As far as teaching gigs go, middle school is generally considered the bottom of the barrel. I liked it. Seventh graders were the worst, but I never tired of how they tortured you for a year, vanished for the summer, and reappeared in the much more reasonable guise of eighth graders. They would greet me warmly by name, shake my hand and ask about my family, as though we were all corporate executives (57).He's right about that! I remember marveling at the transformation that occurs between 7th and 8th grade. It's as if they mutate, sometimes right before your very eyes. For me, the distinctions were dramatic since I taught a combined 7th/8th grade class. In the same room would be just-turned-12 "Jimmy" (say), all smooth-cheeked, delicate-framed prepubescence, seated beside about-to-turn-14 "John" (say), sprouting facial hair and leg hair and exuding testosterone from every pore.
Professor X seems to have several points he wants to make in writing this book, one about the life of the adjunct and another about the art (or craft) of teaching writing, and particularly whether writing can be taught at all. But his primary focus seems to be about whether we (as in the collective "we") are selling students a bill of goods when we suggest that everyone should go to college. His last point is the one generating probably the most controversy, but for the moment I'm interested in the second point: can writing be taught?
This summer I'm teaching a non-transfer level (i.e., remedial) introductory English class "for students who want to develop fundamental essay writing skills, acquire an A.A. degree, or enter a transfer program, but who need further preparation in composition skills." This is definitely a hands-on class with plenty of opportunities for students to try their hand at academic writing with fairly low level of risk or consequence. We do quite a bit of hand-holding. For example, for their fourth out-of-class essay, I provided them with a selection of readings from which they would choose two or three as their "sources" for an argument. Part of the required elements for this last paper would be to cite from these sources using parenthetical citations and to include these sources in a correctly-formatted Works Cited page at the end of their paper. In short: a "research-based" essay, albeit without the research element and on a much smaller scale than the one they will be writing once they transfer into Freshman Composition.
My students this semester run the gamut when it comes to writing skills. Since this is a class designed for remediation, I do teach with remediation in mind, even though at least three of my students could have by-passed the class and gone straight to English 100. I'm not entirely sure why these students enrolled in English 50. Some perhaps tested in, but some enroll by choice, either to "bone up" on skills they've forgotten after having been out of the classroom for a while or simply to take advantage of the opportunity to supplement their current education at a reasonable price. Such is the case of Justin, a home-schooled high-school student who seems to be skating through the course-requirements, and I mean that almost literally. He actually seems to enjoy the class, likes to write, is playful with language, confident enough in his abilities that he experiments with style, deliberately breaking the traditional rules of writing (e.g. fragments) in order to create interest and freshness. Sometimes he overdoes it, and I let him know when overuse of one type of style wears thin (e.g., fragments).
The majority of my students, however, are beginners. Several are second-language students, primarily Hispanic, many of whom can barely craft a paragraph while others can write decent papers but still have to deal with the first-language interference that obscures meaning. I have older students in their late twenties or early thirties, some of them veterans, some parents, some single, some married. And of course I've got the fresh-out-of-high school kids who probably didn't pay too much attention during 10th grade English. So here they are spending a couple of hours four days a week with me.
Professor X writes eloquently of all these students. And though he tries to be gracious, he clearly believes many of them are "in over their heads," as he puts it. He writes, "What I encounter regularly in my students' writing are yawning canyons of illogic and error (78)." He asks, "If you do ninth-grade work in a college classroom, does it automatically become college work?" (81).
I've been teaching composition now (part-time, it must be said) since the early '90's, first at the junior high level and then, starting in 2000, at the community college level. I often work with unskilled writers. Even when I'm teaching transfer-level English, many of my students are under-prepared. I typically have to start from the very beginning: teaching them to read critically, to analyze text, to extract meaning from the written word. I teach them to formulate and articulate their ideas in a reasonably coherent way. In remedial classes, I work at the sentence level, the paragraph level, the basic essay level. At the transfer level, I'm still addressing problems that students long ago should have mastered. It's not glamorous work. I am not always successful. Like Prof X, I get frustrated by the sheer ordinariness of the prose, annoyed by the lack of originality, the level of (to put it bluntly) incompetence.
But then, once in awhile, a student will surprise me with what can only be described as eloquence. It happened again this week as I was preparing my English 50 students for their final exam, an in-class, two-hour, hand-written, prompt-based essay. I gave them an article written by a virulent anti-war activist named Andrew Tonkovich ("Learning to Say No to the Military"), in which the author argues against military recruiters coming to high schools. I had hesitated before giving my class this article. At least three of my students are veterans and another is a military wife. By giving them what amounted to an anti-war screed, would they think I espoused this view? But I distributed it anyway with a simple disclaimer and let them have at it. And while many of the essays they turned in two hours later were unremarkable, several of them (not surprisingly those written by those who had served their country), were impressive. One student, disagreeing with Tonkovich, concludes his essay as follows:
In closing, as a veteran myself, I have seen first hand the trauma and horror that war holds. I understand that no parent would want their child to experience the darkest depths of what man can do. But someone has to do it. Someone has to go fight the bad guys. Someone has to defend the flag. And if we are going to send some teenager or young adult over to die for us, shouldn't they know we support them, love them, and thank them for doing it? When they return from an 18-month tour in Iraq, don't they deserve a high school gym chanting "USA! USA! USA!" instead of some kid preaching his father's beliefs? Thomas Paine once said, "An army of principles can penetrate where an army of soldiers cannot."I'm not sure if his last quote undermines or enhances his argument, but I'll give him the benefit of the doubt (this was an in-class, hand-written essay, after all). I teared up a bit as I finished his essay. I'm a parent, after all. And the parallel structure. Well, I'm an English teacher, after all. Lovely!
Can writing be taught? I've seen it happen, though sometimes I don't know if fault or blame or credit can be laid at my feet or if the student would have eventually succeeded on his or her own. Maybe it's not what we teach or how we teach but that we teach. Perhaps classrooms are like petri dishes where students are placed and instructors add the nutrients and the right environmental conditions and then something almost biological happens--like writing.
That's it. Teaching writing is like a science experiment. Good writing grows, like bacteria, when all the right ingredients are present.
I always knew English and Science would marry.
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