Tag Archives: teaching

Structure can silence voice

October 22, 2026 Nathaly Lopez

The first article I read this week was The Popularity of Formulaic Writing (And Why We Need to Resist) by Mark Wiley, and to be quite honest, I do not agree with Schaffer’s formulaic writing model. I believe that formulaic writing motivates predetermined structures on students rather than allowing them to discover their own voices and develop personal insights. Wiley mentions, “Schaffer claims this format replicates what is found in high-scoring essays on district-wide tests and AP exams.” For me, this sentence is key because it clearly reveals that formulaic writing functions as training for standardized testing. It teaches students how to write an essay for one audience: teachers. And guess what? Students may simply memorize the model. When students memorize a concept or structure, they do not actually learn it.

I know this from personal experience. I may or may not have passed Geometry in community college because I memorized how to solve equations and use the Pythagorean theorem just to pass a test. Did I pass the class? Surprisingly, yes. Did I actually learn and remember how to solve those equations? Needless to say, HECK NO. I memorized rules for one semester, and then, boom, I had no clue what I had learned.

Writing, however, is different. I learned to write because I underwent a process of self-discovery, and writing became part of my everyday life. To this day, I am still learning, growing, exploring, and expanding my knowledge and practice of writing. Writing is an infinite journey without a designated route in my eyes.

What I am trying to say is that Schaffer’s model teaches students that writing is limited. Formulaic writing requires students to follow rules. I believe writing has no limits. The limit does not exist! Yes, I totally stole that line from Mean Girls, but I digress. A structure-based model should not determine whether we know “how to write.” One consequence of enforcing Schaffer’s model is that students learn to follow patterns rather than develop as writers. Sure, students may produce organized papers, but they fail to develop a deeper connection with their ideas, ownership of their voices, and intellectual independence.

First, when students fail to develop a deep connection with their ideas, they struggle to express who they truly are. Our ideas emerge from our experiences, and our experiences often reflect what matters most to us. Following a rigid formula prevents creativity and imagination.

Second, formulaic writing discourages ownership of voice because students write to fulfill expectations rather than express authenticity and agency. To me, Schaffer’s model makes writing feel like the product of a predictable recipe rather than an expression of identity.

Third, let’s talk about the dependency that formulaic writing creates. Many students, especially high school students, arrive in college knowing only the standard five-paragraph essay because it has been taught for years. Once they get to college, they struggle because that structure is not always what professors require. Unless you have a very rigid professor, college writing is more flexible and adaptable. Intellectual dependency becomes a problem because formulaic writing encourages mechanical thinking rather than inspiring students to become independent thinkers. Without a template, many students can complete writing assignments, but don’t become writers because writers make their own decisions.

Now, let’s talk about the pedagogical method as a whole. Wiley mentions, “Teachers can simply refer to this rubric in responding to student writing, making the task of evaluation much simpler, more uniform, and less time-consuming.“

I have always said, and will continue to maintain, that teachers are not entirely at fault. Most of the time, they are following a curriculum and are expected to teach formulaic writing. Therefore, my critique is towards the educational systems and pedagogical methods rather than toward teachers themselves.

Wiley gives the impression that he sympathizes with teachers because he recognizes the difficult conditions many of them work in. Although teachers often face overcrowded classrooms and limited resources, students are primarily the ones affected by this quick-grading method. They become dependent on formulas, and that is something I don’t support because it hinders their ability to become independent thinkers.

In this quote, Wiley pretty much summarizes the idea of students handing over their intellectual independence to a formula. I see it as if students are walking a path that has already been paved for them when they should be instead, exploring discovery and creativity.

“To develop as writers, students must develop a repertoire of strategies for dealing effectively with various writing tasks presented to them in different situations. They must also learn to make choices about genre, content, structure, organization, and style; and they must learn to hone their judgments about the effects of the choices they make as writers. Consider that in Schaffer’s approach the goal of writing is to produce an essay of requisite length that contains the correct ratio of detail to commentary. In contrast, real writers must decide what they will compose based on their intentions, who will read their texts, and what effects they want their texts to have on these real and projected readers.”

Now, I want to discuss Antero Garcia’s How Remix Culture Informs Student Writing & Creativity and how I believe it connects to Wiley’s argument against formulaic writing. Wiley suggests resisting formulaic writing because it assumes the same structure can be applied regardless of context, which is unrealistic because writing situations vary drastically. While Wiley critiques Schaffer’s rigid writing model, Garcia encourages the practice of remixing.

