“I want to argue that
if we take seriously the research and scholarship of these past forty years, we
will have to acknowledge the limits to what we will ever be able to say with
any confidence about how people write and how they ought to be taught….”
--David W. Smit, The
End of Composition Studies,
“Introduction” (p. 2)
“Writing is an act of aggression disguised as an act of
charity” (Bartholomae, 2003, p. 629). When I read David Bartholomae’s
definition of writing in Inventing the University as a young grad student preparing to teach my first college
composition class in the early 2000s, I felt relief. I identified strongly with
my students’ antagonistic relationship with a system of unclear grading and
sometimes impersonal instruction, and I realized that writing could be a
complex outlet for expressing frustration and disappointment, but often, too,
wild ambition. I also knew the feeling of simply wanting to please my teacher—a
teacher I liked very much who I knew cared for me but was bound by a system
that often left him or her frustrated, disappointed, but often wildly ambitious,
too. I was now that teacher. And I hoped that my students would be charitable, whatever that meant. But I also
knew I didn’t I want fake, inauthentic, confused. As a result, I, like so many
teachers, have spent my career a bit of a chimera, oscillating between
student/teacher, aggression/charity, always hoping to find the stable identity
of “charitable teacher” as a possible delivery system for writing instruction.
As a matter of legitimacy, I feel I must define “what I am”
or risk letting it be defined for me, though precisely who is exerting this
pressure, I’m not sure. I get the sense that “the university” asks the writing
teacher to pick a persona: aggressive or charitable. More often, though, we are asked to disguise
ourselves as grading wolves in helper sheep’s clothing: aggression as charity.
Are we really fooling anyone at this point?
In his book, The End of Composition Studies, David W. Smit says in his Chapter “What Does it
Mean to Be a Writing Teacher?” “Writing teachers are sensitive to the needs of
those people whose writing they want to improve. They are encouraging and
helpful” (p. 166). What’s more, he later champions what seems to be my own
position (yes, I felt a brief moment of “whew!”): “Good teachers expect
students to do well, they are empathetic, and they believe that they can make a
difference” (p. 177). I think I would be fine if that is all I had to be. But, there
are the grades. The evaluations. The
tests. The, the, the…. All of the aggressive stuff we talk about being “bad”
but we never comprehensively change. Our system is quite kind to those who talk
about being helpful while dutifully doling out assessment. You can’t just get rid of grades! They say. Why not? Do we even
know what we are doing with them? I’m not sure I know.
The central concerns posed in The End of Composition Studies represent the central conflict I
face every time I walk into the classroom: What is writing? What is the writing
teacher? Ultimately, Smit admits that these are questions that might not have
full answers, and I agree. However, I feel like I need to know what qualifies
as “writing” in order to grade it and
explain that grade. And if I don’t know what qualifies as writing, what the
hell am I doing grading it and calling myself a writing teacher? How, exactly,
am I supposed to explain that? To
others in my discipline? To myself? And most importantly, to my students? At
this point in the milieu of “the university,” my legitimacy as a writing
teacher seems to depend on two very contradictory things: 1) my contractually
bound willingness to say I know what “good writing” is and aggressively slap a
grade on others’ writing, and 2) my willingness to tip my hand and admit to my
students that, no, I don’t actually know everything about writing… none of us
do. If they leave my class feeling like writing is more than a bit mysterious,
it might not be because I’m an utter failure or because they are “stupid” (that
word—I die a little when I hear it, don’t you?): it might be because, as Smit
points out, “We make judgments about people’s writing abilities all the time
based on very little information and a great many unstated assumptions about
what we mean by writing ability” (pg. 32). Smit admits, “There may be no way to
resolve the ambiguity at the heart of writing and writing ability” (pg. 39).
While this might help me sleep at night if I am trying to forgive myself for
that C that I gave the student who might have deserved a B, there is NO
ambiguity on his or her transcript, now is there? So it doesn’t help the
student much. There is also no ambiguity in the message that I have received
time and time again that I shouldn’t contribute to “grade inflation” by being
too lenient (charitable?) if I hand out too many A’s (besides, that might be
perceived as an attempt to boost my own students reviews, and I wouldn’t
want any ambiguity there—it wouldn’t look good, now would it?).
Yet… our students continue to let us read their writing.
Knowing the system, knowing our struggles. Knowing… our students are charitable enough to continue to share their work
with us, validating our position when all else fails. To me, more than being an
act of aggression, this is an act of agreement. A willingness to help us find
our way, even knowing we might not be able to help them find theirs. What
kindness and empowerment! And bravery. Writing and letting someone else read your writing in any environment knowing critique is coming is an
incredible act of courage, ever amplified by the self-knowledge that you are
not a writer of the same experience-level as your audience. Maybe I can’t
always be kind and brave with my students, as much as I want to be. Maybe I
cannot teach them without grading, with transparent charity. But at the very
least, I can recognize what they offer. And I can show them, above all,
respect.
We're all in this together,
Rachael
We're all in this together,
Rachael
(Sometimes we get lucky! Students share their work without our asking for it, and we don't HAVE to grade it! Check out the blog run by one of my wonderful students: Living Simple: Through My Eyes)
I agree with your view of how writing is graded as being aggressive behavior. When you attempt to put a value on one piece of writing over another, writing has lost it's main purpose of letting the writer express their thoughts through words. This constriction makes the writer judge their own work before they even see how wonderful it could be. The system can be very corruptive.
ReplyDeleteAlso, thank you for sharing my blog! I really appreciate it, Rachael!