Writing in Class

I am stealing time from my students today because I'm writing in class. Of course, the students are writing now, working on revisions of the first out-of-class essay of the semester. I could roam around the classroom and look over their shoulders, but I've already answered their most pressing questions, and they know they can ask me more questions as the need arises.

I really love the writing workshop approach, most of the time. When I am working with a small class, like this one, I know that I can get to each of them who needs feedback from me, and their drafts were pretty strong, for the most part. This group had thesis sentences and pretty clear organization, so mostly I've been asking them either to add more evidence to their arguments or to do more interpreting of the evidence they have presented. When they start revising immediately after getting back their drafts with my comments, I know that they're well on their way to crafting better essays. It's the improvement in their writing that I'm primarily invested in--and their ability to see their own writing clearly and begin to figure out what I'd be likely to ask them to do with their writing as they are drafting and revising on their own. Essentially, I ask them to internalize my voice. I remember how thrilled I was when a student showed significant improvement several years ago, and he volunteered the information that as he was writing, he kept hearing me ask him for more details and more evidence--so he just put that into his writing, and of course I was happier with his paper than I'd been with any of his earlier writing.

I think that much of the improvement that came about in my own writing, especially early on, came from my similarly internalizing a teacher's voice. I can remember some specific instances, one of them my first-semester composition prof in college, who got me to put in more detail. (Sounds as if my writing concerns haven't changed much over 40 years!) In graduate school in the 90s, when I was first using computers and also writing long papers, I kept failing to put in adequate transition. I think this came from my processing the evolving text a screen at a time, and the lapses came between screen-sized sections. But as I drafted my dissertation, and it kept coming back to me with long wavy lines in the margins and the word "transitions" as the only comment, I learned to pay particular attention to the connections between my screen-sized chunks of text--and it was Ben's voice I heard in my head. It was the dissertation, too, that first alerted me to my difficulty with drawing conclusions, and I think this is particularly true when I'm writing about classroom studies or other matters pertaining to teaching writing, because it was never much of a concern for me when I wrote papers about literature, back in my undergrad days and my master's program. But I didn't overcome this difficulty in revising my dissertation, since reaching conclusions has sometimes been a problem for me in writing conference papers and book chapters for publication.

So what conclusions do I draw from these experiences? I tend to be alert to the need for transitions in my students' and writing center clients' writing, and I try to challenge my students to draw good conclusions from what they've written--not to simply wrap it up neatly with a recapitulation of the paper's main points and a restatement of the thesis, but to actually think a bit more about what all of this evidence and argument means. This is a challenge, I know, since it's the challenge that I struggle with in my own writing. What are the implications? I am evolving a theory that we are, as a society, more in the habit of saying simply, "I think this," than of reflecting on why we think it. Then, if we do reflect on why, we come up with evidence for a previously held belief--but we often neglect to really think about our evidence, to spend time thinking about what it really means, and whether it could mean something other than the point we've used it to support. Am I making sense here? I think as a culture we're stuck in the initial claim based on our preconceived opinions, and that we select evidence to support it, often ignoring contradictory evidence--and our arguments don't actually reach conclusions but simply restate that initial position.

My students have shut down their laptops and left the room now. They asked a few individual questions on the way out, but it's Friday, and they're ready for a weekend. It feels to me as if it's been a productive week. I am enjoying this semester's teaching, and I've already started seeing some evidence of good revising and rethinking coming out of our process approach in the classroom. I've worked one-to-one with several students--mine and others--in the writing center, and I've been gratified at the improvement I have seen.

I measure my success by the quality of my students' writing--a scary notion if I can't engage them or motivate them sufficiently so that they want to change their texts and they have confidence that my advice is worth following. I also measure my success by their degree of engagement--similarly scary if I have a group that isn't very invested in reading and writing. I've been fortunate this semester in having three classes of pretty motivated students.

As the class period draws to a close, I think about how much I care about writing, and how important it is to me to get my writing "fix" every day. Perhaps this time that I've spent writing voluntarily, for no purpose other than reflecting on classroom literacy experiences, will convey, at the very least, my enthusiasm for writing. After all, if I'm willing to do this when no one is making me do it, it must be worth something.

And I note I'm having difficulty concluding today.