This is why I'm not an expressivist.

We've had some interesting discussions about free-writing as a tool to pull students out of the self-conscious paralysis of the blank page and to get them expressing their ideas without worrying about grammar, form, and organization. Dr. Rickley in particular had some great examples of students who turned in the blandest, most institutional essays imaginable but metamorphosed when they were prompted to write off the top of their heads on something they really cared about.

And I maintain that free-writing exercises have never helped me one bit.

Give me a ten-minute free-write, and it'll usually go something like this: I'll write the first sentence that occurs to me. Then I'll stare at it for two minutes. I'll want to change something about it, but I know I'm not supposed to. I'll have an idea, but I can't quite connect it to the first sentence, so it doesn't coagulate. We're five minutes in now, and I finally come up with a connecting thought between the first and second sentences, and the organization clicks into place. I finish out the paragraph with the other thoughts that have been swimming around looking for a home, but then I realize I'm still really just introducing the topic. Time is up, and I have an introductory paragraph for an idea I may or may not have any investment in, but, chances are, this violence against my customary writing process has turned me off.

I simply cannot write without prewriting. I can't separate composition from organization. If my ideas aren't organized in some way, I can't express them.

I know free-writing doesn't mean writing without thought, but you could have fooled me from how my elementary and junior-high teachers talked about it. I honestly came away with the impression that they expected something meaningful to effortlessly come out on the page as long as my pencil was moving. I spent so much of those free-writing exercises bashing my head against what I thought they expected from me that I barely had any time to write at all - I ended up concluding that free-writing was just a colossal waste of time.

I'm not certain whether free-writing is something that is just at odds with my cognitive processes or whether I just never learned to do it right. There are certainly times I know I have ideas but don't have a framework for them, and I wish I had a way of just dumping them onto the page and picking through them and shuffling them around like those refrigerator poetry magnets, but I'm so hardwired to try to form connections any time I'm writing things in sequence that I feel almost physically restrained from doing so. I am an obsessive-compulsive writer.

In class, I was the only person to mention having had difficulty with free-writing. Most of the other people who talked about it at all did so in glowing terms. That seems to suggest to me that I'm in the minority. I certainly expect that most of the 1301 students don't have the same sorts of perfectionistic roadblocks that I have - they're going to have different roadblocks.

Which leads me to wonder how I'm going to be able to use free-writing in my class. If I struggle with it, how am I going to be able to help students who have never encountered it before? If there will be students in my classroom for whom free-writing is the catalyst they've always needed, how am I going to provide that, and how can I tell the difference between those who just need a little more prompting and those, like me, who just aren't connecting with the idea?

And on the subject, I'm not going to assume that there's no one else with the same problem. How do I deal with students whose problem isn't that they don't know how to express themselves but that they just need time to do so? How do I overcome the artificiality of the "write without thinking" prompts I got in junior high? How do I avoid embittering another generation of perfectionists while hopefully encouraging them to loosen up a little?

One thing that I definitely think needs to go is the VAGUE PROMPTS. "Write about something that makes you feel happy. Look out the window and start writing about what you see. Tell me about the person you would like to be in twenty years." Either they were telling us to write about nothing at all or giving us a topic so broad and so daunting any attempt I could offer in ten minutes would be trivial. These sorts of hazy ideas don't spark my creative process; they paralyze it. Give me something constructive to do, something to respond to, a starting point, a context where I can at least find some anchor points for the structure my mind insists on building.

I can sort of identify with the poor poetry student who couldn't get his head around metaphor. I don't have a problem with the literary device, but I do have a problem when it works its way into instructions. Tell me to write without thinking, and I will reply, "vwe.aEIGES>gdflgna;oEWO;n>sdg:OiEWSREDL:kfdgslkjsD."

Because, come on. Even free-writing is about learning to think.

The Wasteland: Part Two

My own freshman composition experience was a drag. It was literally no more challenging than the one-month composition course I had been required to take as a sophomore in high school.

We had a textbook. I don't remember much about it because I mostly didn't bother to read it, and when I did, I didn't find it helpful. Grammar was never a problem for me, and I turned in the weekly grammar exercises as a matter of busywork.

We had three writing assignments. The first was to summarize and critique an article. The second was to write a single-source essay (we were confined to one source, but our topic was not to be the same topic as the source essay - I never understood why you would write such a monstrosity outside of a course requirement). The final assignment was a more traditional research paper, but, out of a fear of plagiarism, we could only use the twelve articles in the back of the textbook (on the bioethics of genetic science) as sources.

It was like the entire course was structured to promote laziness. I schlepped through with a modicum of effort. The final paper was the only assignment that took me more than one sitting to write. When my professor complimented me on my work and recommended that I look into working at the writing center, I thought (perhaps unfairly), "Based on this? Just how low are your standards, anyway?"

Looking back on it, I realize that I'm as much to blame as the professor or the curriculum for not getting anything out of that course. I went in expecting the class to be useless to me, and it was. If I had taken it as a challenge to learn something useful, to build good writing habits on my own, to go beyond the requirements, it probably would have benefited me a great deal. I've posted elsewhere that I feel my writing habits are pretty poor and that I continue to struggle with the barrier of the blank page even in short-form assignments like reading responses.

