English 319: Persuasion

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Sitting on Fences

High School is a time when people can discover latent talents and abilities. A time when young adults start to decide on what they want to do when they leave the boundaries of their public education. Some skills most kids never knew they had start to flourish under the guidance of their teachers, while the others skills become stagnant. In my case, I chose journalism over physics, I chose to have my work critiqued in front of everyone who reads or hears what I do as opposed to being able to project velocities or being able to pinpoint where sounds come from. Lame, I know.

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From that experience, I believe an effective writing classroom employs both the ideas of Peter Elbow and David Bartholomae, meaning that the classroom should have a teacher that acts more like an advisor would. Someone knowledgeable on the subject who can help shape an argument but allows the writer to find their own unique way about doing things.

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I had no clue what I was doing when I joined my first journalism class in high school. No idea of what an "inverted pyramid" might contain or what the 5 W's even stood for. On the first day of class I was assigned my first article and given a crash course on how to construct a basic news article. With time and the help of our teacher, I learned what it felt like to write under deadlines, how to forge the headline that would tug on the reader's attention. This developed from a few rudimentary lessons from the teacher but was encouraged and matured under supervision. The teacher no longer teaching the student but advising them to use what they know to excel.

It is important to have the teacher inside of the classroom; if that critical chain is gone then the student never gains the ability to grow. Peter Elbow tried to push freewriting to overcome teachers inside of the classroom. It was through freewriting that Elbow believed that one, after writing everything they could nonstop, then edit it down, could achieve a piece worthy of the academic discourse community. In his work, "Writing Without Teachers", Elbow states that a student learns and a teacher teaches, but without the teacher a student can still learn. Students can learn, yes, but without that careful guidance from the instructor can students excel? It was in this setting of the classroom that I learned how to put words on a page, everything I did didn't need to be carefully planned out. It could just happen and it didn't need to be good or bad as long as I got what I needed out but then I would call it a finished product.

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However, it also important to have that unique voice present in writing, the voice that the students need to find by themselves because the teacher can't possibly teach it. David Bartholomae's argument present in his essay, "Writing With Teachers", is that what a student learns to write isn't their own, "It belongs to TV, to Books, to Culture and History."  Therefore, a teacher needs to be present to instruct their students on how to write what has already been written. Which sounds very wrong. The teachers should be there to make sure that students aren't writing the past, that once they learn how to use the writing tools they've received they use them to push new concepts. The bartholomaen teacher is the absolute authority of the room, if they say "jump" you'd better be jumping or on crutches. This method doesn't work for me because I don't like the idea that I'm only writing what had been there before or I am becoming a miniature version of my teacher.

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It is through both arguments that I stand in the middle ground. The classroom I favor isn't that of Elbow or Bartholomae, but of both. A classroom where the teacher may or may not teach traditionally but isn't the authority of the classroom. The teacher would be there to help guide the student if there was a problem but wouldn't tell them exactly what to do or how much of it to accomplish. In High School, I experienced all three styles of teaching class. I had the teacher who would encourage the freewrite sessions and then there were the teachers with the "my way or the highway" philosophy. Sure, I learned a lot in both of those classes but what I learned was how to write this essay and that story and how to go about it. Gaining nothing more. In my journalism class, I gained confidence in my writing. I could write something without having to take it to b approved by a teacher ever day and when I did they wouldn't throw the essay back at me and say try again.

Although this form of teaching may not succeed for every student or class type, the type of class I was in was student run. There was a hierarchy; we would help everyone succeed in publishing the school's newspaper.  The advisor only there to make sure we weren't jumping off of the cliff without good reasons but also giving us a grade. Some students cannot handle that method of teaching; they need the Bartholomae or Elbowian style to guide every phrase and mechanic to completion.

In High school I gathered many different skills, but most of them sit in the back of my mind collecting dust. They are all good skills though and if I need to use them I have them, one day it might become very pertinent to the situation that I be able to measure the air speed velocity of a ball to see where it lands, the importance of keeping the clay on a potter's wheel at the right consistency of water, even how to solder metal onto other metal. The skills I most heavily rely on are those that I developed in writing, not just in English composition classes but in my journalism class as well. Not every student needs to take a journalism to experience this kind of teaching either, they need to sit in a class that has a teacher and is there for help, but a class that relies on the other students to help out when needed. In that setting, the students not only have the skills they need but they are also reinforcing them and adapting to different methods.