Some thoughts on being a writer

Sometimes I think the most difficult part of being an English professor is understanding what it means "to be a writer." I'm convinced that 99% of my students do not think of themselves as writers; they don't write poetry or short stories, they write only when forced to for school, so they don't consider the hours they spend blogging, emailing, commenting on YouTube videos, or instant messaging "writing."

The same is also true for my colleagues in the academy, though: Our jobs depend on our writing, yet few of us talk about ourselves as writers. That's a domain held for the creative writing faculty, those who publish poetry and fiction. The rest of us wouldn't dare be so bold as to assume the label "writer," which means, in effect, that we don't consider what we do - whether it's putting together a research prospectus, a grant application, a syllabus, a lesson plan, a course website, an academic article, or a conference presentation - "writing."

This subject is on my mind more than usual because in two short weeks I'm co-directing a scholarly writing institute for 25 of my faculty colleagues. The goal of the institute, to speak concretely, is for participants to produce a text that is ready for publication. That's a tall order for five days, no doubt, although most everyone is coming in with something already written. But my goals for the institute are even loftier: I want the participants to leave the institute valuing their work as writers, seeing the texts they produce as writing, and being committed to the continual cultivation of their craft.

And so, I'm thinking of the advice I want to give to these writers. Here's what I've come up with as I reflect on my experiences as a writer and what has motivated me, since the age of eight, to write nearly every day of my life:

Write everyday, even if it's only for a few minutes.
Write because in the act of writing, I find the words, words I didn't even know were there, inside me.
Write to know that I am still real. I have substance and thought. I have ideas worth writing down.
Write because it is in the writing that the idea lives, not in the thinking of the idea or the imagining of the idea or the best intentions to give life to the idea.
Write, even if it is only for five minutes, because five minutes over and over during a day will add up to hours, and the ideas will multiply with the minutes.
Write because someday I won't be able to, and I'll miss it. Write everyday.

The challenge of teaching to learn

So this week I've been helping to lead a teacher's institute for university faculty who teach in the "core curriculum," a.k.a. general education classes. From moment one of the institute, these two themes have repeated:

1. How do we engage students with learning?
2. How do we make time for active learning while still presenting content?

I see these two problems as linked. Too many of the young teachers I'm working with seem to believe their job is to present information; they see themselves as repositories of knowledge and students as (to borrow Paolo Freire's banking metaphor of education) empty vessels waiting to be filled with that knowledge. I well remember the lectures I sat (suffered?) through as an undergraduate, and it felt to me at the time like some pompous know-it-all showing off everything he knew that I didn't. I certainly wasn't "engaged" with learning in those classes. And even in the classes in which a professor was an entertaining or inspired lecturer, I mostly memorized information for a test - I certainly didn't "learn" it in any way that would have helped me to apply it later in life. (Which is why, after two semesters of college-level plant biology, I still don't know the difference between an oak tree and a maple tree.)

Tomorrow, I'm presenting a session entitled "Teaching Writing (Not Just Assigning It)" to the teachers. My main point? That teaching and learning must take place at the same time. We can shove an entire textbook chapter's worth of information onto a PowerPoint slide and spend 50 minutes (or, for our poor Tuesday/Thursday schedule students, 75 minutes) reading that information to students, pointing out the bits that are likely to show up on the exam. Or, we can structure activities that help students learn how to learn.

For instance, in my first-year writing classes, I used to drive myself crazy figuring out ways to make students read assigned essays so we could discuss and analyze them in class. I tried hard to assign essays I thought students would enjoy - everybody's head comes up off the desk when Michael Moore asks "Why Doesn't GM Sell Crack?" - but even still, I would always get the same one or two people able to answer my questions and provide thoughtful insights, despite the fact that 25 hands would go up when I demanded to know who actually read the assignment.

One day, out of utter frustration, I just told students to open their books (this was 10 minutes into a dead-silent "discussion" of "Letter from a Birmingham Jail") and called upon volunteers to read the essay aloud. As we read, I told students to circle anything that seemed to them like a main point, to put a check-mark beside passages they found especially moving or eloquent, and to place a question-mark over anything that confused them. When we finished reading what they all swore they had read prior to class, I then had them take out a sheet of scratch paper, choose one of their circled passages, and write down first of all the passage and secondly what they thought the passage meant.

