5060 Blog

            I once had a band director whose favorite phrase was, “Teaching is teaching.”  What he meant by this was that the teaching skills which we learned as section leaders in band could be transferred to teaching in other disciplines.  So far, I have taught percussion as a section leader for four years, high school English for five years, college remedial English for one year as a graduate student, and college freshman composition for one semester as a graduate student.  In my experience so far, the words of my band director have proven true.  Even though my English pedagogy classes have taught me important skills which have shaped me into a better teacher, there are four basic things that have informed my teaching in any situation.

            The first of these is my underlying assumption that all students are capable of learning.  This was something which I first understood as a section leader of the front ensemble, which is the section of the band where band directors tend to dump any student who cannot march or who does not seem to be able to play an instrument.  Ironically, the band directors then tend to give these students the loudest instruments—the cowbell or the cymbals—to play.  It became my responsibility as section leader to teach these students to play these instruments with good technique.  I quickly learned that even the most seemingly hopeless of these students could be taught something.  My later experience as a high school teacher reinforced this important lesson.  I taught a variety of levels from regular to AP, freshman through senior, and in every class there were always a few students who seemed hopeless.  Still, I approached these students with the assumption that they could learn something, and usually they did.  I also attribute some of this assumption to my own experience as a writer.  Although I have always enjoyed writing, I have not always done it in the most efficient or effective way.  It is only within the past few years that I have begun implementing responsible writing strategies like planning ahead and starting projects early.  When students procrastinate and make poor decisions about writing, I can remember being in their position, so I try to share my own tricks of the trade with them.

            Despite the fact that I frequently use my own experience as inspiration, I never forget the second important thing I learned: not all students think the way I do, and this is a good thing.  Their different strengths and weaknesses can enrich class discussions immeasurably.  I frequently stress the importance of diverse viewpoints.  Additionally, I incorporate many expressivist activities into my curriculum.  These do not constitute the bulk of the points for any given course, but they help build rapport with the students and, more importantly, help the students perceive themselves as individual writers and creative beings with distinct voices.  I teach writing as a process, as most teachers do, but I also emphasize to the students that there is no Process that works for everyone.  Many of the expressivist activities which I incorporate involve experimenting with types of prewriting, planning, drafting, and revising. 

            Part of helping the students see themselves as individuals with powerful voices is, ironically, teamwork, the third cornerstone of my teaching.  Although I believe that the individual is ultimately accountable for his or her own learning, I have also found much success with group work.  I find that it is most successful when the students have a clear mission that they are invested in achieving.  I learned this valuable lesson when I taught senior English.  I had been teaching Macbeth in the traditional way—that is, students were reading it out loud, and I would stop them every few minutes to ask someone to paraphrase what we had just read.  It quickly became obvious that 90% of the class was not engaged in the lesson, so I put them into groups and gave them study questions.  After a little motivation, the groups began to really work, and some of the least engaged students were taking on leadership roles in the groups.  At the end of the class, we had a much richer discussion than we had been having.  Group work builds rapport between the students, and it gives them a sense of accomplishment and responsibility.  I also work to incorporate activities which enable the students to use different learning styles.  Again, these do not constitute the bulk of the points for any course, but they help the students interact with the material and frequently provide for rich class discussions.  One of the strongest assignments I created was a group project.  However, I seldom assign groups to do long-term projects together for major points.  These sorts of assignments are almost impossible to evaluate because the work is seldom distributed evenly among the group members. 

            Finally, despite my expressivist bias, I am very concerned about teaching students fundamental skills which they will need to succeed.  It is very important to me that they become capable of using academic discourse.  The activities which require and develop their use of academic discourse are always worth the most points.  Still, I think it is important not to overwhelm the students with the gravity of academic discourse, so I layer these skills.  This was something which I learned in band; it is important to drill and expand fundamentals, or fluency will never happen.  While teaching the fundamental skills, I tend to be as individualized as possible.  I agree with post-process theory, and I try to offer the students as much individual attention as I can, especially with larger projects.  One of my favorite assignments is for students to respond in writing to commentary on drafts and then have a short conference with the students.  I spent one year working in a Writing Center, and the conference frequently resembles a tutorial in which I can help students recognize fundamental skills they can work on.  This often clears up any miscommunication about the commentary, and it gives the students the kind of individualized attention which post-process theory recommends.

