I enjoy cooking. These days, with what feel like ever-increasing obligations in my work schedule and my increasingly long days at work, one of my low-key, relaxed pleasures remains experimenting with recipes, trying things out, refining them. And I wish the way I taught, the way I ask students to write, matched up better with the way I cook.
It starts with when I want something, with desire: when I’ve got a taste in my head, or an ingredient I want to work with. Lately, it’s been fish soup — not quite chowder, but close — and I’ve been coming at it from different directions, most of them involving Thai and Vietnamese flavors. So for the first draft, I tinkered with onion and garlic and sesame oil, fish broth, catfish, potatoes, green vegetables. Not good: the textures were terrible. The flavor of the broth was right, at least. So I regrouped, cooked the vegetables separately from the broth, used clam juice and curry paste and lime juice, added scallions and basil and cilantro at the end. Still not there: the broth is again the best part, but too many different vegetables are distracting, though it’s a gloriously green soup. Better than the first version, at least, in that it’s worth keeping and will feed me for a couple days. But too spiciness and citrus obscures the seafood flavors. I’m almost there, and I’ll try again in a week or two, reducing and focusing the base, making it simpler, making the accent notes work together.
I wish my students had the luxury of that extended process in their writing. I’ve tried to plan it into the course, to make it available, but when I write, I know that availability and desire without time — or any of those terms without the other — are often and too easily a recipe for 1-2-3 casseroles and tupperware leftovers. When I cook, I can come back to it because I want to.
Where’s the place for the student who makes the burnt dish and then makes the same burnt dish again? Sure: I need Shaughnessy and Bartholomae helping me with the recipes. Part of it is certainty and vocabulary, making a roux, roasting the spices, knowing when to deglaze; part of it’s knowing what ingredients you like to pull from. But the most important part, I think, is knowing what you want. What you’ve got a taste for: desire.
Lately, I’ve felt like I don’t know how to teach that last thing.
I’m not sure I know how to teach that last thing either, but I’m not sure it’s very important in gateway courses. Are we talking about other courses? …
Desire may not be teachable, and we certainly can’t require desire. But I suspect (strongly) that desiring that desire be part students’ experiences of learning/writing has a lot to do with how much we want our classroom experiences to be a pleasure for ourselves too. I know I’m determined that my career change to teaching will be as much pleasure as it is work!
I’m a selfish practitioner. Even in required “gateway” writing courses, I’ve frankly told students my overwhelming desire not to be bored. Flagrantly and repeatedly I claim my selfishness and request/demand writing that will interest me. Subversively, I hope that revealing my very real desires to have fun during class, to enjoy the time I devote to reading students work on weekends and evenings, will somehow also make a space for young writers to tap into their desires too. So what if it’s a required course? All the more reason to make it as interesting together as possible. We have to be here anyway, it might as well be a blast, an experiment, a first draft of fish soup rather than just duty or canned tuna.
I think you’re right, though, about the ellusiveness of desire. It’s unusual for students to meet me all the way and identify what they really really want from their writing and learning, although by the end of a semester we’re closer, sometimes. And I do get some funny looks early in the semester when my response to “What do you want?” is “Not to be bored!” It’s a game, it’s an act, but it’s also true. Being blunt about this, I risk appearing overly selfish, maybe even (gasp) unprofessional in the hope that my writers’ will rise to the challenge. Not the challenge of keeping ME interested, but the challenge of becoming interested themselves.
So I guess I’m not really talking about process here although your cooking/drafting analogy invites that. You’re making me think more that investment in a process is a product of desire, and maybe just maybe it’s possible to craft (or at least invite) a climate of intellectual desire even in a gateway course’s classroom.
Collie, I think you are being brave by being honest about this, and I welcome an open dialogue about it because I have a theory about writing teachers who do not prepare their students for the next level because they’re trying to make the course fun for themselves. I think it’s probably particularly true of creative writing teachers, and I think it’s a big problem in gateway courses. Feel free to comment on my own blog. I’m quite open to this discussion.
Michelle, you make it hard for us to keep up with your ever-changing Web addresses. 🙂
I think teaching is rhetorical. If I can’t show students that I’m into it — that I’m engaged — it’s going to be that much harder to get them to engage. So Collie, I like your perspective that the stakes are perhaps higher as far as actual interest goes for required courses (I’m uneasy about the term “gateway” and its connotations of exclusion) than they are for courses in the major.
I’m teaching a staff syllabus Intro to Lit course, and the first essay — Ben Franklin and his autobiography — felt like a slog. But then we got into nineteenth century American prose, and I’ve had a couple students reading all this contentious stuff, some of which was new to me, and it was a real eye-opener. I was feeling a bit down about the Franklin and how it seemed to be so much just me pushing this stuff and saying it’s important (and in some ways not really feeling it), but especially with all the readings around abolition and John Brown, there’ve been the first stirrings of interest among some of them.
And you never know what will strike a student’s interest–and what they will return to as the semester moves on. Sometimes it takes moving beyond a piece of writing into another one for it to make sense or context.
I teach basic writing, composition, literature and creative writing, and I’m not certain which side of the aisle I’m on regarding Collie and Michelle’s discussion–I think that what Collie is saying is that her bluntness and enthusiasm wakes up students who would otherwise snooze through out the semester, which doesn’t seem to me to be creating a “fun” class filled with no expectations but plenty of laughs and inflated grades. And believe me, I can be “no fun” in a poetry writing class when the students are trying to slack off. But the bottom line is that I can’t instill a desire or appetite in every one and that has to do with reasons beyond my ken.
Ah, point taken Mike about the itinerant aspect. And I know I blog a lot of personal crap, so that’s why I created an extra special blog spot for this. http://minthediary.blogspot.com/2008/03/open-post.html.
