Why doesn’t college work better? An Introduction

As much as I like teaching, it’s often frustrating, seemingly relentless (part of why I’m buried and not blogging as much these days) and short of tangible rewards. On top of that, criticism of higher education is common, from employers to students. Why? What prevents colleges and universities from performing better?

I’ve thought about writing a series of reflections about this for over a year. At that time, however, I was also angry at a handful of related issues, and it wasn’t the time for clear thinking. Now that I’m merely buried in work, though, I’m ready to explain. The problem, in no particular order, is students, professors, high schools, parents, taxpayers, administrators, government, employers, guidance counselors, economics, culture, and society at large. Did I leave anybody out?

As I find a moment here and there, I’ll explore these areas one by one, labeling them when I do as part one, part two, etc. But here’s a start.

Higher education exists for one purpose--to continue. Seriously, no irony. It always has, since its inception in the 12th century. Sure, if research occurs, if education happens, if knowledge expands, terrific. But the system is set up not to reward those endeavors, but to continue. In fact, not only have many new ideas originated outside of supposed intelligentsia, but also those institutions often opposed the new approaches. Despite its more recent “liberal” label, college is a thoroughly conservative institution.

All the other stakeholders have much the same focus--to survive. Admittedly, lots of people throw themselves into endeavors for lots of commendable reasons. But the bottom line is survival, not growth. What growth does occur is a byproduct. Add a healthy dose of self-justification, and we have a system of higher education.

So join me on an exploration, and I look forward to your comments along the way.

Writer

Writing, Responsibility, and Repercussions

I’m always amazed at the almost casual way students commit plagiarism, as if the point were merely to generate paper to submit to instructors. Often I’m even insulted with their obvious forays into academic dishonesty, apparently believing I’d never notice, when I usually notice practically immediately, and can confirm in seconds (ironically, this “Internet savvy” generation actually can’t find their way around the virtual world unless it’s the first keyboard posting on Google).

I had three cases this term—over, of all things, blog posts for which they simply earn full credit.

I sighed. I talked to them—one complained that she was just resubmitting material she’d submitted for another course (which is also plagiarism), for which she earned an A. Double sigh—it wasn’t even summary, but rather word for word compilations of the original sources. Another student liked my butt, saying “Well, I certainly don’t want you to have to do anything you don’t feel comfortable doing.” I resisted the urge to vomit.

The third student, however, listened carefully, asked questions, stressed that he didn’t want to lose this class, and not only asked what he could do, but also proposed solutions (involving extra work and grade reductions). In short, he took responsibility. What’s sad is that I was impressed—this is not the norm.

He impressed me again this week. “Hey, I can’t take your Intro to Fiction class after all,” he reported, turning in all his extra work during an office visit. “Truth is, I can’t come back.”

“You can’t come back?” I echoed? Students backing out of course selections is hardly new, and no problem at all, but this was a new approach.

“Yeah,” he answered. “I found this guy in bed with my girlfriend.”

“Ah,” I noted. “I’m guessing that didn’t go well.” Two things strike me. First, he didn’t make excuses, but simply took responsibility for his actions. Unique approach, and one underused. Second, the focus was entirely on the guy, not the unfaithful two-timing girlfriend. Can anyone say double standard? And this brings us back to writing classes.

After five semesters of teaching professional writing courses, with only a couple of exceptions, the professional writing majors are far from the best students. Among the most extreme examples of this occurred in the same class, with the major refusing to hand in her final writing piece, not even the draft, protesting “It’s not ready!” This after the class has worked on these for weeks.

“Well, when WILL it be ready?” I venture. After all, it’s the last day of classes.

“Sometime next week?”

“That won’t work. Grades have to be submitted within three days of the last class or exam.”

“Then give me an Incomplete.”

“No.”

“YOU’RE STRESSING ME OUT!”

“You’re about to get a whole lot more stressed.”