            My mission as a teacher has two parts: helping students develop as individuals and helping students gain the fundamental skills they will need for academic discourse.  With these two goals in mind, I incorporate expressivist activities, group work, and individualized instruction in fundamental skills to help students grow academically.

This is one of the most successful group projects which I have tried.  I designed this activity for a group of AP Language and Composition students when we were reading T. S. Eliot’s The Waste Land.  After they had done some work analyzing the imagery which Eliot uses in the second section, I let the students choose whether they would prefer to research, create an art project, or act.  The students actually split themselves evenly into the three groups.  Each group required a research component, an artifact to be graded, and a presentation. 

_____________________________________________________________________________

The Waste Land Research Assignment

Your job is to research the allusions and identify the connections between the allusions and the main ideas of the poem.  Be sure you find about the specific part Eliot alludes to and how it relates both to the original work it comes from and to The Waste Land.  Remind me to let you borrow my critical edition of The Waste Land.  Some of these sources are there.

Allusions

A Game of Chess by Thomas Middleton

Women Beware Women by Thomas Middleton

Antony and Cleopatra by William Shakespeare

The legend of Cupid.  Also look up “cupidity.”  Connection?

The Aeneid by Virgil

Paradise Lost Book 4 by John Milton

The legend of Tereus and Philomela from Ovid’s Metamorphosis

The Tempest by William Shakespeare

“That Shakespearian Rag”—see if you can actually find the music!

Hamlet by William Shakespeare

Once you have thoroughly researched these allusions, design a handout briefly summarizing your research.  Be sure to explain how the allusions enhance the imagery and themes already present in The Waste Land.

Your group will also be responsible for designing a 5-10 minute presentation about the most interesting allusions.  This assignment is due Thursday, April 24.

__________________________________________________________________

The Waste Land Art Assignment

Your job is to give the rest of the class a visual image, preferably three-dimensional, of lines 77-106 of the poem.  You need to split the work up among the members of the group.  Be sure you AT LEAST include the following:

1) l. 78-82 “the glass/Held up by standards wrought with fruited vines/From which a golden Cupidon peeped out/(Another hid his eyes behind his wing)”  reflecting the light of a candelabra

2) l. 84-89 the top of her table with its jewels, satin cases, and vials

3) l. 94-96 the mantel and the fire

4) l. 97-100 the painting of Philomel

5) l. 104-106 the other art that may have been in the room 

6) the woman, the open window, the smoke floating around the ceiling

This assignment is due on Thursday, April 24.  You will need to present it to the class and explain how you incorporated details from the poem.

____________________________________________

The Waste Land Acting Assignment

Your job is to give the rest of the class an idea of the characters and scenes in the poem.  You will need to create two different scenes—the discussion between the man and woman in the first scene and the gossiping woman at the pub in the second scene.  Make sure everyone in the group contributes equally!

Scene 1

1) Do your best to recreate the physical details of the setting, especially of the woman’s table. 

2) Figure what motivates the woman to say the things she does.  What does she want from the man?

3) Decide if the man answers out loud, or if he just thinks the things that aren’t in quotes.  What kinds of things does he think/say?  What does this show about his character?

4) Think about how the characters would be dressed.

5) Write a script with stage directions that describe how the man and woman will react to each other. You MUST keep the dialogue from the poem word for word.  You should be able to memorize the dialogue from the first scene (lines 111-138).  If you decide that the man is only thinking things instead of saying them, he will have to convey a LOT with facial expressions and body language.

 Scene 2

1) Recreate the pub setting. 

2) Decide how many characters you will need.  Some people think that the gossiping woman is also the person closing the pub, and she keeps interrupting herself to say, “Hurry up please its time.” 

