FOREWORD
This pamphlet introduces incoming TA’s to an approach for teaching composition
intended to help them through their first weeks of teaching.
It also includes some ideas for putting the approach into action.
INTRODUCTION
Dear T.A.,
A
commonplace you’ve probably already heard about
teaching writing is "do whatever works for you." At this point in
your new career, however, you might not have any real idea of what you’re going to do or what indeed might work for you.
Eventually you will know and do what works best for you and your students, but
right now you might feel a need for some ideas on what to try first and on whom
and what to expect in your first semester of teaching.
As
an untrained T.A., I "learned" how to teach much as I
"learned" how to swim: I was thrown into the water with a rope around
my waist. I know the feeling of thrashing around in the water, and I know the
feeling of being scared to death in front of a group of intimidating college
freshmen. They were probably as scared as I was, and I soon found out that they
did need to learn a few things that I could teach them.
Some
college freshmen may be just as intelligent as you are, and sometimes more so,
but you’re older and more experienced, with a lot more
knowledge from which they can benefit. Through this pamphlet I hope to give you
some ideas to make you even a little more knowledgeable, ready to dive in to
teaching (even though you may still flounder a bit).
Enjoy,
David Charlson
You and Your Students
Your students come from diverse backgrounds and vary in intelligence and motivation. All of that makes for quite a mix of abilities that you need to take into account in order to teach well. And once again, no matter how able some seem, remember that you have the edge of experience over all of them.
Nothing will convince you more of this edge than those students who seem poorly prepared for college writing. They might have little sense of sentence structure, problems with standard verb forms, or poor command of written language in general. Don’t give up hope on them; there’s much room for improvement although sometimes it comes very slowly.
Some students will be ready. They might be from better schools, they might be brighter, or they might be both. Nevertheless, they probably still need to improve, whether in organizational skills, style, or some other area.
Don’t let the bright students who catch on quickly make you lose touch with your slower students. You’ll often have to slow yourself down when talking with them. Don’t assume that they’ll quickly understand something that to you seems obvious. You have just as much responsibility to communicate clearly with them as they do with you. Too often, unfortunately, they’ll just sit perplexed rather than ask questions. Although it’s a cliché, "There are no dumb questions" is a good declaration for you to make early on in your classroom. Establishing that kind of environment can only help everyone.
As for motivation, some will care and some won’t. Teach for those who care, and possibly the apathetic will be enticed to join in.
Some will care too much—about their grades. Pressure from grade-anxious students bound for glorious professional careers usually backfires on them: we read their work again, this time more carefully and critically, and usually find ourselves in full support of the "low" grades we gave in the first place. We can only do our best. Just be fair, and don’t lose any sleep over unfounded complaints.
According to the Student Affairs Research Office at ISU, about ninety percent of entering freshmen will have graduated in the top half of their high schools; about fifty percent will come from the top twenty percent; and about twenty-five percent will come from the top ten percent.
About ninety percent of entering freshmen will have ACT composite scores above 16; seventy-five percent will have scored higher than 19; fifty percent will have scored higher than 23; and twenty-five percent will have scored higher than 26.
About twenty percent of entering freshmen have ACT subscores in English of 24 or higher. If these students write effective writing samples, they are placed in English 105. Those students with subscores below 24 are placed in English 104. About thirty percent of them have English subscores of 21 to 23; another thirty percent have subscores of 18 to 20; fifteen percent have subscores of 14 to 17; and five percent have subscores below 14.
You might have some atypical students: students who aren’t just 18 years old, and, more often, foreign students. Older students can provide a different generation’s perspective for your class, and foreign students can provide a different country’s. Often both seem more motivated and more interested, and they can really liven up a class. Occasionally they’ll be intimidated by the fact that they’re not like everyone else, so you should do your best to make them feel comfortable and welcome. Have patience with the foreign student who hasn’t grown up with English—progress usually comes slowly.
Departmental Goals
After completing Freshman English, students here should be able to do the following:
Students meet these goals by writing essays, reading, and learning about language in general.
ESSAY COMPOSITION
Your first batch of student essays will prove to you that most of your students really need to improve, and they can do that by practice, by writing often, by trying again. That’s why we assign over the course of a semester eight to ten essays of 500 to 750 words. Your students submit their work, and you give them your response and evaluation. In that steady exchange occurs most of the progress that they will experience.
How can we help them along?