🙂
This is interesting because I’m not all about making writing interesting. I want to help my students overcome fears of writing and lack of basic skills that the public education system has left them with, and help them learn how to write essays for college. That’s it. I don’t care if they like writing. I just want to demystify it for them and make them believe they can do it for the sake of their purpose.
I don’t think that took.
here
OK — well, I’ll comment there too, but here, I’ll just say: for those students with fears, for whom it’s a shitty, stupid, blank wall of a forbidding and resistant mystery — is there something to be said for inviting them in; for showing them, “Here — here’s one reason somebody might want to do this — it doesn’t have to be doom and punishment — try it, in a small way, for whatever reason you want, even if it’s just to kill time ’til the end of class”?
(Sigh. There he goes. He’s been into the Elbow again, hasn’t he?)
I very much agree with you. Those are the students who I pull up the chair with and look straight in the eye and ask why, and then I tell them how it’s not as confusing as they thought and not as magical, and that they, too, can find a way to write in an organized way that will get them through college. They are, by and far, glad to have specific direction.
Most of my students do not view it as doom and punishment; they merely view it as something unmastered. They want to master something. Killing time until the end of class is a matter for only a small percentage of my students – I mean, the ones who stick around, of which I have a full class at least on MWF.
You could be specific, you know, about what you mean by inviting them in. I think I’ve been more specific in my criticism of creating assignments that do not prepare and why I’m criticizing it.
No worries about the commenting. I just didn’t want to hijack your comments here with something that was a bit of a tangent.
SERIOUS ABOUT PLAY
I’m working toward a work/play fusion – for me, for students in my classes, for my staff of writing tutors as well. Ideally: an integration of intellectual work/intellectual play in rhetorical environments worth the time and energy of everyone who enters. Definitely not just pleasure for the sake of pleasure, nor even a spoonfulofsugar pedagogy. I’m old, though, so I’m purely not willing to waste any more of my life in rooms of dread or duty, so I am wedded to a principle of pedagogical pleasure.
I can’t bear to think of courses as just means to the next course. (My middle schooler did the litany for me the other day: “We have kindergarten so we can learn how to do first grade. We have first grade so we can learn how to do second grade…” I was a little horrified.)
Though I agree Michelle, that it’s important for courses to have something to do with each other, and the concept of preparation has some merit. Since I have little control over the curriculum or students’ transitions beyond my classes, and significant comp research indicates that concrete writing “skills” don’t seem to necessarily transfer across classes in tidy stepbystep fashion, I think it’s important to be explicit with students that they are the ones who own the learning and have to figure out ways to adapt what they know for different contexts.
I try to conduct my courses so students are likely to 1) get/claim/discover real use value in the writing they do and 2) consciously transfer their developing rhetorical savvy to other writing situations. One end of semester reflection on what they’ve learned doesn’t cut it as an exercise in knowledge tranfer. It’s a constant insistence that students have the choice of permeating the borders of the classroom by working on writing that is of consequence to them — whether that’s gaining ability to work more thoroughly with academic texts or researching and responding to internship opportunities.
The work has to be useful to them (and me) on some level and there’s got to be some pleasure in the learning or it just seems a task of mysterious origin.
To address one part immediately,
I have little control over the curriculum or students’ transitions beyond my classes, and significant comp research indicates that concrete writing “skills†don’t seem to necessarily transfer across classes in tidy stepbystep fashion,
this is actually something that I’m charged with right now and that other people in gateway courses and beyond will soon be looking towards. We’re trying to improve our curriculum to insure that it does help students out in a step by step fashion or at very least, they are prepared for the next course, and it’s going to cause some ripples because not everyone is on the same page.
In reading your entry again, I have to say that I agree with some of your sentiments; they’re just not applicable to my situation. I teach developmental writing at a community college. My students are often fresh-faced eighteen year olds who have skated through the public education system without gaining the very basic skills they need to write anything at all coherently. They’re also often single women who have gone back to school to become more educated and help their children with their work as they see their children in elementary school engaged in work (writing, etc.) already beyond their own capabilities.
So this part,
whether that’s gaining ability to work more thoroughly with academic texts or researching and responding to internship opportunities.
while perhaps a worthwhile sentiment, is just not the same page I’m on. It is very important for me and others in my position to consider this in a step-by-step fashion and make sure that the skills are being built upon because I’m dealing with students who have missed out on skills that are elem and middle school level.
I’ll say no more on the subject then! I think clearly this conversation is not applicable to me. I appreciate the opportunity to voice my thoughts in response, though (as always, Mike) because it’s always helpful to me to identify and solidify my ideas to talk about it.
Michelle,
I’ve taught many sections of basic writing at a public university which may be similar to the community college situation after all, especially when you describe your students “skating.” Sounds familiar! While it is maybe easier to play this game of pleasure-engagement with students who are more used to being engaged with school, my commitment to the approach is grounded in a wide range of classrooms.
Enough from me! I’m beginning to sound didactic and stuck in my rut when really I think there are plenty of credible ways to teach well and to think about that work.
Good luck with your important curricular project — necessary work, often thankless, resisted, but so necessary.
p.s. I tried to comment on your blog, responding with concrete ways I “invite them in” but I’m not sure I did it right. Oh well!
Michelle does have a point about teaching at a cc –I’m not completely certain that university Basic Writing students are always the same population as those in the cc. Or that the course is even the same from school to school. Even though skills may not transfer step by step, there is a need for the instructors to cover (or re-cover) aspects of punctuation and mechanics that the students may not have understood the first time around. The tricky thing is that the students often mistake grammar for writing, so you have to go at it in a way that makes it part of the whole process.