22. Writing and Romance: That Love Is All There Is/Is All We Know of Love
Mixing Your Pitches and Changing Dispositions
That Love is all there is,
Is all we know of Love;
It is enough, the freight should be
Proportioned to the groove.—Emily Dickinson
One day, a group of high school students visiting my university walked past me, and one student asked his instructor why they were visiting the campus.
“Because we want to alert people about what is going on in the university,” the instructor answered.
“But we don’t want to know!” the student replied.
That brief hallway conversation stuck with me because I was once that boy who didn’t want to know. To me, school was unbearable. It wasn’t that I couldn’t do it; I didn’t want to do it. I did the minimum amount needed to avoid trouble. Mostly, though, I was bored out of my mind. This approach to my schooling left gaping holes in my education that make me wonder what might have happened if my interest in learning had caught fire sooner. Better late than never, as they say.
Like Barry or the math student in the previous newsletter demonstrated, it’s possible to shift your disposition. It’s nothing new. In fact, you’ve done it multiple times. You are kind of an expert. Think of something you are good at, an area where you already have a positive disposition or growth mindset. Now, think about how you got that way. Next, apply some or all of those strategies and ways of thinking to your writing or any other skill you would like to improve.
Writing teachers can shift the dispositions of novice writers in a positive direction by teaching techniques found traditionally in the creative writing world, things as simple as image and description. Showing students how the different writing genres bleed beyond the imaginary boundary lines imposed by oversimplified curricula helps. You can also show them how to look at problems from different perspectives. If you teach students how creativity works, which Asimov says “is essentially the same in all its branches and varieties,” you have given students skills that will transfer to other situations as well. Teaching creativity not only helps with disposition but also shifts performance. You will be revitalizing students’ writerly imaginations and rejuvenating their openness. They might even experience that floating feeling Barry mentions. Maybe that goal should be the starting point.
A Tale of Two Pitchers
Here is a story to illustrate how your attitude can prevent or allow progress:
A common story in baseball is the tale of the young phenom who can throw blazing fastballs. He’s a sure thing—a natural. No doubt, this kid has the goods. Yet, years later, when people refer to this pitcher, they ask, “Remember that kid who threw so hard? Whatever happened to him?”
As he’d reached the higher levels and as the hitters figured him out (as they always do), the young pitcher became befuddled. He pinned all his hopes on recapturing his early glory. All he had to do was apply himself more, he reasoned. Since it had worked before, it should again, he thought. I just need to perfect my mechanics. Suggestions that he needed to change his style were rejected out of hand. Such ideas were beneath him. I’m a fireballer. Pitching is power. I don’t throw junk.
Another pitcher who rose quickly through the ranks also soon struggled. Looking at his rookie stats, there’s little to catch the eye. He was good, but no phenom. There was nothing to separate him from the pack. But unlike the first guy, his effectiveness increased dramatically, unexpectedly, and even years later, many years after his fastball had lost its punch, he continued to dominate the league well beyond the usual lifespan for a pitcher.
He looked at things differently. To him, pitching wasn’t about power. “Pitching is upsetting timing," he used to say. When it came to hitters, he didn’t worry about their bats; instead, he messed with their heads. And it led to a long, Hall of Fame career.
The first pitcher is a combination of many hot-shots who have come and gone. The second pitcher is Warren Spahn. Spahn’s approach to his craft is an example of how people get to the next level. His concept of what pitching is and how it works helped him to go farther than many who had the same or even better physical gifts. In other words, he had a growth mindset.
Teaching Romance
Disposition is an issue for teachers as well as students. They may be big shots who know their stuff yet remain unaware that they need to address issues beyond their subject area. Such teachers could learn from Warren Spahn:
Mix your pitches.
Upset timing.
Mess with people’s heads. (Including your own.)
If teachers use methods more like Spahn’s, it can change attitudes and even, like with the math student, help students to fall in love with a subject.
In my junior year of high school, mainly because of a few excellent teachers, something changed. Writing a paper in sociology on Margaret Mead, researching Confederate espionage in American history, reading and imitating Thoreau’s Walden in English, doing a lab study on Fetal Alcohol Syndrome in advanced biology, switching math teachers and then suddenly, as if a light switch had been flipped, understanding the homework that had been unintelligible to me with my previous teacher—all of this set me on a different course, even if I hadn’t realized it yet. I met some teachers who mixed their pitches. My disposition toward school was shifting.