Garcia argues that remix culture has become an essential part of how young people learn, create, and communicate. I really enjoyed this article because it made me realize that remix culture is not just in music or digital media. Remixing is something we do every day, whether through writing, communication, or any form of expression. People are constantly transforming existing texts, music, images/videos, and ideas into something new.

From my perspective, remixing is not copying. It is reinventing. It’s reinventing something with the purpose of cultivating creativity and identity. There has to be more than just traditional texts such as formulaic writing. There has to be remixing in our culture in order for students to express their identities. One of my biggest takeaways from Remixing culture is that it’s a liberatory act because it allows students to challenge dominant narratives and reshape perspectives.

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Writing Should NOT Be Intimidating

September 29, 2026 AlyssaR

Hello everyone, I am back from the dead (whatever illness has been plaguing New Jersey right now). Excuse my lateness on this post; I was out sick for a total of six days. Or should I say, I was stuck inside. Today is the first day I see the light of day, and I am very grateful to be back.

How I was looking this past weekend.(Pinterest//ravennarecklesss)

With that said, I wanted to add to the discussion I didn’t get to be a part of in the last class before moving on and posting this week’s blog discussion:

Teach Writing as a Process Not a Product by Donald M. Murray has made me reflect on how I was taught to write, the insecurities that came up because of it, and how I’d like to talk about writing to people who’d consider themselves ‘non-writers’.

Murray describes the traditional, scapegoat way of writing as literary analysis. Literature is not necessarily the problem. Reading and analyzing literature whilst growing up, academically, shaped the way I perceived others. I distinctly remember having to read books like The Outsiders, The Giver, The Great Gatsby, and The Catcher in the Rye, all of which made me more curious about the human mind, community, and how we should interact with the world. The problem is using renowned literature to teach kids who still don’t know how to use their own voice:

“Most of us are trained as English teachers by studying a product: writing. Our critical skills are honed by examining literature, which is finished writing; language as it has been used by authors. And then, fully trained in the autopsy, we go out and are assigned to teach our students to write, to make language live.” (p. 3)

Published literature, at the end of the day, is finished. It’s like trying to encourage an aspiring architect in school to try to build his own version of the Empire State Building. When does our writing, or even better, when did our writing become merely mimesis rather than our own products brewed from the process that authentic writing is supposed to be?

Bring back authentic work.

We’re performing “autopsies.” But what about living writing? The writing that is still breathing. I do not want to only read and then compare myself to writing that has gone through hundreds of revisions and different editors. I do not have an editor; I only have myself. I think that’s why it is so important for us to share our “shitty first drafts,” the scribbles on the page, the thoughts at 2 am in our notes app.

Maybe that’s why published journals, like Slyvias Plath’s Unabridged Journals, are so personable. They’re still alive. Imperfectly human. Even poetry can be shared this way: Tupac Shakur’s “A Rose That Grew from Concrete.”

Instead of this structured way of teaching writing, Murray suggests writing as an experience of three parts: prewriting, writing, and rewriting, all with an emphasis on learning, finding voice, and creative autonomy. I think I’ll think of his theory in every writing practice I do, whether teaching or participating. Writing should not be intimidating. It should be accessible to all.

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Education as a fire that never goes out. Writing a process to find one’s voice & identity.

September 24, 2026 Nathaly Lopez

After reading Bell Hooks’s Teaching to Transgress: Education as the Practice of Freedom, I couldn’t help but say this woman is on fire. In this week’s reading, I was able to acknowledge not only a teacher, writer, and intellectual scholar, but also a woman anchored in justice and deeply committed to the healing power of education. Hooks is so real. So raw. Her voice is like a flame that refuses to go out. She leaves you wanting to read more. She writes with such sharpness. As I was reading, I felt the urgency in her voice, the urgency of someone who refuses to accept a world where learning is anything less than liberating. More than just an academic force, education became a weapon for Hooks—one she used to trespass the oppression of a white‑dominated society and transgress not only intellectually, but emotionally, mentally, and socially.

One of the sentences that struck me was: “School was still a political place, since we were always having to counter white racist assumptions that we were genetically inferior, never as capable as white peers, even unable to learn.” This line captures Hooks’s political and emotional truth about her learning experience. At the beginning of her academic journey, she lost her love for school because of discrimination and marginalization. As Hooks explains, obedience to a white‑dominated system was expected from Black students, limiting their practice of freedom. How could a Black student learn if the system had already decided their place within white society? Regardless of the opposition, hooks was relentless and kept pressing forward.