3) The primary dialogue in this scene will be one person.  The dialogue is so long that the person may use cue cards, but you need to practice so that you can also incorporate vocal inflection and facial expressions.

4) Other characters need to react to the gossip.

Be prepared to present your scenes on Thursday, April 24.  After you present each scene, you will need to explain the details you incorporated from the poem.  Explain what motivates the man and the woman in scene one.  Explain what the main idea of the monologue in scene two is. One person from your group needs to find a camera and film your scene when you perform it.  You will also need to schedule at least two rehearsals.

  I first saw myself as a writer in the second grade.  I was lucky to have a phenomenal teacher who valued creative expression of all kinds.  I realize now that she used an expressivist pedagogy, but then, all I knew was that it was fun to write.  It was a long time before I worked with another teacher who had an equally positive impact on me as a writer—I was a sixth-year undergraduate.  During the years in between, I enjoyed writing, but I did not put much effort into it.  I would get an assignment and instinctively know how to do it.  I never outlined or brainstormed unless the teacher required me to.  Usually, I was still one of the strongest writers in my class, especially in high school.  I attribute this to the fact that I have always been a bookworm.  Of course, I read things like The Baby-Sitters Club, but I also read more challenging books like The Chronicles of Narnia and A Wrinkle in Time.  The summer after my 8^th grade year, I discovered that I was capable of reading and comprehending “serious” books—and more importantly, that they were good.  The two books which drove this point home for me were Gone with the Wind and Wuthering Heights.  I spent most of high school reading anything from the nineteenth century—especially if it was European and written before the twentieth century.  The things I read helped me understand how to shape language, even though I was not consciously aware of it.

            Of course, I had some unpleasant experiences, too.  My seventh grade English teacher was particularly horrible—the kind of teacher who regularly assigned expressivist projects but graded them traditionally.  I also had a frustrating experience in college with one professor who was supposed to “mentor” a paper that was about 90% of the course grade.  He approved my topic and abstract, but when I finished the draft by the due date (a week before the final draft was due), he commented, “I just thought you were going to take this in a different direction.”  He was unable to articulate what that different direction was.  I ended up taking a class with him later and discovered that this was his standard grading practice.  He either liked a paper or did not like it, and he could never explain why.

            After about eighteen years of intuitively writing, I got my first B.  It was because of a general lack of organization, nonscholarly sources, and a weak thesis statement.  Ever since then, I have worked to improve these areas.  This B was a major turning point, but a year later, I had a more significant turning point.  I started working on my MLA and I started teaching high school.  I made the ambitious and naive decision to take the hardest class in the program during my first semester of teaching.  This was a recipe for disaster.  I had no idea how to organize a 30-page paper; more importantly, I could not even seem to write the 2-3-page response papers that were required every week.  About halfway through the semester, I realized that I was trying to do too much with these papers and that I needed to scale back and make a focused, well-organized point.  Around this time, I was teaching my students how to write coherent paragraphs.  I started actually applying the prewriting and outlining strategies that I was teaching, and my writing really did get better.  The six years I spent working on the MLA while I was teaching were one long exercise in learning to organize things.

            Last year, I had two important developments.  The first was that I actually researched and wrote an article in a relatively stress-free way.  I spent about three weeks on research and one week drafting.  I let the draft rest for a week, and then I came back to it with a week left before the due date.  I had time to revise it substantially four times.  The experience completely changed the way I write my papers.

            The other important development was that I wrote my thesis.  It was one of the most harrowing experiences of my life, mainly because I did about 75% of it during my summer vacation.  I had a completed rough draft by April, but I was still waiting on sources to come in from Interlibrary Loan, and the rough draft was very rough.  Making 80 pages into a coherent body of work was completely mind-blowing.  It was a painful, demoralizing, and inherently Gothic experience in which I spent approximately ten hours a day in my room rearranging sentences, all the while feeling completely trapped and victimized by the paper.  I learned a valuable lesson from this: it’s not a good idea to spend two solid months doing nothing but working.  That is how people get burned out.

