Before my first day of teaching ENG 101, I expected to have a class comprised of students who wholly did not want to be there, and would reject whatever I said because “We don’t like reading or writing, and why Ms. Too-Young-To-Be-My-Professor is any of this important?”. I expected the class to be constructed in the traditional ENG 101 fashion: Prof lectures about an “essential novel”, and critiques the students on their traditional academic essays.  While I was the college freshmen who thrived in those classes, I was well aware that most people would rather eat glue.

After my first day of teaching ENG 101, my expectations were shattered. This course is brilliantly designed. I hardly had to sell it to my students. They all seemed excited to be a part of a class where writing is a process that is personal and unique. I expected that I would need to “go to battle for the humanities”, and try to persuade my class why writing is important, but the curriculum naturally does just that.

For me, the schema has been broken, and I am excited to see my students beginning to break the schema as well.

 

“If acceptance is hard for the writer, it is harder still for the teacher, for education is geared up for sameness. We want our students to perform to the standards of other students, to study what we plan for them to study, and to learn from it what we or our teachers learned.

Yet our students learn, at least in writing, if they experience difference. The curriculum calls for sameness, and we unleash them into an activity that produces difference” (Murray 7).

“Van Allen’s point is that the process of writing drives thinking. Sometimes exploratory writing gets transformed into a finished product. More often, as in Van Allen’s ‘memoranda,’ exploratory writing is an end in itself. College students typically do not realize the value of exploratory writing and are not given nearly enough opportunities for doing it. Consequently, they do not get enough practice at the kind of thinking and learning that such writing can stimulate” (Bean 121).