Education was a political struggle for Hooks. But I also feel that her struggle ignited an unstoppable fire inside her, leading her to view learning as a form of liberation. Even though she had painful experiences with marginalization, she believed that education was enabling. Focusing on the academic aspect, Hooks also didn’t have the best pedagogical experiences in some of her classes. She said she felt bored and that the banking system didn’t interest her. Her experiences led her to dissect different ways for students to experience learning as liberatory.

The brilliance of Hooks’s article is in the blueprint she developed for her own pedagogical practice. Her negative experiences didn’t stop her from pursuing education. Quite the opposite: her experiences led her to realize she didn’t want to be the kind of professor students dreaded. Hooks mentions that Paulo Freire became her mentor in radical pedagogy, inspiring her to teach differently than she was taught. Another important figure who influenced her was a Vietnamese Buddhist monk who emphasized the teacher as healer. I had never in my life heard of such a thing, or of a pedagogy that emphasizes wholeness. This made me realize that I had experienced this type of learning back in high school. For all four years, I had the same science teacher who regarded his students as whole humans. And now that I think about it thoroughly, I see him through the lens of “the teacher as healer.”

I will never forget him—Mr. Randle. He was my teacher, but he was also a mentor for many students. Mr. Randle supported my mental health throughout high school. I looked forward to his class because I knew it wouldn’t be just a lecture. I knew his class would be filled with life lessons and words of wisdom. As a class, we all felt like we were his children. Someone we could really count on. He even helped one classmate who became homeless get out of that situation.

(Science labs were never boring in Mr. Randles’s class)

The reason I’m mentioning my former science teacher is that I can relate to how Hooks envisioned a practice of radical pedagogy, which is exactly how I felt in Mr. Randle’s class. Classrooms should be places where professors and students have collaborative relationships with one another.

-ME VISITING MR. RANDLE YEARS LATER AFTER HS GRADUATION BECAUSE I NEEDED HIS MENTORING

Hooks argues that we need an education that heals an uninformed, unknowing spirit. Many of us have had classes in the past with no excitement—just boring lecturing—and the banking system was implemented (and most of the time, we don’t even remember the teacher’s name). The concept of self‑actualization is very relevant because teachers and students must understand that learning is not just in the mind. As Hooks explains, self‑actualization is the process of becoming fully alive, a learning process that requires all aspects of a whole person, not just the intellectual. Hooks’s writing is always a self‑reflective practice that enlightens me not only intellectually, but spiritually and mentally. My biggest reflection from Hooks is that education is a form of liberation. Education is transformative. Learning is blooming and evolving.

Murray’s article, “Teach Writing as a Process, Not a Product,” leans more toward the pedagogical aspect of writing. I really like his idea of teaching the writer instead of correcting the writing. His argument is that students need to be taught writing as a process, rather than through the usual methods some English teachers use, such as grading grammar, focusing on errors, and critiquing structure. Sometimes it almost feels like teachers compare students’ writing to professional literature. I reflect that teachers shouldn’t respond as judges; instead, they should respond as readers to help students (the writers) clarify meaning. Murray’s argument is very relevant because it inspires students to develop their own writing process and voice. Hooks’s and Murray’s ideas connect because they both view learning as a living process. They both believe it’s a process that involves humanity, discovering our voice, and growing not only academically, but mentally as well. Hooks and Murray reflect on the complexity of being a student in a world where learning is shaped by expectations rather than a process to find one’s voice.

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the one in which i forget (and rediscover) common sense

September 23, 2026 bacaya

I must admit: when initially looking at the titles of our readings this week, I was under the impression that their content would not mesh. It was not like the pairing was an issue to me; I had faith that there was a reason we were reading them now. It was just a small act of noticing. Perhaps I had this idea that the teaching of craft would stay focused on just that—craft—and that the idea of liberation and social justice in the classroom were separate issues. I cannot tell you why I thought that. In hindsight, I was wrong.

First, though, I would like to examine Murray’s idea of the writing process as “discovery through language”. For most of my life, I was under the impression that we should only write what we know. It was advice I had heard both online and in creative writing classrooms—how could you write about what you don’t know? Oddly enough, the time I learned to do the opposite lines up with the time I really began to learn how to write. In a class with my mentor, Edi Giunta (there will be no shortage of her appearances in my blog posts, I apologize in advance), I was told to write what I don’t know. It was an idea I struggled with at first. It feels shameful to have to admit you don’t know something. For a while, I resisted this advice, and came into class with the idea that I knew what I wanted to write about, and that I would not stray from it. I told myself that I had been wanting to tell that story for so long, and I would tell it, memoir best practices be damned. In reality, that piece of writing had already been turned over in my head over and over again. The narrative was set in stone, so to say. I now know I had to dip into the unknown to be able to come back and tell the story as faithfully as I could.

