Katie Wood Ray’s article, “Exploring Inquiry as a Teaching Stance in the Writing Workshop,” gave insight into a pedagogy that seeks to construct knowledge alongside students. As she demonstrated, this is the ideal way to teach writing as a craft—as grounded as any practice, with concrete materials—rather than as a formula. Even more remarkable is that, by examining the mechanics of more established writers and writing alongside them, I think that students might see themselves as a part of a community of writers. Often, creativity gets mixed up with the need to be “unique,” but this mentality can often be an intimidating hindrance and an obstacle to learning. At a time when writing is so important, yet so archaically taught, I found this stance to be a useful guide.

The readings this week about writing resonated pretty poignantly with my own experience. Reading them, I couldn’t help but reflect on my own history with writing, since the authors we read were all so passionate about their relationships to the craft.

In 6th grade, I was a crybaby. My mom is an immigrant who went from Iran to Boston for college; my dad is the son of an Iranian doctor. Both of them put an enormous amount of pressure on me as a child to succeed—get A’s, impress my teachers. Long, excruciating hours were spent at night at our dinner table when my dad got home, during which he drilled me incessantly on how to carry out math problems that I couldn’t care less about. Though I love my dad deeply, he isn’t perfect—patience, in particular, is not one of his strengths. The pressure they placed on me manifested in loud verbal rebukes every time I brought home anything below a B, forgot my homework in my locker, missed an assignment. I chalk their attitude up to a feeling of helplessness, especially in regards to my mom; she couldn’t actually sit down with me and walk me through the work as it got more difficult, so her way of helping was to push me, to ensure success, keep me on track at all costs. To my parents, school was the only way I could emulate their own success in this cold, foreign (to them) country. They knew that this country doesn’t really promise anyone success, despite the cruel fantasy of the American dream in which we’re supposed to believe.

One day in 6th grade, I got a C on an essay in Mr. C’s English class—the crybaby in me mercilessly unleashed itself. You have to understand that a C was absolutely unacceptable, and sure to result in a seriously upsetting confrontation at home. So, I started crying as soon as I got it—in the classroom. Mr. C was a kind, funny, empathetic man, and I still talk to him sometimes these days; that morning, he more or less saved my emotional development from the consequences of overwhelming parental pressure. He took me outside, talked to me, asked me about what was going on and why I was crying. At a parent-teacher conference, he spoke honestly to my parents, and ever since then they did their best to let me succeed on my own terms.

But the best thing about Mr. C is that he paid so much attention to my inner world. He saw me writing poems in one of those white-and-black spangled comp books, and asked to read them. They were terrible, of course—I read them, still, and see them as little attempts at exploring my emotional world in immature extremes and allegories. But nonetheless, they helped me grow and reflect on what was going on in my life. Without Mr. C’s encouragement, I may never have valued my own thoughts in writing. He is why to I write, and why I love to share my writing. The incredible thing about him was that he didn’t really care what I was writing. The poems weren’t for class, and they were bad—but he was never hesitant to tell me that they were great, always excited to read them, always encouraging.

One thing comes to mind about the readings for Tuesday. I have become my own writing audience, my own person to whom I write. By that I mean that, at a certain point, I realized that I wanted my writing to be good before showing it to people. It was vital that I develop a way of pushing myself to write and edit without needing a teacher or friend to carry me along, so I started to write to myself. In poems, songs, essays, I always write to make something clear to myself, to think through my emotions and experiences in such a way that they attain a certain level of clarity for me and not anyone else. Then, I can show it to others. This is a technique that I didn’t really encounter in the readings as a method, so I thought I’d include it, particularly since it converts writing from simply thinking into a way of getting to know oneself.

To me, rushing an assignment seems to come very naturally.  Every night, I (along with everyone else) have hundreds of pages of reading, and I’m expected to internalize the themes and ideas being explored by these texts.  Fortunately, I like reading, so I am capable of doing so—but I’m almost always held back by an anxiety (physical and abstract) about having to rush myself through the process.  I feel this anxiety every time I crack open even the most seemingly dull or antiquated text; it’s not that I don’t want to read Chaucer, it’s just that I want to be able to take my time and process his words.  At the end of the day, I’m unwilling—or unable—to compromise, so I end up staying up late to get my work done, reaffirming for myself that I am a person, not a scanner.

Janet Allen’s chapter on effective vocabulary instruction was refreshing, due to the fact that it undertook the task of re-approaching an  area of school that even she herself considered challenging.  One of the most irritating things about a policy like NCLB is that it fails to appreciate that learning is a process, not a product: that in order to be able to read, a person has to understand the words.  In the section that asks, “How can we use vocabulary instruction to increase content knowledge?” Allen outlines a process for approaching complicated texts through the vocabulary words themselves, understanding that knowledge cannot be imposed onto students, that it has to be built.  Particularly for students today, who apparently have difficulty with print literacy, the words themselves are the place to begin.  She notes that, after reading an introductory text that uses some of the difficult language and then assigning a fill-in-the-blank activity, students can “bring enough background knowledge to do a Possible Sentences activity” (99).  Knowledge isn’t imposed onto the students; it is built, stacked, layered, and also connected to new and different ideas.  The Possible Sentences activity takes a small, but well-built, foundation of understanding, and then allows the students to exercise some agency in continuing to create connections between the words and concepts at hand.  Only then do they undergo the process of reading the actual textbook.

This chapter in particular directed my attention towards something that I try to keep in mind any time I am helping someone who wants to learn: the only way to do it is to be patient.  Each page in each textbook is made of individual words, each of which are paths to knowledge in and of themselves.  There’s no good reason to ignore the fact that someone may not understand one, or any, of them.