23. The Time to Make up Your Mind About People Is Never

TFW the Worst Essay in the Stack Is Actually the Best

[Previously]

“So, what do you do?"

Whenever I'm at a gathering where people don't know me, I dread the inevitable question, "So, what do you do?" My dread comes not from shame, but from the predictable responses my answer always produces. When I say, "I teach English composition," there are two reactions. People either say they will have to watch their grammar around me (as they scope the room to find someone else to talk to) or they begin a litany about how "kids these days can't write" (as I scope the room for someone else to talk to). The first responder clearly has had a traumatic and lasting reaction to red ink, and the second seems convinced they know how to do my job much better than I do. Neither can imagine why anyone would choose my work, nor can they imagine what relevance it can have outside paper-writing for a grade, or memo or report writing for a job.

Here I am, writing for a general audience about what I do. Who would want to read that? The thinking is that only writers would read about writing and only teachers would read about teaching, yet many read about science or history or statistics even if they are not scientists, historians, or statisticians themselves. My point? That writing and teaching are like any other discipline—there are things about each that matter to everyone and that have surprising connections to other areas of life, including your life.

Unfortunately, much of the compelling work in my field is written in the specialized lingo and walled-in gardens of academic journals. Writing pedagogy is like one of Italo Calvino's "invisible cities" or like one of the characters in Alan Lightman's Einstein’s Dreams who lives according to the constraints of local time. Those outside have no idea what goes on inside. Those inside have little contact with what goes on outside. Even the arenas of English composition and English studies aren’t really on speaking terms. This needs to change, especially now when writing and reading skills are up against the onslaught of AI. The questions are, even if you are a medical doctor or a pastry chef, how can I show you that there is something here for you? How do I talk about this without being that guy at the party everyone wants to avoid?

Writing Can Be Learned, but It Can’t Be Taught/Those Who Can, Do; Those Who Can’t, Teach

Where do our ideas about writing come from? Most of us, at least early on, have been taught to write largely by non-writers in primary and secondary school. At the university, traditionally, writing instruction at the 100-level was assigned to a few unlucky lower-level literature professors who wished to avoid it at all costs, but mostly it was assigned to part-time, poorly paid instructors with insane course loads or to graduate students with zero teaching experience. How many of these instructors were writers or would even have had time to write if they wanted to? Though there have been improvements, we’ve mostly had a system where instructors who were not writers, or were not able to be because of demanding workloads, were doing the teaching. Many were not thrilled to be teaching composition students who, in turn, were not thrilled about taking composition. (I mean, who is?) A captive audience holding another audience captive. A system like this stands a slim chance of fostering good feelings about writing in students or of changing instructors’ views on the student writing they encounter. Where is the love? Unsurprisingly, through the ages, many people have developed negative feelings and even complexes about their writing ability.

Yes, there are composition degree programs that have proliferated over the last few decades and that turn out specialists in first-year writing. Because of this, luckily, there are more instructors now who want to teach at the 100 level and who write about writing pedagogy, but the compositionist PhDs who come out of the programs and land tenure-track positions teach mostly graduate-level courses and don’t experience the burdensome demands that most program faculty are required to carry and that make it difficult for them to be writers and scholars themselves. This system has feudal vibes, but what do you expect? Universities are medieval institutions, after all.

I was lucky. I spent most of my career at one of the more enlightened institutions in this regard and with a group of highly dedicated, super-committed colleagues. Even so, I had 250 students per year for years and needed to teach summer sessions to survive before the union came to my rescue. I was writing and publishing during this time, but as you can imagine, I wasn’t what you’d call prolific. (For me, writing is a need. I couldn’t not do it. The only exception being a one-year period where I lost interest in everything.) A sabbatical now and then would have been nice. My point is that I was a writer who taught writing, but my university could have done more (something? anything?) to support that.

(If any union reps read this, please fight for sabbaticals for NTTs in the next contract. Support writing teachers and teachers from other disciplines who want to write. Students will benefit from this. The university will benefit from this.)

