Teaching Writing One-to-One

This is not news. One-to-one teaching is more effective than one-to-many teaching. As a Writing Center person, I know that I can have a real impact on a student's writing when I can sit beside her and ask her about her ideas and push her to say more and to make connections. And we can talk about the stylistic choices she's making--word choice, sentence length--and what the implications of those choices are. Then, I hope, the student goes away with ideas she can put to use in further revising or in drafting the next text on her own.

So why have I structured my Professional Writing class with lots of class activities and readings this fall? Wouldn't it have been better to have set it up to revolve around regular conferences? Of course it would! That's the way I'll do it next time--since it's now too late to build in very many more conferences this semester.

And the books that I love--books like Bird by Bird and One Year to a Writing Life and Fearless Confessions and Eats, Shoots & Leaves--maybe I should make fewer reading assignments in this course. Since I get so much out of them, maybe I should take activities and short quotations from them into the classroom and give students short in-class assignments but stop expecting them to take away the gold from whole-chapter reading assignments.

I should know by now that most students will not read assignments if they are not tested on the reading, and they define learning in terms of the least they need to do to get a satisfactory grade in a class. But I read writing books that inspire me and make me excited about writing and I (foolishly?) imagine the students will love to read about writing and will suck up these ideas like thirsty sponges. Perhaps I'll continue to be a misguided idealist, counting on these English majors and Comm Studies majors and pre-service teachers to appreciate the writing advice these wonderful writers share.

How much first-year writing instruction does a college student need? Are changing standards for writing instruction at the high school level going to have any real impact on the first-year writing requirement?

When I look at standards for high school students--our Virginia SOLs and the draft of the national standards--it looks to me as if those who develop the standards want students to leave high school with the writing skills we have taught in first-semester composition courses for the last forty years, at least.

But will that mean we no longer have to teach the same skills? Will creating standards for high schoolers to write well-developed argumentative essays actually make them college-level writers? Or is there a maturation factor involved that we can't hold high school teachers responsible for? That is, will they--like the 18-year-old students of my generation--simply write jejune essays that have a somewhat more polished surface?

I believe that young people can engage with joy and intelligence in intellectual debate in writing, but I don't believe they can bypass first-year writing courses (or writing-intensive courses in other disciplines) by doing more writing and receiving more writing instruction in high school. And standards, by their nature, tend to standardize writing. Good writing, by definition, is individual--not standardized. By all means, have students do lots of writing. But for heaven's sake, don't evaluate their writing ability with a standardized writing test.

Good writing is not just a product of thesis sentence + paragraph development + transitional wording + documentation + proofreading. Good writing comes out of a lot of thoughtful practice, and things to say--things which we learn over time. Most published writers at age 30 or 40 or 70 would be embarrassed if not downright mortified by their youthful scribblings. When we read the juvenilia of canonical literary writers, we read it as juvenilia.

On the other hand, that need for things to say is a strong argument for courses in various disciplines that include a significant writing component. The problem with writing courses--as a general requirement for all students--is their decontextualized nature. The "skills" don't transfer. Moving this first-year-composition approach into the high school will just produce more writing-that-doesn't-really-matter, writing-to-prove-I-can-write (no matter how gifted or passionate the teachers).

By all means, have students write more. Have them keep journals in all of their classes, write summaries of what they've learned in the last 5 minutes of a class, write collaboratively for projects in the subject areas, write creative pieces, write to make a difference in their communities, correspond with students in other states and countries, write their way through trauma, write poems for their grandparents and their mothers and their friends, create Webpage guides to their communities and reviews of their favorite music and books--write, write, write. Let's see them, from age five to age ninety, write for real audiences.

In such a milieu of writing, first-year composition might be a course in which students focus specifically on developing an academic tone and awareness of audience and hone their research skills--useful, but just a little piece of all the writing they do. And let's not try to move that foundational college writing into the high school, whether with "higher standards" or with AP or dual enrollment or promises of first-year-composition exemption on the basis of high SAT Writing scores. Their first-semester writing course is still a means of acculturating them to the expectations of the specific college writing community that they are joining. Let's keep it as such.

Former Students' Writing

Homecoming at Bridgewater College--I had a long conversation late Friday afternoon with one of our former English majors, who told me, "Dr. Trupe, I'm writing two books," and eventually asked if she could send me a manuscript. I was delighted. I told her, "Sure. Just make sure to send it at the end of the semester, so I can look at it during the break." I'm passionate about writing, and when someone else is passionate about writing, I love sharing the enthusiasm. I am looking forward to reading her novel.

Homecoming, Saturday night--I was at a party, where I talked with a recent alum, who said, "Dr. Trupe, I'm really doing 'professional writing' now. It isn't very creative, but I write on my job every day." Once again, I heard the enthusiasm--and that underlying message that yes, my conversations with students about writing have some long-term effect, even if it's only that my former students recognize me as someone who cares to hear about their development of talents they honed as college students.

Nervous about Sharing Writing

I hate showing my own writing to other people. This puts me in a contradictory position because I incorporate response--peer response, my response--into my writing classes and expect my students to use the feedback in revising. I should probably tell them how uncomfortable doing this makes me.

