On Assumptions When Teaching College Writing
This one might read more as a journal entry than some of my previous works, but hell, I teach through journalism and champion its existence as an underserved medium in academia, so I’d be a hypocrite if I belittled it now.
Yesterday I “taught” the worst class in my short career as a writing instructor. Even with the quotations around “taught,” the outcome of the class savagely unearthed any semblance of the word’s definition. I crumbled, I stumbled, and with the students mouths agape, they more than likely wondered how the hell I managed to get a contract to instruct them.
Let’s put it in perspective for a moment: one of the classes I teach is a research-based writing class at a community college. The course functions as the last language requirement for all majors. If they don’t pass, they don’t get their degree, but for good reason: whatever their field, if a student can’t form a substantive argument based on evidence, it will be tough to convince their future superiors of a problem in the workplace or why they deserve a raise. I can see the value in our class, and I should as the instructor, but with the content I’ve chosen it’s tough for my students to bridge the gap. This both worries me and frustrates my students who rely on me.
I teach the course through the “New Journalism” movement of the (primarily) 1960s and 1970s. I chose this content because it’s an electrified and revolutionary genre, one that sizzles in style and is fearless in content. Many of my students enjoy the readings. I mean, who doesn’t love skunk drunk Hunter S. Thompson raving about like a wild eyed greaser frat boy? Prudes.
I begin the course, however, with a more modest narrator, but still an ever heavy-hitting stylist: Joan Didion. Didion can be tough for many students to grasp, especially her flagship essay, “Slouching Towards Bethlehem.” Her imagery can seem flagrant and forged, rather than poignantly expressive. They get confused as to why she doesn’t tell us what she’s doing outright: who she’s talking to and why. They especially don’t like her use of episodic mimesis—her transition-less scenes are more frustrating than structurally impressive.
Take her first, resonating and chilling lines:
“The center was not holding. It was a country of bankruptcy notices and public-auction announcements and commonplace reports of casual killings and misplaced children and abandoned homes and vandals who misspelled even the four-letter words they scrawled” (Slouching Towards Bethlehem 84).
The barging locomotion of “ands” gives us a sense of urgency and boiling over abundance. The pot overflows with poison and emits a noxious gas. As Didion puts it, the place she describes, Haight-Ashbury in the 1960s, “was where the social hemorrhaging was showing up” (85). This is beautiful to me, and, the bio-image of a human body bursting at the seams as a parallel to the unstitched ideal hippie image as more of a tangled and knotted yarn of unreality, keeps me glued to the text.
But this is highbrow bull shit. I barely even understand what I just said back there—but it sure sounded nice. It was all a blur and my saying this in class will only ensure my students’ fate to be “turning and turning in the widening gyre” as Didion’s pal Yeats would say in “The Second Coming.” This phenomenon challenges me, as I’m sure it does my colleagues. Namely: it’s not the students failing to construct an intellectual bridge to the text, but their instructor failing to supply the metaphorical steel beams for them to be able to build it. And yet, what if giving them the steel beams isn’t enough, what if they need more? What do we do if we’ve forgotten how to forge steel in the first place?
If I were to continue my failures as an allusion to Yeats’ poem, it would soar (or perhaps plummet) into the second line, “the falcon cannot hear the falconer.” Say, in the context of my classroom, I represent the falconer, and my students, the falcons. Amongst other interpretations (we will never be able to dig up them all, Yeats is too damn good), as the falconer, I am not only responsible for the training of my students— “to teach” comes from Latin’s “to train,” after all—but to care and consider their needs as well. For, how can a student want to learn with an instructor who does not listen to their needs inside the classroom?
Some things I’ve gathered: Academics can become ensnared in a web of our own assumptions. Some come from our backgrounds, but most rear due to years in the academy surrounded by the likeminded.
It isn’t easy for someone who has swam deep into the eddies of the library to meet someone wading next to the beach. Maybe we don’t want to return to the dry land of “how to close read,” and, more importantly for students, why close reading matters, but what we sure as hell can’t do is refuse a life jacket because we think we never needed one.
I don’t have a solution, nor do I have a satisfying or profound conclusion, but I have found that it’s simpler than it seems: ask them what they need. I had to pry three or four times to confused faces before my students told me they were frustrated, but don’t give up. Show them, sincerely, how much you want them to learn. And tell them. Sure, they were frustrated with the reading, but they were more frustrated with me glossing over basic methods on how to look productively at a text. And I owned it.
Admit imperfection. Share that you, in no way, are the ultimately authority on a subject. They probably will respect you more for it. Vulnerability may be one of the greatest lessons we can give.
