Week 1 reflection

Man, this is quite an undertaking. Teaching high school full-time and starting an MA program as a full-time student at the same time is not for the weary, though it has left me weary after one week. I have to admit that financial aide issues are the reason I find myself in Teaching College Composition, but already I find myself invigorated by the course. Mostly because it is the course I am taking that has the most immediate effect on my day job. It has already got my thinking of how I can better serve my students in the area of writing. I need to figure out a new system because my current one is leaving behind too many students. It is tough not to get bogged down in the conventions of writing, even as the new Common Core Standards emphasize that ideas are more important than conventions. I want to buy into that thought, and maybe this class will help me reconcile my reluctance. Professor's Hayes enthusiasm for the subject of teaching writing is certainly helping, as well. After a long day, it is nice to sit in a classroom and let someone else have the energy. I have been thinking about the question he posed: Why is college composition important? I have a few answers to this question because I get asked "Why is writing important" at least 209 times a school year. The real problem lies, not in answering the question, the real problem lies in the problems with convincing teenagers it is important for all of the reasons I lay out. Every year former students come back and say "I wish I had paid more attention in your class, especially with writing." I ask them to tell my current students that, but it rarely helps. The student who is brilliant at math cannot see how writing will help him in his life because high school math requires so little writing. It can be defeating.

Reader Response to Faigley

It is impossible for me to separate these two parts of myself, as I read "Competing Theories of Process: A Critique and a Proposal." There is the part of me that teaches high school and reads this in that context. While none of my English Teacher Prep classes said anything to me about having a process for teaching writing, I instinctively knew I needed one when I started teaching three years ago. I needed to make sure that all of my students were playing the same game, which is essentially what the importance of having a process to teach writing is. Then there is the side of me who is a student learning the names of these processes for the first time. For me, being able to put a name to them has been liberating. It allows me to realize that the process I have been teaching has been a mishmash of the three processes Faigley lays out in the article. Teaching writing is the hardest part of my job. Tougher than classroom management, tougher than teenage apathy, and certainly tougher than literature analysis. Because it is impossible for me to separate these two parts of myself for now, and it may always be so, I am going to look at these three processes through the prism of teaching at the high school level. The Expressive View: Faigley cites D. Gordon Rohman as saying that the definition of "good writing" is about integrity, spontaneity, and originality. It is not surprising that this is considered a Romantic notion, because it sound dreamy. I believe it is the dream that good writing can burst forth in moments of spontaneity, but I have found that in my experience, spontaneous writing in the classroom is rarely quality writing. The Expressive view does not seem practical in a classroom of students for whom writing feels second language acquisition. Spontaneous writing works in small doses, as a way to activate the brain, but in my experience, does not produce meaningful, coherent and cohesive writing. Cognitive View: Reading through this process I found myself nodding repeatedly. Instinctively this where my current teaching philosophy resides in terms of writing. It is not my belief that is the optimal way to write because it feels like it can handcuff growing writers to stick to a specific type of essay. Breaking teenagers out of the five-paragraph essay is a yearlong process, but the pre-writing, mapping, brainstorming, help struggling students more than anything else. The key is teach them that these structures are not set in stone. One thing I find pleasing about the cognitive view is that it helps students with their organization. Social View: I have been grappling with the social view for days now, and I have come to the conclusion that I am stumped. I am not sure if I cannot see how it works because of my high school teacher lens, or if I am just not able to come to a solid understanding of its meaning. One thing that stood out to me was this idea that there can be no expert writer. I am not quite sure what it means, but based around the text, it would appear that since writing comes from one's own culture and home, that there is no way we can judge every writer on the same scale. I have not come to any grand conclusions about what my future teaching process will be. I have to think that whatever it is, there will be a way to combine aspects of the three of these processes, because my short career of teaching has already shown me that no two students learn to write the same way.