We worked out a compromise, and this particular situation is extreme, but all too often representative. “Professional Writing,” to them, seems to mean babbling about summer vacations to a patronizing high school teacher, and they expect to find jobs “Where I can do something creative.” Thing is, those jobs expect you to, well, create. A lot. Often. And well. Oh—and on deadline.

But these students have clearly been taught otherwise.

Writer

Puccini, Pavarotti and Performance

Just arriving home today, I heard “As It Happens,” the Canadian news magazine presented in the evenings on NPR, the third airing I’ve heard today about the death of Luciano Pavarotti. “I was on the N.Y. Subway listening to an aria on my iPod,” reported an interviewee, “and I just cried at the beauty of his voice. I looked up and saw the headline of the newspapers about Pavarotti’s death, and the woman reading the newspaper was crying too. He just touched so many people’s lives.”

Indeed he did.

As a young music student, not from a musical family, I struggled to understand why opera was such a big deal. Among the recordings I heard was Puccini’s “La Boheme,” sung by none other. I got it. I still cry at the beauty of those passages—and this as a jaded musician who’s heard a lot of music so many times that it’s practically aural wallpaper. Pavarotti’s singing stands out, and I not only learned to appreciate opera, but also learned that the performance mattered greatly I the appreciation of the work (probably no small part of my decision to pursue music as a performer, not primarily an educator or scholar (those would come later).

I started teaching college only because I was asked to take on an Intro to Music course at a local college—part Music Appreciation, part Music History, all for non-majors, so I strove to offer students quite a varied taste of the music world—including opera.

“We have to listen to an OPERA?” they’d complain.

“Have you ever heard an opera?” I would counter.

“No…we just hate it.”

“Why?”

They didn’t know.

So, each term we took two class periods to watch a video of an excellent performance of Puccini’s “La Boheme” produced by the San Francisco Opera, staring Luciano Pavarotti. Students settled down into their most attitude-broadcasting postures, feet up on the chair in front, elbow on an adjacent chair, head leaning resignedly into the palm, fingers draped like a ledge to “shade” the eyes. I ignored the passive aggressive protests, started the video, and turned off the lights.

In retrospect, I should have been amazed that the class proceeded in silence (I was still new to teaching).

I DID notice that each term, the second day, almost all of the students returned. They assumed the same defiant postures, I again pretended not to notice, and picked up the opera from the previous class period.

The plot of La Boheme is not complicated. Mimi meets poor artists. Mimi falls in love with Pavarotti’s character. Mimi is sick. Gets sicker. Gets sicker and sicker. Then she dies.

Students sat in the darkened room, eyes covered. “Sniff,” I hear, as we enter the final scene. “Sniff, sniff!” comes another. Faster and faster—soon the whole room, still visually unmoved, is sniffling. At Mimi’s death—the end of the opera—a chorus of sniffles accompanies the applause as the cast takes its bows. I graciously wait to turn the lights back on.

Writer

The Best and Worst of Words

Someone recently started a discussion thread on a message board, asking for each user’s favorite word, remarking that as writers, we should have some insight. People posted many interesting choices, but my initial thought is also my final response: the.

What word could prove more useful? Want to mark any word of your choice as a noun? The. Sure, other words can do this, but most are limited in their capabilities. Demonstrative adjectives (that, this, those, these, and other such words) can do this, as can count words (numbers and relative quantity indicators), but these are subject to external circumstances. A and an can mark nouns too, of course, but they’re constantly jockeying for position, always looking over their shoulders for what vowels or consonants might be following—let alone possible exceptions. Even then, their indications are indefinite. Adjectives, with or without additional modification from adverbs, just steer information obliquely. The, however, knows its own mind. This is definitely that. It’s THE noun, not a suggestion or a possibility. The is the anchor in an uncertain world.

That uncertainty is the root of my least favorite word, usually applied in the phrase “in conclusion.” I forbid using this marker in my classes, arguing that such a flagged conclusion can’t be leading up to much. Mindful of this rule, one of my poetry students. a college senior, submitted his final paper with his final paragraph beginning “to conclude.”

