I don’t have a very specific mantra or central belief system within my writing classroom. I maybe did coming into the quarter but I also remember mentally instructing myself to remove my expectations and preconceived notions of what I would be doing. For the most part any persisting ideology about writing instruction that was present prior to this quarter has been dissolved. However, there is one vague goal I still hold onto, that I am co-opting from my experience as an undergrad. The writing professor that was most influential on my commitment to writing had an impressive ability to find what was worthwhile in any work of any student. This professor ran two workshops I participated in, and in which I often harshly judged the work of my peers. Over and over he would pull a nugget, or heaps of nuggets from work that I thought was straightforwardly bad. This not only affirmed the student, but also reinforced good mechanics, or powerful imagery, or just generally illustrate to the rest of us the diversity of shapes good writing could inhabit. I was often surprised, and often upon reflection realized the narrow mindset I adopted. I think that in habituating us to this affirmative practice, he pushed the empathy I had for my peers, and especially for my peers who I thought produced some pretty trash material. He did this by showing me that what I thought was bad, was often just different, or while there were some poor decisions made in different stories/poems always alongside them existed genuinely quality decisions.

I think that this habit corresponds to the goal I have for my classroom. I want to show my students that however bad they think their work is, or whatever harsh feedback they receive from their peers, there are genuinely exciting/original/interesting/hilarious/profound moments in the work they give to me. I guess this could also be understood as a central assumption. That every student does in fact have something worthwhile to say, and there is worth in the way they say it. The other aspect of this is to hopefully make this affirmation public. To let other students see that where their peers’ writing deserves praise, to hopefully break down (or re-orient) their understanding of bad and good, and to ideally see their own work as praiseworthy. Even if students haven’t developed any increased capacity to write, they have no ability to translate meaning across mediums, they don’t understand how the hell to use WordPress, if they are at least a little more confident in their abilities, or less neurotic about how others will evaluate them, they will be freer to be creative, to work towards originality, and to take ownership over their work.