A Journey to Literacy

I learned to read later than many of my peers—in first grade. While this realization was a frustration for me at the time, I never realized that it was a serious concern for my parents until my mother gave me a collection of my work from first grade. In it was a manila envelope filled with worksheets that my aunt, an elementary school librarian, had mailed to my parents. I never asked if they requested the materials or whether she took it upon herself—which she often did—to help, but seeing it indicated to me that someone had identified an issue. This was not due to my lack of reading material or to my parents not reading to me: I think I had every Little Golden Book printed before 1975 and a subscription to Humpty Dumpty magazine—guess who gave me that for Christmas. I was more interested in using the Little Golden Books as a road for my Little People cars than I was in reading them, and I completed the coloring, drawing,  and the “What’s different in this picture?” activities in my magazine, ignoring the stories altogether.  When ignoring the words was no longer an option as my focus was directed to actually reading the material, reading became a chore.  Writing, on the other hand, was a different story.

I moved to Germany after Kindergarten, away from my grandparents who had been a huge part of my life. Writing was the only way I had to communicate with them, so it became more important for me to write than to read. Looking back over my work from first grade, I thought that it would have been difficult to determine that I had a reading issue judging by my handwriting, which continues to receive attention. My theory has always been that I saw writing as an artistic expression: essentially, I drew my letters.  While reading was a chore, writing was a joy, and I wrote prolifically. I don’t know how many of the letters I wrote were actually mailed, but I wrote hundreds over the course of Daddy’s three-year tour. When my sister and I played school, I always focused on writing, requiring her to trace and copy letters countless times, which she could not do with very much success being four years younger than I.

In this collection of papers, I also found a passport from the 1977 summer reading program full of international stamps to represent the books that I read. I vaguely recall the program, but I do remember how I got there: my first grade teacher Mr. McGowan had a daughter my age, and he invited me to be Katherine’s companion to the summer reading program. We became fast friends and actually attended two others together. Not only had he taught me to read, but he also introduced me to opportunities to read outside of school and material better than SRA reading cards. His influence in my life was greater than he’ll ever know.

Our move from Germany in 1980 was the impetus that changed the way I viewed reading. I felt disconnected from my classmates, so I read to escape. My third grade teacher introduced me to James and the Giant Peach and Charlie and the Chocolate Factory, my aunt introduced me to the Little House on the Prairie series, and Scholastic books introduced me to the paranormal, the supernatural, and the otherworldly. I soon discovered Narnia and Judy Blume, spending a great deal of time with Lucy and Margaret in my room and on the school bus.

As I have discovered with my students and with my own children, I began to read less of what I chose to read as I was assigned more to read. Fortunately, I had Mrs. Bucy and Mrs. Underwood in junior high who assigned enjoyable tales by O. Henry, Poe, and Maupassant. In high school, Mr. LeMire assigned A Separate Peace and Lord of the Flies—both of which I enjoyed—and Ms. Panzarino assigned Julius Caesar and Of Human Bondage—both of which I detested. Mrs. Wetzel assigned classics from the American canon: The Crucible, The Scarlet Letter, The Last of the Mohicans, Life on the Mississippi, and The Great Gatsby. Mrs. Hemstreet assigned works from the British canon one semester (The Canterbury Tales and Paradise Lost, and the next semester, Mrs. Speck assigned a variety of works suggested by CollegeBoard for AP Literature: Hamlet, The Ballad of the Sad Café, and Gulliver’s Travels. The fact that I still remember each of my teachers’ names over twenty years after having had them is a testament to the impact that they had on me.

Even though my reading became limited as I progressed in school, my writing expanded. The essays and reports that I wrote in my classes paled in comparison to what I wrote outside of class. I was a reporter in junior high, in high school, and during my freshman year of college. I was a prolific poet in high school and a writer of short stories and rants against the system in college—most of which were never seen by another’s eyes. I wrote countless notes in high school and countless letters in college. I found myself and I lost myself in my writing, and now I have it to remind me of who I was, who I loved, what I hated, and what I dreamed.