Yeah, that’s better. Why not just write, “So where’s my paper leading? To what final point? Final argument? Well, no point, really, so let me just repeat the stuff I already said.” Twenty-five words instead of two! That’s gotta help meet the minimum length. It would at least be more honest and more entertaining, if still pathetically weak in content.

So “conclude” becomes a sorry attempt to “occlude,” merely to include what the student should preclude, clearly choosing to exclude more effective approaches, preferring to seclude any real thinking process, clearly not at all clude in.

This decision mirrors the one to baulk against concision, circumventing precision by changing expletive openers like “it is” and “there are” to “it’s” and “there’re” rather than exercising incision in favor of much more definite subjects and verbs. Such an inclination to decline more effective approaches in order to recline will ultimately leave the student facing quite an incline, but this seems systemic in his native Incline Nation.

I do try to intercede, as I want students to succeed, but when they proceed to embrace approaches that precede college level writing, they prevent any hope to exceed grade school competence, and I can only concede.

The student’s stated goal, incidentally, was “to just earn a C.” Mission accomplished.

Writer

Adulthood Sucks (and so does adjunct-hood)

Remember that sweatshop essay you wrote for freshman composition? Or, if you didn’t write one, certainly your classmates did--I’ve read multiple versions of this essay in portfolio committees and General Education Assessment Review committees.

No doubt, you pointed to unfair conditions, substandard wages, and blamed callous CEOs whose only concern was the almighty dollar—let any unhappy workers leave. You probably noted that those CEOs cited even worse conditions elsewhere—hell, those workers were damn lucky to work for these low wages, as it let them climb out of poverty.

If you were particularly insightful, you noted that those CEOs work for share holders who expect a robust return on their investments, and thus, share holders, not specifically CEOs, should be held accountable. Perhaps you even realized that a free market economy would not likely achieve equitable treatment, and hence government would need to intervene (I haven’t read many of those essays).

In the case of education, you are all those share holders. Despite how people like to complain about it, you elect the government. The school boards run the schools, the governor runs SUNY (The State University of New York)—but YOU elect these “CEOs.”

SUNY colleges—universities, ag/tech colleges, community colleges—all rely on sweatshop labor. We call them adjunct professors, and we pay them around $2600 per course, or based on the work load of full time professors (three courses per term), just over $15,000 a year. Statewide, roughly 60% of instructors are so paid. (And while SUNY colleges offer these people health insurance, many others in community colleges go without.)

A few departments in a few colleges have consistently fought against such glaring injustice, pioneering and expanding, for example, hiring adjuncts as full time lecturers. Yet even here, although this development is certainly welcome, the sweatshop continues. Full time lecturers are paid just over $30,000 to teach four courses per term, and they are denied access to tenure. Thus, many of them will work, grateful they can at least pay the bills, but will retire in poverty with little to no savings. Others cover their liability by continuing to teach as many as six courses a term at other institutions ON TOP of their full time obligations, as well as a wide assortment of outside occupations--all to earn just what a typical full professor earns, but at the expense of their personal lives.

Additionally, English professors in particular do so at virtually impossible odds. First year students arrive, convinced they know everything about writing, unable to identify the subject and verb of a sentence, let alone write a specific thesis statement, angry at instructors who challenge them to grow, annoyed they have to take writing courses at all. Even worse perhaps, I consistently see Juniors and Seniors—English majors, Professional Writing majors, Education majors and so forth—who can’t write without such basic errors as comma splice run-ons, subject/verb agreement, pronoun/antecedent agreement, misplaced modifiers, faulty parallelism—let alone effective paragraphs, sentences, rhetorical purpose. Those instructors who push this face the wrath of students seeking the easiest way through their course work possible, encouraged by administrative policies that abdicate responsibility for oversight to the course evaluation forms students complete at the end of each course, thus encouraging faculty to teach to make students happy, rather than prepare them for the outside world. So we graduate students who can’t write.

Well, suppose students want to learn in such an environment: where are all these instructors in the face of such obstacles? In their cars, on the way to their next college job—or jobs.