We can get them off to a good start with a good assignment. Then we can discuss with them, with the help of their textbooks, various routes to take toward completing it. Also, they can help each other out by examining each other’s work. Finally, they can benefit from your written and oral response to their work. Each of these four ways to help will be discussed in detail below.
Making Good Assignments
A good batch of essays often results from a well considered, carefully prepared assignment, one that suggests a purpose, an audience, and a strategy for completion. Students can then define specifically their purpose and audience, and they of course have to determine the strategy and complete their essays on their own. But a good assignment gets them off to a good start and provides necessary direction.
Since your students come from various backgrounds, the assignment should allow room for choice. This freedom gives them the fairest chance to do their best. It might also better engage their interest and provide you with a more interesting and diverse batch of essays to read.
Preparing a well-written handout for your students gives them a solid foundation to write from. A handout serves better than just telling them to, for instance, go compare and contrast two things, or better than just writing sketchy directions on the blackboard. Students can hold the handout in their hands, discuss it in class, and mull it over later. You might read each assignment handout aloud in class, clarify and expand parts as necessary, and encourage questions to resolve problems early.
What is a good writing assignment? The commission on English of the College Entrance Examination Board offers the following guidelines:
For instance, you might ask your students to write an essay to the draft board indicating why they would or would not bear arms in a war. Or you might ask them to write a letter to a skeptical elder worried about how much TV they watch. These suggestions did not just appear out of the blue but came out of a classroom situation. They are presented more fully in Appendix A.
Putting your students in definite rhetorical situations like the two above often results in better and more interesting writing than letting them write about last summer or their dorm rooms. Narrating about last summer and describing dorm rooms are clichéd examples of two "modes" of writing, narration and description. Modes are usually thought of as patterns that accomplish specific tasks, a few other modes being definition, classification and division, comparison and contrast, etc. Two sample modal essay assignments, for narration and description, appear in Appendix B.
Assigning a sequence of essay based on traditional modes is very convenient, but beware of doing this for the same clichéd reason that people climb a mountain: because it’s there. In the long run, any writing exercise is probably good, but you can make it better by injecting significance into each assignment. Why narrate or describe—and to whom? Why compare and contrast this to that? These questions can have good answers—essay assignments shouldn’t float in space, or else most of the essays might.
Students will write about themselves and their mothers, and that doesn’t have to be bad if they are led to go beyond the "so what?" stage. Educator James Moffett suggests that we teach students "how to express ideas of universal value in a personal voice" (5:129), and if they can use Mom to do that, fine. In essence you have to reduce their egocentricity to the point where they can consciously present themselves and their ideas confidently. If a student realizes, for instance that Mom let TV babysit him and that that happens too much in our culture, then a good essay is in the making.
Assigning essays based on modes provides a natural and varying sequence of assignments, from narration through argumentation. If you deviate from modes, you should remember that observing some sort of sequence in your assignment is important and sometimes necessary. For instance, students naturally need to know how to summarize an essay before they can summarize and comment on it. Likewise, they might need practice with summary and comment on several individual essays before moving on to a simple synthesis of two to make their own positions. Complex syntheses can then follow, in which more than two essays are drawn upon to support students’ own views. Along the way, you can point out how each assignment builds on or at least differs from the previous one.
Our English department provides a standardized syllabus with a specific sequence of assignments and activities for your first semester. This syllabus can provide you some security as well as save you some time in planning out the course for your students, but if you have your own vision of where you want to take your class, making your own syllabus can help. That takes time, but it might save time and frustration later.
General Writing Advice
Most likely, your good essay assignment will relate in some way to whatever textbook your class uses. Most textbooks contain plentiful advice of all kinds, plus examples of good writing (from sentences to full-length essays). The advice and examples often relate to the various modes of writing, which your students can attempt to perform. As mentioned before, some sample modal essay assignments appear in Appendix B.
Writing as a Process
Generally, the advice pertaining to any mode is that writing is an ongoing process, that good essays most often result from pre-writing, writing, and re-writing; and that perfect first drafts written the night before are rare indeed. This process approach closely parallels the way we think—how we clarify, elaborate on, and sometimes change our conceptions about this and that over time.
Some students already practice writing as a process; the night-before writers, however, might need a little encouragement. By asking the whole class to prepare rough drafts for reading by peers and/or you, you can possibly change the ways of the night-before writers as well as convince other students of the virtues of their ways.
