Reflections on Teaching Freshman Composition

It is 8:30 a.m. I am about to leave my Mill Street apartment to walk to Ellis Hall to teach my first Freshman Composition class at Ohio University. I am nervous, a little sweaty; I only moved to Athens a week ago, leaving my husband behind in Frederick, Maryland. I have never lived by myself. I have made a large commitment to something I do not really know will work out for me: earning a PhD. I have a syllabus I prepared with a group during orientation. It does not have my “stamp” on it; it is syllabus carved out day-to-day. Restrictive—yet with many gaps left for individual teacher input.

And now, now is the moment of truth: I am about to face twenty young adults who have no idea who I am. I do not know who they are. The room will be dead silent; I know it. I hate silent classrooms. To me they represent lack of camaraderie, lack of engagement, lack of humor.

It is not as if I have not faced first-day teaching jitters before. But this will be the first time I face them at Ohio University in front of twenty eighteen-year-olds. I do not know what to expect. One thing I do know, though, is that there is a good chance that they will be as scared or more scared than I am.

_______________________

September 21

We have let down our hair a bit, we Freshman Composition companions in room 213A. The room has a nice chattery sound to it as students—who all know each others' names and have since the first week—work in collaborative groups on a project designed to engage them in an exchange of their written ideas regarding Paula Rust's essay “Sexual Identity and Bisexual Identities: The Struggle for Self-Description in a Changing Sexual Landscape” from the text we are using: Writing as Reflective Action (Carter Duncan and Sherrie Gradin). I have tended to use collaborative groups not only for thinking activities where they must report back to the whole group, but also I have used them for working with “academic” papers. I often use group discussion and group searches for textual supports of opinions as a way to teach students how to incorporate those textual supports into a thesis-driven paper. I don't necessarily make the papers long, but I try to set the bar really high as to what I expect them to be able to do with quotations and citations.

Today is a big day. I am going to return their first formal papers' rough drafts.

The assignment was to write a four-to-six-page personal essay about an experience they had had. I had a wonderful time reading the essays. I approached these papers as I would a graduate level fiction seminar (something I'd been teaching for some years) in terms of the feedback I gave them. I'm proud of my approach, and the students were really responsive. They can't wait for my notes now—but I've learned that I can't spend as much time on future papers as I did on the first ones. But I also learned how validated my students felt as writers. The following is from a recent student paper:

I learned that I shouldn't try to hide events in my life. Other people can identify with pretty much anything that has happened to me. You can take an event that has occurred in your life and come up with one hell of a paper. Just writing can bring up feelings that you never knew you had. To hold back from writing should almost be considered a shame. I can't tell you how much you can learn about yourself. (Steven Hattendorf)

I'm still following the course syllabus carved in stone during orientation with my fellow response group members. I've never followed a daily syllabus before that I can remember (I taught in the public schools for twelve years). It doesn't mean I haven't; I just don't remember doing so. And I don't ever plan to do so again. I see lots of benefits in terms of students being up to date and knowing what's going on, but I feel really trapped by the lack of flexibility. I like to be able to carry on with a theme or project that happens to ignite my class's inquiring minds.

The first day I entered English 151, I wasn't too sure how much I was going to like the class. My teacher Elly made us do an in-class writing assignment that I wasn't too keen on and she even had the nerve to assign homework. Who assigns homework the first day of school? What was this lady thinking? I thought to myself. If she wanted me to like her, she was going to have to ease up or I was going to have to change.

And yet, and yet, this class was going better than I'd ever hoped. My students are bright and polite and engaged. Unbeknownst to me, I've been following Peter Elbow's ideas of writer ownership, and my students are blooming as writers—students who on the first day wrote on their information cards that English was one of their worst subjects, English was boring, they hated to write.

I asked my students to write reflexively about the course. They knew I would know who had written what because I asked them to sign their names and also to give me written permission to use their work (or not) in a paper I was writing. I told them to feel free to write whatever they liked, and it would be a short, timed writing assignment. Despite my knowing what each student wrote, I'm willing to believe at the least that there are shards of honesty in their voices:

This class has helped me realize that I am a pretty good writer. It was mainly because of Elly's comments on my papers. There are a lot of comments, long comments, even if it's an A paper. Through the readings I got to see different families and lifestyles and this showed me that it's okay if your own family isn't “normal.” English 151 has turned out to be a big help in my writing even for other courses. (Valerie Clifton)

Reflexivity is one of, if not the most important things that I have learned. Learning to see from another person's culture's or gender's point of view is amazing to me. So much more can be learned and experienced when thinking and feeling how another culture may think. So far in my life, this class and its material has been the most valuable to me. The teacher had a lot to do with it. (Gene Marchese)

It has been hard to get up early enough to make it to English 151 every morning, but once I am there it is worth it. I think the most important thing I learned is what is expected in a “college” paper. I also learned a process that, when completed, leads to a very polished final draft. This course has made me more of a thinker. (Erin Petit)

This class has helped me handle a heavy load of homework. When I need to read a story and write a two-page response, I have to really get into my work. I used to have trouble writing over two pages in a night, but now I have opened a door in my brain that allows me to keep expanding my thought to make a better paper. (Jon Obers)

