Teaching Writing: A Collage

by Libby Falk Jones

I. Evolution of a (Writing) Teacher: Three Critical Moments

One: I learn to learn.

 Fall, 1967.  My first semester of grad school in English at SUNY Stony Brook.  My hardest class (though none of them is easy): Eighteenth-century Literature – Boswell and Johnson, with Professor Thomas Rogers.  He seems nice, like Jiminy Cricket – calls us respectfully by our last names, using “Miss” and “Mrs.” accurately – but I’m terrified.

Sure, I had a good undergraduate record at a good school – but as a history major.  Plus I’ve been out of school for a year, writing copy for a pharmaceutical company and reading novels on my lunch breaks.  My motivation is strong – I know I love literature and I’m eager to learn – but my ignorance is deep.  Stuart, from Brandeis, has read everything, twice.  Saul, from SUNY Albany, is already teaching.  A transplanted Southerner, I don’t think I fit.

If I stick it out in grad school, one day I’ll be up there at the blackboard, so I watch all my professors with a new consciousness.  The second day of class is on Johnson’s “Rambler 151.”  Mr. Rogers calls on me to state the thesis.  I have “read” the assignment –  passing my eyes over the pages –  but have not grasped its heart. Even more shameful, I’m not familiar with the term “thesis.”  Mr. Rogers explains that it’s the conclusion, what Johnson wants us to take away from the essay.

Should I just say I don’t know?  Some native gumption won’t let me give up so easily.

“May I have a minute to look at the essay?”

 “Sure.”

I skim the piece, noting points, then focus in on the concluding paragraph.  A main idea leaps out: “Man should examine his life.”  A thesis is a conclusion, right?

Hesitantly, I state Johnson’s idea.  Without changing expression or commenting, Mr. Rogers writes it on the board.  I’m embarrassed – it looks so bold, there. Is it right?  Mr. Rogers asks me for my evidence. He asks others what they think.  Some suggest substitutions.  He writes those on the board, too.  I consider each suggestion, looking back carefully at the essay.  Those points are there, but none is the controlling idea.  I point this out.  When the speaker accepts my reasoning, Mr. Rogers erases that point from the board.

At the end of the period, my thesis still stands.  Now I see how that thesis controls the essay, how Johnson’s subpoints lay its groundwork.  My classmates and I have inquired together into the argument and structure of the essay, confirming and deepening my original insight.  I have learned to stick my neck out, to support what I say, to consider others’ viewpoints.  How has Mr. Rogers taught us?  He has asked questions. He has not given us answers.  We have figured them out for ourselves, in dialogue.

Next week comes our first essay: describe the character of the Rambler.  This won’t be a single sentence, right or wrong.  I read lots of Rambler essays.  The Rambler comes alive for me, a moral fellow, caring at his core, wise and sometimes harsh, a little tendentious and pretentious.  I draw some conclusions and support them with citations, worrying all along that my efforts will be inadequate.

When Mr. Rogers returns our papers, we eagerly flip through the pages.  I see comments in the margins of my classmates’ work; mine has only a half-page of comments at the end, in Mr. Roger’s fine, controlled hand.  “This is admirably done,” he begins, going on to name all the things I have done well: reading beyond our texts to find telling evidence to support my points, developing and qualifying my meaning so carefully that he has not had to pursue my thinking in the margins of my piece, quoting accurately and to the point.  It has not occurred to me that a writer would not do these things.  Mr. Rogers’ naming and affirming these scholarly habits lifts them to the level of strategies I will use again and again and later teach to others.

Even more important: reading his comments, I know that despite my lack of appropriate preparation, I can succeed in graduate school. That essential affirmation carries me through challenging courses, difficult written and oral examinations, and the seven-year writing of a dissertation.

            -- “It is not terror that fosters learning, it is hope.” -- Mike Rose, Lives on the Boundary

Two: I learn to teach.

Spring, 1968: Most of the other graduate students are teaching their own classes.  I watch them with envy.  They devise and share clever writing assignments on essays in the Norton Reader, a new assignment every two weeks.  They spend lots of time marking papers.  They have power, authority.  Chatting after a seminar, one T.A. brandishes a red rubber stamp, “BULLSHIT!,” with which she peppers her students’ papers.  Others laugh, agreeing that this is a good means of deflating these arrogant New Yorkers.  I know instinctively that I could not teach that way.

The university begins a new program, where graduate students serve as tutors in residence halls.  I have done okay fall term, so I’m hired to sit two evenings a week in the ground floor parlor of a women’s dormitory, available to help any of the residents.  Finally a young woman stops in.  An earnest Long Islander in her first year, she has to write a paper on an Emily Dickinson poem.  She doesn’t understand the poem. And it’s only thirteen lines -- how will she get 500 words on it?

I have no easy answer.  I’ve never read the poem myself, don’t know much about Dickinson.  As an authority, I’m a failure.  What can we do?  Together we look at the poem.  She reads it aloud.  We talk through Dickinson’s ideas, noticing each word and thinking about how that particular word contributes to the poem’s meaning.  We try substituting antonyms, then synonyms.  We begin to see subtleties in Dickinson’s language.  With our voices, we exaggerate the punctuation, seeing subtleties there too.  An hour passes quickly.  Years later, I’ll recite that poem – “After great pain, a formal feeling comes…” –  as I labor with my first child.