For around 10 minutes, the room was quiet as students worked diligently on this exercise. (I worked, too, because hey, Dr. King warrants a second or third or fourth close reading.) And when the pencils stopped moving, we went around the room sharing what we'd identified as main points.

It was like a miracle occurred. Even the most reluctant, arms-folded-over-chest, one-eye-on-the-clock-and-the-other-on-the-door student had something to say. Students argued over the meaning of passages. Without any prompting from me, they started to volunteer the passages that had confused them - which often turned out to be passages a classmate had understood, circled, and clarified for the class.

We repeated this process for a few readings over the next several class periods, and eventually, I started assigning students to complete this type of double-entry journal as homework. What I found was that not every student was willing to put in that kind of time outside of class; some still tried to duck under their desks whenever I asked for volunteers to "discuss the reading." Yet many students - most, I can say - did this work because they found it useful. It helped them to read closely and critically, something they had not been trained to do, something that doesn't come naturally to any of us, something we all had to learn.

My course evaluations from that class convinced me that I needed to keep doing what I was doing even though it meant we spent less time on grammar exercises, rhetorical theory, and the research process, because almost every single student commented that she or he was using those close reading techniques from our class in other courses. To me, the point of a general education is not simply to make a "well-rounded citizen." Let's face it, we can mostly get through our lives just fine without knowing the history of Western civilization (or the rhetorical appeals to logos, pathos and ethos, to point a finger at my own self-important discipline). But learning how to learn - how, without the guidance of a teacher or a tutor, to dig into a complicated text or tear apart a complex idea and really grasp it - that's a crucial skill. That's something worth going to college to learn.

Of course, the challenge of teaching so that students can learn is, in the first place, convincing university administrators (and on down the chain high school, middle school and elementary school administrators) that curriculum can't be so jam-packed that all teachers feel able to do is shove facts down students' throats, hoping they can hold at least a fraction of it in long enough to spit it back out on an exam. The goal of education has to be helping students become self-directed, critical thinkers, which leads me to the second part of this challenge: Teachers who understand that teaching is about learning, not about content, should be the ones setting the curriculum.

True educational reform in this country doesn't require new legislation. It requires an understanding of what education really is, at bottom. I hope tomorrow I can offer my fellow teachers some tips and tools for teaching "writing to learn," but more importantly, I hope I can persuade them that, as a wise colleague of mine said, if a student doesn't really learn, then the teacher didn't really teach.

Last Day of English 100 (a teaching poem)

I tuck the fat brown envelope with the carefully-typed instructions
into my bag bulging with textbook, gradebook, notebook,
manila folder containing instructions for the final portfolio.

Reflect, I say, that's what I'm looking for, that you know yourself,
and seven blank faces stare back at me. Seven
out of ten who held out almost until this, the last day. Seven

Out of twenty-five who started the term. Six were lost
in the first four weeks, before the first essay was due,
another half-dozen or so when midterm grades came down and they saw

no hope of making the necessary C. Two I lost just last week,
telling them no, not even with an A on the portfolio can you pass,
and both asked, Are you teaching this class again in the fall?

I don't know whether to be flattered or heart-broken.

Seven out of twenty-five, that's all I've kept for sixteen weeks;
I am left with seven faces gazing suspiciously at me and this word - reflect -
on the board, silent, heavy, stark.

I'm not trying to trick you, I say, have I tried to trick you all semester?
No, they agree, but still don't seem to understand
this word, reflect, this ability to make knowledge out of themselves,

to have something worth saying they didn't read in the textbook
and to be asked not to SAY it to but to WRITE it in two hours -
How long do you want this to be, Miss? How many pages?

Whatever is in you, I think, while silently I take the fat brown envelope out
and tell them, Now it's your chance to evaluate me,
and they clamor to tell me again how much they have learned

before I can ask them to write a single word.