Many students do try to plan ahead but only so far as attempting to prepare the perfect outline and nothing else. While some can make great, well-formulated outlines, others get straitjacketed by this approach. They feel bound to something they’re not sure they like in the first place. Thus, you might present various other possibilities for pre-writing and have your students perform them: brainstorming about a topic, freewriting about anything, making lists, drawing diagrams, recording themselves, and/or running through "heuristics" to discover material.
Heuristics can be any set of specific strategies for generating material. Students could perform, for example, modal heuristics to the topic of money. A student could begin to narrate a story about money, describe what money can do to people, give examples of how money can help. Money could be defined, compared and contrasted to something else, classified in its importance, and so on. From this hodge-podge could come at least one good idea for an essay or several good ideas that could be incorporated together into an essay. Heuristics are especially helpful for those students who feel they haven’t much to say.
In general, short lectures on the writing process are inevitable; long ones are probably ineffective, possibly pointless. Naturally, various modes of writing and various strategies for composing have to be introduced, but after that, students should be allowed to discover for themselves the best ways to complete the task at hand. Taking too much time telling them exactly how to write may actually shake their confidence and hamper their incentive to do what they already might know how to do fairly well. Classroom conversations might center on how they’ve done it in the past, which will provide a base to which you as well as other students can add suggestions.
Writing and Textbooks
Students might get the idea that they have to compose perfectly the first time from all the "perfect" essays they’ve been told to emulate in composition textbooks throughout the years. Professional and model student work can certainly be emulated, but it shouldn’t intimidate. Thus, you should do your best to make students aware that an author is just a person with something to say and that they are authors too. Also tell them that finding something to say and saying it well takes time for any writer, professional or amateur.
Whether the readings in textbooks are supposedly sacrosanct work by professionals or model student essays that undoubtedly got an "A" somewhere, the underlying message to the student is sometimes "you can’t do this," not "do something like this." Emulating and imitating masters can work for some students, but others often fail because they don’t yet have the great ideas that motivated the masters’ formulation of their work in the first place. Although noting good form should never be discouraged, investigating the ideas contained in the form might be more worthwhile. Students need to find something to say before they can think about how to say it best. You can close the gap between how they perceive a professional’s work and their own by healthy questioning of content as well as form in published writing. Investigate why they think an essay by, for instance, Bertrand Russell is "boring"; with an "interesting" essay, help them probe into the author’s success—what was done and how.
Textbooks usually place each of these model essays under whichever mode it best exemplifies. You might point out that these authors and most other writers often describe when they narrate, narrate when they exemplify, exemplify when they describe, and so on (as the above modal heuristics suggest). Most likely the authors didn’t set out to write in a rigid mode; they just wrote. By making your students aware of the natural overlapping of modes, you can free them from the sometimes unnatural restraint modes can induce.
Besides providing a basis for emulation, imitation, and discussion, professional essays can provide themes or topics from which students can launch their own essays. Students can respond to an essay, review it, analyze it. They can compare and contrast two essays, or synthesize from two or more of them to create their own positions. The previously mentioned assignments about bearing arms and about too much TV are topical in nature. Once again, see Appendix A if you’d like to see them further developed.
Addressing Common Shortcomings in Students Writing
You’ll soon notice that student writing is often very egocentric, so the next lesson many students need to learn is how to decenter, how to make their egocentric prose into something sharable with another. They often write in what educator Linda Flower calls "code words" (2:90), ones that mean much to them but little to you or anyone else. These code words are often mysterious to a reader. If you can get the writer to elaborate and expand on them, the mystery can be solved and the writer will improve.
A great example of how meaningful code words can be for the source and how mysterious they can be for the audience appeared in a Sunday comic strip, "The Family Circus" (Des Moines Sunday Register, February 23, 1986). Little Jeffy sees various bugs do their amazing feats: an ant carries much more than its weight, a grasshopper jumps much farther than its length, a bee flies, a lady bug crawls up the wall, and a water bug walks across the water. The last panel shows Jeffy’s baffled parents wondering why Jeffy would "like to be a bug." In Jeffy’s mind was a great essay, but from the message he gave his parents, they had no idea of that.
Many students are also fond of making assertions like "the movie was good" without backing them up with reasons or evidence. They need to be made aware of their audience’s need to better understand the reasoning behind their opinions.
Some student writers are
conscious of some sort of audience although they often conceive it to be a
stuffy one indeed. Now in "college," they might strive to write
academically and in the process lose their real voices to vagueness,
generality, and pomposity. According to educator Mina Shaughnessy,
"They don’t know what to do or ‘what you want’ or what academia
wants" (
Many students will bring to college some notions that their high school teachers taught them about writing that might conflict with yours: "Don’t ever use contractions," "Use five sentences per paragraph," "Never write in the first person," "Don’t use be verbs," etc. The best thing to do here is first explain the good intentions behind that kind of advice and then tell them that those commands aren’t Commandments.
