Deciding where we stand

I ask my graduate students, most of whom are either English teachers or aspiring to be, to post responses to our weekly readings. I've been pleased with the online discussion their responses have generated, but sometimes, I'm also bemused by questions like this one:

"Is it possible," Student M. writes, "to not incorporate some of these ideas and STILL help students write?"

I smile, because the answer is obviously yes. Not everything we read for class every week is going to be applicable to our students, our institutions, our curricular goals. Yet the question makes me smile all the more because it is asked in relation to an article on teaching grammar - or, more to the point, an article against teaching grammar through the so-called "drill and kill" exercises common to English classes all over the United States.

The "grammar issue" is cyclical in the teaching of English. I think for the most part the field's theory has arrived at the conclusion that teaching formal grammar (i.e., identify the direct object in this sentence) has little to no impact on the grammar students use in their writing. But theoretical acceptance sometimes has slight pedagogical impact, and so long as our high-stakes testing for secondary ed students demands that they be able to diagram sentences and define parts of speech, high school English teachers are essentially forced into teaching grammar drill-and-kill style. And, to be honest, many college English teachers fall back on this method once we face the overwhelming number of comma splices and sentence fragments riddling our first-year writing students' essays. Our department even requires students to purchase a $100 grammar and mechanics handbook, although supposedly we as a field are "beyond" grammar.

Deciding where we stand as teachers is a difficult, delicate process, one that requires being exposed to the theory so we can even begin to formulate those positions. Still, in my student's desperate discussion board post, I hear the confusion theory can create in the classroom: What if I do this wrong? What if I don't implement my teaching in just this way? Are my students going to learn anything from me?

Composition theory is rife with internal contradictions and opposing viewpoints, much like its sister discipline literary theory. What makes teaching composition easier, though, is that we as a field have thus far resisted grabbing a "theory banner." It is possible to, as Wendy Bishop and Peter Elbow advocate, "range wide" in our pedagogy. Finding what works for a particular group of students means having a well-stocked toolbox of teaching strategies and a willingness to flexibly adapt one's teaching approach to each group of student writers. It means reflecting on our practices, why they work (why they don't) and how they work (how they don't). I hope, by the end of the term, that my graduate students understand this if nothing else: Like writing, the teaching of writing is an art, and there are many different paths to creating a masterpiece.