Peter Elbow’s campaigning for the utilization of more low stakes writing assignments in schools correlates with the way I feel I actually “learned” how to write. In High Stakes and Low Stakes in Assigning and Responding to Writing, Elbow posits that “Low stakes writing helps students… find their own language for the issues of the course; they stumble into their own analogies and metaphors for academic concept” in a way that “is saturated with sense or experience” (7). I’ve received all sorts of passing grades during my life as a student, but the ones that come to my mind whenever I think of assignments that I’m proud of are ones where I was allowed to add my sense of humor or a creative twist to the assignment; it sort of speaks to this idea that a student doesn’t view their writing as their writing until a part of themselves is actually in it, and its no longer just a paint-by-numbers recreation of whatever the teacher had them study. To that point, after class Maya and I walked to the parking lot with the One Most Inextricable from My Soul, we continued talking about how we learned to write, and Maya made a distinction that struck me; she made a distinction between her personal writing and her academic writing. I myself make that distinction often, but hearing another writer bring it up casually made me realize how ingrained the disparity between how we’re taught and how we actually learned can be for some of us. We, intentionally or unintentionally, other our academic writing instead of consider it integrated with the writing we do for ourselves.

I also enjoyed Elbow’s sections on how to respond to student’s writings. He writes, “Even when we write clear, accurate, valid, and helpful comments, our students often read them through a distorting lens of resistance or discouragement—or downright denial” (8). Of course, such a reaction is to be expected when helpful comments are directly tied to a decreasing score; they seem a lot less helpful and a bit more punishing. His later mention of “[avoiding] an impersonal ‘God/truth voice’ in [his] comments” actually makes me reminisce about an educator of mine who would use those constantly; I fondly remember “Wrong!!” and “Incorrect!!” or even just “!!” in red ink all over my essays for two marking periods during my senior year of high school (13). She would even yell her heavenly judgments out during presentations if you misunderstood the presentation topic; although I ended up thriving in her class, I definitely understand why so many of my classmates dreaded 2nd period. If she was a bit gentler, maybe we all would be in graduate writing programs.

As for Donald M. Murray’s Teach Writing as a Process Not a Product, the first quote that struck me was his use of the word “autopsy” to describe how educators teach literature (3). It made me smile pretty wryly because its a very apt descriptor for many classes I’ve been a student in and, regrettably, many classes I’ve been a teacher in as well. I also like Murray’s statement that “you don’t learn a process by talking about it, but by doing it” (20). It seems like it can be reductive, but in my experience the best way to learn the process is to practice the process; it’s certainly more engaging than just “autopsying” a piece and holding up its parts for show hoping your student can recreate it by their next due date.

This blog post was sonically powered by John Coltrane’s 1958 album Blue Train. I was in a Coltrane mood this morning, but wanted to try something other than A Love Supreme (which I love; I just needed a bit of variety today).