Even in non-academic writing, the process of discovery is irreplaceable. While reading, I was reminded that the course titles for English 101 and 102 at NJCU were not just titled something along the lines of “English Composition”, but rather “Critical Reading and Writing”—emphasis on the critical. I look back on those classrooms now and see Murray’s implications of teaching process all throughout them. I think about the ways I’ve encouraged my students to just write—to not worry about the assignment, to just get their thoughts on paper. The way I’ve been taught to let them grapple with not knowing. To not jump in and try to guide them a certain way. To, as Murray so eloquently puts it, just shut up. It is beautiful when it works.

However, I am cognizant that this ideal practice might not be realistic—at least, not yet, and maybe not for a long time. While reading bell hooks, I thought about the kinds of students and classmates I had. On one end, I think about my high school classmates. Many of my classmates, including myself, were the top achievers during our middle and elementary school years. Many of them came from families who could afford to put money into education and extracurriculars. If we committed ourselves to education, we were all but guaranteed placements in Ivy Leagues and prestigious internships. School was a chance at power. This, however, meant a suffocating school environment. Advanced placement was expected, not exceptional. If you were not staying after school for extra classes or resume-ready extracurriculars, you were falling behind. You did not, could not, think of school as a place where it was safe to discover.

On the other end of the spectrum are the peers I had in undergraduate. I think it is safe to say that college was also their chance at power, albeit of a different kind. If my high school classmates had the privilege of time to dedicate to their studies, in college, time was a resource often stretched too thin. I am cognizant of the fact that NJCU was seen as a “safety school” to many. Most of our students attended because it was cheap, or the school was nearby. Our demographic is very different from the kinds of people I knew in high school. I had many students who believed they had to conform to the traditional path: go to college, get a degree, get a high paying job. However, many of these students also faced additional outside pressures. They were the breadwinners of their family. They had siblings or parents to tend to. They were the first to attend college. Because of this, school was just something they had to do. Their focus was the degree at the end of it all. I had many conversations with students who wished they could take the time to sit down and do the kind of learning that would help them, but more often than not, schoolwork—and discovery through writing—was last on their list of priorities.

In class, we talked about new writing technologies—generative artificial intelligence. Generative AI allows learners to skip the process, the most liberating part of education, in favor of the product. What is so disappointing is that I can see students from both ends of the spectrum falling victim to this. When you have been told your entire life that you must go to school to better your social standing rather than to learn, it is easy to justify cutting out the parts of the journey that don’t seem to support that goal. The unfamiliar is scary. Why should I risk being vulnerable when I can just plug in a prompt into AI and go? It gives me my time back. It ensures I turn something in rather than nothing. It is safe.

In an ideal world, everyone has experienced the joy that I’ve been able to experience in the classroom. Everyone has the resources to go to school for the love of learning, rather than out of necessity. Everyone is free of pressure, free of fear of vulnerability. At the beginning of my reflection, I wrote about my initial confusion about the two articles. I now assume I must have known somewhere in my subconscious how they were connected: through the idea that the ability to deeply pursue the craft of writing is intrinsically tied to the state of the human being.

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Rhetoric and the Engfish

September 17, 2026 Zach Martin

So this week’s read was quite the mixed bag, Dear Reader. On one hand, it was really enlightening because it was so relevant to my career field. On the other hand, it was painful because it was so relevant to my career field.

Now it goes without saying that there are a lot of issues with the way that we teach, because I want to be as broad as humanly possible, English. Despite the fact that this piece was written in 2006, it aged startlingly well. While there would have been no possible way for McComiskey to have known the absolutely earth shattering, pedagogically shifting, classroom breaking, shifts that we would face in the forms of: the rise of social media, the fall in media literacy, and the utter monstrosity that is Artificial Intelligence. But I’m getting ahead of myself.

There were a couple things that definitely stood out to me.

Issue #1: Teachers don’t know the content

While, I do think that it is pretty funny that they say it so bluntly, there is a really depressing truth to it. In all of the classes I have taken, both while I was majoring in education and my alt route courses, they never really focused on rhetoric. If I am being completely honest, those classes only really focused on lesson plans and Danielson. It is expected/implied that we will learn rhetoric in our content specific class, it rarely happens like that. It’s one of those things that sounds really good on paper or at a board meeting but it doesn’t happen like that in life.

Education majors are still people.

If it is easier to pass a children’s lit class than a rhetoric class, 9 times out of 10 *Not actual statistics* the educator to be will take the easier class. I have coworkers that never needed to study rhetoric, despite its relevance to the curriculum.