This has been a great class. This is the first English class that I have been successful in. I feel the combination of college and the freedom to express my views has opened doors for my writing. Because of this class, I am a more confident writer and thinker. This class made me look at opposing views to mine. (Ryan Romer-Jordan)

I have learned that my stupid storytelling is actually a writing style. (Kevin Campopiano)

This class meant the world to me and at the same time changed my perspective of the world. This class made me reflect on ideas that before I would never have taken the time to care about. It made me care about important issues I had shut the door on, such as gays and African American discrimination. The one thing I took away from this class was a new definition of myself and everything that I am. I had never thought about my own identity. (Megan Crawford)

I have not only read the most challenging material, but I have also had to pull out the demons which inhibit me. I loved it. I felt as though my writing progressed beyond my expectations. I was able to do this because I know that whatever I write, my teacher will be comfortable reading it. I have never had such an open-minded class. (Erin Cassane)

This course has been great for me. It has me think at a whole new level. It has made me open up my eyes and make me feel not so different. By different in a sense of not fitting in. In class everyone voices their opinion and I used to not be open enough to do that because I was scared of what my classmates would think of me. Now I am able to open up with people I don't know and not feel looked down upon. This course opened my eyes and mind to a whole new world. (Justin Gebura)

In high school, I was never a strong English student. I never got above a C on any of my essays. I found my self-esteem to be greatly boosted by taking this class. I have learned a lot about writing and also a lot about myself. (Bryan Hunt)

I read a little article by Martha Beck this week in the October Redbook magazine: “Choose Happiness! It's Within You Right Now. All You Need to Do: Find the Gifts Only You Can Give the World.” Here is the introduction:

You are a genius. Say it out loud: “I am a genius.” If this feels exactly right, skip this article. But if calling yourself a genius brings forth inner waves of frustration, shame, or anger, read on. Your disbelief doesn't mean you have no genius; it simply means your genius is hidden. It's high time you brought it out in the open. (116)

I read on. Turns out identifying your most wonderful talents is like learning that the litlle ceramic dish in which you store safety pins is an ancient heirloom worth millions of dollars. Use the following clues, Ms. Beck tells the reader, to guide your attention to the genius you may not know you have:

I have had a very challenging student this term. He is a sophomore who took Freshman Composition at Findley College last year. Due to his low grade, he was forced to drop out of the class. The teacher was “really old and she had a degree from Harvard,” he told me, explaining how it was that once again he was in Freshman Composition class. He's a student who has trouble making it to a nine o'clock class—either on time or at all—and he frequently smells of alcohol. A challenge, as I said. A likeable person, a person who wants to do well, a person with a handsome, slightly snobbish exterior, which is probably hiding a world of low self-esteem. I see him as a child who needs saving; he sees me, I suppose, as an easily manipulated teacher. Yet, we connect somewhere that's positive—for both of us, I think.

He's not a good writer. It's so hard for him to express himself in writing. He composes “convoluted” sentences. Due to his desire to make either the sentence or the thought more complex than it really is, I have to wade through malapropisms and made-up words as well as awkward sentence structure to decipher meaning. However, despite absences and lates, he and I have a good working relationship. He frequently meets with me during office hours and we go through his work, sentence by tortured sentence. I'm hoping he's beginning to get what I mean when I say, “Just write it down the way you're telling me. Straightforward and simple.” The best essay he'd written—until an epiphanous moment in this last week—was his first essay, a strictly personal essay. He managed to capture the feeling of abandonment he felt when his parents divorced and left him at his grandmother's. As he tried to write more academic papers following that composition, I began to wonder what would happen if I gave him more creative freedom—if he allowed himself more creative agency?

I found out with formal paper number three. He composed a third-person point-of-view story about a young man who sets off against his parents' wishes on a sailing adventure. At first, I didn't think he'd written it: It was too clean, too crisp, too filled with visual, specific details. The piece had too much authority in it to represent this young man's tentative essay attempts. However, he'd scattered enough “convolutions” throughout the paper, for me to acknowledge his (at least partial) authorship.

Today in class each student was working individually on either paper number three or four. I sat down to chat with him and to see how things were going. I told him how wonderful I'd found his sailing paper. I asked him if he'd ever written third-person narration before. He told me no, and then he smiled. He said, “It was weird, but when I was writing that paper, I was having fun. It was easy.” I told him about an article I'd read recently that talked of genius and natural gifts being what comes easily. His smile will stay with me a long time, I think.

I feel like a big baby today. It is our last class, and I happen to love these students and I happen to be thrilled with the progress they have made as writers. They have learned what is meant by my process writing; even students who were reluctant to revise their rough drafts beyond the spelling and grammatical errors have learned to take pride in their globally revised papers—or at least they have decided doing revisions were worth the effort to get the grade they wanted. I'd made a decision to let them keep revising until they did get an A as long as all drafts were turned in on time. Only three took me up on this offer, but to have three students care enough to keep writing meant a lot to me.