When I submit chapters for inclusion in books, I hang onto them forever, doing as many as 10 or 12 revisions. When I was past deadline for my book on young adult literature, the editor kept begging me for my manuscript, but it wasn't perfect yet. It's hard for me to let it go.

When I get a chapter or a book back in galley form, I procrastinate about editing it, because I know that it's set at that point and, while I can make minor editing changes, I can't reorganize the text or completely change my thesis.

When something is published, I usually don't look at it. When I got copies of my book, I couldn't open it for weeks, even though I gave away the copies I intended to. The first time I opened it up, I saw a sentence with a mixed metaphor.

So, when I read something I've written aloud to a class (unless it's something like a writing assignment!), I cringe. I can hear all the flaws. I want to sink into the floor.

But I keep writing anyway.

Time for another fresh start

We're blogging in my Professional Writing class, so it seems like a good idea to start up here again. The fall semester is pretty full for someone who teaches three classes, directs a Writing Center, and runs a placement procedure for first-year students and works with selected students on a one-to-one basis. Committee work and assessment get squeezed in around the edges. Time for scholarship? Hmm. When will I get back to that writing project?
I get really excited about students' excitement when they are writing. I find writing not only relaxing, but necessary, and it's very difficult to make time for it. This is a challenge we all must cope with, students and professors alike. So far this fall I've been able to maintain my personal journal, writing 3-4 times a week, but I haven't done much experimenting, as I'd planned to do following Natalie Goldberg's writing suggestions in Old Friend Far Away.
I like to tell students that I write along with them because it "keeps me honest." But I didn't write a personal essay with them over the past couple weeks because I became a grandma Sept. 17, and the baby and her parents live with me--so my personal life has sort of overtaken my professional life. I've sent out quite a few longish personal emails to the people who want to know about her, and I texted my other daughter at some length yesterday, describing her and taking guesses at who she looks like. Speaking of baby--I think it's time to go home and see if her mama's ready for a break.

More Alternative Writing Assignments

These may seem more appropriate to high school than to college writing courses, but I am more interested in having students enjoy writing (and reading) than in impressing me with their mature academic style. (And I continue convinced that such assignments can develop critical thinking skills, and can be incorporated into more formal critical writing.)

• Students can write letters from Pip to Estella and from Estella to Pip (or emails or text messages);
• they can write diary entries for any character they know enough about (and if their knowledge is limited, they can write a single diary entry, say, by Mrs. Pocket at the end of the day when Pip is introduced to the Pocket household;
• they can write a dialogue between Matilda in Mister Pip and Pip, imagining them as contemporaries in one world or the other;
• they can write a humorous narrative of a performance (a play, a movie, a TV show), as Pip does in Chapter XXXI, in which he sees Mr. Wopsle in Hamlet.

Alternatives to Critical Papers

The longer I teach college writing courses, the more convinced I am that we drain student writing of interest and vitality when we teach and require only academic analysis. The language arts and secondary English teachers know that there are many ways for students to engage with literary and other texts and often make interesting assignments that engage students more fully than formal essays of literary analysis, book reports, or research papers.
So today my ENG 102 students have several alternatives that involve them in close, critical reading of Great Expectations but don't require a full-blown literary analysis:

• they may lay the groundwork for a character analysis of a memorable minor character;
• they may fabricate a life history, weaving together their own identity with either Pip's life story or the life of Matilda, protagonist of Lloyd Jones's Mister Pip;
• they may do a close analysis of Dickens's style in a passage of their choice; or
• they may imitate Dickens's style, choosing a passage from a text they've written in the past, possibly from another course (especially our first-year seminar), or writing a new passage.

These are all assignments I would have enjoyed at just about any point in my reading of Dickens--from my ninth-grade reading of Great Expectations for English to my current rereading of the wonderful novel.

Brainstorming about writing texts

In the midst of working on my midterm grades, I keep thinking of wonderful ideas I just must pursue--avoiding the discipline of ranking and justifying the ranking. I truly love reading student writing, finding out what students have to say, commenting, inviting revision. I really hate having to give grades. After 24 years of this, you'd think it would be easier, not harder, right?
The latest scheme is the assembling of various instructional materials for our writing classes, to create a textbook of sorts. We have materials and assignments for our PDP program (first-year seminar, seminar for transfer students, second- and third-year reflective conversations, senior reflective essay/portfolio), and some of us share and modify colleagues' first-year writing assignments and classroom activities, and then there are the shared assignments for upper-level courses and the coordination of first-year and second-year writing courses for English majors, not to mention assessment rubrics. And, in this season of choosing textbooks for next fall's courses, I find that the textbooks just never match the ideas I have for classroom activities and writing assignments, so I usually pick several trade paperbacks that sort of work, and I tell people to buy the handbook but I don't much use handbooks myself (with so many materials online). This spring I'm thinking about spending my summer assembling various readings for the activities I want to do, drafting reading guides and activities related to the readings, and, in short, making my own master textbook from which I can draw various materials for an electronic-reserve anthology for each course I teach.
Maybe I should go back to grading, though!

