Did we read the same article?

Student A, You have written an interesting engagement with some of Mike Rose’s ideas here. You have a certain flair hiding out in your writing that I really enjoyed too. In particular, in the first paragraph, you write, “from an early age, putting a pencil to a paper seemed like to be the most impossible […]

Feedback for Student C (On Their Response to Rose’s “Rigid Rules”)

Feedback: Dear Student C, Your essay response to Rose’s article was self-reflective and engaging. You successfully demonstrated what from the essay resonated with your own experience and process. Where you lost points in the rubric were in demonstrating an understanding of Rose’s primary message. For example, the first paragraph of your essay conflates the rules […]

House Plants

Not surprisingly, my young students don’t believe they’re writers at all. I imagine they look at the classroom (and wordpress) as a kind of echo-chamber; assuming their voice will bounce off the walls and return to them— that there is no receiver. This tenuous call-and-response attitude they have when they’re asked to write is typical, […]

Imposter Syndrome

My first instinct is that students often feel like imposters when they sit down to write. From every angle, they are receiving information about writing and its processes. Whether that means they are getting reinforcement and praise in regards to their writing that they honed in K-12 or they are reforming their whole conception of […]

Internalized Routines & “The Writer”

In our reading for today, Mike Rose accurately writes that “people don’t proceed through problem situations…without some set of internalized instructions to the self, some program, some course of action that, even roughly, takes goals and possible paths to that goal into consideration” (5). This might seem rather obvious and can seemingly be applied to […]

blog [blawg] n., 1. a website containing a writer’s own opinions

*Belief [bih-leef] n., 1. an opinion or conviction 2. confidence in the truth or existence of something not immediately susceptible to rigorous proof 3. confidence; faith; trust Are my students’ ideas about writing opinions? Convictions? Impressionable notions of truth that are susceptible to the influence of material proofs? Confidences that could be reinforced or shaken, faith […]

Sometimes the title comes last

This feels somewhat similar to my last post where I peered into my students’ heads and watched their inner critics berate them into paralysis. From talking to them, I imagined them facing these harsh judges, speaking in the voice of English teachers past, who tell them their work isn’t good enough, saying things like “provide […]

Teaching Writing in a New Way: Unlearning the Rigid Rules

Many of my students undoubtedly consider themselves to be bad writers. They have little to no confidence in their writing abilities and second-guess every sentence they create. As Mike Rose puts it, they have “a growing distrust of their abilities and an aversion toward the composing process itself” (389). Thus, alongside their small confidence levels, my students […]

The Importance of Being Earnest

I apologize for my title. It seems like a huge obstacle to student writing is that they are thoroughly conditioned to be performative and to respond to cues- the compulsion is to mimic each other, satisfy the teacher or get the correct answer. Their writing, at this adolescent stage, is reflective of the way they’ve […]

Who Offers You the “Writer” Identity?

The myth of genius authorship pervades, always. From the moment students are taught the basics of writing—the standard structures in which to say something in their writing—they are faced with a kind of unconscious model to mimic. Be that example essays of “ideal” scholarship or the supplementary literature they are given to think about and […]

The Struggle is Real

My student’s struggle with writing is the struggle of all writers against that eternal fiend which is ever present: Apathy. I could talk about sentence structure, transitions, reading drafts aloud and so on, but I find these deficiencies all pale in comparison to people’s ability to give a crap about what they are doing beyond […]

The Tyranny of the Critic 

The first thing that troubles my students about writing is the idea of it. They’ll have to sit down, sit still, concentrate, produce, be judged by standards they don’t always understand. Let’s look at these one at a time. The first hurdle is getting started. Most of them aren’t natural writers, aren’t particularly interested or […]

Different Values

For some of my students, the struggle with writing is dependent upon the context. Some folks really struggled with the literacy narrative but excelled with the research proposal. More of the students found the literacy narrative challenging than found the research-centered writing. In fact, many of them did not manage to bring their narratives out […]