I think I've learned a lot about this particular group of students. I think I spent too much time trying to help my student who was late and absent far too many times. It's hard to generalize how I will conduct myself with my winter quarter students, but the odds are, I won't take extra time to push/help a student who is consistently late or absent. I made a conscious to reach out to the student I discussed above, but I don't know what he got from my extra help. He actually told me that he felt he deserved an A. And he was serious. So it may be that I learned—relearned—something I already know: Students who really want to get to be better writers and who genuinely care about their grades don't miss eight classes. I probably was manipulated, but I don't really care. It was an experiment. The odds are that he probably did a lot more work than he may have done for a less flexible teacher. In doing the work, he may have learned something—and that, after all, is the goal.

Refer back up to my students' comments, and note Bryan Hunt. He's the student who says, “I was never a strong English student. I never got above a C on any of my essays.” I want to leave the reader with the first paragraph of his formal paper #3, a paper for which they could design the prompt:

The snow crunched beneath Greg's feet as he made his descent to the banks of the Tobyhanna. He gently broke the surface of the frigid water and searched for trout rising to the surface. Greg opened his fly box, removed an Elk Hair Caddis, and tied the fly onto the end of the leader. The sun penetrated the dense clouds for the first time that morning, and Greg felt a blast of warmth. He whipped his line back and forth and watched it shoot upstream across the placid water. His fly delicately landed atop the water and floated downstream. He cautiously watched as it curled around an emerging rock, Suddenly, the water exploded as a monstrous brown trout latched onto the end of Greg's line. he jerked back his rock and set the hook. The rod became heavy as he moved toward the bank to land the fish. As the fish came closer to him, he made a cradle with his hand under the water and guided the fish into it. His hands stung as they exited the water and were struck by the winter breeze. He removed the fly from the fish's jaw, placed the fourteen-inch fish into his creel and started down the stream to another pool.

Your paper is one of the first I read. Your responsible and gentlemanly behavior in the classroom as well as some of your ideas intrigue me, and so I was looking forward to reading your work. I wasn't disappointed. I see some real strengths here: an ability to look at the past and reflect on it—also an ability to be reflexive—to a point. You examine what exactly you'd accomplish by fighting with the kids calling you names. The reader can't help but respond to this dear little boy—I bet your mother shed a few tears, too (and maybe your dad).

You have a nice, clear writing style, too, with few errors. Most of the suggestions in terms of writing from me have to do with sentence variation, putting a little spice into the paper.

I see here a really solid draft by a strong, thoughtful writer; if I were to grade it right now, I see it as a B paper. I think there are some things you might consider to make it an A paper.

I wrote a bunch of notes all over the paper, but here is a summary of some ideas that you might consider:

You bring in bell hooks at some point—6th grade—but the reference seems to come out of the blue. I don't remember any reference to her at all before then or her essay and its meaning. So I see that you could do one of two things: You might weave hooks throughout beginning in the introduction—build to the killing rage you felt and then how you dealt with it—I think this would make a strong paper—but it would definitely take a fair amount of work—you'd have to begin with hooks and her killing rage and use that as a point you yourself built toward. I think this would be solid and believable. You would have to cite specific references from hooks and use MLA notations (in Hacker). Another approach might be to simply use the killing rage quote from hooks at the top of your paper in italics like a frontispiece—being sure to give hooks credit for the quote. Then I think the reference point is perfectly clear in your paper. It's something to think about.
To me, this would be a much stronger paper if you made use of the narrative techniques used by Iserhoff and hooks. By this I mean where they actually paint a scene—let us see the characters, hear them talk, use dialogue. You do this one time near the end with the kid who calls you a retard. I'd suggest you think about integrating this technique throughout. You just imagine the scene—the sights, sounds, smells, tastes, touch—and if you don't fully remember, you just make it up. Most of this stuff sounds as if you still remember it pretty vividly, though.
Like your classmates, I'm wondering if those parents of yours don't need to be a slightly larger presence. I didn't get much sense at all of their reactions. Often when a child has difficulty leaving the nest, it's because a parent has difficulty letting the little “fledgling” go! Sorry for the bird analogy.

To me, you're writing about something meaningful and revealing—a risk—and I compliment you on it. I'm honored you shared this story with me. I reiterate that you're a good, solid writer, that this paper is in good shape, but that I think with some real effort, you can make it a topnotch paper.

Looking back at my comments on the paper, I do see something for you to think about is focus—and that goes back to bell hooks—I'd really like to see you go to the trouble to lace her and her work throughout the paper because I think you are demonstrating a similar idea. Think about it! We'll talk at conference.

Elly Williams received her PhD from Ohio University in 2006; she now has a tenure-track position in creative writing at the University of North Dakota. In addition, she acts as a thesis advisor for Johns Hopkins University and teaches at the Sewanee Young Writers' conference. She continues work on her new novel, The Lavender Lake Affair. Her last piece for The CEA Forum was entitled "A Study of Family Memoir and Ideologies of Gender: Application to the Intersection of the Creative and the Scholarly in the Writing Classroom" (35.1).

September 4

_______________________

September 21