Class Counsel: Workshopping and Peer Editing
So far it sounds as if it’s us against them, that they write and we read, and never the twain shall meet. Recently that polarity has been criticized by some educators, who suggest that students should be recognized as real writers and competent readers and critics of each other’s work.
This suggestion has given rise to "workshopping" and “peer editing." For simplicity’s sake, I offer the following distinction between workshopping and peer editing. In workshopping, a copy of each student’s work is evaluated simultaneously by either a small group or the whole class. In peer editing, students get in small groups and exchange and examine each other’s paper. In either case, embarrassment is not the goal; improvement is, by having students consider their responsibility to get through to an audience. You should do your best to suggest a constructive critical environment, not a butcher shop or a playground.
Ideally, students would carefully read and criticize each other’s essays, but alas, sometimes this is not the case: "this is pretty good" often echoes throughout the room. To get students to read more closely, you can provide them with a handout that demands serious reading of the other student’s draft, that asks the reader to determine the writer’s thesis, the essay’s coherency, its clarity, its meaningfulness. When a student finds out that another student might not understand exactly what he or she means, the writer might gain a heightened awareness of audience. If nothing else, these handouts can increase students’ incentive to participate, especially if you require the reader’s as well as the writer’s name for credit.
Workshopping
To introduce workshopping, you might put up for evaluation a troubled piece of your own writing: for instance, the botched first draft of something you wrote for their class (whether you botched it or not). By baring your writing soul to your students, you’ll make it easier for them to take their turns. Students might be relieved to see that you the teacher have to struggle with composition too.
To workshop their writing, you can prepare a ditto of parts of or entire student essays that are worth examining or improving. You should probably keep the writer anonymous unless someone feels comfortable with or proud about having his or her identity known. Managing whole-class evaluations is naturally a little easier than managing small group workshops at first since you’re actively in charge. You can use your position to offer praise where possible if for some reason none of your students do. You can "publish" what you think are good works, to see how your students respond. You can also publish troubled works with potential if you feel that the trouble-shooting is instructive and constructive for the writer as well as the class. Naturally, no one likes to be embarrassed, so you should remove grammatical errors from any published student work. That way students can concentrate on the effectiveness of the overall composition rather than digressing about misspellings and such. Besides dittos, you can ask your students to provide copies of their work for evaluation by small groups—asking students to make copies for an entire class might get a little too expensive.
You might appoint a leader for each group, someone to start off questioning and comments. Students can read copies "cold"—on the spot—or they can take them home to prepare for later discussion.
Peer Editing
Peer editing avoids the trouble of making copies. For peer editing, ask students to bring readable rough drafts of their essays to class (getting them to write rough drafts is obviously a hidden advantage to this!). Then split the class into manageable groups—from two to five—and let them loose.
They can pass each other’s work around in the group and mark good as well as troublesome passages. Students sometimes can also clear up another’s grammatical problems more effectively than we can since the clearing up is offered as advice rather than teacher’s correction.
Some might be hesitant to criticize a paper if the writer of it is present in the group. You then might try anonymous exchanges. There’s no easy way to do this exchange in a failsafe manner, but for some students the attempt eases their consciences and emboldens their critical minds.
Your Counsel: Written Response and Conferences
Workshopping and peer editing widen the audience for student work, but there’s still the one audience your students care most about: you. Your written response to their work is where most of the action is, so you should take care with your comments in order to facilitate their improvement. You can also respond orally to their work, by way of individual conferences.
Written Response
As you read your students’ papers, especially the more troubled ones, you might be tempted to correct or mark every mistake. This over-correction can backfire, producing shame, confusion, and fear in some students. "Too often we encourage the student’s self-hate rather than his self-love," says educator Donald Murray (7:131). Since that’s not what you want to do, consider instead identifying one or two recurring major problems at a time for the student. Get them out of the way first, then move on to further refinement in future essays. Correct to solve problems, not punish. To solve problems, you’ll need to do some directing beyond "read handbook" or "fix awkwardness." Deduce your students’ misunderstanding if possible, or confer with them about it. Rewrite or edit for them, if you think they’ll catch on to the tricks you used. And praise when you can.