For every person who wishes to write more, there are several more who have shied away from writing, if they could, and who could blame them? Probably you’ve heard each of the above sayings. Regarding statement 1 (Writing can be learned, but it can’t be taught), I’m here to ask, what if writing can be taught, just not always in the ways you think? As for the second statement, (Those who can, do; those who can’t, teach), I’ll let you be the judge in my case, but I take issue with the first half of that one especially. Many can but don’t, and that begins with what school has taught them. I’m interested in the tension between what students have learned about writing and what writing could offer them instead, as well as what I can learn about my writing from this tension. The ways writing has been taught and the circumstances under which the labor of writing instruction is delivered has set up a baked-in, counter-productive dynamic where, often, we are unwittingly teaching students to avoid writing or even to fear it, and we have also been breeding instructors who, for various reasons, are teaching a subject they have little current experience with as writers themselves. In short, what we’ve established is an environment in which students and instructors are set up to fail.

(Why do I feel like I’m in trouble now?)

Red Flags and Reaching Beyond Present Abilities

Let’s take a look at how these tensions play out in the classroom as represented by a student's paper filled with things considered to be red flags. If you were to give it a quick read-through, several issues are apparent:

• Unquoted, undocumented information

• Many swing-and-miss attempts at connections

• Heavy reliance on personal experience

• Summarized readings without much engagement

• A seemingly pointless reference to a famous person from history

• Grocery lists of society’s ills

• An overwhelming number of English Language Learner mistakes

These red flags in a college essay will get you banished to the writing center or cited for plagiarism and will earn you a poor, if not failing grade. Yet often, there’s a lot you can learn about writing from such an essay and such a writer.

The paper in question was written in response to an assignment sequence on environments. The course anchor texts included an excerpt from Henry David Thoreau’s Walden and his ideas on “extravagance” (which we saw earlier) as well as Alan Lightman’s novel Einstein’s Dreams. Thoreau speaks of possibilities beyond what he terms “the common mode of living,” urging readers to test the limits of “tradition and conformity.” Einstein’s Dreams is made up of small chapters, and in each one, time has different properties—"Time Is a Circle,” “Time Is Absolute,” etc. Characters’ lives are ruled by these different manifestations of time. This book was introduced to see how the students’ characterizations of Thoreau’s “extravagance” might change after reading about Lightman’s closed, deterministic little worlds. Now, let’s look at how one student handled the assignment.

Knowledge and Society

“Knowledge and Society” caught my attention because it is both insightful and problematic. It puts Thoreau’s principle to the test in an innovative way, yet it is filled with things that are often seen as signs of deficiency.

“Knowledge” begins with a long list about science, evolution, time, and then moves into a kind of official biography of Einstein, cribbed from Wikipedia. These details from Einstein’s life seem incidental at first. It’s the only connection the writer makes to Einstein’s Dreams, and it’s the loosest possible connection. He seems to have no clue how to connect the biographical details to the novel.

The bio part seems like filler, though there is a vague hint of what will come later when the writer says of Einstein that he had the luxury to be exposed to science, art, and music as a child. Even if he didn’t excel at these things early on, he was fortunate to live in such an environment.

The writer never tells us where this information comes from and doesn’t quote anything. There is evidence here and in other places that some of his mystery language comes from a variety of unnamed sources and is being used without quotations or attribution. It’s an example of poorly executed “patch writing”—segments lifted from various sources patched together to make a “new” essay. Later, where the essay talks about Einstein’s theories, there are a couple of brief quotes, but we are not told where they come from or who is speaking.

After the biographical information, there is a notable segment that asks what role society plays in creating thinkers such as Einstein. He asks his readers to imagine Einstein growing up in a place like his own home, a “place where people still live in small mud huts, and use water from the nearby lake.” Imagine young Albert, he says, tending cattle, milking cows, farming, and logging, instead of being exposed to science books and violin lessons. How would the so-called genius fare then? Here is where the not-yet-explicit connection to Lightman kicks in. The writer grew up in a deterministic environment similar to one of Lightman’s Time Is a Circle or Time Flows Backwards kinds of worlds.