The pattern isn’t new—why are so many high school graduates, “A” papers in hand, so poorly prepared? Large class sizes, overly protective parents, ideologically focused school boards? Hard to tell—probably several interlocking reasons.

Here’s where you, the share holder, come in.

Changing this takes money. This means paying more in taxes—or giving up other services. I can complain all I want about my “bill burden,” but my choices are (1) increase income or (2) cut expenses. Government is no different.

Here’s the reality—you own a sweatshop. What will you do?

Is education important? Are fair employment practices? Is this what you want for your family, your community, your society?

We frequently see complaints about high taxes, but we pay a fraction of the taxes most industrial nations pay (we are also the ONLY industrial nation without national health care!). Washington keeps touting tax cuts to stimulate the economy, but ignores the growing discrepancy between rich and poor since the Reagan fallacy, admitted by his own people, created by the “trickle down” economics preached by the much more cynical Bush administration? Have you noticed that each federal tax cut costs you more locally? And for all those complaints about high taxes in New York—have you lived in other states? Yes, the taxes may be lower—and you also can’t get the services New Yorkers enjoy.

Sure, the mantra drones on about wasted government money. Yet, the U.S. spends more on the military than EVERY NATION ON EARTH COMBINED. Overkill?

Here’s the point—as a citizen, you are the shareholder. You, implicitly, agree with these developments. You, the shareholder, could also decide to instruct your “board of directors” otherwise. You could make it clear that education is a priority in New York State, or in whatever state or country you live, and that running sweatshops is not acceptable.

Or was that freshman composition essay just talk?

Writer

Why I have little faith in High School

A bad joke at best, admittedly, but when my total at the local store came to $19.32, the clerk duly announced "Nineteen Thirty Two." “Not a good year,” I remarked.

“I wouldn’t know,” shrugged the clerk, a High School graduate.

These people know me well (I see them almost daily), so I teased, “What do they teach in High Schools these days?”

She shrugged again. “Wouldn’t know. I don’t go to school.”

I couldn’t yet give up. “What did they USED to teach in High School?”

Stymied. “Dunno. I never paid attention.” And so on with her life long career as a clerk. But I can’t say my High School experience was much better.

I remember Kindergarten—age four. My teacher read us “The Lion, the Witch, and the Wardrobe.” I was fascinated. My home had several books—my mother had been a librarian, my maternal grandmother was a sixth grade teacher, and my dad was going to night school—and I started to read them. I read all of the C. S. Lewis Narnia series over the next few years (along with many other works).

Then it stopped. I was failing 1st grade arithmetic—until my mother bought a pile of flashcards and forced me to go through them again and again until I mastered it. Second grade wasn’t much better—I’d learned to hate school. Third grade was the deal breaker. My teacher was a witch, and I shut down. I received a C in reading. My parents were so confused and concerned that they invested in a flurry of eyesight and hearing tests. I don’t remember fourth grade at all (but I DO remember my dad coming home early when JFK was assassinated). In one of these grades, shuffled off to art class, I showed a friend a sundial I had designed and built from cardboard—hours of work. The art “teacher” walked over and ripped it to shreds.

In 5th grade, when my dad was transferred, I moved to a new school. My parents resisted placing me in the recommended “accelerated” class, noting that perhaps I just wasn’t up to the pressure. My new teacher, then, was an extremely tall, imposing man I frankly feared a bit—Mr. Christensen. Not only is he one of the best teachers I’ve ever known, but YEARS later, when I was facilitating a “introduce the arts” class for teachers, he was among the attendees—and instantly remembered me. Ironically, a few years after that, I had his daughter in two separate college classes. Yet a few years later, now working for National Public Radio, she interviewed me for an Indian land claim piece.

6th grade clinched the turning point. When my mom arrived for a parent/teacher conference, Mr. Grudzinski (as I understand from my mom later), apparently fresh from a parental conflict, announced, “I gave your son a B because that’s the grade he deserved!” Unfazed, Mom replied, “OK…” and Mr. Grudzinski relaxed. “I’m not supposed to show you this,” he noted, “but I think you should see this,” and he showed her the results of our placement tests.

