I believe that freshmen already have their own philosophy of writing before they start 1301. However, these philosophies are often toxic. Students think writing wastes their time and they won’t need to write. It would be fascinating to read a study about freshman attitudes toward writing, but even without reading one, I can often tell a student’s writing philosophy through the way they write. When I read an assignment, I can tell whether or not a student cared about her or his work. I can tell if a student has proofread or not, for example.
In my mind, the ideal form of teaching is where the student comes to the teacher, not the other way around. As a teacher, one needs to adjust unhealthy student writing philosophies, but I think it’s important for students to think they arrived at this conclusion on their own. It’s an Inception moment. If a teacher brings students to a point where they have a healthy philosophy of writing, that teacher will produce writers.
But what is a healthy philosophy of writing? Must it lie within the four taxonomies? Within the taxonomies, I subscribe to a combination of romantic and rhetorical. Beginners should write to become self-aware, and once a writer is self-aware, she or he can make rhetorical/social contributions. I don’t think that the cognitive approach necessarily helps, because I don’t believe imitating expert writing behavior is going to help novice writers. And the formalist tradition is too formal, because it’s paralyzing to new writers. I just learned the reasons behind proper comma use last semester. Before that, I had an intuitive sense of how to use a comma and just faked it. The point is that grammar is such a complex subset of rules that it should not obscure clear thinking or idea flow.
So as a future writing instructor, I think that would be my goal: to inspire kids to become romanticists and then rhetoricians. How to practically and effectively implement that idea is something that perhaps only experience can teach.
The progress you describe, students first becoming "romanticists and then rhetoricians," is an interesting way to understand the connection between having students enjoy writing and, in whatever sense, be good at it. While reading this I thought about how we learn about rules in most anything else. The easiest connection (and first) was sports. In sports, we learn many of the rules before playing, but we perfect our knowledge of these rules by performing. Many of the ways we learn these are by making baskets in the other team's hoop (or watching that done) and other loose comparisons that I could make. That said, maybe there is something in the balance of having students know about the rules of writing first, then perfecting these through free-writing. This seems to contradict what free-writing is all about, but if we could mix the effective parts of the taxonomies, maybe this wouldn't seem so far away.
ReplyDeleteI think you’re right about the fact that students need to come to the teacher. However, I don’t think that teaching involves having students “think” they arrived at any particular conclusion on their own. In order to learn, students really do have to recognize the truth of things by themselves. I understand the Inception analogy—in a way, teachers do try to implant ideas in their students’ minds by various subtle and wily devices, so as to bring them to a point where they are ready to do or accept something. In your case, you want to instill in them an appreciation for writing in order to get them to actually become good writers. But implanting ideas in someone else’s brain takes more effort from them than it does from you. So when your students start to enjoy writing because of all the free writing exercises and mind manipulation you engage in as a teacher, remember that they came to it on their own. You led the way, but the achievement is theirs.
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