My earlier disinterest had two main causes. First, my home environment was stressful, chaotic, and predatory. I had a lot on my mind. Being so preoccupied made it difficult for me to commit to studying. Like Endler‘s guppies, who, because of their predatory environment, had dull spots to help them blend in with the stream bed and avoid detection, I liked to lie low.
Second, until my junior year, most of my teachers had presented their material as lectures accompanied by instantly forgettable multiple-choice exams. There was zero romance involved. Since I came from a family where few graduated high school and no one had yet attended college, and a home with few books and no one to help with homework, the exam model was foreign to me. I didn’t know and didn’t care to know the ins and outs of test-taking. It wasn’t until my junior year that writing, research, and experimentation became more prevalent in my classes. And, even in exam-heavy courses like math, I found that when the teacher focused on the process as much as the results, I understood. Somehow, I caught the learning bug, but because of my earlier issues, continuing my education was more challenging than it might have been. Without those key teachers, though, my disposition toward my education may never have changed.
The Pedagogy of the Enamored
My late high school experience and the switch of math classes made it dawn on me that how a subject is taught is as important, or maybe more important, than what is being taught. This struck me most forcefully in graduate school, where I found myself teaching and wondering how the hell to do it. Luckily, the TAs teaching first-year writing, like me, also attended seminars where we studied composition theory and pedagogy. We were learning about what the research showed about how students learned language skills, plus we were learning methods for how to teach in ways that connected with those findings.
We weren’t teaching introduction-body-conclusion or compare-and-contrast essays. Students were writing essays based on personal experience with teaching and learning issues and writing responses to readings by experts on these issues from composition studies, memoirs, the sciences, and more. The key was sequenced assignments, meaning each new assignment was a revision of the previous essays based on newly introduced material, full class analysis of student essays, and guided peer review. It was intensive and effective, and, though I was the teacher, I was learning as much or probably more about writing than my students were.
“Writing About Writing” is one of the trends in composition studies these days, and that’s what we were doing forty years ago, but we didn’t call it that. This version was more stealth, like a series of head fakes, where students were told they had a theme called Teaching and Learning, but the T&L issues were really composing issues. Writing was the true subject.
Studying pedagogy changed my approach to writing and how I think about it. It’s not enough to be good at something and to have vast knowledge of a subject area to be able to teach it well (as I saw with my high school math class). Studying how people best learn your subject will make you look at your subject anew. This, in turn, will change how you teach.
Maybe the biggest problem in education is how to get students to become curious enough about a subject to want to know more. What’s often missing in education is the joy part, Barry’s floating feeling, the romance of learning.
Sequencing and the Pleasure of Working on the Subject
I have used the Teaching and Learning theme occasionally since grad school, and I’ve modeled other sequences after it using different themes while adopting a similar template. The beginning of the sequence asks students to describe a memorable or meaningful experience with either teaching or learning. Once the stories are written and revised, course readings are brought in. What students find is that their stories bring up issues that the experts talk about, and so the experts become more like peers. After a while, students’ reflections on the issues raised become nuanced and complex as they come up with insights that couldn’t have happened without including their experiences and without revising multiple times while reading experts and each other. In short, the class becomes part of a discourse community where everyone is exploring related issues together.
One student wrote about tutoring his sibling and explained how patience is key for the teacher, who must also teach their student to have the same kind of patience. Forcing the student to focus on coming up with the right answers early on causes frustration and gives the student the feeling that they can’t do it, which leads only to what the student calls “negative consequences.” The writer later concludes, “The role of the teacher is not only to teach the subject, but also to teach them the pleasure of working on the subject.” This is what the math student’s teacher did. It turned him from an indifferent student into a math lover.