            Despite the fact that I wrote so much last year that I almost ran completely out of steam, I do not know what I would do if I could not write.  My interest in writing stems from the fact that it helps me figure things out.  On a personal level, I keep a journal that I have written in almost every day since ninth grade and sporadically before that (my second grade teacher hooked me on the practice).  My family used to always love it when I would write journal entries about our vacations—I remember that my uncle was amazed that I did footnotes.  They always knew that they could ask me where we went and what we did.  Whenever I go for extended periods of time (more than a day or two) without writing in my journal, I start to feel very disoriented and unfocused.  Writing helps me figure out what I think.

            All of my writing experiences have shaped me into a writer who is beginning to understand that a first draft does not have to be perfect, prewriting and planning can save a lot of headaches, and frequent, short sessions of writing are much more productive than infrequent marathon sessions.  More importantly, I am beginning to see writing as a means of discovery rather than a duty which is required.

       I first saw myself as a writer in the second grade.  I was lucky to have a phenomenal teacher who valued creative expression of all kinds.  I realize now that she used an expressivist pedagogy, but then, all I knew was that it was fun to write.  It was a long time before I worked with another teacher who had an equally positive impact on me as a writer—I was a sixth-year undergraduate.  During the years in between, I enjoyed writing, but I didn’t put much effort into it.  I would get an assignment and instinctively know how to do it.  I never outlined or brainstormed unless the teacher required me to.  Usually, I was still one of the strongest writers in my class, especially in high school.  I attribute this to the fact that I have always been a bookworm.  Of course, I read things like The Baby-Sitters Club, but I also read more challenging books like The Chronicles of Narnia and A Wrinkle in Time.  The summer after my 8^th grade year, I discovered that I was capable of reading and comprehending “serious” books—and more importantly, that they were good.  The two books which drove this point home for me were Gone with the Wind and Wuthering Heights.  I spent most of high school reading anything from the nineteenth century—especially if it was European and written before the twentieth century.  The things I read helped me understand how to shape language, even though I was not consciously aware of it.

            Of course, I had some unpleasant experiences, too.  My seventh grade English teacher was particularly horrible—the kind of teacher who regularly assigned expressivist projects but graded them traditionally.  I also had a frustrating experience in college with one professor who was supposed to “mentor” a paper that was about 90% of the course grade.  He approved my topic and abstract, but when I finished the draft by the due date (a week before the final draft was due), he commented, “I just thought you were going to take this in a different direction.”  He was unable to articulate what that different direction was.  I ended up taking a class with him later and discovered that this was his standard grading practice.  He either liked a paper or didn’t like it, and he could never explain why.

            After about eighteen years of intuitively writing, I got my first B.  It was because of a general lack of organization, nonscholarly sources, and a weak thesis statement.  Ever since then, I have worked to improve these areas.  This B was a major turning point, but a year later, I had a more significant turning point.  I started working on my MLA and I started teaching high school.  I made the questionable decision to take the hardest class in the program during my first semester of teaching.  This was a recipe for disaster.  I had no idea how to organize a 30-page paper; more importantly, I couldn’t even seem to write the 2-3-page response papers that were required every week.  About halfway through the semester, I realized that I was trying to do too much with these papers and that I needed to scale back and make a focused, well-organized point.  Around this time, I was teaching my students how to write coherent paragraphs.  I started actually applying the prewriting and outlining strategies that I was teaching, and my writing really did get better.  The six years I spent working on the MLA while I was teaching were one long exercise in learning to organize things.

            Last year, I had two important developments.  The first was that I actually researched and wrote an article in a relatively stress-free way.  I spent about three weeks on research and one week drafting.  I let the draft rest for a week, and then I came back to it with a week left before the due date.  I had time to revise it substantially four times.  I really hope that I will be able to recreate that experience with all of the papers I write. 

