After Reading Papers

I’m beat. I’ve spent most of the evening going through the first stack of student drafts, and I’ve still got plenty to go tomorrow. I’m not even commenting all that extensively — usually just a quick paragraph pointing the paper’s author back to some comments her partner made in the peer response letters I had them do — but still, it’s draining. I’ve changed my first essay assignment this year, drawing considerably on assignments drafted by other teachers in the Writing Program this summer, to couple the usual reflective tendencies of the personal narrative with some more analytical moves that ask students to position themselves within their perceptions of the process of education.

From the early drafts I’m seeing, I’m pretty happy with the assignment. For the most part, they reflect two predominating views of the purposes of writing: writing as an essential communicative skill for the business world, and writing as the true expression of an inner self. That first view pretty clearly lines up with what I’ve been calling the vocational model of education, but the second view doesn’t really seem to directly line up with the liberal education model, unless the true expression of that inner self is itself a marker of class distinction, or unless that authentic inner self is itself set apart from the masses via the Arnoldian process of education.

While I’m at it, I suppose I’d best confess my own conception of the purposes of writing. While I certainly understand writing as giving voice to things that originate in part from what we call a self (and all that qualification is meant to indicate that I don’t want to get sidetracked into the whole social constructionist thing right now), and while I certainly understand writing as a means of communicating those ideas to others, including those with whom one works, I’m also a big believer in writing as a socially situated act by which one constructs oneself and other people (check out Cicero’s oration for Ligarius for an absolutely amazing example of this construction in action), and also as an act which itself builds knowledge rather than just transmitting it.

With all these differing constructions of writing in mind, consider Sharon Crowley’s argument that “the point of humanistic composition is not to create better writers but to display the cultivated character that is the sign of an educated person” (86). This gives me pause when I think about my enthusiasm for the uses of the Web in first-year composition. I know I favor the liberal education model over the vocational education model, but my idea that asking students to publish some of their essays on the Web was intended to make writing matter more, to place it into play in a system that went beyond the simple student-teacher grade-exchange; Crowley’s argument shows me that my temperament and beliefs about education may be pushing me towards asking students to do an online classed performance of self.