Mom came home. “You will earn “A” grades from now on,” she announced. End of story. It was OK. I loved Mr. Grudzinski—a very nice man, a very funny man, and a great teacher.

Junior High School was scary. Suddenly, I was in classes with those “accelerated” students, none of whom I knew. I withdrew again, finding refuge in only two places—mathematics and music. Mark, a math wiz, became my best friend. We both entered a county wide contest. I won a gold medal for my presentation on “Functions and their Graphs.” Mark didn’t fare so well. The next year, I wrote a paper for the same contest on differential calculus. I thought about a career as a mathematician, but I was worried, and was cautioned, that this might not be a promising field. Add computers to this and consider just how bad this advice proved to be.

Four Junior High teachers stand out—two of them surprisingly in Social Studies, a subject I had always hated: Mr. Neufang and Mr. Lane. Suddenly, I understood that this was not about boring dates and events, but about people and exciting times. Riding a horse through the White House? Got my attention. I started to care about the outside world—and learn about it. The other teachers were in science. My 7th grade teacher was so full of puns and tricks that he kept my interest—40 years later I can still name the bones of the body. But my 8th grade teacher, Mr. Wiltze, really pulled it all together. We had to write a series of correlations—Dandelions and Icebergs, for example. We had to think. We were not rewarded for mere length (I wrote 12-20 page papers). We didn’t get good grades for the hell of it (and I didn’t do so well—B grades, as I remember).

Unfortunately, that was the end of my public school education. Yes, I did have a few good teachers—I remember a geometry and a French teacher—but my education moved to what I was reading/studying outside of class. By far the worst was English—we just did the same damn thing we had done in 7th grade over and over and over, just with different reading material. To get an A, just write about some personal interest. These teachers were pathetically easy to play. No wonder students come to college so ill-prepared. I did have one excellent teacher, Mr. Wanzer, my music teacher, who taught us Music History and Appreciation with a college level text, Donald J. Grout’s “A History of Western Music.” Wanzer took us step by step, and showed us the importance of each development. He developed our talent—I directed our Jazz Band my senior year. I earned performance scholarships from the Eastman School of Music and the New England Conservatory, entering my classes knowing far more than my classmates ever learned—no exaggeration. Of course, Wanzer was fired.

As a High School freshman, I visited my guidance counselor to choose my courses. I had a choice between Biology and Earth Science. I wasn’t (then) interested in biology, so I opted for Earth Science—but first I had a question. I DEFINITELY wanted to study physics (a passion I still hold today), so I asked for assurance that Earth Science would allow me to follow the sequence of courses I would need to get to physics in my senior year. I was given that assurance, so I took Earth Science (in a class of mostly seniors).

The bitch lied. When I wanted to enroll in the next course, Chemistry, I was told I needed Biology first. So, I completed my science education one year behind my peers. I never studied physics, except for the extensive reading I’ve done on my own.

The final straw was my senior year. When I received my schedule, it beared no semblance to reality—completely ignored my language sequence, for example, and scheduled me for three periods of study hall. Huh? I finally knew then, completely, that my education was up to me.

Working around the bandroom and Mr. Wanzer’s office, I happened upon the Master Schedule. Hmmm. I opened it. Interesting.

I threw away my course schedule and wrote my own—partly getting into my friends’ classes, but also getting myself into classes I wanted—Humanities, for example. I had no study halls. I went to the classes I had chosen, knowing that in each class, after attendance, the teachers would ask, “Is there anyone I didn’t call?” I raised my hand. “Does your schedule say you’re supposed to be here?” I nodded yes, knowing they never checked. “OK,” they said, and added me to their rosters.

