I’ve been day-dreaming about teaching since I finished my undergrad degree 5+ years ago. I’ve mused on class activities, invented course descriptions, and framed my personal reading in the context of how I could teach it. From book clubs to rearing job trainees, I’ve tried to develop a methodology to my own reading and responding that may (hopefully) translate well in to teaching.

Then I came to the threshold of it: I was accepted to graduate school and offered a teaching assistantship where I would have my own classroom, my own students. However, I’m not teaching literature. I’m not teaching the books I loved and the critical theory that’s opened up my reading and the persistent human experiences that thread their way through capital-d Discourse. I’m teaching…writing? While I’ve spent a lot of time thinking about what makes me a good reader and how that has influenced me as a (hopefully) good writer, it’s much more difficult for me to pinpoint when and what “taught me to write.” Immediately, my excitement and expectation was reduced almost entirely to anxiety. If I can’t pinpoint how I’ve learned to write, how can I effectively teach writing?

Bean’s text have done a lot to alleviate my fears and, I hope, set me up for success in the classroom. Bean says,

“I reward students for wading into the complexity of an issue. Teachers generally report that it is easy to distinguish insightful from superficial pieces of exploratory writing. The key question is not ‘How well written is this piece?’ but ‘To what extent does this piece reveal engaged thinking about this topic?’ I reward the process of thought rather than the product” (143).

The structure of the class and, particularly, the grading contract have allowed me to separate myself from the anxiety of being unqualified to give evaluative feedback on student writing by focusing on something much more achievable: observing individual growth. What’s more, the variety of the projects and in-class assignments is broadening my understanding of “teaching writing” to something, likewise, more achievable: identifying composition. Murray says,

“I have the habit of writing. My simple tools are always with me: pen and paper. I try to follow the ancients’ counsel nulla dies sine linea, never a day without a line. A line, however, may not look like a line to a non-writer. It may not be a sentence. It is most likely a phrase or a fragment, a word, a list, a diagram” (3).

The idea of teaching to students to identify writing in terms of various forms of composition allows me to play more to my strengths: re-framing the “literature”—the material—of composition and applying those aspects as tools in student writing. While I still feel like something of an impostor, I also have a foundation on which to direct students’ learning, as well as to build my own understanding of what it means to write.