The Student’s Manual for English 104-105 suggests four main categories for evaluation—material, organization, expression, and correctness—and the Freshman English Theme Paper cover sheet employs the grid grading system to evaluate each category as either excellent, good, fair, poor, or unacceptable. If you choose to use this system, you should probably briefly write out your rationale for the marks you give. Your written comments should cover why, for instance, the material was "good," the organization was "fair," the expression was "fair," and the correctness was "poor."
The grid sheet also has a blank for purpose, which students meet either satisfactorily or unsatisfactorily. If the purpose wasn’t specified by the assignment, you might ask students to briefly state on the cover sheet their purpose and identify their audience too. Then you can evaluate how effectively they’ve accomplished their tasks in their essays.
When are your students finished completely with their essays? Should they just correct the grammatical errors you caught, or should they rewrite? Rewriting to improve writing reinforces the process approach although it’s up to you whether to require revisions or not. The Commission on English hopes that our responses to the student essay "will not be its epitaph but a prelude to further learning" (1:98). Some students like to rewrite to get it right. Others mistake rewriting for punishment; for them you might mention that even professionals are rarely satisfied with their own work the first time, or the second, or the third . . .
And naturally your students will want to know how all the above translates into the grade you give. If the translation is not clear from your marks and comments, you should further explain your standards in class and/or conference. Your instructor’s manual provided by the department gives some guideline for grading, but ultimately each teacher has to determine his or her own way.
Conferences
By meeting individually with students in conference, you can tell them how well they as writers are getting through to you (and they can tell you how well you as teacher are getting through to them). Since the main topic of conversation should be their current work, make sure that students bring their latest essays if you don’t have them on hand.
The earlier you hold your first set of conferences the better, for then you can sooner identify your students’ concerns and problems about writing. The sooner they realize that you won’t bite (and where your office is), the more inclined they’ll be to visit you for help.
Although most students will be glad to talk to you, some will be shy and taciturn. For starters, you can ask the quiet ones (as well as the others) what the thesis of their latest essay was, is, or will be. You can also concentrate on any particular problems they’re having as well as praise their strengths.
Talking with 25 students individually takes time, so you should probably limit each conference to ten minutes or so, possibly canceling a day or two of class. Since you’re a teacher and a student, the time you can give to your students is not unlimited. You just might be the only instructor they’ll get to know well for years to come since many of their other classes will be large lectures. They’ll appreciate that, but for your own sake, don’t socialize much. Stick to business, or else you could end up with little brothers and sisters who won’t know when to go away.
It’s up to you how much you
want to work with various individuals. You might want to take charge of some
poorer writers, for instance, or you might rather send them to the people in
the
GRAMMAR AND FRESHMAN ENGLISH
Freshman Composition isn’t really designed to be remedial English; nevertheless, some of your students might need to greatly improve their grammar. They might even seem like hopeless cases, but usually they’re not. They might only be suffering from poor preparation, and now’s the time to catch up.
We hope that they can do
this by meeting individually either with you or a member of the
Grammatical problems common to many of your students can be addressed in class. While the errors any particular student makes seem sometime like random guesswork, there is often some logic behind them. The trick is to uncover the faulty logic, contrast it with the right way, and hope for correction. For instance, in the sentence "Everybody likes their mother," students assume everybody is plural and then naturally choose their to agree with it. Sometimes the logic is harder to uncover; sometimes there is none, in which case you can present the right way.
You can examine common problems by providing instructive examples from your own resources, or you can take a workshop approach, culling mistakes from various student papers and collecting the suspect phrases or sentences on one handout. Naturally, you’ll want to observe anonymity if you publish student errors.
As your class what’s wrong with the examples; don’t tell them, at least not right away. Have them tell you why they choose their answers, whether correct or not. By first hearing their reasoning, you can better explain its merit or fault. Use the blackboard if you feel comfortable with it, and let them use it when appropriate. The visual helps. If you’re comfortable with overhead projectors, they are available in many classrooms.
Some terminology will be necessary to explain certain principles, but if it can be avoided, that might keep confusion to a minimum. And don’t go too far back to basics with the whole class, or else you might run the risk of boring and/or confusing some already competent writers: "If it ain’t broke, don’t fix it." How many writers do you know that deliberately set out to write an ablative absolute?