Even in writing this, I have realized how much my own experience has impacted the way I have approached reading and writing with my children. Abigail learned her ABCs and to write her name in preschool. When I asked her if she wanted to start working on learning to read the summer before she began Kindergarten and she replied, “No, I’ll just wait and learn it in school,” I never asked again: I did not want her to feel that her not learning to read before school was an issue as I had felt, and I was confident that she would learn quickly—and she did. I find her writing more often than I find her reading: she regularly records thoughts in journals and emails her friends. I am always impressed with her writing for school: it sounds like her, and I hope that it always will.

For Heath, learning to read and write seemed to be as much of a natural process as learning to walk or to feed himself was. By age three, he could read all of the NFL football team names, which he learned on his own from reading scores and schedules on television, in the newspaper, and on the Internet. By age four, he could read sports articles with very little help. Being left-handed, writing has proven to be a little more of a challenge for him, but he systematically records NCAA football schedules, scores, and rankings each week for both the real season and for his season, so I am not terribly concerned. Because he primarily reads for information, I am continually encouraging him to read to escape, to explore, and to discover; and it warms my heart when I find him doing so.

In many ways, my own experience dictates what I teach and how I teach, but more importantly, it influences my understanding of students’ reluctance to read, resulting from insecurity, a bad experience, or a silent protest against what they are being asked to read.  As an experiment in a small high school freshman English class, I individually selected a young adult book for each student based on what I had learned about him/her during the school year. I was amazed to learn that it was the first book that many of them had enjoyed reading since elementary school. This speaks volumes about curricula, about how we limit students, about what must change, and about how my own experience influences my instruction.

Learning by Teaching

The best way to learn is by teaching: considered to be one of the best practices (an education buzz word), this idea reverberates in education literature and workshops. I’ve found this to be true both for my students, as well as for myself. In preparing to teach a concept, you to have a clear understanding of it that will enable you to present it in several ways and to clarify it further if necessary. Through such preparation, a great deal of learning occurs.

I am not too proud to admit that I really didn’t learn how to write until I taught writing. Of course, I was a pretty successful writer before moving to the other side of the desk, but I never really knew why. I had never thought about how I approached a writing task, how I planned, how I researched, how I actually wrote an introduction until I had to explain to students how to do those very things. This essentially forced me to examine my own techniques and strategies and to try new things. Through preparing to teach others, I actually taught myself  a few new tricks. This proved to be the case even with minutia: the colon now finds its way into almost all of my writing.

Preparation for teaching is a continual process that involves both planning and reflecting. Although I do not sit down to write reflections for each activity, strategy, or lesson I teach, I do reflect. I continually fill my tool box (another bit of education lingo) with ideas that have worked and those I want to try. If something doesn’t work for me, I either alter it or remove it immediately from my collection of files. Some of these tools are printouts from web sites, some are merely notes on post-its, and some are bookmarked sites. All of them are accessible for use during planning, and all are expendable if they don’t work for me. Seeing this as a continual process makes me a somewhat of a natural reflective practitioner, for I am always looking for new ways to do the same ol’ thing better.

FYC Student and Instructor Expectations

Ideally, a student will enter FYC understanding the forms and functions of grammar and mechanics, enough about rhetoric to formulate an substantiated argument, and a vocabulary broad enough to manipulate language in creative ways. This, however, is not an ideal world, and these ideal students are not enrolled in FYC courses. Realistically, FYC have distorted views of grammar and mechanics resulting from the misconceptions of their former teachers, little understanding of how to develop and substantiate any argument beyond their own (unsubstatiated) opinions, and a weak vocabulary resulting from limited reading experiences. Therefore, an FYC student really needs to come to class knowing what they do not know, understanding of their own strengths and weaknesses, being accountable for their own learning, and willing to take risks in order to facilitate growth.

