Process
Status Items Highlights Done See section below Claims None Questions None Output None
Highlights
id988936227
I had to change the way they wrote. I axed the take-home essays I’d assigned before—this wasn’t a “writing” class, anyway—and assigned what I suspected were far more difficult in-class, timed “flash essays,” with prompts I gave the same day. No trudging back from the library with 10 pages on Woolf in the special season of Cleveland weather we call “stupid cold.” Long, research-based essay assignments had always worked well for the top students in the class, the ones who were already trained to write. But I’ve rarely seen, over the course of my career, the kind of development I hoped for in the majority of students whom I asked to write that way.
id988936238
I was also thinking of the writing I myself had been doing lately, smooshed within the hour I had for lunch, or pounded out on the couch after toddler bedtime. I wanted my students to have a taste of the adrenaline and, yes, stress that came from writing when faced with real time constraints. I wanted edge-of-the-seat writing that opened itself up to failure. They would confront their fear without guardrails, without bumpers, without AI-drafted support, without a plan or even a thesis. One student came up to me after the first flash essay, a little frustrated and worried that he wasn’t meeting the mark. He felt like he was writing into the complete unknown, rather than with a plan in mind. I said that was exactly the point.
id988936258
I devised simple essay topics that asked students to write about their own difficulties as readers. One was: “Write about a moment in an Emily Dickinson poem that you don’t understand.” Another was: “Write about your morning routine, but in the style of Faulkner.” I didn’t want to create 32 new Faulkners. I wanted the students to experience the moment when their own style broke through the imitation, when the attempt to write like Faulkner failed and revealed, as a kind of photonegative, their own emergent voices. John Keats called this state of being “negative capability,” a condition in which the writer learns to live in a perpetual state of uncertainty.
id988936411
dults underestimate the power of simply telling a young person to read a book and vouching for it ourselves.
id988936335
The iterative process of confusion, endurance, and incremental understanding is what literature professors teach when they assign whole books. This march toward understanding doesn’t have a great name other than reading. We need to help students grow into the difficulty of reading. The best way to do that is not to “meet them where they are,” a bromide that has become doctrine for higher education. We have to do as Whitman says instead: Stop somewhere ahead and wait for them to catch up.