Next week she’s back and brings a friend.  Soon my eight hours are all filled.  I talk with students about the texts they are exploring.  I help them understand their assignments and their teachers’ comments on their writing.  I’m an evaluator rather than a grader; a coach whose authority comes from my understanding of their bewilderment in the face of unfamiliar things, from the questions I ask rather than the answers I give, from the ways I can help them as readers and writers articulate what they already know and the ways I can encourage them to entertain new ideas.

My more than thirty years of teaching – in and out of the classroom – will be informed by this early conferencing experience, where I walk with learners one by one along their paths.

Three: I become a writing teacher.

Fall, 1977: Four schools and one child later, still at work on my dissertation –  a rhetorical study of two nineteenth-century fictions –  I find myself teaching freshman composition as an adjunct instructor at the University of Tennessee, Knoxville.  I am part of the Freshman English Program shaped by the legendary John Hodges, author of the Harbrace Handbook, a standard in the composition field.  Texts – imaginative, expository, and argumentative – are and continue to be central to my teaching.  At Tennessee, my focus shifts.  Before, I was a teacher of literature who used and also taught writing.  Now, I become a writing teacher who (often) uses literature.

This shift results largely from my own interests. I love the growth I see in my composition students –  growth in insights, creativity, ability to express themselves, ability to think and argue.  I love the fact that writing involves the whole person – head, heart, and spirit.  As a teacher, I love the freedom teaching writing gives me: I can stay true to my subject while inventing new approaches, topics, texts, and assignments.  In fact, my subject demands this flexibility, calls forth responsive teaching.  A writing teacher quickly discovers that active learning is the only kind there is: writers have to write.  Collaborative learning is also a given: writers have to have responses from their audiences. I thrive on the improvisational teaching that follows from these basic truths.

And after a decade of teaching writing – of experiencing the challenges as well as the joys – I see the need to theorize my practice, to discover better ways of teaching what’s always been English teachers’ daily bread. Tennessee takes writing seriously, the freshman staff has meetings, people talk about genres and pedagogies of writing, they share theories as well as assignments. I soon see that this local conversation is part of a larger one: composition and its philosophical framework, rhetoric, is emerging as a scholarly field. I read, I talk.  I read Britton and Kinneavy and Bruffee and Elbow and Berthoff and Flower.  I come to understand and appreciate the three primary composition theories, expressivist, cognitivist, and social-constructionist – each the others’ opposites but paradoxically, all true. My practices flow from these theories as well as from my growing experience as a teacher of composition – a valid knowledge source, what Stephen North (in The Making of Knowledge in Composition) calls “practitioner lore.”

My teaching of writing helps me find new strategies for analyzing the texts in my dissertation; I finish it with strong reader evaluations.  I publish my own students’ writings in a class booklet and offer to edit a collection of good writing in the Freshman English Program, to become a text for students the next year.  I help to plan a revised first-year writing curriculum and in it teach new writing courses, one on language and argument, one on technical writing.  I begin my first research project on writing, a study of assignment design and invention strategies in Tennessee’s first-term course.  I begin attending and presenting at national conferences.  I propose an experimental writing class, one based entirely on conferencing. I edit the handbook for instructors in the Freshman English Program. I design a study of teachers’ approaches to non-sexist language in composition classes.  I help develop and teach a sophomore course in creative writing.  I develop an approach to teaching critical thinking and argumentative writing and I study its effects.

And after ten years (and another child), I’m ready to move to a full-time position centered on writing and the teaching of writing.

In teaching writing, I use everything I’ve ever learned.  And I keep learning, every term, every day. For me, teaching writing holds what Parker Palmer terms the two essentials of good teaching: love of learning and love of learners.  Being a writing teacher holds me to a high standard of knowledge and practice.  As a writing teacher, what I do matters. I have found a vocation.

II.        Teaching Writing: True Poems

Cat Cinquain

The cat
sits on a pile
of papers.  Muffled by
fur, words creep out.  Sacramental.
Crayon.

Class Dream

I am teaching
            a class in
                        writing. My
son is there,
            age four. Some
                        new students –
a gray-haired
            woman with glasses
                        and a one-year-old
in diapers. As I
            give the lesson,
                        the baby totters
to the desk
            to suck my fingers.

 I shake my
           son’s shoulders until,
                        flushed red, I

look down to
            see my body   
                        bleed bright
green.

The Writing Teacher’s Invocation

I’m a bag lady
A bag of tricks lady
Give a word
            Find a place
                        See that line
May my energy sizzle
Your opaque eyes

Song for the Class

You give me your poems,
your souls on the pages.
You want to make meanings:
I only hear sounds. 

Your souls on the pages:
arias, drumbeats.
I only hear sounds:
I don’t know your meanings.

Arias, drumbeats
at the hearts of your poems.
I don’t know your meanings.
I do know your souls.

At the hearts of your poems
are your meanings in sounds.
I do know your souls when
you give me your poems.

—

“Teaching Writing: A Collage.” From The Art of College Teaching: 28 Takes. Ed. Marilyn Kallet and April Morgan. Knoxville: U of Tennessee P, 2005. 51-58.