But I have to think there is a potential, even at the freshman level of composition, to challenge students' ideas about writing as a process, as a discipline, as an art, as a discourse. Most students (I know I did) view their writing as secondary or tertiary material, commenting on primary sources but unable to question them, synthesizing the ideas of others but unable to advance any of their own, as far outside the academic discussion as anything can possibly be, and ultimately of no use whatsoever outside the class requirements. It is almost like medieval scholasticism where the authoritative canon is sacrosanct; students may compare the authorities, favor some over others, but they can never consider entering the discourse as an equal.

Obviously, most students at the undergraduate level aren't capable of holding their own in an advanced academic discussion where most of the participants have a decade or more of research to validate their publications. But the conceptual disconnect is not so much one of degree - I haven't reached that plateau yet - but one of kind - I am not an academic and therefore have nothing to say. Students have a sense that their own writing is powerless and trivial, not because they have not learned how to express great ideas, but because they are students.

A curriculum like the one I experienced more often than not serves to reinforce that conception. As a result, I didn't even bother to take my writing for that course seriously, and I couldn't take my professor's feedback seriously. My question for this class is this: how do we give our students a sense of their own potential without patronizing them? How do we manage their progress without stifling them?

The Wasteland (part one)

"Freshman English is also frequently invoked as an empty space notable for its various lacks, as an absence. According to Crowley (1986), 'When teachers of English write about the course in their professional journals it is to complain about it: its teachers' lack of training and motivation; its students' ill-preparedness and lack of motivation; its low status; its lack of intellectual integrity' (11). Crowley, herself, remarks on the [sic] 'the intellectual poverty' of 'the ordinary unproductive vineyards of freshman English' (14-15). For Stade, freshman English is 'singularly devoid of either the profitable or the playful,... has no content at all... [and] is not a subject' (144-145). Moreover, Greenbaum argues, freshman English is a course designed 'to develop in the student an overwhelming sense of his own inadequacies.' It is, he writes, the place 'where a person learns that he can't write,' and it thus serves as 'the crown on thirteen hapless years of composition education that has taken expressive children and molded them into wordless adults' (186)."

Heilker, Paul. "Freshman English." Keywords in Composition Studies. Ed. Paul Heilker, and Peter Vandenberg. Portsmouth, NH: Boynton/Cook Publishers, Inc., 1996. 108-109.

A quick note to my fellow T.A.'s: if you haven't yet read the keyword article on freshman English, do so. It contains a brief overview of scholarly writing on the phenomenon of freshman composition courses. Most of the statements are very negative, like the above quotation, but they illuminate some very real problems with the perception and process of these classes that can interfere with or even undermine the benefits we hope to impart. These criticisms demand a frank evaluation of our curricula, our teaching philosophies, and our expectations for our students, and they similarly demand an intentional response in our practice as teachers of writing.

I selected the passage above because it seemed to me the most damning of the whole article. Freshman English is most notable as a rhetorical void, a course of study that has no content but demands a product; its products, even if structurally sound, are empty of content, significance, and meaningful self-expression. Its classroom is characterized as a gathering place for apathy, inadequacy, and intellectual barrenness (or even dishonesty). Worse, it is part of a larger educational framework whose end result is to quash expressiveness and real rhetorical literacy.

This is why I think we should suspend all 1301 and 1302 classes immediately.

Wait, what was that? Graduate assistantship? Darn.

What I mean to say was that it bears examination whether our classrooms individually or the Texas Tech composition program as an institution fosters the sort of rhetorical stupor that Crowley, Stade, Greenbaum, and many others identify with freshman writing classes. The one thing we absolutely cannot control - not without convincing the university to gouge the enrollment, which doesn't really solve anything - is the quality of our students, or, more to the point, the quality of their education in composition to the point they enter our classrooms. We know that the most exceptional students will generally test out of 1301 and 1302, but that still leaves us with an incredible range in student aptitude. Some will enter deservedly confident of their writing skills and may be skeptical that we have anything to offer them at this level. Others will essentially need remedial training to bring their verbal skills up to college standards.

I think the greatest source of strength in Texas Tech's approach to freshman composition is the high degree of specific, individual attention it fosters. How? By placing assignment commentary on a similar level of importance to the classroom instruction itself. The two cannot be separated; they are both integral parts of our students' education, and each serves the other intimately. This is why it is so crucial that our classroom instructors and document instructors stay on the same page regarding their points of emphasis and standards of evaluation. It also means that we must take our role as commentators at least as seriously as our role as graders. We must demonstrate to our students that we truly do care about their progress as writers and that such progress is attainable, or we cannot reasonably expect them to care.

I was going to address the content of our classes as well, but this post is becoming an essay, and I have other things to do this morning. Perhaps I'll save that for a later post. My purpose here, more than anything, is simply to provoke some thought, reflection, and criticism; I certainly don't think that I can solve or even fully understand the many problems pursuant to freshman composition programs. But the greatest danger for us teachers, as I see it, is an unreflective approach.