and basic writers in the academy.
But this "objectification" of basic writing also masks the role of basic writing
instruction in the larger ongoing social, economic, and political drama of
history. Though in one sense that drama can seem sufficiently removed
from the immediate demands of the classroom to be safely ignored, in fact
its force inevitably mediates the values, beliefs, and actions of students and
teachers in the classroom, the location and conditions of that classroom, and
the aims and performance of all concerned with the course, day by day, year
by year.
Hmmmmmmmmmm. "Dominated members of the dominant"?
"Objectification" of basic writing "masks" a "role"? What exactly is that
"force" "mediating" toward the end of that paragraph? How does it do that?
(I can't imagine what these people teach in freshman
English, can you?)
In this context, you might want to look at
Observation #5: Many writing teachers would rather be
teaching
something else.
Well, across the country, most writing teachers would rather be teaching
literature. Very few writing
teachers went to school to teach writing. Most went to school to
read great books, to commune with Shakespeare, to enjoy Hemingway, to
sweat through James Joyce; they didn't go to school to learn to teach
writing to rank beginners. (Curiously
enough, those who do go to school to become "composition specialists" or
"writing specialists" often end up as
administrators of writing programs or teachers of graduate students--people
who seldom teach very much freshman writing at all.)
Observation #6: Writing teachers as a whole are a rather
solemn lot.
I suppose being solemn isn't necessarily bad. Executioners need to be
solemn; so do judges and mortuary directors. But somehow, writing
teachers are more solemn than they should be. Here's a list of some of the
topics on the first day of a recent conference of writing specialists:
"Reweaving the Lifeworld: Language and Experience in an Era of Cynicism";
"Composition as Social Praxis: Is the Subject Still Writing?"; "Cultural
Compositions: Student Research as Cultural Inquiry"; "Turning Others into
Texts: Sites of Multiple Transcription: "Increasing Stuident Agency in the
Politicized Classroom--A Radical Approach"; "Toward a Coherent
Antifoundational Practice"; "`Saving the Pedestals': The Ethical Impasse of
Postmodern Composition"; "Rearticulating Resistance in the `Post-Racist'
Composition Classroom: Intersections of Race, Class, and Authority";
"Redefining Accountability in the Post-al Academy"; "Working Class Identity
and Writing against the Grain through the Discourse of Experience: Toward
a Rhetoric of Responsibility" . . .
Hmm. Where are the students here? Where are the writing issues? Where
are the discussions of actual student work? Apparently, getting students to
write better isn't enough of an issue. Instead of teaching writing, writing
teachers must be activists; they must rearticulate something; they must
reweave the lifeworld. Their students must learn responsibility; they must
discover themselves; they must discover the intersections of race, class, and
authority and "agency" and "coherent antifoundational practice"--all in one
semester. (Why? I suspect many writing teachers think that just teaching
writing is easy (or perhaps boring drudgery) and the only way to justify
themselves . . . to get any respect in the "academy" . . . is to create a
moral/ethical/social/political dimension that will help them to transcend the
mundane stuff that "anybody can do.")