what have I learned (2-2)

This is going to be a contintuation of what I posted as a new post on the class discussion board. I sincerely hope that post did not sound like an ill-logical rant. I guess I feel that I learned a lot from writing the dreaded “five-paragraph theme.” As a high school student, it gave me the structure I needed to feel comfortable enough to be able to express my ideas. I guess I appreciate Brittany’s idea that it can be used as a formulaic answer (and I’m certain that any teaching tool can be distorted), but it can also be a valuable device to help students streamline their thoughts and help them to think about how writing can be structured.

Since I’m thinking about high school, it might be helpful to try to remember what I learned there. Yes, the five-paragraph essay was a main form of writing for me. However, I also did learn about research writing. Certainly, I was not an expert at it, but I had been introduced to it well enough that integrating sources was something I was very comfortable with. I even remember doing a character analysis of Jane Eyre my senior year of high school of which I was very proud. It very much foreshadowed my college career, but since I thought I was going into history at the time, I didn’t realize it. Of course, the problem with using myself as a model is precisely that I never took English 190 (Truman’s version of English 1000) because I had received credit for it in high school. So, I will be teaching to those students who didn’t get college credit, and I have a harder time understanding the abilities of such students because I have not been in their place.

In thinking about what I learned in undergrad, I think one of the most powerful concepts was that you can generate thinking through writing. I take the concept so much for granted now, but I guess I didn’t really become convinced of the idea until sophomore year of undergrad. (Although, now that I think about it, in senior English in high school, we did have to keep reading journals, and thinking through writing was probably the point of those, although I don’t think I quite realized that then.) I remember several professors in undergrad who did the freewriting exercise where we just had to keep writing, even if we were just writing “I don’t know what to write” over and over again. Another helpful professor was my American Realism and Naturalism professor. She had us turn in two page responses to what we had read for every class. At first that was an enormous challenge, but eventually I became very comfortable with it and loved the thinking that it helped me to generate. At the end of the semester, those responses became almost easy, and I can’t tell if it was senioritis, or if I had really improved in generating content for a literature discussion.

I guess what I want to take away from today’s blog is the importance of freewriting for me. I want my students to understand how it is done and how it is useful. (But this is where I always feel bad because I simply don’t do it unless I am forced to—it’s usually a matter of time—I spend all my time reading and never manage to get to the writing. Of course, the same will probably be true for my students—most could probably write better essays if they were only willing to spend the time. I even know its still true at the graduate level, so I guess teachers never escape it, and I’m sure it also exists outside of higher education, so oh well.)