            The other important development was that I wrote my thesis.  It was one of the most harrowing experiences of my life, mainly because I did about 75% of it during my summer vacation.  I had a completed rough draft by April, but I was still waiting on sources to come in from Interlibrary Loan, and the rough draft was very rough.  Making 80 pages into a coherent body of work was completely mind-blowing.  I was lucky to have an amazing chair (by which I do not mean the rolling chair I sat in as I typed—it squeaked and was altogether uncomfortable) who guided me through it.  I’m glad I did it now that I’m tossing around dissertation ideas, but it was a painful, demoralizing, and inherently Gothic experience in which I spent approximately ten hours a day in my room rearranging sentences, all the while feeling completely trapped and victimized by the paper.  I would have come out more often, but my parents were remodeling the kitchen, and the general chaos of the house seriously disturbed my calm.  I thought I was becoming The Madwoman in the Attic.  I learned a valuable lesson from this: it’s not a good idea to spend two solid months doing nothing but working.  That is how people get burned out.

            Despite the fact that I wrote so much last year that I almost ran completely out of steam, I really don’t know what I would do if I couldn’t write.  My interest in writing stems from the fact that it helps me figure things out.  On a personal level, I keep a journal that I have written in almost every day since ninth grade and sporadically before that (my second grade teacher hooked me on the practice).  My family used to always love it when I would write journal entries about our vacations—I remember that my uncle was amazed that I did footnotes (actually—in retrospect, I’m kind of amazed and disturbed that I was essentially annotating things back in elementary school).  They always knew that they could ask me where we went and what we did.  Whenever I go for extended periods of time (more than a day or two) without writing in my journal, I start to feel very disoriented and unfocused.  Writing helps me figure out what I think.

            This would probably be the ideal time to mention that one of my persistent flaws as a writer is that I struggle with conclusions.  Here is an example.

I tend to view lesson planning as analogous outlining a paper.   It always looks very neat and tidy, and I think I have all my bases covered and it will flow flawlessly from beginning to end, where there will be a nice conclusion to wrap everything up with a bow.  Of course, it never happens that way, and I’m glad.  Sometimes, as I am teaching, I will realize that elements of the outline should be in a different order, so I will rearrange sections mid-lesson.  Also, some of my best teaching ideas have come to me while I am in the middle of teaching the outlined lesson.  They inevitably force me to make some kind of departure from the outline.  Last week, for example, I had planned to have the students practice some peer critiquing in class so that they would be prepared for the Critique BA.  While they were “critiquing” (i.e., lackadaisically marking up) each others’ papers, I spontaneously decided it would be a good idea to have the students discuss how they felt while they were critiquing, and then use that discussion to springboard into a faux “grading group” meeting where they would define the important things they would look for.  This was a decision partially informed by our 5060 discussion of peer critique.  They seemed to really respond to this, and I would definitely do it again. 

It seems that no matter how many times I teach the same lesson, I get an idea for how to improve it or change it while I am in the middle of teaching it.  I chalk this up to the same muse who drops really cool ideas into my head while I am in the middle of typing papers.  It’s just important to follow that muse whenever possible.  Of course, the muse doesn’t usually come if I don’t plan ahead and if I am not constantly thinking about teaching, just as the muse doesn’t usually show up during a writing session if I don’t work steadily on a project.  Another qualifier: the significant difference between drafting and teaching is that teaching needs to be much more coherent than a first draft does, or you will lose the students.   Sometimes I can’t implement the really cool idea right away, and that’s where reflection comes in.

 Reflecting after teaching is incredibly important.  It really is a good idea to take five minutes after each class and write down what worked and what didn’t.  I am finding this easier to do now that I only have two total classes per week instead of 35 classes per week.  Still, though, I sometimes end up procrastinating the reflection at times until it is too late to remember what I would have written.  I wish I did it more consistently, though.  If every lesson is analogous to a paper, then I am losing all of my revisions by not reflecting.  It is exactly like forgetting to click “save” after a revision session.  The next time I teach the lesson, I’ll be forced to rely on my faulty memory for the changes and tweaks I made.  Given that I still can’t remember which room our various workshops are supposed to be in (I usually just follow the smell of pizza on Fridays), I definitely need the security of a written reflection.

