Teachers procrastinate as much as students do; no surprise, since all teachers were students once, and if anything, have become more efficient procrastinators. A look around the web at teachers’ end-of-semester weblogs indicates that many teachers distract themselves from grading by turning their thoughts to reflections on teaching: what worked this semester, what didn’t work, what they plan to change, and how those changes will lead to a real improvement in their students’ learning.
Two people have recently posted entries that seem related to me. At Collin vs. Blog, I came across a reference to John Udell’s suggestion that first year composition courses incorporate methods used in MFA programs, and via Mike at Vitia, I discovered John Lovas’s request of teachers to contribute lists of “the five most important issues or concerns you face when planning a writing course.”
I happen to have an MFA in Creative Writing with an emphasis in fiction, though I did take two poetry workshops, a craft of poetry class, and a form and theory of poetry class. I also hold an MA in the teaching of writing, which is fancy title for a rhet/comp degree, so I’ve been able to look at the writing thing from at least two perspectives.
In the creative writing workshops I took, the focus was on critiquing classmates’ stories and poems. Our teachers assumed we had already taken the appropriate intro and craft courses, and didn’t need to learn how to write a story or poem. What we needed was time to write and time to have our writing ruthlessly de- and re-constructed. And we needed to learn how to de-and re-construct the work of others. That’s about all I did for two years as an undergrad and two as a graduate student. What I learned from that was how to read very, very carefully, and how to talk about what I read in constructively critical ways. I got real good at explaining (nicely) what went wrong in a classmate’s text and how flaws could be dealt with. As a result of some of the criticism I received, my writing did improve somewhat. As a result of some other criticism I took, I developed calluses against hurtful and stupid remarks. And I vowed to never inflict similar cruelty or ignorance on any of my future students.
In my rhetoric classes, our teachers also assumed we were already competent writers and spent no time in class examining the characteristics of “good” writing in our own work. We seldom got to see each other’s writing, and when we did, it was in discussion forums and at end-of-semester presentations that featured very little criticism. The aim was not so much to improve our own writing as it was to consider, discuss, and write about theories of writing and the teaching of writing. We surveyed moments from the history of rhetoric, conducted keen eyed analyses of other people’s rhetoric, explored the effects of affect in the classroom, looked at the ways that our students’ (and our own) diverse experiences contributed to construction of identity and voice in writing, and examined the elements and conventions of particular genres. Some of what I learned in those courses helped me to become a good teacher, in terms of being able to help students help themselves to discover what they wanted to say and how to say it well. I also learned how to be a better listener, to resist the impulse to speak with all-knowing authority and to sit back and ask open-ended questions designed to elicit more information.
So what does this have to do with first year comp courses, or with important issues in planning said courses? Well, I partially agree with Udell’s remarks about teaching writing the way it’s done in creative writing workshops. Students do need to learn how to see their own writing and the writing of others as plastic, impermanent, and imperfect. I know too many teachers who spend zero class time looking at the revision process, much less practicing revision in class. The usual excuses (it takes too much time, students don’t know how to give good peer reviews, all they do is correct mistakes) point more to the teachers’ lack of know-how than the students’ ignorance. Students need to be shown how to critique each other’s work and they need practice critiquing and revising their own work. They need models of common writing problems to analyze, and they need help generating constructive suggestions.
When I introduce the first revision workshop for each semester, I spend some time before the workshop talking about what real revision entails. I pass around an essay from a previous semester, one that has problem areas common to most students. As a class, we deconstruct the essay paragraph by paragraph, and sentence by sentence, identifying and articulating where the writer went off course or where meaning became muddled. Then I go over my workshop rules, assign students to small groups, and go around the room, group to group, sitting in briefly to make sure everyone’s on track.
I do this for every essay they write and I let students know that I expect significant revision. If I don’t see it, I say so in my summative end comments. My students don’t just turn in a finished essay. They turn in a portfolio that documents the process of idea generation, drafting, revision, and editing. They include their peer reviews so I can see what kind of advice they received and I remark on the quality of peer response in class when I give back the graded portfolios. So I guess what I’m saying is that on my list of five most important issues in planning a writing course, number one would have to be the teaching of revision.
As for the other four, those change from semester to semester. I often feel a mixture of elation and despair this time of year, vacillating between beating myself up for my failures as evidenced by my students’ muddled prose and/or congratulating myself for pulling off some assignments that seemed to help students produce a little good thinking and writing. This semester, my thinking revolves around: 2) program objectives due to an upcoming SACS review; 3) learning outcomes due to my own struggle with the gap between the developmental and college level courses I teach; 4) my ongoing conflict over whether to emphasize the craft of writing or critical thinking (why can’t I have it both ways?); and 5) of course, as always, my eternal quest to make my grading strategies work better as a teaching tool.
I’m done procrastinating now. Back to grading.
