Although it is difficult to truly have a teaching philosophy when one has zero experience on the giving end of the classroom, it is possible to hypothesize on which learned/perceived examples of “good teaching” would be most useful in the face of many a sleepy-eyed freshman (or, perchance, beyond). Therefore, it is with exceptional inexperience and a fair amount of uncertainty that I put forth my unseasoned beliefs.
As can be seen in my literacy autobiography, I tend to approach work from a creative angle. I could extend this to the classroom by helping my students find their voices within the academic framework. They should learn early that writing not only does not have to be dry but that it should not be dry. Writing, like all living things, requires water to live and sunlight to thrive. In a creative teaching course I would encourage my students to always carry a pen and paper so they can write down snippets of conversation or images they see during the course of the day. Limited to the content of a 1301 course, however, I would want my students to feel free to be humorous and adventurous in their work to keep it interesting for them and for the graders. I want them to learn that writing can be fun.
But by “fun” I do not mean “terribly written.” It can be easy for young students to mistake the two, equating the freedom to spice up their writing with the freedom to be vulgar and unacademic. Humorous, adventurous writing is all well and good, but students need to be aware that their risks must be taken with a healthy dose of academics. Think the old adage, “You have to learn the rules before you can break them.” Familiarizing students with examples of humor and creative writing within an essay format will better help them to understand just how to add these touches into their own work. The writing book has several wonderful choices, including the David Sedaris and Robert Rodriguez articles. By emphasizing the ways these authors insert their own voices into a literary article, students will become aware of various methods for writing sound academic papers that refuse to be boring. My Powerpoint presentation on deconstruction, which inserts humorous photos and French music into the relatively dull facts about deconstruction, would be a useful product to show my students when explaining this concept. It remains an informative piece but it is injected with just enough humor to make it less groan-inducing for the audience.
Before students can write academically, however, they need to be confident in their spelling and grammar. It is probably not best to dwell too long on these topics in the classroom, but individual papers must be carefully edited for consistent errors so the student can learn from their mistakes (Grammar correction). Professional writing does not contain comma splices every other sentence. If the class, as a whole, experiences specific issues I would dedicate a little more time in class providing helpful advice about how to fix the problems in the future.
These three points imply a certain amount of student interaction in the classroom. I believe it is important to stop lecturing every now and then to get the students involved with the material. Asking lots of questions and allowing students to speak up and contribute to the overall class discussion lets them feel more like a community instead of a lump on a desk. Giving them class time to use as a forum enhances their desire to show up and learn.
Unfortunately, I have not yet had the opportunity to force my beliefs on a group of unsuspecting undergrads. But when the time comes, I hope the ideas I have picked up throughout the semester will help me to create a classroom environment that inspires the students to write better, wetter drafts.
I was a six-year-old plagiarist. For class writing assignments I copied text from video game booklets and summarized “Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles” episodes. Looking back on the monsters I drew and the little stories I wrote for them, I now believe I was rewriting “Ultraman.” I confess now these sins against popular entertainment because I do not want to be damned to a life of adapting games and television shows into godawful grocery store novels.
My parents started teaching me how to read at the age of three. Some of my earliest memories are of my mother reading the Bible to me as I followed along in a separate copy. I was also fond of audiobooks. My parents tell me I listened to the tapes so much I had the books memorized before I could actually read them. When other relatives came by I would impress them by “reading” these books to them, turning the pages at the appropriate moments (indicated by beeps on the cassette tapes).
The Atari 2600 and Colecovision also taught me to read. My dad owned somewhere in the vicinity of eighty games, and he taught me to recognize titles by the image on the cartridge so that when he asked me to put in Looping I knew exactly which game to grab. Once again, I became a regular performing monkey once an aunt or uncle came over, showing off my phony reading abilities.
But perhaps I was already learning how to read properly. Sometime between my third year and kindergarten I had developed my ability to the point where I could read books in front of the class. By that time I had moved on from the Bible and was reading choose your own adventure novels. I had the first nine books in the Endless Quest series, my favorite being the fourth, Return to Brookmere, by Rose Estes. Although I loved these books, strangely enough I would never get into RPGs until Chrono Trigger.
My introduction to writing must have been simultaneous with my reading, because as early as I can remember I told people I wanted to be a writer. But the first big expression of this desire didn’t reveal itself until the fifth grade when I wrote a 100-page novel. Keeping in step with my earliest writing memories, the novel was fan fiction, an adaptation/reinvention of the computer game King’s Quest V. A year or two later I would base another novel in the world of Space Quest.
