Model Misbehavior

Kittle (Chpt 2)

"To teach writing, you have to be a writer."

The mantra seems overly simplistic and something I'd disagree with simply out of spite of its self-confidence.

Abandon writing journals? Blasphemy!

A waste of time? Go jump in a lake!

Writing isn't driving a car. There's no checklist. There aren't multiple kinds of driving and there are universal qualifications for what it means to be a bad driver.

Yet there is something to the idea.

Don't get me wrong. I'm still in a point of thinking Kittle, while a capable narrator in her own right, is taking the wrong approach in many ways by putting crucial and frightening pressure on teachers to take sole responsibility for student writing. Such responsibility puts teachers in an impossible position, in my opinion and I'm not sure that this ever works as successful classroom discussion.

However, if students are able to see that writers do have a process and that such a process is applicable to everyone. It also signifies that writing does not simply occur in a classroom and that a variety of writing contexts call for a variety of modeling styles.

I'm still working this out. Check in later.

Not an Instruction Manual

While reading King's passage, I feared for my students. As King describes the "instruction manual" style of writing, I flashed back to the kind of texts I despised in high school. All of these were non-fiction pieces about science or sports that were written with no imagination and in such a patronizing tone that I seldom managed to finish them. It doesn't mean all non-fiction falls into this category. I remember my emotional outpouring to Orwell's "To Kill an Elephant" and my sly smiles at the simplistic snark of Woolf's "A Room of One's Own." Yet I worry for my students because the current system patronizes them by removing legitimately interesting and compelling narratives in favor of tasteless nonfiction that removes imagination and creativity from the process of reading. Similarly, how can we expect students to write in any meaningful manner when the method of instruction suggested by the Common Core seeks to largely remove fiction and frankly more interesting texts from the curriculum in favor of nonfiction.

Bird by Bird

The Bird piece spoke my language. The process of writing has never seemed simpler to me and I feel like a coward for avoiding teaching non-formula writing for so long. The simplicity of this process would undoubtedly resonate with students and I plan to have them read this passage in upcoming days. I remember vividly one of my students during the Freshmen memoir unit explaining to me that he had, to his recollection, absolutely no meaningful experiences in his life that he would write about for his memoir. While his classmates seemed to effortlessly describe a plethora of memorable experiences (the never-ending Domino game, an existential crisis while reading a school-book, and an immigration to the United States), this student simply shook his head. I was shocked because he wrote fabulous essays. However, these were formulas and offered little in the way of cognitive challenge for this child. I hadn't taught a student to write. I had taught him to jump through the flaming hoops and he still gnawed as the 81-shaped dog-biscuit of his Regents score.There was no creative process or struggle. He didn't have to grapple with the process of writing.

I wish I had read this before that moment. This passage offers key insight into the fact that there is no "guru" formula that can be used when it comes to simply telling the truth.

Theory Text Reflections

Nagin:

I can remember the class where we "learned to write." Each week we were given a tive-hundred-word writing assignment. We wrote a variety of papers: narrative, descriptive, contrast- and-compare, and persuasive essays, to name a few. We would receive the assignment on Monday, with little discussion of what was expected. Sometimes we were given a few minutes to begin our papers, then we spent the rest of the week hearing about different types of sentences and paragraph unity. We never really applied those ideas to papers in class, but the teacher assumed we would use those skills correctly in our work. We did learn the "formula" for exposition: a three-part thesis with an introduction, three body paragraphs, and a con- clusion. . . . The following Monday, she returned our papers with red marks and a grade on the last page. If we had over a certain number of red marks, we were required to recopy the incorrect sentences or misspelled words ten times.4  (Nagin, 31).

This passage struck me with its familiarity to how I was instructed to write. I remember with some degree of phantom pain like an old sports injury swelling up the process of the "essay a week" mentality as a student. What I am suddenly nervous about is the fact that I have spent the past two years with the "essay a week" model crucial to Freshman curriculum. Yet where I hope I am different is that the process involved incorporation of new ideas into each draft. For example:

Week one: Having a formal, explicit thesis statement
Week two: Providing relevant textual evidence
Week three: Removing the first and second person (NOTE: Not for the faint of heart. This is the equivalent of Custer writing, "Day Three: Sitting Bull and Crazy Horse). 

