Recently, one of my creative writing students shared a great insight.
She had been telling me that her peer group in the creative writing class was really good. They had helped her to make sense of her rough draft.
I was glad to hear this. But then she said something even more revealing.
“They are all writers,” she said. “They are taking writing and the class seriously. They are taking me seriously. Not like my peer group in Writing 2.” And she smiled. “That’s Gen Ed.”
That’s Gen Ed.
Why would her experience with the students in a creative writing class be so different from her experience with students in a Gen Ed class? One would think that these students with at least college sophomore standing would have begun to take their studies seriously.
Apparently not. Apparently, writing wasn’t so important.
Where Writing is Taught
My student was getting at an important truth about learning ignored by most parents and politicians: that the teacher matters almost less than the students in these different classes. The students are the ones helping to create a positive or a negative environment for the subject and for learning.
I’ve noted this about my Gen Ed students before, that after a long “career” of Gen Ed “writing” in high school, which is followed up by first-year writing in college, most of them have been alienated from writing and their own writing process. And the reasons for this may have to do as much with the kind of writing that they were assigned as it does the way it was taught.
First, the writing was the pointless, writing for a teacher–usually in the usual forms given to “beginners”: the five paragraph theme, but also, the book report (assigned to make sure the student has read the book), and the research paper. These are forms of non-communication, assigned for testing and assessment purposes. And the students know this. They know that these assignments are not given to engage them in real writing.
But the more damaging aspects of these assignments is what they accomplish in terms of teaching about writing process, about learning how writing is a form of exploration and discovery–two really exciting reasons to write. In a word, they accomplish nothing. There is no process to be learned from the five paragraph theme. One has the form ready made, and the student fills in blanks. If they discover a new idea while they are finishing this act, they have to exclude it. It doesn’t count.
These forms are for non-writers. And most of my students, by the time I get them in college Gen Ed courses, have learned their lesson well. They are not writers and, they believe, never will be. With writing being so trivial, who would want to? Meanwhile, the writers, like my student mentioned above who has observed them and wants to work with them, feel some sadness for them.
The problem she and teachers like me face is the problem underlined by the author of the biblical book Ecclesiastes. “Vanity, all is vanity.”
I really have never liked the feeling of vanity that sometimes comes with teaching a Gen Ed class. The experience is one of all form and no content, sort of like the writing assignments the students had in high school. If no one sees that I can help them learn to write, they won’t participate or prepare or listen. They will put in time, check off the requirement box, and go on, untouched by something that could have been meaningful but wasn’t.