As Eve LaPlante put it in a Boston Magazine article* on education, it’s “not the subject matter, but the method” that fosters the “romance” stage of the learning process. LaPlante profiled high school semiotics teacher Don Thomas, who says, “When teaching takes, it’s not because something conventional has been conveyed, it’s because something unique has been conveyed.” The pleasure part doesn’t usually arise from lectures, but from participation. And when this happens, there are improvements. As researcher Scott Freeman says, “when people switch from lecturing to any kind of active learning . . . we were seeing important increases in average exam scores . . . and significant drops in failure rates.”
For context, my student’s comments about tutoring her sibling emerged while the class was writing about and grappling with issues related to the successes and failures of their education. As later assignments inevitably brought the theme back to writing as a topic, students adopted language they acquired from the course readings and each other. This helped them to work out in writing their successes and failures as writers and the possible reasons for each.
With the sustained focus the sequence provides, writing students learn that they can do something complex even if it takes a long time, even if things don’t get off to a great start. In addition, during this process, students learn how revising gives them the chance to discover the romance part—“the pleasure of working on the subject.” With the sequence, the early pressure to get it right and the “negative consequences” that come with that, potentially including a damaged disposition, disappear.
Because Something Unique Has Been Conveyed
Unfortunately for most of us, the joy, the pleasure, was often missing when we were taught writing in traditional ways. A focus on grammar, vocabulary, and form too early in the process doesn’t cut it when it comes to romance. According to Don Thomas, grammar “does not ‘describe’ the language of image, movement, gesture, perception, and aroma.” It doesn’t capture, LaPlante adds, “the eagerness and curiosity a student feels when struck by the desire to understand.” So I agree with my student. It’s not enough to teach the subject without teaching the pleasure of it.
And one way to tap into the joys of writing is to convey it in unique ways—to make the familiar strange. In The Truman Show, there’s a line that goes, “We accept the reality of the world with which we are presented.” Students accept the learning world with which they are presented and often think that it is the only option. Anything an instructor can do to break that fourth wall has the potential to awaken eagerness and curiosity.
LaPlante explains, “The first task of semiotics is to make the students question their assumptions about the world, to make the known mysterious.” This includes questioning our language use. There is an exercise called the “fractured T” experiment, where a T is broken into multiple pieces for one student while the other has the completed version. A partition separates the students as the “speaker,” the one with the intact T, explains how to assemble the fractured version to the other student, the “listener,” who isn’t allowed to ask questions.
The experiment does several things, says LaPlante. It “demonstrates the predicament of a writer. Students’ writing is often vague and unclear, she says, because they do not imagine the reader’s limitations.” In the experiment, one speaks while the other listens. As LaPlante says, “a reader can’t talk back.” She adds that “the experiment shows how description matters.” Students are learning to think about their readers in Bakhtin’s sense, developing an internal sense of a listener and their answer.
The eagerness, curiosity, and romance aspects of learning can be brought on through various novel and/or counter-intuitive methods, such as the T exercise, or through teaching Berthoff’s uses of chaos and tolerating ambiguity, or by designing activities that cause people to look at familiar things in new ways. Berthoff, sounding much like Thomas, says, “I learned to come to class, not thinking of a territory to be covered, but with a compass, a metaphor or a juxtaposition, or a question from the class before.” Thomas elaborates on the ambiguity/uncertainty idea when he says, “Most people don’t realize that understanding is not a constant state. When you really understand something important, it comes and goes. You sneak up on it.”
Berthoff cautions, however, that after we immerse our students in chaos and ambiguity, we need to be “teaching ways of emerging from chaos.” Teaching involves giving students strategies for sneaking up on things. This can be done through an emphasis on revision, on building a discourse community made up of charitable readers, and on showing how the characteristics of the writing process thrive and derive their energy from these thrilling encounters with uncertainty and reinvention.
So what’s romance got to do with that? Well, what is love if it’s not thrilling encounters with uncertainty and reinvention?
When it comes to learning, love is all there is, and that’s what we should be teaching. Teaching and love, to paraphrase Emily Dickinson, should differ — if they do — as Syllable from Sound.
Notes
*Eve LaPlante, “The Secret Life of Language: High School Semiotics.” Boston Magazine, Nov. 1983
Next, we’ll take a look at a beautifully problematic student essay.
“What is love if it’s not thrilling encounters with uncertainty and reinvention?”
Beautifully said.