Three months later—three months—my guidance counselor asked to see me. “People have been looking for you,” she said, “calling your name in study halls.” So right there, I knew she was a lying idiot—or at least I hope people wouldn’t look for a lost student by calling a name every day for three months. Obviously, they had long ago just crossed my name off their attendance lists. “Um, well, when I got my schedule,” I explained, knowing I was talking to a moron, “I realized it was a mistake, so I just went to the right classes instead.”

“You can’t just do that!” she exclaimed. Knowing I had already won this battle three months ago, I put on my most contrite face. “Gee, I’m so sorry,” I swore. “I didn’t realize. I’ll never do it again!” Of course not. I’m a senior. I’m out of here.

And thank god. I needed to learn, and I clearly wasn’t going to do it in High School. Mostly they wanted me to pursue a career as an architect, as my aptitude tests indicated (I think my dad still wishes I’d done this). This, of course, is currently a depressed field. I scored 720 on the math portion of the SATs--before they decided to lower the bar. I graduated with honors. And I knew that school did not equal learning.

Writer

Why "Can’t" (Doesn’t/Won’t) Johnny Write Well?

I’ve been listening to complaints about student writing for a few decades now. Professors complain that students can’t compose sentences, can’t construct paragraphs, can’t even demonstrate a command of seventh grade English grammar, and eschew anything resembling critical thinking or revision. Employers complain that colleges award degrees to functionally illiterate graduates. Students complain that high school doesn’t prepare them for college writing, and at the same time, complain that their courses require too much writing. High school teachers frantically try to teach writing while mostly teaching to the New York State Regents exams, all while handling large classes and behavior problems.

The usual culprits are the Internet, Instant Messaging and cell phone text messaging. Students are used to short, abbreviated language (lol, btw, and so forth), runs the argument, thereby atrophying written language skills.

I don’t buy it.

“I can design an assignment to interest and involve any student,” boasted a colleague, a student teacher supervisor, at a recent small group meeting for the National Writing Project (designed to bring high school teachers together with college professors to address the quality of student writing). “It’s just not that hard.” But this is the problem. Sure, engaging students is important, but often their entire high school education is nothing more than assignments such as these. Students write little more than agree/disagree statements, personal reflections, and other self-indulgent writing that dances along the surface of real issues, repeating stereotypes and generalities, rather than broaching any true analysis.

High school students then bring these habits to college, convinced that every article by a Native American is about getting kicked off the land, that every article about women is about how the media forces them to live their lives as bulimic Barbie dolls, that poverty exists because some people are lazy, that all the world’s problems would vanish if everyone would just support the President. The textbooks reinforce such superficial thinking, organized in pro/con fashion, promoting the simplistic view that every issue has two sides instead of delving into the multiple positions reflected in true debates.

Perhaps even worse is the commitment to the “Self Esteem Movement,” the idea that education should continually reinforce students’ self image. Who invented this nonsense? Granted, attacking students would be counterproductive, just shutting them down, but how does THIS help: “That’s OK, dear. I understand that you’re doing the best you can, so we’ll just lower the standards to your level so that you will then be doing well. Feel better?” That’s not encouragement. That’s not building self-esteem. That’s patronizing. That’s telling students, “I know you just aren't good enough to learn this material, so just never mind—it doesn’t really matter anyway.” It’s an insult, and a horrible thing to do to a child—or to a college student. Yet, SAT scoring was revised for exactly this reason.

So students learn to play the victim—and get rewarded for doing so. “I don’t get it,” they claim. “What specifically?” I ask. “Any of it,” comes the answer. A college student can’t understand a single word of an article. “Well then—there’s no way I can help you,” I inform them. That’s the point, right? They’ve completely blocked any avenue except telling them what to write. You should see the look of shock on their faces. But it’s true—once they throw their hands up, game over.

They’ve been taught to play the angles. Got behind? You had “family problems” or “personal issues.” Got a test, or a paper due? You weren’t feeling well that morning—but you’re feeling better later in the day and can get the paper done then. Challenged too much? Turn to your parents, or the Chair, or the Dean. Log on to professors.com and warn your classmates that this instructor teaches for real, and try (as the site explicitly notes) to get such instructors fired.