FYC instructors need to come to class knowing where their students are and where they need to be. While knowing theory provides an instructor with a foundation upon which to build the curriculum and instructional practices, it cannot compensate for knowing his/her students. Objectives that require students to perform tasks dependent upon previous learning are lofty and unachievable if the instructor has no understanding of the scope of the high school curriulum. The majority of FYC students rarely wrote formal essays in their high school English classes, and usually, those essay topics and essay formats were prescriptive. The majority of FYC students have little, if any, experience writing analysis essays, not to mention formulating an analytical thesis.  For these reasons, instructors need to scaffold lesson plans, having one activity build upon another to achieve the objective. Should that objective be unachievable during one lesson, the instructor must implement “plan B,” whether that is reteaching, working on an alternate activity, or extending a due date. Having to resort to a plan B reflects an instructor’s commitment to student learning, not his/her incompetence.

Grading Practices

One of the clips in “Take 20″ focused on the idea of “correctness” and how it isn’t necessarily as important for a student’s writing to be grammatically and mechanically perfect as it is for them to have conveyed the content effectively. I have always believed that an unsubstantiated claim is a far greater sin than a comma splice, and this has undergirded my grading practices all along. I do believe it is important to indicate grammatical and mechanical errors on student work (afterall, 90% of what I grade is actually a first draft), but I disagree that these errors should weigh heavily in grade determination. This has made me extremely unpopular among the red BIC wielding grammar warriors in my former high school English departments, but I simply could concede and grade the way they did and had for decades. Many of my own essays “bled” from red ink slashes in high school, but I cannot honestly say that my writing ever improved from that grading method.

My grading practices are a direct reflection of my “philosophy” of composition. I firmly believe that content is far more important than grammar and mechanics: students are usually familiar enough with comma usage rules to be able to look them up and apply them; however, they cannot look up how to think, how to analyze, how to support a particular claim, how to utilize their own voices, and how to communicate their thoughts effectively.

What Puzzles Me…

Since our very first class, I have been contemplating the very definition of “rhetoric” in terms of “where it ends” (as Dr. Kemp phrased it). While I agree that “visual rhetoric” exists in the same context as verbal/written communication, I wonder when it crosses the line. When the “ends” of visual rhetoric are for capital gain (i.e. advertising and marketing), can it still be classified as rhetoric? When the “means” of visual rhetoric are solely based on the appeal the physical appearance depicted rather than on the interpretation of the image, can it still be classified as rhetoric? The boundaries are too blurred in my mind at this point. Can someone clarify them for me (if they can, in fact, be clarified)?

Take 20 Video

The composition instructors made several comments that I found most interesting and a little surprising:

• “I don’t think correctness has a whole lot of place in first year composition.  Again, I think it’s about invention, I think it’s about audience.  To the extent that correctness matters, it’s about caring.”
• “… if John McPhee needs a copyeditor, how can I tell a freshman student, you know, you’ve got to produce this and it’s got to be correct and you have to do it on your own?”
• “Teaching writing is encouraging students to take risks and not penalizing them for taking those risks.”

I suppose what appeals to me most is that they validated my own views about ”correctness.”  In several instances, I’ve found that the English teachers who regularly massacred student work with their red BICs were the very ones who sent emails, memos, and professional reports full of errors. As much as it pains me to admit at times, I know that my writing is far from perfect, so how can I expect my students’ to be? When I see my students taking chances with their writing–whether its challenging a particular text’s thesis or using a colon to correct two independent clauses–I feel like I’ve done my job.  Needless to say, these views were quite inspiring and made me feel like I am not alone in my pedagogical philosophy (like I have for the last six years).

The trends that I see emerging involve multi-genre writing, visual literary, multi-media composition, and multi-modal composition that combines the visual with the aural. (I am not certain if such a designation exists or if I am using it correctly, but I hope I convey the idea somewhat successfully.) Without question, these trends will have a huge impact on other areas of the academy that essentially expect composition courses to solely focus on writing.

I am unlike those teachers in the video who “absolutely love” teaching composition and grading papers: I prefer teaching literature and writing in that context. As Andrea Lunsford commented, I suppose I simply don’t have the “patience” for it.

