J. Dinan

English 103

Finding Middle Ground (A Sample Problem-Solution Essay)

Introduction

One of the better kept secrets in the world of teaching is that students have as much power as teachers do. True, teachers always have institutional clout, such as the power to send a defiant student to the principal’s office or, most importantly, the power to give students grades that may have some kind of impact at home or at school, for better or worse. But the carrots and sticks wielded by teachers often look shriveled indeed next to the power of students to make or break a teacher’s day--at least those teachers who still give a damn. I was reminded or this very recently when I got upset at my English 103 class, a writing class which, because it meets in a computer lab and because of its “workshop” nature, tends to depend more on the students for its value than do more traditional classrooms. If the students aren’t involved, doing what needs to be done, then the class doesn’t work.

Most of the time, my English 103 class meets those responsibilities, despite habitual lapses by some students. Most of the time. But not last Tuesday. Things broke down. Even students who typically demonstrate a lot of discipline crumbled. I stood there and wondered, “What the hell is going on here?” My day, as they say, was shot. I was angry; still am, especially after waking up at 4:00 a.m. thinking about this situation. So, I have a problem here, namely, how to restore a classroom in which students are actually being students for the whole class session--but to do so without wrecking the very qualities (for example, students being active, not passive) which I know are important to good writing-class environments.

Description of the Situation

I am a great advocate of computer-assisted classrooms in which students play a far more active role than usual in their writing education. I’ve been teaching in such classrooms since 1984, and have marveled at how young writers who in the past have had little power (or success, in many cases) in their writing lives can thrive in a workshop environment where their writing--not handbook drills--are the center of the course. But it’s a shaggy business. I can live with some of that. When you ask people to take responsibility, you also need to cut them some slack. Most of the time that works in my English 103 class, but recently I find myself disliking some of the actions I am seeing. A good number of the students are wonderful, to be sure. They see what the agenda is, work hard, consult with me when they need help, and go about their business, using their time and resources well. If I have any complaint about this group, it’s one that I make with an inward smile: they sometimes don’t have total patience for the non-writing activities of the course (they want to back to their own writing/essays).

By way of contrast, I have two Social Clubs in the classroom. One of them meets almost all the time; some of the members are pretty good a multi-tasking: they talk and write at the same time. Sometimes, though, they just talk, and that’s when, for them, a good thing goes wrong. Interestingly, this Social Club #1 is not part of the group that has begun to see the class as an hour long rather than an hour and twenty minutes. Quite the opposite: they work up to the bell and occasionally beyond. It’s when they don’t work efficiently before the bell rings that bothers me. (It may bother other students as well.) At such times, they contribute to the problem I have to deal with.

Social Club #2 (which actually only has two full-time members, sometimes three) is more irritating than Social Club #1, because it is openly irresponsible, even defiant. I give them their due; when they do work, they work hard and well. I like working with them during those times, which generally is the first hour or so of the class. But then some kind of factory whistle seems to go off in their heads (fatigue and grumpiness, I think), and they gather in the middle of the room to chat the rest of the class session away, pulling with them a reluctant third member who is (bless him) still bound by more traditional ideas of what is and isn’t acceptable classroom behavior. Social Club #2 contributes to the problem I am facing in three ways. First, during their too-frequent “down” times, they aren’t doing their work and thus aren’t engaged in the learning-to-write process. Second, other class members notice them and as a result are challenged to maintain their own self-discipline. As one student put it recently, “I heard others packing up so I started to pack up too.” Finally, it just flat-out ticks me off when students do this; and, yes, any negative emotions I feel do contribute to the overall problem.

As for others who on occasion contribute to the problematic situation I must deal with, well, it’s an individualized sort of thing. For example, one student, a very hard worker in other locations--including when he works on his English 103 projects--has done almost nothing during our actual class sessions the entire semester. To his credit, he feels sort of unhappy about it, too--but not so much that he is willing to take advantage of the in-class opportunities to “be a writer” that this kind of class format provides. Another student, who also is extremely productive when she is on task, typically drops out of the World of English 103 about halfway through every other class session. Hers is what I call a “transition problem”: when she finishes one assignment she has trouble forcing herself to move on to another project. (This, I suspect, may have been a problem faced by nearly the whole class the Tuesday after Spring Break--it was one thing to finish up a revision project, quite another to commit to a new project.) A third student, who generally needs both time and a lack of distractions to write productively, doesn’t operate all that comfortably in the ramshackle workshop environment. And so it goes. Most of the people, most of the time, are just fine. But some significant erosion has taken place lately, and that’s something I need to attend to--for their sake and for mine.

Factors to Consider

As a writing teacher, my main concern must with be the writing development of my students. This includes both their writing skills per se and their attitudes about themselves as writers. However I deal with the situation I described above, it has to create an environment in which writers can grow. My thirty years of teaching writing have taught me that hostile environments where success is secondary to maintaining a traditional power structure are not places where young writers develop best (or old ones like me, for that matter).

A factor that is related to the one above--and something that I must also consider--is what might be called “student morale.” This particular course, particularly with the heavy editing I do on the “instructor drafts,” asks for a pretty big commitment on the students’ part--most likely a bigger commitment than they had expected to be asked to make when they signed on for the course. The brain side of them understands all the standard (and legitimate) points about the only way to get better at something is to do it a lot, full of awareness and some of the time under the guidance of a professional. That’s the brain side. The heart, on the other hand, can get sore and weary and discouraged as easily as it gets engaged and motivated and pleased. Obviously, I need to try to find a way to keep the balance on the upbeat side of things when it comes to such matters of the heart.

