Do you ever have those times where you feel like every conversation you have and every article you read somehow relates to what you're thinking about? No? Maybe it's hyper-awareness, or just plain paranoia. But anyhow, I just see so many experiences in my life for the past week leading me back to the question of the role of writing in the classroom. So here's how it started off:
The classes that I'm observing at Reagan High School are called "Creative Writing." That's right--not a "required" English class, per se, but one that the students don't necessarily choose to be in. The students who take the class are in 10th grade, and they're also taking an English 2 class, but they performed poorly or failed the end-of-year test in reading/writing. They're pretty much required to take the class, in the hopes that by the end of the year, they'll be completely caught up to where they're supposed to be for 9th and 10th grade. But it's not called a remedial class...it's "creative." I see that being a strength and a weakness. The strength is that they're not having to test and re-test a bunch in this class, so there's a freedom from the pressure of outside curriculum requirements. Also, they are working on writing short stories or character sketches, instead of having to work within the typical structured argumentative essay format. I really like the atmosphere of the class. The students aren't necessarily thrilled about having to write in the first place, but they seem to enjoy being given the space to experiment with explorations of their made-up character and finishing the dialogue of a break-up in the school hallway.
On the other hand, I'm not sure that they take the class very seriously. Like I said, they're also required to take English 2, which seems to negate some of the validity of their "creative writing" course. It's sad, since I think they almost view it like an elective; however, it seems like the methods used in this class would actually encourage more engagement with the development of their reading and writing skills. On Tuesday, the class did an exercise where they looked at different YA novels' first lines. They were supposed to notice which ones grabbed their attention, so that they could structure their own stories with a hook at the beginning. One of the students read a first line, and he kept on reading. He came in on Thursday, distraught that one of the main characters died. My CT was astonished that he read the entire book in two days. This kind of engagement with a text seems new for these students, so I'm not sure if they're given the same kinds of opportunities for reading and writing for pleasure in their "real" English classes.
That gets me to part of the reading from Bomer from this past week. In his chapter on writing that supports readers, he mentioned that "we should not build English classes where every reading event has to be commodified into a product that can be graded" (152). And that makes so much sense to me! When every little thing that we do in a classroom has a grade attached, there's also the possibility of failure. How can we promote the idea of reading for pleasure or reading as a part of everyday life if it's always attached to the concept of achievement? I think it's difficult to find this common ground. Sure, a good idea is to assign each student a reading/writing journal. So should you be able to grade the reading journal to make sure there's some sense of progress in a student's reading life? Or is a fear of failure inherent in the action of a teacher looking over a student's writing?
The other issue from this chapter on that has resonated with me throughout the week is the concept of formulaic essays. I love this quote:
"With that kind of writing [formulaic writing], students are not actually communicating with anyone, but they're not really writing to think either. They're too connected with being explicit about their claims and their relationships, with providing evidence, and with maintaining a cohesive text that avoids any digressions into new thinking. So they're not really using writing to think or to communicate, just to comply. We can do better." (160)
This is my daily struggle! As a writing tutor in the community college setting, I work with a lot of students in basic composition classes that are requirements for liberal arts degrees. You would think that I would have a new challenge everyday, but sadly, most of the teachers work off of a sort of essay formula. Even for a class that is centered around reading and responding to short stories, the formula is simple: summary; central idea of the story; statement about how three elements (maybe tone, setting, and character) exemplify the central idea. Each subsequent paragraph addresses one element, with quotes and explanations of the quotes in a certain order. I even tell students that as long as you have the formula, you should be fine in the class. Do the students learn anything? Sure, they eventually learn how to pick a central idea out of a story (but even then, they know that there are certain central ideas that aren't quite "right"). But there is no sense of communicating with anyone, or actually thinking about the story that they've read. They're just following the formula.
And then I came across this series on writing from The Atlantic Monthly. Check out "The Writing Revolution" along with a pretty handy response. Basically, New Dorp High School decided to change their writing curriculum because the school was doing so poorly in testing. They emphasized the basics of grammar and sentence structure, to the point of actually giving students a specific word order in which to answer questions in class. It also emphasizes "fundamental" analytical essay structures, and the school reported improvements in test scores. But here's the problem: is the school actually enabling students to become better writers, or is it teaching students how to write for the standardized tests that it wants them to pass? I posed this question on Facebook (the arbiter of all real debates), and a lady who went to grad school with me for English stated that I wouldn't have been in higher education if I didn't know these "formulas" for writing. She's probably right.
All this is to say, yes, I wholeheartedly agree with Bomer, that we should not teach formulas for writing. But is there a point at which we're doing our students a disservice by not offering them this "get out of jail/get into college free" card? Maybe there's some kind of middle ground that can be reached. I'm hoping that I get to witness some of that middle groundedness this semester.
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