Current college structures aggravate the problem. Administration leans heavily on student evaluation of courses to assess instructors, ignoring the obvious point that students don’t yet have the skills to effectively judge faculty. So, the predictable happens—the goal is keeping students happy, not education. Reading assignments address students’ preferences instead of challenging them. Writing assignments are predictable and avoid any real difficulties. Students are given specific step by step guidelines to follow, instead of organizing their thoughts themselves. One of my colleagues stresses that she doesn’t worry about specifics, teaching instead “the joy of writing.” Give me a break. If you need a friend, get a dog. Students have friends—they need teachers.

I’m all for building self-esteem, but REAL self-esteem. Set high standards. Help students learn the skills needed to reach those standards. Let them try. Gently redirect them when they fall short. Have them try again. Encourage them. Have them try again, and again, until, as one of my students noted on her final assessment of her writing in my course, they “earn the coveted ‘Good.’” THAT’S self-esteem, knowing they’ve faced challenges and successfully mastered them, not just told so. After all, in the “real world,” they need demonstrable skills, not platitudes. True education should provide those skills.

I’m all for models, too, but not “Here, just do it this way” formulas. What true music teacher would teach an instrument without demonstrating that instrument for the student? Writing teachers must do the same—write for students. Explain the process as it unfolds. Note that the “answer” isn’t to “do it this way” but rather to begin to understand the abstract principles involved. And once learned, those abstract principles won’t mean instant success. Can a piano student master scales just because the teacher explained how to play them? Obviously not—weeks and months and years (depending on how high the students wishes to rise) of practice lie ahead.

And finally, writing instructors must themselves write. Would you take guitar lessons from someone who never played? Then why writing? No wonder students decide that since they’ve had a writing course in the past, they’re all set. What musician doesn’t realize that continual improvement is mandatory, and that excellence just means “get in line with the other excellent players”? Writing instructors must recognize the same--and maybe they'd stop teaching such damaging misinformation as "put a comma where you want a pause" instead of looking at sentence sense, or "forecast the next paragraph by abruptly changing the subject in the last sentence, repeating it in the first sentence of the next paragraph" instead of composing writing with clear direction, or "write a bunch of general sentences to slowly get to a point, then go back to general statements" instead of clearly developing ideas. Reaching a minimum word count doesn't equal effective writing.

How else can we show students that writing is a process, that writing well involves thinking and analysis, that writing can always improve—and that the journey is worth the effort?

Writer

Creative Dissonance

Dissonance. I like the word.

My colleague used it today as I described changes to my thinking about teaching my fall courses. “You’ve always been a good teacher,” she noted, “but there’s a dissonance,” referring to a mismatch between my nature and my approach. I know. I’ve felt it for quite some time.

My students feel it too. I’ve noticed that when I’m just blunt, frankly expressing my thoughts about their work, students blossom. Not intimidated in the least, even though I’m then at my most forceful, they simply accept and respond positively, thoughtfully, even creatively—rather than the resistance or timidity they can too often exhibit otherwise. I believe here they see me as truly genuine.

This week, some former students presented their work in one of my courses at a conference. They noted challenges, difficulties, discouraging tasks—and then urged their fellow students to follow the same path and take the course. Other students, current students, definitely not my best students, registered for my advanced writing courses, saying “Yeah, there’s a lot of writing, but you hardly notice it,” and “It’s kind of fun.” Interesting. And late today, a community leader contacted me about the “real world” writing my classes produce—referred enthusiastically by one of my students. I think I may have been looking in the wrong direction.

Years ago, a Toronto pianist gave me a book as a thank you gift that outlined the theory of Creative Tension, the idea that dissonance between where we are and where we want to be motivates creative action. Again, interesting. Sufi musician Hazrat Inayat Khan describes people as tones, some harmonious, some dissonant—for example, C and B are dissonant notes, but adding E and G produces a poignant, relaxing chord. Yet again, interesting.

I think we’re on to something. Viva la dissonance.

Writer