I'm currently questioning whether this type of repetitive writing should be entirely stricken from student writing. While students may dislike this process as it is by no means an enjoyable process, I can't shake that there can be value to frequent (even nightly) writing assignments. However, my take away from Nagin is that all writing must have a purpose and specific focus and this is what teachers should consider when students craft essays. 

Hayes and Flower:

Pre-Writing" is the stage before words emerge on paper; "Writ- ing" is the stage in which a product is being produced; and "Re-Writing" is a final reworking of that product. Yet both common sense and research tell us that writers are constantly planning (pre-writing) and revising (re-writing) as they compose (write), not in clean-cut ~tagesF.~urthermore, the sharp dis- tinctions stage models make between the operations of planning, writing, and revising may seriously distort how these activities work. For example, Nancy Sommers has shown that revision, as it is carried out by skilled writers, is not an end-of-the-line repair process, but is a constant process of "re-vision" or re-seeing that goes on while they are comp~singA.~more accurate model of the composing process would need to recognize those basic thinking pro- cesses which unite planning and revision. Because stage models take the final product as their reference point, they offer an inadequate account of the more intimate, moment-by-moment intellectual process of composing. How, for example, is the output of one stage, such as pre-writing or incubation, transferred to the next? As every writer knows, having good ideas doesn't automatically produce good prose. Such models are typically silent on the inner processes of decision and choice. 

I admit to being a hypocrite. When I was in high school, I willfully battled in every English class against pre-writing. My relationship with the process was so antipathetic with pre-writing that for my AP Language editorial senior year, I wrote a four page argumentative piece for the school newspaper that pre-writing should not be part of overall essay grades largely along similar lines as the authors argue here. I never needed to pre-write for my essays. Since it was required as part of the overall grade, I largely faked my outlines and organizers based on what was already in the essay.

Yet here I am almost 10 years later forcing (pardon my French) this bullshit on my students. Don't get me wrong. There are students who need to complete graphic organizers before they can put so much as their name on a paper. Yet I am now curious as to how rigid my process has been. Should students be taught the formulas that Hayes and Flower tend to discourage or should a more fluid process be implemented.

It isn't the first time I have fought this internal battle and I have tried it both ways. Students have had the choice of writing without outlines and prewriting or with it. Yet I do not trust my students to actually do the things that the authors suggest without some sort of structure and reinforcement. Students need the red pen to circle their grammar mistakes to prevent them from skipping the revision component of the writing.

Someone help me. I'm terrified of teaching kids anything but the ways that never worked for me.

Philosophy of Teaching Writing

The first day of school, I gathered my freshmen around the Promethean board and asked them the questions that would define the entire year:

"What does it mean to write? What does it mean to write well?"

The students stared at me as images of hieroglyphics, cuneiform, and Navajo blankets and wrote some responses that writing conveyed information in a physical form. We discussed symbology and coding and, predictably, the conversation remained largely sterile. Equally predictably was the sterile tone of the year's writing process. My instruction focused on "training" writing. Students crafted thesis statements, learned to proof-read grammar, and cite quotations to support arguments or literary analysis. Yet this never qualified as "teaching writing." I was simply training students to write the acceptable answers for solid Regents and SAT scores without regard for what it meant to actually write. At the end of my first year, the question that now defined my instruction adjusted. "Is writing a science or an art? How can it be taught?"

It is this focus which must serve as a core to my undefined philosophy. If writing is a science, I have perhaps developed effective strategies for teaching it. Students examine solid writing and can even develop their own criteria for what strong narrative writing looks like. Students can utilize graphic organizers to formulate lengthy argumentative essays. However, the result is robotic, reducing students to automatons with no real distinguishing voice within their writing. Yet this approach is unsatisfying. There seems to be little creativity or individuality in this approach and reduces writing to a sterile and academic task which is entirely utilitarian. If students are writing under these conditions, are they truly writers or simply regurgitates of formula?

My ideal instruction would involve on teaching writing as an art. While certainly standards exist such as content, form, style, and technique, this process would allow for students to experiment with writing, to engage in the feedback process from peers and instructor, and would see their writing evolve based on self-designed standards. However, I recognize my current inadequacies to teach this style of writing. Additionally, I am concerned as to the potential for backfire in terms of test scores if students are not to some degree trained in the "science" of writing.

I hope this philosophy branches out.

Kyle