Responding to Hesse

In my life outside of the classroom (both as a teacher and student) I spent years and years performing in musical theater at the community theater level. Doing so brought me a whole host of delightful artistic friends. A few years back there was a massively successful song by Robin Thicke, Pharrell Williams and T.I. called "Blurred Lines" that the estate of Marvin Gaye thought had a baseline too similar to a Gaye track, and they sued for writing credit and tons of money worth of royalties. The Gaye family won the case, and it was the cause of a ton of conversations between my musician friends about ownership of a groove. To them, and to most people, "Blurred Lines" did not sample from the Marvin Gaye song, and to my friends, this set a dangerous precedent for ownership of anything that could possibly sound remotely like something else.

All of this is a way of me asking if ownership of writing is a good thing? As I read Hesse's delightful speech, I kept wondering if "Who Owns Writing?" is even a question we should be asking. In his piece Hesse makes a point of mentioning blogs and Wikis as newer types of text and writing with freer ownership. He uses the phrase "sanctioned knowledge" as the opposite of what Wikipedia allows. The use of sanctioned is especially important, because I think, in effect, he is wondering if writing should be owned either, or maybe what he is getting at is that ownership of writing needs to have a much more open definition. Ownership of writing implies mastery, but of what? Is there a certain type of writing that is valued higher in terms of ownership? One of the barriers I feel like I am constantly trying to break through with my students is the idea that writing does not have to be scary. But, one of the problems with writing through students' eyes is that they see ownership of writing as being something academic, and unfathomable to get control of.

The idea should be to take ownership of writing and show students that there are different levels of ownership, as well as a wide variety of writing ownership out there. Hesse touches on this when he wonders if the word "writing" is the problem. The act of writing causes anxiety for students, probably because they do not claim ownership of it. As an instructor, the goal should be to extend a kind of ownership to the students. I am still trying to figure out how. Does one have to attain mastery to have ownership? In my opening story, ownership means being the first one to create a generally used and accepted groove line, but there is no correlation to a groove line in writing, or is there? Does one have to understand a certain syntax before one can have ownership? These are the questions that fired in my head while reading the article and have stuck with me for a week since.

I begin a new expository writing unit with my eleventh graders tomorrow and as I reminded them all of that fact on Friday they groaned a groan so loud and heavy that I am still feeling it on my shoulders. They get to choose any career they want, research it, learn about it, then write about it. They love the idea of researching and learning about any career they want, but the minute I say write about it, or if I mention the final product is an essay, they freeze. I have 9 more weeks to try and help them take ownership of their writing.