WP4: WRIT150 — A Retrospective

WRIT 150 has been an interesting component of an interesting past 4 months. 2021 had begun and the world — my world — was still in the throes of a ticking global death toll. As I was driving to a park in D.C. on January 6th, I got an amber alert on my phone telling me there was an emergency 6pm curfew. Several days later I got on a train to Chicago. There I met a young couple from Nebraska who bought a meal for an older homeless couple. We all spoke briefly, and then I got up to go check out the big metallic bean thing in the city center. Several hours after that, I got on a train to Emeryville, California. There I was picked up by a friend’s sister who lived several hours north. We drove back to her place, got In-n-Out, and I slept on the floor of her landlord’s office. I camped on the back porch for the next few days, occasionally going on hikes around a local reservoir. I took my first class of the semester on that porch. I then made my way further north to the farm I was to live on for about 2 months. As I was getting familiar with my classes and teachers, I was gravelling driveways and collecting eggs. I almost met a man named Douglas Fir. I had to transfer out of my WRIT 150 section because it was at a bad time of day and I didn’t like the teacher, but my other classes seemed interesting for the most part. I managed to transfer into a different WRIT 150 section later in the day, but I missed the first class I was supposed to go to because I was still struggling to adjust to living in the same time zone as my University. When I realized I was missing class, there was about 15 minutes left and I was in the middle of weighing out 15 pound bags of weed. I thought it would be too awkward to hop on for the last quarter of class. Two days later, I managed to make it to this new WRIT 150 section, and it turned out to be one of the most informative and engaging classes I’ve ever taken. The content in this class influenced the way I write and the reasons I write, it forced me to take a confrontational inventory of myself as a human being, and has deeply altered my understanding of educational theory.

Here’s “Several Things about WRIT 150”:

1. Pedagogy of the Oppressed: If you haven’t read this yet, you need to. I’m probably going to be repeating that to every teacher I have from here on out. It was a strange experience reading a book that actually has direct application to the rest of the class and the nature of the class itself. I enjoyed how the ideas laid out in the first 2 chapters of Pedagogy of the Oppressed fueled the direction and structure of the way this class was conducted. Some of the sections of this book have become a lens through which I can assess the quality of the teaching of all my other classes, and it was kind of terrifying. The Pedagogy readings illuminated many obvious flaws of the standard models of education that I had been experiencing my whole life. It gave name to the things that I always felt to be wrong, but couldn’t articulate. It also gave me alternatives to the current model, so that I can now do more than passively criticize and shrug my shoulders “because that’s just the way things are”. While I don’t take Paolo Friere’s book as gospel, it has irrevocably changed the way I understand the education that myself and millions of others like me receive. I’ve taken some of the educational tenets of Friere’s libertarian education model and applied it to my real life. In every conversation I engage in, I try to assume that every party has something to contribute and simultaneously many things to learn from the other parties.
2. Workshopping: I had never done this in a class at any level before. It always seemed like a given to just assume that the teacher’s criticism and commentary of a student’s work was more valid than that of the student’s peers. I received a lot of helpful advice from peers that ultimately made its way into my writing, especially later in the semester once we’d developed a bit of rapport and familiarity with one another’s writing styles. And what’s more is that I think some of these critiques couldn’t have come from my professor (or any professor), because they were things that only another 19 year old would’ve thought to contribute. This process has made me value the students learning alongside me as teachers in their own right.
3. Multimodal Writing and Teaching: It’s been really interesting to focus on writing through the lens of asking “how can I most clearly convey my core ideas to a reader”. I grew up being taught to write from the perspective of “how similar can I make my writing to the standard template my teacher gave me, how closely can I stick to the prompt”. I’ve come to appreciate the employment of non-verbal communication being used within written pieces of work. There are many things in life that language simply isn’t best equipped to articulate. Videos, images, and anything else that isn’t strictly prose can and should be used in writing wherever they’re able to effectively convey an idea or an argument. It’s such narrow minded and archaic thinking to assume that “real” writing can’t incorporate any different mediums. Considering we live in a time where many people read books, articles, and other texts on computers or listen to them on audiobooks, it seems strange than many writing teachers and programs are so adamant about the rigidity of what academic writing can look like.
4. The Posts: I had a good time with the post writing portion of this class. As I discussed in my WP1 and WP2, I’m naturally predisposed to partially autobiogrpahical, chronologically ordered entries of writing, so the format of these assignments came very naturally to me. They reminded me of my third grade english teacher who encouraged us to write about whatever the fuck we wanted in whatever way we wanted. It’s very freeing to be told that there are no expectations other than that what you write be honest to yourself and that it be interesting to yourself.
5. Writing style: I think my writing style hasn’t changed much this year. I would say that it has been refined, or narrowed down though, in a way. I’ve always been able to express myself with relative ease through writing. If anything, I found it easier to write down what I was trying to say rather than to speak it aloud. And just as we all develop a certain vocabulary and set of verbal mannerisms when we speak, we all develop a unique way of writing. However, the particular style I developed was not something that fit well into the standard “Double Chunk” paragraph mold that I was violently beaten over the head with for 7 years. Being given explicit creative freedom (within an academic setting) gave me the confidence I needed to reconcile my personal writing style with the underlying goals of academic writing (those goals being to clearly and efficiently express ideas and arguments).

Final verdict: 10/10, would recommend.

Thank you to my professor and peers for an interesting year.