Understanding the Assignment*

“One major difference between the world of ancient rhetoric and the world we now inhabit is that the ancients did not develop a rhetoric that was mechanical and formulaic.”

–Sharon Crowley and Debra Hawhee, Ancient Rhetorics for Contemporary Students

(*This is a short “keynote” address I was invited to give for the Writing Program for the start of its academic year, August 2021)

For the next few minutes, for this keynote, I would like to tell a story. The reason for this is quite honestly because I’ve never done this before. I’ve talked at conferences, but I’ve never given a keynote. So, I’m a keynote novice. I don’t know what this sort of talk calls for. Like a true novice, I am going to rise to this uncertain occasion by doing what I know. I will tell a story. At all the Kickoffs I’ve attended this week, no one has been doing that. There’s been much urgency. We’ve been given bullet points and power points. And charts. And all are needed, I know. But no stories. I think we need stories.

I’ll begin with a version of the “Long ago in a Galaxy far, far away” story trope. My hope is that if I do tell this, we will all recognize the realm I’m talking about.

For a week now I’ve been thinking about my first semester as a full-time teacher fresh out of grad school. That’s the long ago part. Fall, 1997. I had just finished my dissertation. I had taken a full-time teaching job at a small two-year school called Richard Bland College, located just outside of Petersburg, Virginia, where the Civil War ended. This is the far away part. Named after one of the lesser known signers of the Declaration of Independence, RBC was a feeder school to the College of William and Mary. I had moved my family there. My daughters, now 31 and 29, were 7 and 5. Oh, and I should tell you so that you don’t just think this is nostalgia, my mother had just died the week I was to defend my dissertation, a few weeks before we moved.

I was starting a new job in a new place where I didn’t know anyone. We had left friends, our community, our church, our Walmart all behind. And I was, well, facing loss. I had a 5/5 load, and most of my teaching was in what is usually called developmental English. I was replacing a teacher the school had let go because she had become known for giving everyone in her class an A. All of her classes were full, and even waitlisted students were somehow getting in. She had become a problem for the school because Richard Bland’s agreement with the larger school across state was that students could automatically matriculate to William and Mary if they maintained at 3.0 or better at Richard Bland.

I was given my office keys and the textbook for my developmental class, and it was clear to me what my role was to be: I was going to be a gatekeeper. I was going to make sure that only the worthy made it through. The textbook I received started with drills in sentence structure and then moved to paragraphs. If I followed this text, my class would spend the main portion of the semester writing sentences according to patterns and then four or five types of paragraphs—comparison/contrast, cause/effect, process, or enumeration, and only get to writing an actual essay by Thanksgiving.

I decided I could not do that. Instead, I went to my new department chair and asked if I could teach my students essays. The chair was a literature specialist. Going into his office was to navigate a labyrinth made of stacks and stacks of paperback science fiction and fantasy novels, all of which he had read. Once a year, he got to teach his scifi course as his reward for teaching so much developmental writing. But he had also once studied with Edward Corbett and Erika Lindemann, and he knew what I was asking and told me to follow my ideas.

So I set up my developmental classes like this. I would begin with the kind of essays students would compose in Writing 1. In contrast to my Writing 1 classes, I would go a little more analytically. I gave them the assignment, opened it up, explained some of what most teachers didn’t say they were asking for. I explained that there were different ways to go about doing the assignment. I gave a few examples of how people succeeded. Instead of sentences, I had them freewrite. Instead of paragraphs, they did parts of their essays. I caught some obvious grammar errors but also noticed turns of phrase and content. At the same time that my Writing 1 class was bringing in a first draft of the narrative essay, my “developmental” class was still doing invention, still getting used to writing whatever was meaningful to them. After the first few weeks, I saw my classes, over-filled with students expecting the previous teacher, shrink. Lots of dropping out and disappearing. But there was a core who stayed, and they are the real heroes in this tale. They are the people of interest. They wrote their essays and tried my feedback in new versions of their essays. I kept reminding them that they were beginning to succeed at essays their peers were writing in Writing 1.

The next semester, I saw many of these same students again. And this time, they had this sense of knowing what they were doing. This time, they were getting practice. It was the second time around. As the narratives were followed by arguments, these students became the best writers in my Writing 1 class. When it came time for research writing in the course, they made some interesting decisions. One student, for example, used an anecdotal opening he had found in Time Magazine and documented it for a paper on the Three-Strikes Law that President Clinton had passed. What was interesting in this was that I saw them beginning to think about the choices they had to make as they composed their essays. Because they had had me for a second class, and because they had learned these assignments, they were able to practice doing them. There was something valuable for them in not just doing a new assignment once, but doing it until they began to master it. I’m not saying this is the only way to teach, and I suppose not everyone needs this. But these students did. They needed to understand the assignment. Practice doesn’t make perfect, but it can lead to a certain mastery.

I don’t know how well they did after my classes with them. I like to fantasize, and so I give two endings to this story. First, of course, was the real ending, the probable ending to my story, the usual ending to the stories we have of people who enter and then leave our lives after a short span. But then there is the more instructive version, my fantasy third act, which is conjecture, but I like to consider it.

So first, the fantasy: after those two classes together, I like to think, these students left with new ideas about writing processes and purposes to take with them, so that they could approach future teachers about their writing questions and think about opening up new assignments and learning to understand them. And their future teachers would know something about what they had learned with me—this is the fantasy now, hear me out–and use the terms they knew to talk to them about their writing and encourage them to move into their next, newly challenging assignments. I like to think that with a good teacher they could now take their understanding of argument and bring it in meaningful ways to new writing situations and know what to use and what not to use.

That is the fantasy ending. I have never been sure. I do know that the movement through writing courses can lack continuity. When a student comes from a community college, this is problematic and made jagged by the goals of differing institutions. What they experience as first-year students may not be lined up with writing in junior and senior classes at another institution, no matter what the matriculation agreements may be. We will see students this term transferring in from two year schools. As I’ve said already, because my students began to navigate the assignments I gave them, I like to think that they gained the necessary metacognitive skills to begin negotiating new assignments they would encounter later on. I can’t be sure, though. We have them for 15 weeks, or as I did, for 30 weeks, and we can hope that they will master what we show them. And that mastery can be a basis for future growth with new assignments. What we want is not a matter of learning a formula but of learning a genre in which certain moves are allowed and others aren’t, and the more we demystify it, the more we help our students to use these genres in their thinking in the future.

I’m going on about this because it speaks to what I might call my vision for our program this year—if an interim is allowed vision: it is that we increasingly work together to build our classes for our students to understand the assignment and to repeat it, redraft it, and begin to master it; and then they are allowed to move to the next class with the language to communicate with new teachers who know where they’ve been and what terms they’ve used. That is what I will be working on this year when I’m not teaching, thinking of ways to build bridges between our classes. My vision is for our program to be one most concerned with the ongoing development of the writers we work with as they move from first-year writing to graduation.

This is why I wanted to highlight this statement from Sharon Crowley and Debra Hawhee. We are not teaching formulas. We are teaching thinking and critical thinking about the rhetorical nature of writing in different disciplines and helping students to develop new choices to make for their writing problems. We are giving them strategies and getting them to think about making choices based on whatever situations they are writing from so that when they are given a new assignment, they have choices to make that might spring from abundance. It might work from these two points:

Explain the assignment. Help them understand it.

Then give them practice in doing it.

Thank you for listening, and thank you for teaching. Many blessings on your work with your students.