After this technically flawed (and challenging to read) yet powerfully written section, the writer takes Thoreau’s principle of extravagance to task and notes that in such an environment, Einstein might become some “political revolutionist, a refugee, or another shot and dead prisoner forgot about decades ago.”

It’s clear now that the partially plagiarized, undocumented biography is key to the author’s message. It prepares readers for the eventual connection to Thoreau’s extravagance idea and the writer’s critique of it.

For a teacher, this essay raises questions about how to respond. By the usual standards, the paper is a mess. A grade for this? I don’t want to think about it. Still, I didn’t want to crack down on the “incorrect” writing and likely plagiarism. The language appropriation may have been necessary to get him to this point because he is reaching “beyond his present abilities,” as Paul Williams says. As a writer and as a fairly new English speaker, he’s reaching “beyond what he’s sure he can do and into the unknown,” which is not only brave, but is exactly what I’m looking for.

The paper “kicks the pail” and “leaps the cow yard fence” in Thoreau’s sense and goes beyond the typical state thesis/support thesis model. The student is not merely restating the work of others. It’s a dialogue, a discussion, a push-back, not a report or regurgitation. The experts he is reading are his partners in the investigation, and here, the writer’s knowledge and experience are essential contributions. At first, my students often say, “You can’t use experience in academic papers.” Well, if the writer had not thought to do that, he could not have extended Thoreau’s ideas in this way. This essay is an illustration of Willian Carlos Williams’s “no ideas but in things.” The details from the writer’s background allow him to provide a complex reading of Thoreau. Sure, Henry, go ahead—try being extravagant where I came from.

Yes, you can choose to be extravagant, to go against “the common mode of living” in the Concord woods. You can spend your free time thinking about time and light waves in Bern. However, the writer said that if someone like Einstein or Thoreau were born in such a place as the one he knew, “we will clearly lose a turning point of time in history.” If Einstein or Thoreau weren't lucky enough to be born in privileged environments, we probably would never have heard of them. The student concludes by characterizing his society at the time as being closed and isolated. What does it mean to be born a genius in such an environment? Or is that even a thing? How much influence does the role of the environment play? In the writer’s former world, he says there is “no choice left” for people but Thoreau’s “common mode of living.” This leads to a life of “day after day suppressing and changing the nature of your mind to be oriented to fit that particular society.” It’s like John Endler’s dull-spotted guppies, who, because of numerous predators, needed to blend in with the stream bed to survive long enough to breed. How many Einsteins or Thoreaus are lost to history because of this?

This also applies to the teaching of composition or anything, for that matter. It’s an issue for the university as a whole and society as well. If we have a pedagogy of severity environment where a paper like this writer's is seen only as a mass of mistakes, as stealing the words of others, then we will potentially miss a turning point. We, too, at the university of all places, will be acting like some oppressive regime and placing constraints on young minds.

The writer is critiquing Thoreau while enacting those same principles in his writing. His critique of extravagance is extravagant. He has leaped Thoreau’s cow yard fence. Though his message is obscured by other easily addressed issues, his writing in this early draft has already achieved Thoreau’s “success unexpected in common hours.”

How often have well-meaning teachers like me limited students in the ways this writer claims Einstein or Thoreau would have been limited in a different environment, suppressing and changing the nature of minds to fit that particular class, leaving students like him no choice left but the common mode of living?

I could say to the writer, “You can’t use the encyclopedia as a source” and “You can’t use the words of others without attribution” and “You can’t rely so much on your experience in an academic essay” and “You need to work with a tutor on your English.” Then he would likely shut down. And there is no guarantee he would rise above the situation just to spite his teacher. Instead, he may no longer feel free to pursue his own goals or have agency in his writing and will become too discouraged to fight back. He might try to give me only what he thinks English teachers want when they assign papers—some dull, uninspired, but orderly, reasonably correct, cookie-cutter version of every college essay on Thoreau.

