At first, I was only nervous that I would be a bad at this teaching thing. As time goes on, and my class has not turned on me or exploded in a thousand broken pieces, I’ve started to wonder what it might mean to be a good at it.

I thought that writing extensive comments, really going in and workshopping my student’s literacy narratives would be a good idea. Surely, they would learn from my insightful questions and thoughts. Surely the energy and time I put in would be worth it.

Maybe not. Ok, probably not. First some of the thoughts of the second years in our staff meeting on Monday left me with the impression that 1) my students wouldn’t read my extensive comments and 2) they wouldn’t understand what I was trying to say even if they did. So I turned to Muriel Harris to see what the bad idea really was.

She agrees, more or less, with my peers. An over-graded paper, she says, has little to no educational value. Writing extensive comments are simply lost on students who don’t have great reading skills (more on that later), who don’t understand my vocabulary and jargon, and who don’t know how to prioritize my critiques into actionable advice. Less is more. Also, studies appear to show that when reading online, comprehension and memory both decline. Of course, I sent my comments in the form of emails. Oh well.

I want to take this to a place of usefulness though. So if good teaching doesn’t look like extensive comments, what next? For one thing, Harris suggests doing that hierarchical work first. Comments should be become shorter, focused on one or two main points. The longer work needs to be done in person. It’s my job to identify the most important things and bring them to my students’ attention.

The second part is reading, I think I wanted to teach writing through suggestion and commentary, but as Carillo suggest, poor writing is usually poor reading. And if the reading skills are low, (as Harris suggest) than my comments are more than useless—they’re frustrating.

Yesterday, I tried to bring in a George Saunder’s story to illustrate what I think of as good writing. I tried to have a conversation about reading as writers, seeing the choices that he made. It felt flat to me, and I left with a sour taste. Maybe I wouldn’t bring in any more reading. But Carillo points out that reading is a skill that gets less and less attention as we age. That we forget that reading is active and creative. So maybe rather than abandon the project of reading in class, I need to emphasize it. That doing more reading may improve my student’s writing way more succesfully than extensive commentary.

I wonder if in this course we haven’t compartmentalized reading and writing too much. Carillo points out that exposure does not lead directly to comprehension. There is more work to be done along that path. She suggests two strategies for discussing or framing reading that I thought were helpful too. One is rhetorical reading where we pay attention to how the reading is working to persuade us. The second is reading as a writer, paying attention to choices. After I tried and failed (or felt like I failed) at introducing that second skill or way of reading, I was ready to give up and abandon the project. But it may be more helpful to see them as practices that need to be grown. So I shouldn’t expect us to be great at them at first. That the only way to get better is through work and repetition.