Voice and Power

What seemed to be consistent across the readings on Expressivisim was the tenet that good writing has “a sense of writer presence,” as Burnham put it, and that through finding this “voice,” a person can be empowered to “act in the world.” Immediately I was drawn to what Burnham describes as the Espressivist’s ultimate educational goal: “fostering individual moral and ethical development.” I also liked much of the passages and quotes taken from the writing of bell hooks. Although I’m not really sure how to more “actively commit to a process of self-actualization,” I know that I want to be a teacher who helps students develop into “socially and morally aware citizens.”

Perhaps this child needs a dose of social awareness.

In class we have talked about why we teach writing and what we want our students to get out of it. My view has always been that I want students to learn from their writing and to discover something about themselves that they maybe didn’t already know or to be comfortable expressing something they feel without being ashamed and without the fear of embarrassment. I was always trying to get students to tell it like it is – be honest about their life, situation, and opinions. I wanted them to be comfortable in their own skins. I wanted to hear the voice of my students. I wanted them to hear their own voice too, which leads to a feeling of power and ability to make change.

Sometimes I felt like maybe I wanted too much, and I was also pressured by mentors and administrators to fall back into the comfortable, old, traditional way of teaching writing that culminated in painfully dull, lifeless essays and papers. Faigley writes in “Competing Theories of Process” that “expressive theorists validate personal experience in school systems that often deny it.” I do feel guilty that I was one of those teachers who denied students opportunity and didn’t give their writing the “value and authority” that it deserved. But, I will again assert my unapologetic cheesiness and say that they key word in that sentence is “was.”

It was either this illustration or a photo of David Hasselhoff holding two puppies.

Write for TRUTH!

 

My son Max dancing with no shame.

I don’t remember where or when, but I once heard the following story meant to illustrate how people lose their self-assuredness as they grow older. When you ask a class of kindergarteners how many of them know how to dance, they all raise their hands. When you ask a class of teenagers how many of them know how to dance, maybe only one or two will be brave enough to raise a hand.  I think that the same would be true if we replaced “dancing” with “writing.” I thought of this when reading Ken Macrorie’s “Telling Writing.” I was fascinated by his comparison of a third-grader’s writing and a college student’s writing: “One is dead, the other alive.” I struggled to think back to my own writing in elementary school compared to my writing in college or today. I scavenged for the only piece of writing I have from my youth: an autobiography written in sixth grade. Reading this again of course made me laugh, but some of it also made me wonder if in sixth grade I had already had enough training in “Engfish” to have lost my honesty. Still, there were a few places that I think were authentic, such as this passage: “I was very pleased to find out that my name, Margaret Rose, was the same as the princess of England. However I didn’t look like a princess because my legs were bowed and my toes pointed in and were overlapped.”

The Macrorie reading was by far my favorite this week, and I really appreciated how he used examples of actual student writing. I had much of the article underlined, strong points that resonated with me, such as “A honest writer makes every word pull its weight.” Now, although I felt uplifted that Macrorie says “there is a way out” of the “empty circle (where) teachers and students wander around boring each other,” I was also a little depressed thinking about my own writing. How often does my writing hit even one or two of Macrorie’s eight ways writings gain power? Do I reward my reader with meaning? Do I create oppositions which pay off in surprise? Do I waste words? This is a lot of pressure. These are high ideals. However, Macrorie does also say, “telling our truths is hard.”  I have to remember to keep trying. I have to remember that I may not be the next Steinbeck, but I can learn to write better, to forget the Engfish and “find a voice that rings true.”

Hang Ten

The writer as a surfer waiting for the perfect wave to ride immediately resonates with me (E.B. White’s metaphor in Murray’s “Essential Delay”), as does much of Murray’s article. I enjoy his style and look forward to reading more of his work. The concept of writer’s block as an “essential delay” is new to me, although I have experienced the phenomenon. Yet, I have never investigated it enough to realize that the waiting is actually a crucial step in the writing process. I also relate to Murray’s thoughts on how writers must write for themselves first and others afterward, that we must need to write like an itch needs to be scratched. However, this does bring up a question for me. Murray notes that when confronted with writing by assignment or invitation, experienced writers “will find a way to discover a personal need that parallels the external need.” But, how do we help our students discover this ability?

Another article I particularly enjoyed this week is Lad Tobin’s “O Brave New World.” I was moved by the passage from Murray about teacher-student conferences. I became a teacher to experience what he describes: that “good tired” feeling you get when your student’s writing speaks to you or when your lesson goes perfectly as planned. I also appreciate Tobin’s honesty in admitting that he wasn’t applauded and hoisted upon his students’ shoulders when he started his first class using process pedagogy. I think it’s sensible to follow his suggestion to use a combination of instructional techniques with process at the core.

What can we do as teachers to help students discover their own unique voice? (photo from www.postsecret.com)

Still, I found myself wanting to know more about how to help students “gain access to their ‘real’ or ‘authentic’ voice.” This is something I continually struggled with in my writing lessons. It seemed a lot of my students were one of two extremes: totally self-conscious and afraid to write, afraid to hear what their “voice” has to say, or overly confident to the point that their voice was lost amongst rare words and rambling passages. I’d like suggestions of activities to help students find and use their voice, because as Tobin suggests, we must treat students as writers.

