Teaching and Writing and Teaching Writing

You wouldn't know it, but I've been elbow deep in student papers for the past month. Thankfully, I have not had to grade them, only help students with them as a tutor in the writing center. It's both soul-filling and appalling work. The students are what make it soul-filling: they're mostly adult women coming back to school at a non-traditional age, and so very driven and highly motivated to succeed. They want help, they want to learn, they want that piece of paper that's the prize, that they hope will better their lives and give them more income, make their parents proud and inspire their children. They're the best kind of student you can ask for; a teacher's dream.

What's appalling is how the educational system has failed them. Few of them come in with a good grasp of grammar, even something basic like verb tenses, and subject-verb agreement. Many don't understand what the basic units of a sentence are. The subject-verb-object construction is really complex and confusing to them. Part of that is the lack of nomenclature: we don't share a common language about the intrinsic parts of language, because somehow many of them got out of elementary school without even understanding the difference between a noun and a verb. They have never diagrammed sentences, learned to spell phonetically, or break words into syllables. They don't read aloud or do so poorly and can't hear where a comma would go, where their breath tells them it would go. I'm led to wonder what the hell they were taught, when I was learning all these things back in 2nd and 3rd grade. Whatever it was, it was neither successful nor useful, and I doubt this was entirely the students' fault. It's an all-too-typical complaint from college teachers of all stripes, but there's nothing to be done about it at this level, for these students, but help them catch up and fume privately about shortchanged public schools, underpaid teachers, crowded classrooms, lack of materials, and an indifferent public.

The other appalling part is the stories they have to tell in their papers. Far too many of them are absolutely heartbreaking: domestic violence, drug addiction, mental illness, an HIV diagnosis, chronic health problems, children lost to the streets, drive-bys, cheating men, abusive parents, gunned-down friends and family, immigration struggles, nights in jail. And yet they're here, bootstrapping themselves up out of whatever it was they went through, clawing their way out of bad relationships, low-paying jobs, single parenthood, abandonment, indifference. They abso-fucking-lutely amaze me—not that they can do what they're doing, but that they decided, themselves, to believe they could change their lives, then went and did it. And nothing, but nothing is getting in their way.

I haven't done this kind of one-on-one tutoring in a long time, and when I signed on, I wondered if it would spark my own writing the same way teaching a structured course always has in the past. The answer is yes. In part, it's because of these women fearlessly telling their stories, claiming their history, and spelling out their plans to rise above it. Not to sound trite, but it's like watching Oprah for three hours a day, three days a week. All this courage and determination uplifts me and makes me once again realize how charmed my life has been, how privileged (to use a word that was recently hurled at me like a curse), and how easy. I am lucky, lucky, lucky. Maybe this is why teaching feels so right to me. I've always believed in the "teach a man to fish" philosophy and I know how to fish: what better way to share my luck and my privilege? It also deeply appeals to the feminist in me. CNR is primarily a woman's college like the one I went to, and I deeply believe, as my mother did, that education and economic independence are the best things you can give a woman to improve her life.

I realize what I have in the writing center is a self-selecting population of students who aren't shy about asking for help, and aren't too proud to take it. I'm sure CNR, like all schools, has its share of slackers who don't really know or care what they're doing there, who prefer to coast along on the financial aid, thinking it's a good scam. I think there may be fewer of them than I'm used to because this is such a focused program (it's mostly health services students). My upcoming classes will probably have the usual bell-curve mix of ability and motivation, although that too is different when you're teaching an elective.

I'm really looking forward to teaching an entirely new class and a new genre of writing than I've taught before, especially something that I did myself for years: journaling. I see journals as a strange mix of personal and public, imaginative and factual, creative and disciplined. None of these attributes are mutually exclusive, but they don't often blend the way they do in a journal. I know that I would not be the person I am without the reams of paper I consumed in introspection, in analyzing relationships, in thinking about what to do with my life, or what was going wrong with it. It's a luxury that many people don't have, and even fewer realize they can make work for them. It's a fine way to teach writing, too, I think, because there are so many ways to make journals work. There are few rules, and much room for exploration of form and to learn how to clarify ideas and tell a story.

In short, I think it's going to be a good class. I'll keep you posted. My first class (tentatively) meets June 3rd.

Comments

[quirkyartist]

What an interesting post! Having graduated as a mature age student last year, and having been in class with many other mature age students, I have to say that things seem very different here.
The fact that the mature age students are motivated is the same, but all my peers seemed very well-educated, many already with prior qualifications in other fields. We had students from the Australian, New Zealand, South African, Pakistani, Serbian and English education systems. I guess they were just a different socio-economic group. Maybe because we were doing fine art.

[Lee Kottner]

I did my undergrad degree with a lot of non-traditional age students, too because that was part of the ethos of the women's college I went to. I didn't appreciate at the time how valuable they were to have in class, but they were, like me, mostly middle or upper middle class white women. The women I'm tutoring now mostly came out of working class, inner city NYC schools that are notorious for their poor quality. There are some students coming in from Jamaica and the Bahamas, and their basic education is much better, but still needs some help. What bothers me so much about seeing this is how smart the students who come in generally are. Every now and then, there's one who has managed to somehow transcend the system and grasp the right ideas on their own, but who lacks the confidence in their own intelligence. That's really heartbreaking.