English class and maybe education itself will become merely a series of hurdles he must jump. He won’t care anymore what he says, at least not in school, and his only goal will be to finish. This will keep him from taking the kind of care with his writing that will lead to gradual syntactical improvements, so there won’t be much improvement. He may then conclude that writing isn’t for him, or he just doesn’t have what it takes. He will remain someone who doesn’t revise much, who is usually sent for tutoring, who will always be a C+ or B- writer, or worse. He will remain the writer he now believes he is. He will have little personal stake in his work, so he may even get someone or something else to do his papers for him when he sees an opportunity to get away with it. He will never see the potential uses of Thoreau’s extravagance for his writing self.

As his teacher, I will suffer for creating the kind of environment that produces dull-guppy students who write dull-guppy papers. By offering no choice left but the common mode of living, I will end up mimicking the kind of social environment the writer criticizes in his description of his country. I will not only be unintentionally suppressing my students, I’ll be suppressing myself.

But as Thoreau said, “It is never too late to give up our prejudices.” I should remember that the writer is “laying the foundation of a true expression.” If I show him that his essay makes good moves that have already led somewhere worth going and can lead even further into new territory, that matters of usage and documentation can be addressed gradually during revisions without derailing his efforts to develop his productive ideas, then he may be inspired to trust the writing process and himself enough to care about his work and to address whatever issues and concerns arise—both in content and in form.

Tolerating Ambiguity and the Uses of Chaos

The writer’s challenge to Thoreau shows he is willing to explore the possibility that Thoreau could be right and wrong at the same time. He is learning to tolerate ambiguity, as Ann Berthoff would say. This yes-and-no, uses-of-chaos aspect of academic inquiry can then be realized in his work as he teaches us a new way of reading Thoreau that only he can produce. So my feedback should encourage this reaching beyond present abilities, even if it’s messy and confusing at first, even if I might feel the urge to throw up my hands in frustration at some of the not yet fully realized English. Otherwise, this student could end up just another fair-to-poor composition student “forgot about decades ago.” Is my classroom just another oppressive government or one of Lightman’s enclosed, deterministic worlds, or does it get off “the beaten track”?

Because the assignment is part of a sequence of assignments that will be revised based on peer-group responses, full class discussions of sample essays, plus comments from me, there is time to focus on what is great but buried under a debris pile of troubling grammar and usage issues and appropriated language. Through several stages of feedback and revision, the essay will have a chance to evolve from its current state into a brand new creature that has retained its best characteristics and left the rest behind. The focus here is on what I and his classmates can learn from him that will help all of us as writers.

Through the sequence, as we grapple with environments, Thoreau, Einstein’s Dreams, Lakoff and Johnson’s metaphorical concepts, and Endler’s guppies, ultimately, we are investigating what kinds of environments have produced the writers we have become and what steps we can take to transcend our perceived limitations.

The “Knowledge and Society” essay teaches students and reminds other writers about how essential revision is to the process. It teaches me to be patient with my drafts and especially to listen to what they are telling me. And it teaches teachers not to draw hasty conclusions about who is a good writer and who isn’t—or what is a bad essay and what isn’t.

Maybe at the next party I attend, when a stranger asks me what I do, I’ll say, “I design environments where cows kick pails and leap fences and where colors are allowed to flourish.”

Whether you are thinking about your own or a student’s writing ability, whether you are a medical doctor or a pastry chef, whether you are thinking you have someone pegged, as Katharine Hepburn’s character, Tracy, in Philadelphia Story said, “The time to make up your mind about people is never.”

Notes

Next, we’ll talk positively about plagiarism and expand on what I said above about my student’s plagiarism: “The language appropriation may have been necessary.”