“ I hated in high school when I would get my writing back from my teacher, and they would edit it and make me take stuff out, and at the end it didn’t even sound like me. The thing I turned in wasn’t my writing”.

That is a quote from one of my student’s letters in response to the question: “Do you think of yourself as a good writer, and do you like writing?”. This quote has haunted me the entire quarter. Our discussions in class are centralized around genre, and this comment has forced me to question if there is a hidden genre that students believe they must write in. It’s not academic writing, it’s not creative writing, it’s not technical writing—it’s something more obscure, and possibly more sinister than that. It’s “The Genre of The Teacher”. This genre is not what we, as instructors, call our writing assignments, but it is what a lot of our students think the writing assignments are. We assign a personal narrative, the students think it a personal narrative that we as their teachers must like. “The Genre of The Teacher” coincides perfectly with the banking model of school. The teacher is the end all be all of knowledge, the student the empty vessel, and said student must produce something that matches the aura of the teacher’s knowledge.

I understand that I am being highly abstract here, but stay with me. Even though us as instructors are taking the time to define various genres, and explain how each genre functions with certain and different rules, our students are still feeling the need to adhere to this other genre: one where the main rule is write what your teacher wants to hear. Writing in “The Genre of The Teacher” ultimately leads to student frustration. The above mentioned student is blocked from personal success because he feels that none his the work (whether successful or not) is his own. It is a stripped down, or in his terms white-washed, version of his work. His ideas, words, and  turns of phrases, yet the teacher’s are correct. The genre perpetuates the banking model, despite the fact that I am consciously trying to step away from the banking model.

All of this is to say….I don’t know how to fix it. I see and hear my students struggling with writing, yet this specter of a genre undermines everything.