Writing Process

I am one of the guilty ones: during my MA study, I “binge wrote” all of my the 15-20 page papers in mad 24-hour sessions. I did the research weeks in advance, scribbled sketchy outlines to organize it, and even “wrote” the papers in my mind, but I never sat down to get my thoughts on paper until the deadline forced me to. Looking back through them when selecting a writing sample for admission applications, I realized how obvious my process was. I will forever wonder how great my paper ”Anti-Catholic Sentiment in The Monk” could have been had it been revised at least once.

I have realized the error of my ways: not only did the quality of the work make this glaringly apparent, but also the realization that I am too old to suffer the days of physical impairment caused by sleep deprivation. Needless to say, it has been years since I’ve written anything academic or scholarly. The paper that I am currently working on will essentially serve as the “proving ground” for my new process. I began the paper as I read the work, annotating specific interesting or contextually significant passages. These observations then directed the search to find if someone had already addressed them or if those areas addressed relate to the ones of  interest. Although I have written a short response paper and a presentation on my observations and the research related to them, I am still in the “pondering stage.” However, writing down my thoughts–something I never did before–has helped, and I know it will prove beneficial when I draft. My plan is to work in sections, dealing with one aspect of the research at a time, over time.

I am also guilty of hypocrisy: I always stressed the importance of revision to my students, and I even designed the assignments to require it, yet I can only think of two times that one of my papers ever made it through this step of the process in my MA study and never in my BA. My hope is that working through this essay one section at a time will prompt me to revise the previous work along the way, culminating in something about which I never have to wonder.

Academic Voice

The emphasis that instructors place on voice is directly related to their instructional emphases; therefore, it is an area of contention for many. Traditionalists believe that academic voice should sound like a textbook or an encyclopedia; expressionists believe that voice should be consistent regardless of the writing purpose or audience. Both are extremes, and both are wrong for our students.

Foremost, students need to understand both purpose and audience in order to determine the formality of their academic voice. Nothing is more trying than listening to a paper presentation at a conference that reads like a conceptual mathematics textbook. At the same time, a paper filled with casual comments and humor is hard to take seriously. A writer’s distinctive voice does not necessarily interfere with nor detract from academic voice if it is appropriate for the occasion. Voice, after all, is a rhetorical convention.

Why teach composition?

At some point during my first class meeting, I tell my students that of all core requirements, composition is the only course that directly applies to all others. Essentially, this is the very reason that we teach composition.  The course should provide students the opportunity to fine tune their writing skills while learning to think critically about their own and others’ writing. 

Having spent the last six years teaching high school, I am very familiar with the my students’ backgrounds. Many of them only have a basic understanding of the generic essay form of five paragraphs written on a scripted prompt. Rarely did they develop their own topics or were they required to support their arguments or analyses with textual evidence or resource material. Most are at Moffett’s “generalization” stage in the way they view and approach writing.

If a student is to build upon this foundation to reach the pinnacle of academic discourse, they need to understand the vast differences between the two and they need guidance to make that transition. They need to see word choice, grammar, and mechanics as rhetorical choices rather than what Mr. X or Ms. Y like to see in their students’ work.  They need to understand their audience and compose their work accordingly. They need to move from Moffett’s “generalization” stage to “abstraction.”

First year writing teaches students to think through writing and to write through thinking. Academic success depends on the strength of these abilities.

The Three Most Important Aspects of Writing

In my experience, all compelling, eloquent, entertaining writing is strong in three major areas: content, organization, and voice. For this reason, I focus on these areas instruction and give them the most weight when assessing writing.

Depending on the mode of writing, the type of content varies; however, all content must be purposeful. A narrative composition must have a point, just an an argumentative composition must have support.  Because the audience’s prior knowledge ultimately dictates the depth and sophistication of the content, the writer must be aware of his/her readers.

Readers must also be considered organizing writing. A writer may lose its audience in a poorly organized narrative, just as it may lose their interest/support in an argumentative piece. Just as words are carefully selected to transmit meaning, organization must be carefully planned to elicit the desired result.

Where the desired result is concerned, voice is integral. Nothing repels readers faster than lifeless writing. When all else–content and organization–are strong, lacking voice is like leaving the icing off of the cake: while some readers may like cake, others prefer icing.