Eating Lunch While I Wait for Students and Think about Writing and Character

So it’s a turkey and Muenster cheese sandwich, a half pound of tomato-feta-and-cucumber salad, a brownie for dessert and pecking away a few sentences at a time here while I wait for students from my freshman composition class to come for documented essay consultations. I set this time aside to go over a draft with them in as much detail as I have time for and that their drafts deserve because they will not have the time to rewrite the essay after I have given it a grade. (My policy is that students can rewrite almost anything for a better grade as long as they hand it in to me according to the timeline defined in my syllabus; there’s just not time for that this close to the end of the semester.)

I had conferences scheduled on Wednesday and Thursday of last week too–today is Monday, and it’s about 1 PM where I am–and out of three freshman comp classes, of about 20 students each, exactly 6 showed up. I could, I realize, require students to sign up for these conferences, but at this point in the semester, frankly, I am tired and I don’t have that much energy to invest in trying to get people who don’t care enough to come on their own to care about the paper they are trying to write. (I realize this is a little unfair; that there may be people who care but are sincerely busy enough that they won’t schedule the time unless they have an appointment, but those are not the majority of my students.) In fact, here is a student come to talk to me right now. Back in a minute.

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I’m back, and it makes me happy to be able to say that the student who left my office is a real success story this semester. She is not likely to get better than a C+, but considering that she started out failing almost every assignment I gave, that she was convinced she just did not have it in her to write a competent essay, that C+ will represent more learning than most students accomplish. If I could give her a grade based purely on the amount of progress she has made and the effort she has clearly put into the draft we just reviewed, I would give her an A, or at least a B+.

Ironically, though, this student’s success illustrates very nicely what I wanted to write about when I started this post, except that when I started I wanted to use the students who haven’t been showing up as my starting point.

When I applied for promotion to full professor last year, one of the things I had to do was write a brief statement of my teaching philosophy. This was my favorite part of putting my promotion proposal together because, while I have been teaching for nearly 25 years and of course have had a philosophy (or philosophies) during all that time, this was the first time I’d ever had to articulate what matters most to me about the teaching of writing, understood both as the process and the product of what I do in the classroom. This, in part, is what I wrote:

To learn to write well is to pursue a connection between your facility with language and the content, intellectual and otherwise, of your character. I do not mean by this that people who cannot write well have no character or that writing is the only way in which people can show their character. I mean, simply, that you cannot write well if you do not make this connection, because not to make it is to fail, as a writer, in holding yourself accountable for the quality of your own thinking. Or, to put it another way, it is to fail to take your own intellect seriously. As a teacher, primarily of writing but also of literature, I measure my success not in how many A’s or B’s I give out—since grades reflect the surface of learning, not necessarily its quality—but in whether my students have begun to take on the responsibility not simply of having ideas, but of having the audacity, because we lie to our students if we do not acknowledge that it takes courage, to attempt to communicate those ideas in words compelling enough to command a reader’s attention above and beyond the fact that they were written in response to a classroom assignment…. As writers, we exercise this responsibility—we hold ourselves accountable—most obviously through the process of revision. In order for revision to be meaningful, however, in order for revision even to be possible, a writer must have a sufficient stake in what she or he is attempting to revise that the work of seeing it anew feels both worthwhile and necessary.

I originally wanted to write about how frustrating and debilitating it is to have so many students who, no matter how hard I try to craft their assignments so that they can pick topics in which they have a stake, apparently do not take this responsibility at all seriously; it is a pleasure to have written instead about one who clearly does.

Cross posted on The Politics in the Poetry, The Poetry in the Politics.