Why We Should Allow Students to Scribble First

Recently, I tried writing a poem on the COVID-19 Pandemic. As usual, at the start I felt the way I imagine that my students do when I give them writing assignments. The insecurity was real. How could I capture the hugeness of a pandemic that had forced the whole world indoors?

I wrote anyway, viewing the pandemic from a café I liked to inhabit regularly that now provided only curbside service and to go orders. Inside, what used to be a cozy place with music, art, and mismatched furniture now more closely resembled a warehouse floor with taped lines marking where people were allowed to stand.

As I wrote—scribbled really—some internal rhymes and a few concrete details that inform most pandemic retail space gave the writing shape. I went small and personal and concrete. Though it felt like a snapshot, I wrote a poem.

I’m not arguing that all writing should unfold this way. Nor am I arguing that what I wrote is a great poem. I can say, though, that it is a poem and that much writing does unfold this way, though it may not be the way most are taught to do it. We are taught, “In the beginning was the thesis and the outline” in most school systems. Given the five paragraph theme, that means three random things about a general topic. It also means inauthenticity.

I am aware whenever I teach a new class of college freshmen that this indeed was their training, and that much of it involved a prohibition against allowing them to write from their experiences. We want them gazing outward, and yet that outward gaze does not allow them to begin to render the world they see.

There are known epistemological reasons for these barriers. Plato started it, characterized the human condition as being similar to men chained in a dark cave of their prejudices. Only philosophy could bring true knowledge and freedom. Note that he didn’t say that art or poetry could.

In the European Middle Ages, theology replaced philosophy as offering the path to true knowledge.

Then came the scientific revolution.

These have been very heady epochs and eras in Western Civ, though scribblers have more recently been around, some emerging from the school yards as essayists, some as poets, some as novelists. They’ve been readers. They also seem to share a valuing of the personal and a vision for how the personal creates connections.

Lest we dismiss personal writing and experience too quickly as educators, we should consider the current responses that have come all over the world in reaction to violence inflicted on individual lives. These responses came in reaction to personal stories.

A man was murdered because he was suspected of passing a counterfeit $20 bill. His story resonated because we all understood the subtext. He was also a black man who’d been accused of passing the bill. George Floyd’s story, laid in with the kindling of a thousand other true personal stories of police brutality ignited a kindling of human induction. This has begun to shape new changes.

Personal experiences can represent a doorway into the human condition. Writing about where we stand right now and what we face can matter. Yes, Black lives matter, and we should be hearing from their stories. They should be shaping us.

My COVID poem is not of this same order. But it attempts to see the world rendered in terms. We should also set our students loose, in journal writing and in personal essays, in their own lives and language, not to write about what they did for summer break, or what they want for Christmas. No, instead we should let them unmute their world and begin to listen for what they will say.