I have been disengaged from my teaching the last several years. I am burnt out on the mundane details of it, like the drudgery of grading and of tracking attendance, but more importantly, I am also lacking in passion. I used to believe this work I did made a difference – now I am uncertain if I have any lasting, positive effects on my students and the world through what I do in my classrooms.
I have lost a sense of purpose for my work – a conviction that what I am doing matters.
I teach the same stuff over and over:
Yes, you need to have a point you can articulate to make your essay effective — it’s called a thesis.
No, you can’t just tell me that you loved the movie – you need to analyze how it works, how it made you love it.
If you make a statement about how that song gets a message across to its readers, it helps to have evidence from the song to back yourself up. Quote lyrics!
Yes, you can break grammar rules, but an academic essay peppered with fragments, run-ons and misspellings isn’t likely to win you any points. Break the rules on purpose and for a specific effect! Not because you didn’t know the rules.
It gets old.
Especially since I no longer believe that… hmm, let me just be blunt: I don’t believe in the academic essay anymore. Not one bit.
Yup, I said it. Out loud.
I am a teacher in academia, working in a course sequence that has as one of its goals the preparation of students for the writing they will do throughout college, and I do not believe that the kinds of essays we teach are useful.
That said, I do still believe in everything I listed above – writing is about communicating, and it really does help if you know how your readers will react to sentence fragments and if they produce a cool rhythm in your prose or are just annoying, it is important to have some sense of purpose for your pieces, being able to really look at something and talk about how it works is cool and keeps you from being taken in by the oodles of silly shit out there on the Internet, and being able to back up the things you say if you’re arguing something is pretty key to your ideas being entertained at all by anyone.
The problem is, is that the “academic essay” is completely lacking in context. It is a sterile exercise in purposeless analysis. And no one writes this kind of thing anywhere else but in undergraduate coursework.
Because this kind of essay is used by instructors across the disciplines as away to get students to prove they know things – that they’ve read the chapters assigned with some sort of critical attention, that they memorized the facts and dates and theories and can do some minimal assessment of them, that kind of thing – I feel obligated to make sure my students can do this kind of writing. And I have seen students’ abilities to do basic textual analysis get weaker over the years. Blame it on underpaid and overburdened high school teachers, blame it on having to teach for tests like AIMS, blame it on the Internet or texting or whatever (which I don’t frankly buy into) – but the lack of preparation in this arena is real and definitely more profound that it was when I first began teaching.
Anyhow… So I feel obligated to “get down to basics” or something and teach basic analysis and expression of said analysis. Not quite the 5-paragraph essay deal, but it’s feeling more and more like just that with every class period I spend focused on thesis statements and body paragraphs that have claims and evidence and explanation and that tie back to said thesis statement.
I have watched my teaching move to focus more and more on these aspects of writing and less on writing as communication, as expression of a self, as playful exploration of ideas and experiences. All because I have felt guilty about wasting valuable class time on that kind of thing – those more intangible aspects of writing – when my students so very much need practice with academic essays to survive college.
In so doing, I’ve killed the joy in teaching I once had, because frankly, teaching like this is boring. Like I said before, it’s writing that is almost totally removed from reality (except for the “survive school” reality), and so lacks passion and engagement for any one – students, me…
In a moment of beautiful synchronicity, an article was passé don to me by a colleague: “Language, Power, and Consciousness: A Writing Experiment at the University of Toronto” by Guy Allen. Allen describes a curriculum he developed, a bit by accident, while teaching a course called “Effective Writing.” There is a lot to his article, of course, but it boils down to this: he discovered that by teaching personal essays he improved his students’ abilities to write effective expository essays. Direct teaching of expository essays did not improve those abilities.
Let me reiterate: direct instruction in expository writing skills didn’t improve students’ expository writing abilities, but teaching them personal essays did.
Well, COOL.
This guy ended up teaching an intense regimen of personal narratives, combined with direct work on craft (exercises in eliminating wordiness and clichés from writing; how to replace passives and forms of “to be” with active, concrete verbs; being detailed instead of vague; building strong, parallel phrases, sentences, and paragraphs – that kind of thing). Students applied the craft exercises to their personal narratives, revising them throughout the course. All of this was driven by a focus on communicating – these stories were shared with others, and so demanded that the authors have a clear goal for their work, and that they utilize the craft skills to get it across.
They got it. They wrote and revised and were passionate about what they were writing because it was their lives and ideas and experiences being communicated to real people. They could get distance on their writing and analyze it and the experiences they were trying to convey because they cared that readers get what they wanted to say – so they were invested in the entire revision process. They didn’t just tell stories – they crafted them, imbuing them with energy and purpose and the power to actually reach and touch readers.
These skills then carried over to all their other writing, even the “academic essays” they had to write in some classes.
There is a lot Allen had to say about why this worked – the power of narrative to engage us and help us think more deeply about everything and help us make the world make sense… About the power of treating students as writers and working to improve them as writers – rather than improving their writing… And I will write about that in detail in a future post. But right now, I just want to say how FREE I suddenly feel. Freed from this life-sucking teaching focus that I’ve fallen into over the last few years. Freed from the guilt that if I teach something aside from basic academic writing (whatever, really, that is), I will be failing my students.
I want my students to feel they have something to say, that they are writers, that they can convey ideas effectively to readers, and that writing is so very much more than regurgitating course content or proving mastery of grammatical conventions for a grade.
If I can teach them that, I will have done something real in the world, I believe.
