If I were to look into their brains at the beginning of the quarter, I imagine my students would be thinking “why am I writing? This is silly—I won’t be needing to write essays later on in life”. These assumptions spring up due to their narrow (or Rose may describe it as rigid) definition of literacy. They think that literacy only corresponds to writing impossibly serious essays, and reading crusty literature. This guise of a single genre (or Genre of The Teacher) that I mentioned in a previous blog post. There is one round peg, and not only are we trying to force square pegged students into it, but quite possibly round peg students do not exist.

Again, I am reminded of my student’s comment: “ 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”. I may have fancied myself whimsically creative when earlier I said that statement was haunting me, but now I truly see the validity in my tongue-in-cheek language. I am repeatedly reminded that my students feel stifled by the rules they feel must control their writing.

Circling back to their rigid sense of literacy, if I were to peek into their minds now at this point in the quarter, I think there might be something different happening. Now that their idea of literacy is expanded, their mentality towards how they think the should write has expanded as well. Their Literacy Narratives were fairly cookie cutter, all of them writing in The Genre of The Teacher in attempts to turn in something speaking directly to my expectations for them. Now looking at their Project 4 and 5s, I see them taking risks, using more of their own voices, and writing more than what is required of them. While they may still be struggling against the grips of rigid rules and inflexible plans, they are actively working to subvert or defy them.

The rose colored glasses may very well be on right now, but I cannot resist celebrating a tiny bit. There is change happening. Some students are beginning to overcome writers block without realizing they were being blocked in the first place. They are learning to produce work that both sounds like them, and follows the rules of the game.

I hope to be continually haunted by my student’s comments, and see more to follow…