Sunday night reflections

Which of these two assignments would you rather receive in a writing class?

• 1 Write an essay that imitates the form of a Mark Twain essay, updating it to a modern topic.


• 2 Write a 4-page description of your kitchen. If you don't currently have a kitchen, describe the one you know best: your parents', or sibling's, or friend's. Use the passage from the class handout as a model. Try to describe the kitchen accurately to all the senses, so that we feel we're there; be sure to describe an empty kitchen, without people in it.

Why?

Being only slightly obsessive about things that happen in class -- and also needing to distract myself from a presentation that won't write itself -- and not finding sufficient distraction in Alchemy -- I am trying to think through the best way to talk about how the book for 5931 connects up specifically, directly, and poignantly with what happens in our classes day-to-day.

I got interested in theories about teaching when I taught for a few years at the Los Angeles Conservation Corps, a job training-education program in South Central Los Angeles. I had been a teaching assistant in rhetoric classes at Berkeley before we moved to Los Angeles. At Berkeley back then, the 10-week class was divided into 5 2-week sections, and in each section students read a book and wrote a paper about it -- no revisions, just final copy, please. For 4 of the sections I was responsible for grading 2/3 of the papers (and sitting in on the class) and for the remaining section I taught the book and graded 1/3 of the papers. Together with bits and pieces of substitute teaching from before, that was the sum of my teaching experience.

The teaching at the LACC came about backwardly (as most things in my life do): I volunteered to help them set up and run their computer lab, which led to teaching people how to use the computers, which led to teaching GED prep and life skills classes and developing a whole lot of education materials for on and off the computers (which led to a whole bunch of work for the government and other folks, but that's another life). Because the corpsmembers were most often people who had dropped out of high school (often in the second semester of their senior years, because they did have other whole lives that they valued over the poor quality of the schools), the take on teaching at the LACC was "Figure out what works." So I read off my little butt in order to get help and ideas.

I started by reading books that were directly about what to do in classrooms, and for that I found that it was writings from teachers in K-8 that were most useful to me -- and from specific teachers in that group. These specific teachers knew they needed to make class interesting, but in addition, the books I found that were most most useful were all written by people who valued student engagement, confidence, and pleasure. I found (for example) math books from which I learned that, to get students to trust their own thinking, you can put them in small groups to solve concrete (and fun: let's use raisins!) math problems, most of which did not have only one proper way-to-solution. In such situations, you can also make a rule: if anyone in the group has a question, you have to work it out in the group; if the whole group can't work it out, then you can ask the teacher. (My favorite writer by far from this set of favorites is Vivian Gussin Paley.)

The more I read, the more I realized that the books that were most useful to me all shared overlapping views of students: they were based on a belief that students are smart, that education is about building on what people already knew, and that students can tell you what matters to them. I also read books where the classroom activities were based on a(n implicit) view of teaching as being about filling lacks in students, about making them be what they weren't, about starting off by believing they didn't want what you had to offer; I didn't realize until afterwards, when I was trying to figure out why I had used almost nothing from those book, that the implicit theory underlying the activies they promoted was what pushed me away. All these readings made me realize that there is no way to approach what you do in a classroom without working from within assumptions (even if they are unstated and so not-open-to-questioning) about what classrooms and students are. And those assumptions, taken together, compose your teaching theory.

I realized that I could be teaching without paying any attention to theory and yet that all my teaching had theory underpinning it. The way I arrange a classroom shows who I think I am in terms of my authority; how I grade says something else about my authority and what I think people are learning; how I teach writing -- and communicating -- teaches students to think and act as though writing is an isolated intellectual act or a social practice articulated with identities and power.

All that is long lead up to explain why I chose the Tate book for us to read. Almost all the essays describe classroom activities that grow directly out of assumptions about who students are and what writing is -- and what the whole purpose of living is. I want us to be able to talk with as much knowledge as possible about what we are doing in our classes and why -- with that "why" articulating both to "Because the class could stand to focus on introductory paragraphs" as well as to "Because the class could benefit from discussing whether we want to be the kind of people who are attracted to flashy introductions" -- because I believe this to be my responsibility as the teacher of this particular class. Reading these essays -- and making decisions about where you fit among these approaches -- helps each of us contribute to building the world of relations we seek with others.