This I Believe
I sat down with Kalli and told her I didn’t think her Definition Essay was working. She had, for some reason, reverted to the dreaded five-paragraph model.
“Where is the voice I heard in your last two papers?” I asked.
“I don’t know…this paper is hard.”
“I understand. It’s probably the toughest essay of the semester.”
“So how do I fix it?” Her face was reddening.
“I’m not sure you can.” I could almost hear her stomach drop. “I think you might need to try a different approach.” And the tears welled up in her eyes.
Many a student of mine has been bewildered — or even, like Kalli, reduced to tears — during one of our writing conferences. I tell them to cut their introduction, or maybe everything but the intro, or maybe they should just start over altogether. This is failure — out loud, in the wild, often surrounded by two dozen other students typing away, and maybe, just maybe, hearing everything — and they know it. And it hurts.
But it’s not the end.
“Don’t freak out!” I say. “You’ll get there.” And eventually they do.
Experiencing failure this way — not as a blindsiding cumulative comment or a score out of a hundred, not delivered weeks after they turned in their final draft, when they have forgotten what they even wrote about — but as a near-necessary part of the process of developing an essay, face to face, during an admittedly uncomfortable conversation, invites students to grow from that failure. We in education like to say this is vital for students, but we rarely walk this walk.
What we often miss is the growth part. We are good at identifying the bad in our students’ writing. It’s easy to scrawl a number in a rubric, or write a code in the margins, telling students their writing is awkward, or trite, or nonsensical, or five-out-of-ten. In my experience, however, that doesn’t help students actually write anything good. It’s the writing equivalent of separating the wheat from the chaff. It’s important for making flour, but it doesn’t bake any bread.
To do that, we have to do something more: we have to tell students when their writing is great, even if most of it’s not.
In almost every essay, I believe, there is something — a paragraph, a sentence, a phrase — that shows a glimmer of promise, of power and insight. I see my role as a teacher as that of the experienced reader who can help my students learn to recognize this flotsam of success in a sea of failure.
“Keep that!” I say, perhaps overly excited about a sentence or paragraph. “Cut everything else, but don’t touch this! It’s gold” Then, I encourage them — through questions, maybe the occasional suggestion — to mine their minds for more.
Sometimes students challenge my feedback in these conversations: “I’m not going to touch any of it; it’s all gold!”
“Really?” I ask. “What about this sentence? What did you mean here? I was confused.”
This leads not to argument — at least, not usually — but rather to nuanced, meaningful discussions with students about their writing, the kind I never had in my earlier years as a teacher when I only wrote comments on the final drafts of papers, illegible in my scrawled handwriting, returned to students weeks later. I love these conversations. They are my gold, and I want to keep them, and hoard them, like Smaug in his Lonely Mountain.
The best part is that the conversations do lead to more gold. After the bewilderment and tears, after rewrites and conferences and rewrites and conferences, students learn, and grow, and become better writers. I see it, but more importantly, so do they.
“So what do you think?” I said as we sat down for our post-writing conference.
“I think it turned out okay. It’s so different from the first draft.” She flipped through the essay. What had been five formulaic paragraphs was now fourteen, and filled with story, dialogue, and subtlety — gold gleaming everywhere.
“I think so, too. It’s a great example of persistence. You got there.”
Kalli smiled. “I did.”