Further reflections on reading Mister Pip

In Mister Pip, Mr. Watts introduces himself to the village children as their teacher with a promise that he will always be honest with them. On their second day together, he begins reading aloud his favorite novel, Great Expectations, following the first chapter with the observation, "When you read the work of a great writer, you are making the acquaintance of that person. So you can say you have met Mr. Dickens on the page, so to speak. But you don't know him yet" (Jones 21). Implicit is a second promise, that the children will eventually know Mr. Dickens through hearing the text that Mr. Watts will eventually call "Mr. Dickens' greatest book," when he asks them to help him retrieve the text through their memories, after his copy of the book has disappeared, so that it will not be "lost forever" (129).
Yet the entire novel challenges the stability of a text, the stability of a reading of a text, through a series of accidental conflations of Pip, Dickens, and Mr. Watts himself, a circumstance that Mr. Watts himself will eventually take advantage of in spinning out his supposedly autobiographical tale to the rebel soldiers, emulating Scheherazade in forestalling their violence by playing on their love of story to keep the village safe until a boat can arrive to pick up a select handful of islanders who have arranged an escape. In the narrator Matilda's evolving understanding of the text and the first interpreter of that text in her life, we find confirmation of Roland Barthes's assertion in "The Death of the Author" that "Writing is that neutral, composite, oblique space where our subject slips away, the negative where all identity is lost, starting with the very identity of the body writing." The more Matilda seeks to know Dickens, and Mr. Watts, the less she knows him. Ultimately she concludes that she must seek her own individual identity by returning home, not by studying literature. Yet it is the teaching of that elusive interpreter, Mr. Watts, that lover of story, that steers her to this conclusion: ". . . my Mr. Dickens had taught every one of us kids that our voice was special, and we should remember this whenever we used it, and remember that whatever else happened to us in our lives our voice could never be taken away from us" (256).

Reflecting on Reading

Just finished rereading Mister Pip with my ENG 102 class. I assigned it as an introductory text to two themes--the role of reading in our lives and the impact of Western culture on colonized peoples. I liked Mister Pip because I read Great Expectations in school in ninth grade and I didn't like it much then. I was in my 40s before I reread it, and then I really liked it. I can't help but think my experience of the novel might have been different if I'd heard it read aloud, as Mr. Watts reads it to his class in Jones's novel. In ninth grade, I found the dialogue unpleasantly challenging, especially to the eye, and the situations sometimes incomprehensible. It's difficult, though, to recreate much more than that of my initial reading experience, because by the time I reread it, I was so much more practiced as a reader. Matilda helps me recreate first impressions.
I appreciate Matilda's effort to enter into Dickens's/Pip's world--because I had a similar response to reading, from an early age. Reading was my gateway into other times and places and communities, and ultimately I would find nineteenth-century England my favorite place to dwell imaginatively. I had a secure childhood in a rural setting that now, in retrospect, seems idyllic--beautiful wooded Western PA hills, creeks to dabble in, abundant wildflowers, fossils to stir my curiosity about the distant past. But sometimes I remember my early reading more vividly than that quiet sylvan world. I have a reading memory of sitting on a log, reading Treasure Island, being simultaneously in the sunlit woods and on a ship with Jim Hawkins, weighing the fascination and threat of Long John Silver. Some of the time, no doubt, the ship was more present to me than the forest smell of leaf mold--despite the appeal of my surroundings.
If I lived in a community menaced by warring factions, like Matilda, I would no doubt spend more imaginative time in that remote world of the book than in my own, because the possible sights and sounds and smells of my present would not bear imagining. Fear would drive me to disconnect with the present.
Yet, reading Mister Pip as an adult, I have to sympathize with Matilda's mother, too, when she expresses her disapproval of Matilda's being caught up in an imagined Victorian England. Yes, Dolores is unpleasant and narrow-minded and judgmental, but she is right about the importance to Matilda of knowing her roots, of learning her family tree all the way to its mythological origins. The connections that Dolores tries to teach to Matilda are the skeleton of who she, Matilda, is. The made-up English boy has nothing to say to Matilda about how to live in her own world. When Dolores contemptuously points out that Mr. Watts knows nothing about feeding and sheltering himself on the island, with his white man's knowledge, she has a valid point--for what is an education that does not teach us how to live in the world that we actually inhabit?
But what does Matilda learn about from imaginatively dwelling in Pip's world? Courtesy. That people fall short of our expectations because they are only human. That we can love and long for someone/something that we can never have, and that desire can drive our lives and mold our understanding of our circumstances. That we can reinvent ourselves. That benefactors can deliver us from the limiting circumstances in which we find ourselves. That even though we know what it means to be treated cruelly by those we love, we can nonetheless treat others whom we love equally cruelly. That people can become stuck in a particular time, refusing to move on with life. Are these life lessons of equal value to lessons in catching and preparing fish for our dinner and building a home out of jungle materials? Mr. Watts makes room for both kinds of knowledge in his classroom. It seems that the only knowledge that is denied a place in his school is a narrow, literalist reading of the Bible, which Dolores sees as eminently practical, determining where one will spend eternity.