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?