OPTIONAL WRITING ASSIGNMENTS: JOURNALS AND OTHER HOMEWORK
Most educators believe that to improve, students should write every day. But if essay due dates are two weeks apart, some students will practice only once every two weeks, delivering Thursday-night specials on Friday morning. So, in addition to writing essays, your students can practice further through writing journals and shorter writing assignments. Neither is a necessary component of the suggested approach, but both can benefit your students.
Journals
Assigning the writing of journals serves to "encourage a flow of
words" (
Journal writing should be worry free for students, nothing but a writing playground in which students get used to filling the page. If you ask students to write journals, grading is discouraged beyond just giving credit for participation. Ask for a few pages a week, anything goes. You might suggest writing about reading for some students who feel they have nothing to write about.
Don’t correct these journals unless some earnest students interested in perfecting their grammar request you to. Also, you shouldn’t read ultra-personal passages if students don’t want you to—tell them to write "DO NOT READ!" at the top of any page full of these passages.
Because of the freedom allowed by journal writing, some fairly surprising material shows up, from profanity to intimate personal problems. Respond to all that they write as positively as you can since any encouragement is appreciated. If you give no response at all to the journals, students will assume you don’t care, which usually results in their not caring. Return the journals at the end of the semester, for obvious reasons. Your students have written part of their lives into them, so they’ll be very interested in keeping their journals.
Other Homework
Besides journals, shorter writing assignments might be considered too. They often seem more pressure free than essay assignments and can result in some surprisingly good responses. A fair essay writer sometimes produces fantastic 100-word efforts, and the positive reinforcement you can give on these can move the writer toward writing better essays. Also, asking students for a response in, for instance, fewer than 100 words can move them toward clarity and conciseness, and force them to come to the point.
Short writing assignments can be about anything although connecting them to the readings might make the most sense. Assigning writing about reading makes them read assignments more closely, which helps build reading skills and improves class discussions. With discussions centering around the homework, your students won’t be "cold"—they’ll have better developed ideas in their heads and on paper, ready for exchange. Shy students can read their replies in class, and then you can comment on or compliment the work, and ask them to elaborate on or clarify a promising point. Their confidence can only be built by doing, and talking about their writing is a good first step.
A few students’ reading homework might indicate reading disabilities, which should be addressed as soon as possible. There are experts in the reading disability field, and you might send a troubled student to one of them.
Many students simply need to be told that everything can’t be read at the same speed, that reading slowly is sometimes the best or only way to comprehend difficult material. Their "boredom" with it is sometimes a function of frustration: reading Plato isn’t easy; to often they give up. A way to overcome this is to warn them about a tough assignment, which they then might take as a challenge.
Short writing assignment possibilities include the following:
HOW TO ENLIVEN DISCUSSIONS
Your students’ main concern is how well they complete their essay assignments, and that concern ideally should carry over into the classroom as you discuss the assignment, the writing process, relevant readings (including student work), and language in general. Those topics are worth talking about, but sometimes discussions about them won’t go well. No matter how carefully you prepare for a discussion, no matter how stimulating and provocative your discussion questions seem to you, students respond with silence. You’re not sure whether they’re bored, confused, stupid, or lazy. So either you lecture on, answering your own questions, or you call on students randomly, forcing them to volunteer.
"Discussions" don’t have to be that dead or that one-sided. Don’t assume that you’re a failure, and don’t hate your students, for the problem probably lies in the traditional classroom setup where you’re the boss and they’re the underlings, where you’re the master in front of a class full of just pupils. Your students probably know when you’re fishing for the "right" answer, and they’d often rather have you provide it than risk trying on their own. Guessing can be embarrassing, so they reserve their right to remain silent. Most will be inclined to sit and listen (and sometimes not listen) to you and/or the random brave soul who speaks up.
Don’t let them get away with it. They’re essentially shirking responsibility, and you’re taking too much (and probably talking too much). I’m not saying to call on them, to force them to volunteer answers; instead, have them volunteer questions, make them ask. Instead of always trying to lead them to know what you already know, find out what they want to know. Ask them what they think and why. Let them pursue meanings, and let them articulate their interpretations, instead of relying on you to tell them the Truth.
Consider that the first move to make in enhancing any discussion is literally a move: whenever possible or appropriate, sit in a circle with your students. They can then see each other as well as see you on their level. Make them as comfortable with you as possible. Try reversing roles: they don’t have to raise their hands; you do. "If each student has to get clearance from the teacher to speak," James Moffet says, "interaction among students has little chance to take place" (6:95). Be a friendly guide, a fellow writer interested in hearing their ideas as well as presenting his or her own. You can learn from them, and they can learn from you and each other.