Forgetting that students are already writers when they come to us is one of the reasons why writing classrooms lack “quality instruction,” which Rohman and Wlecke assert in “Pre-Writing” is at the core of the problem. Although I don’t find the passages about the “Archetype of the Plant” very thrilling, I do enjoy this quote: “The mind is not simply a mirror; it is in addition a lamp.” I really enjoy thinking of pre-writing in the way Rohman and Wlecke describe it: the period of discovery when writers uncover “how they and their subject ‘go’ together.”

In the Lynn reading, I gathered from the section on plagiarism that it's best to find a middle ground on the issue. On one hand, it's not fair to hold students responsible for accidentally citing something incorrectly; yet, allowing students to cut and paste a paper together is not acceptable. I agree that what is at the heart of plagiarism is academic dishonesty. I think that all too often teachers get wrapped up in the power they hold over the student and forget to be reasonable.

Sometimes teachers should give students more credit, like when they say they didn't know something was plagiarism.

Towards the end of the reading, Lynn refers to E.D. Hirsch and the 5,000 essential facts that educated people ought to know. Although I laughed out loud at Hirsch’s “audacity,” he does at least admit that it’s not the lack of formal skills that leads to poor writing, a fact that is frequently emphasized in our readings. I didn’t have any luck finding the episode of SNL in which Hirsch’s book is spoofed. But, what came to my mind was the Tonight Show’s “Jaywalking.” So, I’ll leave you with a link to one of the funnier ones I found. I wonder how many of these facts are on Hirsch’s list!

You spelled dinosaur so wrong you shouldn't even try.

Some of us wrote about peer conferencing in this week's blog, so I was searching for some thoughts on the topic and came across this video. These kids are so cute. You're going to laugh out loud at least once, I promise.

Paradigm Shift

My teacher education involved little of learning how to teach writing. Most of what I learned on the subject was from my mentor during that impressionable first year, when classroom management and other stressors sometimes overpower the will to step out of the box and create inventive lesson plans. As a “newbie,” I generally didn’t ask questions and took the advice of my mentor not to “reinvent the wheel.” I often used what she gave me or what was left in my classroom files from previous teachers, despite the state of the graying manila folders in which these handouts were contained or the crumbling overheads on which tedious notes were composed. As I read Hairston’s “The Winds of Change,” I began to recall the feelings I had as a new teacher, “exhausting (myself) trying to teach writing from an outmoded model.” I can easily recall the terror of the impending research paper due date and the dread and exhaustion that overwhelmed me when thinking about all of the unnecessary commas, fragments, misplaced apostrophes, and so on.

In the district in which I taught, all students in the same class, whether it was junior English or freshman biology, were required to take the same finals. This was despite the fact that different teachers with different styles and philosophies were teaching the classes. This certainly did not breed an air of individuality, and I felt that my mentor was quite conventional in her thinking, and she generally seemed more aligned with the traditional paradigm to which Hairston refers, emphasizing product over process, the linear progression from prewriting to writing to rewriting. There was little to no talk about intervening during the writing process, and it seemed there was a tipping of the scales towards the value of correcting mechanics in student writing over the value of helping develop content in student writing. I felt more pressure to be sure students completed all three of the required essays, than to take the time necessary to facilitate students to produce just one that was truly exceptional. This leads me to something that I thought hit the mark in the Lynn reading, that “the extent to which classroom teachers have been aware of a revolution” may be exaggerated and that we don’t know “how many teachers…continue to teach writing by doing worksheets, learning grammar rules,” etc.

As the new teacher fears started to subside, an inherent sense of wrongness in the way we were teaching writing began to nag at me, and over the next two years, I did finally begin to assert myself and get some of the final exam questions changed to reflect what I felt was important. However, I still regret that I didn’t have the chance (or take the risk) to step even further out of the traditional writing instruction comfort zone that was thrust upon me. When I realized that Hairston wrote the article nearly three decades ago, I started to feel embarrassed and cheated that I wasn’t more aware of this revolution in teaching writing.

Even ten years after the article was published, during my high school years, I don’t recall much instruction at all on the process of writing. We were given a topic about which to write, we handed in the paper on its due date (on most occasions), and a week later the proofread paper was returned with a mark scrawled across the top in red ink. In comparison, as a teacher I did experiment with some aspects of process writing, from different methods of prewriting, like free writing and clustering, to peer conferencing and keeping journals. So, I do have to assert that some strides have been made in the shift to the new paradigm; however, although Hairston hints at the slowness of the shift, I think it may be even more snail-like than she imagined.

However, I am still inspired about the future and motivated by the zeal with which Hairston discusses the Revolution, as well as excited by the possibilities that exist within Lynn’s chapter on invention. One of the most challenging aspects of teaching writing is helping students to use their imagination, to help them ignore the nagging self-consciousness that compels them to say, “I don’t know what to write,” and help them uncover that they actually do have something to say.