An FYC teacher (or any teacher) should, at bare minimum, know the material that he or she is teaching.  Teachers also need to have an idea of what the students already do or don’t know, and teachers should know that it is okay to spontaneously adapt lesson plans to accomodate for any miscalculation of student knowledge.  FYC teachers should be aware that students have different learning styles, so teachers should also have ideas of different ways the students can attack problems that arise in the composition or reading process.   Finally, teachers should know that students aer not expert writers; they are just figuring out how to use the writing process.  They don’t know that it’s normal to begin a writing project with feelings of panic, dread, and general malaise.  They are still trying to figure out how to get past these roadblocks, and it is important for a teacher to know when to use the stick and when to use the carrot.

Of course, ideally, students would also come to class knowing the material that has been assigned for homework.  Obviously, we can’t really expect that to happen all the time.  In trying to formulate Plan B, I usually re-examine my lesson plan with the idea that at least one student will come to class having done no preparation whatsoever.  I do not significantly rework the actual lecture part of my class; at this point, I usually only lecture for about 10-15 minutes per class.  If a student gets confused during the lecture, I can always tell him or her to go back and do the assigned reading and then ask me any left-over questions.   Activities are more problematic.  I always have to figure out what I will do with students who forget their books or their papers or whatever else they might need to do the activity.  The key is to come up with an alternate activity that will still benefit the student but will be in some way undesirable enough that he or she will not want to repeat the experience of being left out of the main activity.  I know it’s not a great idea to use work as punishment, and that’s why I make sure that it is still relevant. 

Still–students are smart little creatures.  Even when you have a Plan B (or C, D, etc.) in place, they will usually find a way to outsmart you.

In a perfect world, I like to read through a whole set of assignments and then sort them into A, B, C, D, and F piles .  I’ll make a few preliminary comments about either extreme strenghts or weaknesses, but I purposely avoid being nitpicky.  Then, I go through and try to figure out what makes the papers go in each stack. If it’s an assignment I’ve given before, this part usually goes faster.  Of course, this inevitably involves shuffling papers from stack to stack, especially the B and D papers.  Then I go through and add more commentary and assign a final grade.  Maybe this is a backwards way of grading, but it usually works really well for me.  By the time I am finished, I can be confident that I have graded all of the papers consistently.  Of course, this procedure is impossible to do with RaiderWriter, but I am gradually getting used to it.

I’m also fond of using rubrics, even though I know they are problematic.  I use them because I want the student to understand where he or she has room to improve.  It seems like students tend to think that they only have to worry about fixing grammar problems, and a rubric clearly shows them that content problems count for significantly more points. 

I aim for a balanced approach in my commentary.  I try to make sure that I discuss both mechanical errors and content.  I try to find something positive to say, and I try to find something critical to say.  I have found in the past that even (or especially?) students who habitually make A’s get very annoyed when all they get is “Great work. A+” written on their papers. 

In the past, I have probably been a little too prescriptive with my commentary, especially as it pertains to grammar.  This is largely because that is what is expected of a high school English teacher, and if I had not been prescriptive, the students and the community would have thought that I was not doing my job.  In that case, it was a matter of establishing ethos to be prescriptive.  However, I really prefer to facilitate whenever I can.  In a professional development workshop at my old school, we watched a video by Harry Wong (he’s geared toward elementary and middle school teachers, but his practical advice about first-year teaching is priceless for anyone).  He points out that at the end of the school day, it’s common to see students running out the door, giggling and laughing and generally bouncing off the walls.  Teachers, on the other hand, kind of stagger out the door and fall into their vehicles, completely exhausted.  He then adds that it should be the other way around, and teachers need to avoid doing all of the work for their students.  I am in agreement with anything that means I get to run out the door at the end of the day and still have the energy to watch reruns of The Office when I get home without falling asleep.  More importantly, if I am telling the students exactly how to fix all of their problems, they never have to turn on their brains. 

Striking a balance between being prescriptive and being facilitative is hard, though, as I have previously whined about, and it is something I am working on.