It’s a sad truth of the profession; due to complacency, many teachers can’t provide the instruction they should.

Issue #2: Grammatical correctness and grades

So I’m going to expose myself a bit. I used to be one of those “Erm actually…” grammar police people. Now, I did it because I was a know-it-all brat; however, now that I’m a teacher, I see the real time impact of enforcing grammatical correctness.

I’ve had plenty of students who can convey their thoughts and ideas verbally. They don’t care about following norms. They don’t care about punctuation (mainly because they aren’t writing). They don’t care about any of that.

The only thing that matters is getting their point across.

One of my best/most verbal students was one of my lowest scoring students. While she struggled with certain aspects of writing, she could convey her thought like no joke. She would also pick up on themes and ideas unlike anybody else’s business.

I think that by focusing on grammatical correctness, we deter students from interacting with not only the text, but also with their classmates.

There is also the issue of grades.

I hate grades, and I hate grading. Point blank, period.

Whenever I give an assignment that will be graded, students will do whatever they can to find the straightest path to 100. They don’t feel a need to go above and beyond. They don’t think outside the rubric. They just check boxes. The amount of times I’ve heard, “Mr. Martin, I wrote [X] words but my story isn’t done, what do I do?”

What do you mean, what do you do?

Keep writing.

But it is easier to squeeze blood from a stone, than to get a student to complete more work than the rubric asks.

And, again, one of my best students, pretty regularly, scored low. A lot of students, had they been in her spot, would have just given up on themselves. Why put in effort if I am only going to fail?

Again, I hate grades.

Both of these also tie into academic writing, which clashes with the student’s normal voice.

Issue #3: Engfish

That is all.

Until next time, Dear Reader.

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like a kid in a candy store, except everything is free and made of big words

September 17, 2026 bacaya

In reading Janice Lauer’s “Rhetoric and Composition”, I find myself thinking about my experience with the act of writing throughout my years in school. It feels odd to be able to put a name to all the work I’ve done before, both as a student and during my experience as a tutor. The margins of my print-out copy of the reading recall my experiences in the classroom: “i always talk about how students consider themselves ‘bad writers’” and “dr. walters is that you” in response to the idea of revision.

In particular, I found myself reflecting on what Lauer calls the current-traditional paradigm, and how for most of my life, writing was taught to be a challenge with subjective parameters. There was an idea of what good writing was, who did it, and where it could be found. Rhetoric was a two-day unit (vocabulary test included), and feedback from teachers focused on punctuation and sentence counts. This experience with writing often extended past me. When I talk about how people learn to write, I tend to refer back to a student of mine who considered herself a “bad writer”. In reality, her issue was a weak grasp on things like comma placement, something that we were able to fix in just a few tutoring sessions. Her voice, however, was something that seemed to come naturally. She was adamant that she wasn’t good at writing, and for the first half of the semester, was hesitant to engage with our class. I think years of being told writing could only be done a certain way taught her to feel shame in her work. To coax her out of her shell took delicate care and, unconsciously for me, many of the ideologies Lauer covers.

Only in college did I realize what studying English could entail. For the first time, I was able to see English as not just Shakespeare and five-sentence paragraphs. I fell in love with writing as a craft and being able to help others understand it. I know now that this is because of the nature of rhetoric and composition, being a “human science”, as described by Louise Wetherbee Phelps. I found it funny that as I read, I was able to connect ideas with experience: the theories of invention I had come across while generating writing across classes or the factors that influenced my feedback to students I tutored. What a surprise, I thought, that although I was not aware of the science, there exists a reason for the things I learned to do. More than that, while reading about the growth of the field of rhetoric, I was fascinated by the idea that composition had been, “considered only a teaching practice”. To me, it only made sense that the field grew. I was reminded of the saying: “how you do something is how you do everything”. The way we compose—the way we put together our words—is the basis of almost everything we do. It is how we express ourselves, why we write to-do lists, where we get the information to write a report. Of course it is natural that we study it.

*“it is ALL connected” – me, re: writing being interdisciplinary*

I am excited to finally “put a name to the face”, or so to speak, with all I have learned about writing so far. During our check-ins last week, I spoke about how, for me, returning to school meant practicing being more deliberate. The information in this reading is similar. It forces me to look back on my learning experience with a new lens and pick it apart. When was I taught this idea? How? Which of these ideas do I subscribe to, and what experience taught me to think otherwise? Even the philosophical aspects, which I sometimes struggle to wrap my brain around, excite me. It feels like I am about to open a whole new set of toys with which to write with.

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