And, yes, my own emotions need to come into play here. I get upset when I am cast into roles I don’t want to play--like traffic cop. To be sure, most of my anger is internalized (that is, I don’t often say exactly what I’m thinking, knowing I will be calmer in a matter of minutes). But the irritation is still there, bothering me, having an impact. I don’t teach well when I’m angry, and students in my classroom don’t learn well when the environment is poisoned by battles of any kind, even quiet ones. So when I choose a strategy for handling this situation, I need it to be something that makes me happy too.

Evaluation of the Options

I have several options, it seems to me. One that I need to consider carefully is, basically, doing nothing at all (beyond what I have already done by way of alerting my students to my belief that a problem is starting to exist). “Doing nothing” certainly doesn’t seem like a very aggressive way to handle a problem situation, yet there are some merits to this non-approach. For one thing, history has shown that these problems are often temporary rather than deep--the result of students having difficulty “coming back” from Spring Break, for example: post-Break Traumatic Syndrome. Things might get back to an acceptable level after a week or so, even without a lot of moves on my part. On the other hand, some of the problems described above have been problems for quite some time, just ones that were allowable, given the Big Picture. I really don’t want to go back to that state of affairs. Class time needs to be more valuable across the board.

A second option is to make major changes in the very nature of the process called “English 103.” This would entail taking the computers out of play to a large degree and doing a lot more traditional “in the middle” stuff: rhetorical analyses of essays, grammar reviews, etc. It is hard to find a good side to this option, since I don’t think letting students revert to the comfort of passivity is good for anybody, least of all them. But it would take certain students off the hook they are on right now, especially those who have difficulty maintaining self-discipline for more than 45 minutes at a time. So, for some, morale might be better. But I don’t buy it. If I took this tack and turned the course into a traditional writing class, I would no longer feel lousy about the things like some students’ iffy work ethics, but I would feel even more lousy about reacting to the lapses of the worst students rather than creating an environment that is healthiest for the better students. In fact, I know that only in a workshop classroom can we escape from those god-awful, self-defeating distinctions between “worst” and “best.” So Option Two is unacceptable too.

A third option is to continue with the workshop format but be a lot more structured and clear about expectations, even to the point of making classroom work (or lack thereof) a big part of the assessment process. For example, since good classroom work is so important to engaging in the process of English 103 (that’s the process where students learn now to write better), I could say (without being nasty about it) that I’ll routinely assess everyone’s classroom work on some kind of scale ranging from “Full Commitment” to “Absent”, planning on melding that assessment into my evaluation of the actual product (a completed essay): “B” paper, “D” engagement= “C” for the project. This kind of adjustment might be good for students who really need to have teacher-driven incentives to perform even at a minimum level. This scheme would also reward students who, though they may right now lack the writing skills to produce top-quality essays, are willing to work their butts off trying to do so. The problem with this kind of traditional carrot/stick plan is that it is insulting, demeaning. It insults students because it implies that they are little kids who can’t motivate themselves to do the right thing for themselves. It insults the teacher because it implies that the only way he or she can have a hardworking, productive classroom is to institute cheesy evaluation mechanisms. Earlier I said that “morale” was an important factor for me to consider when dealing with this situation. Well, concerns about morale (and about the bad writing environment that bad morale creates) lead me to reject Option Three.

A final option is a slightly more aggressive version of my first option--the “do nothing” option I discussed earlier. Since making radical moves, including getting in the face of students who seem to be drifting, would probably be an example of overreacting, perhaps I ought to take a quieter not-quite-hands-off approach. I can let the class know that I am concerned, and that my concern in certain situations turns to anger. (Because of long-term training, students are sometimes surprised when they discover that teachers--like parents?--are people.) I could let them know one way or another that I understand that dealing with the writing projects in this course, especially given how heavily I edit their drafts, can be a big and occasionally frustrating challenge. I might also mention how people are still social beings who are sensitive to the behavior of others. In addition to such whole-class advisement, I could deal with individual problems just that way--individually. And quietly. The biggest concern that I have about this strategy is that it may not be dramatic enough to work. On the other hand, most of my students are pretty grown up most of the time, so why not continue to treat them that way and see what happens? A bit scary, but that’s how teaching is, sometimes.

Conclusion

I have decided to take the moderate route of quietly letting my class know that I am uneasy with some of the things I see going on. I will probably do this quietly at the beginning of class someday soon; I want to do it at the beginning of a class so that it doesn’t appear that I am reacting spontaneously and in anger to something I just saw seconds earlier. I won’t give any sermons about education and responsibility; lectures are for parents and pastors, and I don’t think they do much good. Instead, I will focus on how the situation is making me unhappy because it does not fit well enough with my vision about what classrooms such as this should be like. To support this approach, I will have quiet, non-public chats with a few of the students who I think can (as should) make a difference.

I like this approach because it fits well with both my personality and with my view of what writing teachers should be. By being honest yet moderate, I can also maintain what I believe is a very good overall rapport with my students. Our classroom needs to remain a healthy environment in which writers can work and people can grow.