Your ideas often won’t agree with theirs anyway, but unless you hear theirs, you’ll never know the difference. Get their thoughts out in the open whenever possible. They need to take as much responsibility for discussions as you do, and this just won’t happen if you always control the questioning—they’ll slack off on you and hope the more talkative students save the day. Shift the responsibility their way; share the responsibility with them. Requiring them to bring to class one or more questions written out is one way of getting this going. To their questions, you occasionally can apply your interpretation, and a real dialogue can take place. Steering is sometimes necessary, of course, but pushing too often just won’t work.
When you ask questions, make them as open-ended as possible. For instance, you might ask what Thomas More’s purpose was in describing Utopia rather than asking leading question like "Was it to criticize his own culture?" Seeking particular answers to your questions is not forbidden; just don’t overdo it, especially if it defaults to lecture.
What’s wrong with lecturing? Mainly, it doesn’t help students practice their language skills. Your lectures can be entertaining, inspirational, and educational, but if your students aren’t listening, your work is wasted. Telling them how to write, telling them what this author is doing when he does that, these are probably not the most effective ways to help them improve their language skills. James Moffett goes so far as saying that this sort of exposition is not only dull but inhumane (6:118). "The best method of influence is dramatic, not expository" (6:93), he says. In general, students pay closer attention to somewhat spontaneous conversations than they do to prepared lectures or sermons, and blending your preparation with their questions can be exciting for you too.
Your students will sometimes surprise you with what they don’t know: who Thoreau was, what the left and right political wings are, why Jonathan Swift suggested eating babies in "A Modest Proposal," etc. But they can also surprise you with what they do know, and if you don’t provide the best possible environment for them to speak out, then you lose out as well as they. Talk with them, not down to them.
You might want to try small group discussions. To promote responsible exchanges, you might require each group to report to all later in class. The report could be an oral summary, a collectively written piece, or whatever else might fit or work with the topic.
CONCLUSION
All that’s contained herein is of course only my ideas, founded on a variety of influences. I hope that the ideas might help you somehow if only by way of disagreement with them. There is much advice available from colleagues and supervisors, plus there is much literature about the teaching of writing and rhetoric. My bibliography is a starting point for some fascinating readings, and they will certainly lead you to others. Also consider taking coursework in teaching composition, especially if you think your teaching career might extend beyond your first year or two. The more confident you are in the classroom, the better you can teach.
One last piece of advice: experiment. Some teaching aids and methods will work for you that won’t work for others, and vice versa, but you won’t know for sure about any strategy until you try it. In short, don’t be afraid to try anything, whether it be my suggestions, others’ advice, or your own ideas. You’ll make mistakes and bomb a few times, but your students probably won’t even notice. You’ll be as sensitive about your performance as a musician worried about a few mistakes the audience never hears. Let that concern inspire you, not get in you way. And have fun.
ANNOTATED BIBLIOGRAPHY
This book presents what college English programs should stress and how to do that better. Its sections on language and composition are especially helpful for the beginning teacher. The language chapter suggests that improving writing skills involves much more than just mastering grammar. The composition chapter suggests that teachers have a well-organized sequence of good writing assignments. It also suggests methods of evaluating student writing to best facilitate improvement. An appendix includes examples of facilitative evaluation.
This textbook presents an in-depth process approach to composition. Although it can certainly be used as a textbook for students, I believe it serves better as a sourcebook for teachers. It is full of suggestions about the writing process that teachers can make to their students.
This book challenges traditional approaches to teaching composition while suggesting one of its own. The authors highly recommend workshopping and peer editing, and they also suggest that good writing evolves to fit particular needs—it rarely fills pre-formed molds.
This book is a survey of teaching writing. Especially designed for the beginner in mind, it recommends the process approach and includes several chapters on what that approach is and how to teach it. Various other chapters answer questions about what teachers should know about rhetoric, cognition, and linguistics. Other chapters consider how to teach about words, sentences, paragraphs, and form.
This is a collection of articles on teaching writing and on the after-effects of the author’s Teaching the Universe of Discourse. In general Moffett suggests that we make more effort at recognizing each student’s individuality.
This book presents a comprehensive theory of language instruction that stresses the importance of inner thought, conversation, and letter writing before moving on to more formal kinds of discourse: drama (what is happening), narration (what happened), exposition (what happens), and argumentation (what will or may happen). No stage is necessarily "better"; each is important for the development of thought and writing. Included are many suggestions for putting the theory into action.