I am still wrestling with finding a balance between being facilitative and being authoritarian.  Students seem to want me to just tell them what to do.  I can still see why a certain amount of direction is necessary, especially for beginning writers, but I can also see that this is a dangerous area.  There is no way to give directions that will work for every student.  Many of them want writing–especially writing assignments–to have a guaranteed formula that will get them an A.  On the other hand, if I am completely non-authoritarian, many students would not know where to start with the assignments.  I find this much more problematic with grading than I do with teaching, and I had a similar frustration when I used to work in a Writing Center.  Sometimes it’s hard to know when to just tell the student how to fix something so that they will have an example to follow and when to just provide a gentle nudge.

My other major area of concern is getting students invested in the subject matter.  Some of the theory we read about group work pointed out that students work best in groups when they see the value of the assignment they have been given.  I think having them use the groups to offer each other feedback on their in-class work has been helpful.  Still, they are not offering as much criticism as I would ideally like them to offer each other.  I think this is because, as one article said, offering real criticism of writing jeopardizes their social relationships.

I’m about to make a shocking confession: I liked teaching high school. I know: shudder, gasp. To make a long story short, one of the reasons I wanted to work on a PhD was that I wanted to learn more about how to teach students to read and write.

When I was watching the Take 20 videos, I was surprised to see the teachers were expressing the same concerns about teaching college that I had about teaching high school. They wished they had learned more about rhetoric and reading. One of my main frustrations as a high school teacher was that my pedagogy classes only shallowly addressed ways to teach writing and reading. As one person said in the video, it was basically assumed that we knew how to read and write, so we could teach other people how to read and write. Of course, that assumption is ridiculous.

The other thing that was interesting to me was the idea that a teacher should be a facilitator instead of a dictator. I think this is true. When I used to teach Macbeth to high school seniors, I gradually realized that the way I had learned Shakespeare–reading a passage as a whole group and then discussing it–was not working (maybe it didn’t even work for students when I was in high school). I put the students into groups and gave them discussion questions, and it was amazing how much they figured out without my direct assistance. It was a little bit of a blow to my ego to realize how much they DON’T need me. All they needed were some direction and some gentle nudging to stay on task. Many of the students who had been sitting there with a glassy-eyed expression on their faces came alive when they did group work. It’s true: group work works, but students do have to be invested in the problem they are solving.

When I do my best writing, I follow a pretty clear, logical process.  I literally sit down with my calendar and plan when I need to get each part finished, and I stick to it.  For a good seminar paper, I spend a  few hours over a few days picking a topic.  Then, I spend about a month researching.  Although I will probably continue researching while I am writing, I will usually only have a few articles left to look through.  After I have finished the bulk of my research, I will figure out how to organize the paper and what major points I want to make.  I will usually jot down an outline, but it is not ever very detailed.  I spend about two to three weeks actually writing the rough draft.  I put it away for about a week, and then I re-read it.  Usually I go through a moment of panic where I start to think that the paper will never work.  I’ll put it down for another day or so, and no matter how bad I think the paper is, I will start figuring out ways to revise it.  I just can’t leave it alone.   Then I break the paper into 3-4 sections, revising a section each day.  I reprint and revise/edit 2-3 times after the first revision, looking at progressively longer sections at a time. 

That’s my IDEAL process.  Sometimes, it doesn’t quite work out that way.  Sometimes, I spend too long researching and I don’t get to revise as many times as I would like to.  Sometimes, I take too long to choose a topic, so I don’t spend enough time researching.  Whenever my process is off, it is usually because I have not set deadlines for myself–or because I have not stuck to the deadlines.

When I do the “good” version of my process, the process is usually relatively stress-free.  When I don’t use the good version, I can become very demoralized, depressed, and resentful of a paper. 

As far as teaching process goes, I think it is important to keep in mind that everyone’s process is different.  I usually explain my process to the students so that they understand that good writing doesn’t just fly out of the brain and onto the paper.  I also offer them suggestions of other things they can try.  They usually ignore my advice, but it makes me feel better to offer it.  I like to imagine it will sink in one day if they ever need it  (I was actually one of those kids in high school who thought that outlining was a waste of time.  Not any more!!).