I didn’t come into my own as a writer until seventh grade when I discovered poetry. The Wellston Middle School arts and letters pamphlet, The Wellston Rocket, published three of my poems in the eighth grade. I continued writing poetry consistently until the end of high school, but when I joined the Berkner High School newspaper, The Berkner Rampage, I started to spread myself out between poetry, fiction and journalism. After graduation I temporarily abandoned all three to become a full-time reader.
When I came to Texas Tech I intended to study journalism. But it wasn’t for me. All along I wanted to get back to poetry and fiction so I switched over to the English department. My senior year was the most productive time of my life. I stopped plagiarizing from single sources and started to “pay homage” to my favorite books, stealing and melding together so many ideas they’re unrecognizable, which is about the most you can hope for in fiction these days. No one is without their influences, so I take all of them at once and mold them into something new. At least, that’s what I hope to do now that I’m too old to plagiarize.
When composing a piece of literature (the heading under which every word I write falls), first I take a brisk walk through the autumn streets (for it is always autumn wherever I am) and observe the people I see and the scenery they inhabit. Then I follow them around, to their office or home, and spy on them through the windows. After being chased away, I contemplate the entirety of their existence, down to the very fabric of their socks, and return home. Upon opening up my laptop, I sit in idle wonder for about five minutes before standing up to pace the room. I proceed to pace, faster and faster, for a number of hours before falling into a despair which leads to violent outbursts of self-loathing. Finally, in the dawn of a new day, inspiration strikes just before I pass out from utter exhaustion. When I come to an hour later, I grab the remains of any inspirational leftovers and write for all I’m worth before the deadline closes in (as it inevitably does). Minutes before fear becomes horrendous reality I have completed it, a new masterwork ready for the eyes of an adoring public.
Moving on…
To be more successful, I think the obnoxious writer above should allow himself more time in the pre-writing phase. Thinking about writing only the night before a paper is due is not only bad for his paper but terrible for his well-being. Once he’s finally cranked something out, too, he should give himself time to edit what he has written, especially to change the long bits that don’t make much sense. Perhaps his method works for him now, but it will not always work.
As far as all this “process” over “product” nonsense goes, it seems to me Murray is simply re-labeling the teaching process to sound more laissez-faire. Teaching pre-writing, writing and editing as a process is already the natural order of things. He seems to be saying we should allow students to write as terribly as they like so they can spend the rest of the semester editing and revising the same paper over and over again (because it’s all good, yes, and we’re very student-oriented, yes, and we don’t want them to give up on writing, no, so we should just shut up and not exist, yes). What I’m saying is, OF COURSE writing is a process, but SOMETHING has to come out of that process, and that something is a PRODUCT, which should be, hopefully, a GOOD PAPER. I do not agree with the idea of letting the process run off into infinity with no final product to show for it.
So called “voice” enhances “academic voice,” so called, I believe, etc. Although it’s easy to think of academic voice as the dried-out shell of an old professor dying on the beach, this is not always the case. The best academic articles maintain some humor of their authors, some turns of phrase what allows them to be unique-like. Without voice, an academic article is really only the hollow husk of a cicada, not the cicada itself, and what a disappointment that is!
We teach first-year writing because we don’t have the option of teaching fourth-year writing. But we have to start somewhere. I suppose we can most identify with the little tykes. They’re just learning their primary language for the first time and we’re learning to teach them that language for the first time. So we’re both beginners, really, these illiterate swarms and us. The poor things. I wonder what they did in high school. I wonder how they got to college in the first place, unable to understand their own language.
We should teach them how to write a single coherent sentence, how to pinpoint the thesis of an essay, and how to wipe their own grammatical drool so we don’t have to do it for them.
Teaching proper spelling and grammar is important. A student who can’t write a proper sentence won’t be able to put together a coherent essay. But beyond those foundations, it is probably most important to focus on comprehension. Many students read essays and do not pull out the main points when summarizing them. Writing is inseparable from reading. If a student can not read properly he or she will never write properly.
I suppose that’s only two things. So I’ll separate out the importance of the sentence. As instructors, we need to teach students the breath (and breadth) of a sentence. People throw around run-on sentences and comma splices like they just don’t care (which, in all likelihood, they probably don’t). They need to understand how commas are used to indicate brief pauses or breaths in a sentence and how periods are used to separate complete thoughts from each other, usually with a longer pause/breath than a comma. I think that helps them understand a little better the uses of these poorly mistreated punctuation marks.