This is a collection of articles about the writing
process and teaching writing. About writing and teaching,
This book addresses thoroughly and sympathetically the problems of beginning writers. Its chapters consider handwriting and punctuation, syntax, common errors, spelling, vocabulary, and, most importantly, taking all the previous factors and going beyond the sentence with them to coherent discourse. In other words, writing is more than a collection of parts.
This is a collection of articles, by numerous authors, on teaching writing. It splits the articles into three categories—general, theory, and practice—although naturally many overlap in emphasis. In general the book surveys current trends in composition.
APPENDIX A: SAMPLE TOPICAL ESSAY ASSIGNMENTS
Would You Go to War?
This assignment came after several of my students
"performed" from their textbook a transcript of a courtroom trial.
The trial concerned Rosika Schwimmer,
a Hungarian immigrant petitioning for
Would you go to war? If so, would you choose to take up arms or would you choose to serve in a non-combat function only? If you would not go to war at all, why not?
If you would go to war, tell why beyond "to defend this great country of ours." Also explain your position on whether you would take up arms or not. If you would not go to war at all, tell why beyond "I could not kill other human beings or help in efforts to do so."
Defend your position by explaining how and why you’ve come to your beliefs. Trace or cite significant influences (if any) from, for instance, TV, movies, reading, school, church, personal life incidents, people, whatever. I’d suggest rereading the Schwimmer case as well as the two extended comments that follow in the The Little, Brown Reader (Pierce Butler’s majority opinion and Oliver Wendell Holmes’ dissent).
Who is your audience? The draft board. I am the draft board, and it is my duty to man and woman the armed forces. If you choose not to serve at all, advance your statement of choice very seriously. The draft board doesn’t have much of a sense of humor.
As the draft board, I will be glad to accept those who will serve and fight. A gung-ho, kill-the-Commies statement of choice will serve the primary purpose of getting you drafted, but your statement will also be judged to gauge promotion potential. The more sophisticated your statement—in other words, the more you get away from "killing Commies"—the better your chances at desirable advancement.
Are We a Society or an Audience?
This assignment came after my class had read numerous essays about the pro’s and con’s of the media and after they had read Plato’s "Myth of the Cave." The assignment follows:
"We’ve changed from a society to an audience," says Kurt Vonnegut.
We watch an awful lot of TV. Network programming, cable offerings, and VCR’s provide us with an endless amount of entertainment. While not watching TV, we listen to an awful lot of music. Stereos, boomboxes, and Walkmans keep our ears full. And the miraculous MTV combines the best (or the worst) of both worlds.
We do read although the most popular reading
materials reflect the pop culture fed us by the entertainment industry: People.
TV
Who is in control? Why do we have Big Mac Attacks? Are we in a cave carefully constructed by the manipulative mass media? Are we simply receivers? In an essay, explain, examine, and/or defend if you wish the captive audience our society has become. Don’t make your case primarily egocentric; i.e., don’t rely on the fact that you might not be a mindless member of the captive audience. Instead, show that you’re not by writing a coherent essay about the topic. Write it to a skeptical elder who is worried about us.
You may use relevant essays in The Little, Brown Reader to support your case, either by adopting, adapting, or refuting various authors’ points. You also may use outside material, and you don’t have to ignore your own experiences (just don’t make them central to your thesis).
APPENDIX B: SAMPLE MODAL ESSAY ASSIGNMENTS
Narrating an Event
Narrate an event in which you learned something about yourself. Your audience is your peers in this class.
This essay is a way for all of us to get to know each other. The event you write about doesn’t have to be crucial turning point in your life. Just pick an event that did affect you somehow: it might have taught you something, it might have made you change your mind about something, or it might have helped you make up your mind about something.
Most likely, in this assignment, your thesis will be implied rather than explicitly stated since the nature of a narrative essay often makes an explicitly stated thesis unnecessary. Nevertheless, you still should make sure that your reasons for writing are clear in your mind. Use your natural voice or another which you can control, and have fun.
Describing a Person
Describe a person you’ve come across in your life whom the class should definitely hear about. Make your essay a character study; don’t just praise or condemn whomeveryou’re describing. Show that you have some insight into this person, that you have ideas about what makes him or her tick. Deal only with important or significant details, and don’t go overboard with physical description.
Writing about family members is certainly not forbidden. Just keep in mind that this is a character study of someone we all should know about. You might love your mother, but why should we? Why is she that special? Make sure you take these kind of considerations into account while picking your subject.