Writing What We Teach, Part II

I am confident we have no reason to teach what we cannot do. A professor has no business talking extensively on a subject he or she knows nothing about. Likewise a writing teacher shouldn't be teaching writing if he or she can't put a sentence together.

By the time most instructors finish their master's degrees and set about teaching, each has come up with a style of writing that carried that writer through school. Maybe someone pours a glass of Scotch and sets it on the windowsill with a cigarette. Then she writes all night and won't touch the goodies until she's done 5,000 words. Or maybe the writer writes a draft each day and rewrites every morning, but never on a Sunday. Maybe one writer revises as he writes, or writes it all in a 23-hour marathon.

The point is that most writing teachers have a system. We can do as well as teach. We know how good writing gets written. Especially by the time we are working on advanced degrees.

That said, this assignment in Missouri State's practicum--the "Writing What We Teach" assignment from English 603, practicum--helps and hurts instructors. It helps because it draws attention to the process of writing again, things we have internalized. It turns writing inside out, and gives us empathy for students. But it is also a chore, and it does destroy some of the mysticism about writing.

It takes off, as Hemingway said, "Whatever butterflies have on their wings." It dissects the magic. And although we gain empathy, we are forced to drag out all of our secrets and then use them, somehow, to find a way to teach our students. But don't most of us do that already? Maybe I'm wrong, but I think we do.

I think the problem is this: The assignment didn't force us to do anything differently. Speaking for myself, this is how I teach anyway. I tell my students about how I write, how others have written, and so on. We talk about the messy process--a buzzword for a long time now in composition classrooms--and we revise and rewrite and generally draft together. I write all the time anyway. In a very fundamental way, I am always writing what I teach.

I would guess that there are not a few students who, for example, write textual analyses in their advanced literature classes--Shakespeare and Chaucer, etc. So do we really need to do it again?

If anything, the "Writing What We Teach" assignment in our practicum helps us to be mindful, understanding, and empathetic. Everyone needs to be reminded of a student's plight sometimes. But we live a student's life, too. We lead double lives.

In conclusion, I can't say I will use this assignment when I teach my class. It hasn't modified my views on how to teach, what to lecture on, etc. (my pedagogy). This isn't a reflection on the assignment, of course, but simply an observation. Using my own writing process as an example for students--or as a way to understand students, or whatever--is just a side effect of the way I have always taught.