What I Discovered About Myself as a Writer

As I worked on compiling the items for my portfolio, I discovered that choosing what I wanted to include was not as difficult as I thought it would be. While there are many pieces that I could have selected, the ones that I wrote about in my Annotated Table of Contents all represent my education as a writer.

            It was clear early on what these pieces said about me as a writer. I do my best writing, my most meaningful writing, when I take risks as a writer and as a thinker. The only exception is the Thank You notes that I wrote as a child with my mother. While I didn’t take any risks as a writer because my mother helped me with what to write, by modeling the composing process, my mother enabled me to know how to take risks in the future.

Other than the Thank You notes, the other pieces do represent some sort of risk that I’ve taken: even though I liked my idea for my Shakespeare paper and I thought I was onto something, I didn’t know if my professor would agree; both pieces for my Reading Nonfiction class were experimental and pushed me outside my comfort zones as a writer; it was a gamble to share personal writing with my students, but it paid off by enabling them to dig deeper to add more personal insight into their own writing; the Writing Strategies Menu that I’m continuously working on is a also a risk because I don’t know if it will actually work the way I want it to; and the poem I wrote was more of an intellectual risk because I tried my hand at poetry.

Whether any of these writing efforts were successful in the traditional sense doesn’t really matter to me. What matters is that I learned something about myself as a person and as a writer through each of them, which is something I want to recreate for my students. It is difficult to take risks and students are often reluctant to do so. I hope that through sharing my own experiences and my own writing with my students, that they will feel emboldened to try risks in their writing.

One-Pager 2003 Revisited

Smith, Frank. “Myths of Writing”.

            I first read Frank Smith’s article eight years ago, in the summer between my junior and senior years of college, when I took Approaches to Teaching Writing the first time. A lot of what I think about writing has changed in the past several years, but a lot has stayed the same.

At that time, having never been in the classroom as a teacher beyond a few volunteer hours, I didn’t know how I would teach writing. I loved to read, but I did not love to write (gasp!), so I considered myself a “literature person” not a “writing person”. Of course, I recognized the fact that as a teacher, I would have to “do” both. My love for literature was the reason I decided to go into teaching and I figured that the writing part would just naturally dovetail into whatever literature we would study.

            Thus, as I started my summer session eight years ago, I unwittingly believed Myth #22, people who do not themselves enjoy and practice writing can teach children how to write. It wasn’t that I disliked writing; it was just my preference to read rather than to write. Having not done much real writing for myself prior to my time at Iowa, I didn’t understand the benefits of it. I fell victim (as a student, not a teacher) to a number of Smith’s Myths, such as Myth #3 (writing involves transferring thoughts from the mind to paper), Myth #8 (learning to write precedes writing), Myth #12 (you must have something to say in order to write), Myth #14 (writing should be right the first time), and Myth #15 (writing can be done to order). The biggest benefit I got from reading Smith’s article was not as a teacher of writing, but as a student of writing. Of course, as I read Smith’s Myths, I realized that I didn’t actually believe them. But I did practice them. Therefore, the first step in evolving into a writing teacher was to dispel these myths from my own writing practices and see what was left.

            That is why, at least for me, Smith’s article turned out to be the most useful article in helping me become not only a better writing teacher, but a better writer period. In many ways, I think this article is geared for students rather than teachers: it wasn’t until college that I realized writing-as-discovery was rewarding, useful, and fun. I always struggled with Myth #3 (writing involves transferring thoughts from the mind to paper) because I thought that what I had to put down had to be perfect, even though I knew all about “revising”. The rest of the aforementioned myths speak to the writing-as-discovery journey that writers embark on. As someone who had a problem articulating what I thought, it seems obvious that the whole “writing-as-discovery” thing would have been a natural process for me. But the fact is, it wasn’t. Nobody ever explicitly told me that I didn’t have to know exactly what I wanted to communicate before I wrote it; nobody ever told me that it was okay that I didn’t know what I thought right away, that I could figure it out as I wrote—that I would figure it out as I wrote and rewrote and rewrote. Had I known this sooner, been expressly told the secret, I would have seen the value in writing much earlier and in turn, become a better writer. It is because of my own journey of self-discovery as a writer that I now explicitly teach writing-as-discovery to my students. I am able to practice it in my own writing, and in turn, model it for my students.

            As a teacher of writing, I have come to enjoy writing more. I hold with what I said eight years ago: we, as teachers, need to impart the reality of writing to our students. But, what is that reality? That writing is hard? That writing is fun? That writing requires thought and effort and work? That writing is worth it? Sure. But as I’ve been teaching teenagers the last several years, the reality I’ve come to see is that when we teach students writing, we are really teaching them to take the time to discover what they think, why they think it, and how to say (or write) it. Teenagers especially struggle with knowing what they think about something and it is through writing that we can help them navigate their own minds. I still struggle with knowing what I think about something and I haven’t been a teenager for a really long time. Therefore, I still believe that Frank Smith does a service to teachers with his article, but I’ve come to discover that he has done a service to students with his article as well, because after all, we’re all still students of writing, no matter how old we are.

Writing Memoir Commentary

            The writing memory that I chose for my writing memoir this semester was a research paper that I wrote when I was a senior in high school. In AP Literature that year, my teacher assigned a research project that required us to choose a person who influenced a particular decade (or decades) and research what it was that this person particularly influenced and how.

            I had just come back from New York over Spring Break where I had seen a made-for-TV biopic on Audrey Hepburn. The movie, though terribly acted, was interesting enough for me to want to find out more about Audrey Hepburn, so I chose her as my person to research. After reading a biography about her, I decided to write about her influence on fashion and body image in the 1950s and 1960s.

            Over the course of writing that paper, I discovered quite a few things about myself. The most direct discovery was the personal connection (though slight) I felt with Audrey Hepburn. When she came on the scene in the 1950s, she presented a completely different body type and style to what had previously been popular (aka Marilyn Monroe and other blonde bombshells). Though I certainly realize that popular culture has taken the slender body type to an extreme, and that Audrey Hepburn herself suffered from anorexia (more out nerves than a conscious decision to not eat and be thin), I still appreciated the change in what was considered “beautiful” as a not-very-curvaceous teenager.

Something else that came out of my research was that I learned about an entire period of American culture that I had previously known nothing about, and discovered that I really liked it. Furthermore, it really suited my personality—the fashion, the films, the music—all of it. In high school, I didn’t really consider myself as very different from my peers because I more or less liked the same things in mainstream popular culture that my friends did. While I did genuinely like all the things my friends did, I still felt like there was more out there that I wanted to experience and know more about. As I read about the popular culture of the 1950s and 1960s, I felt like I had found the kind of “stuff” I was looking for.

            The most important discovery that came out of my research paper actually had nothing to do with the paper at all. Somewhat coincidentally, around that same time period I had really gotten into Frank Sinatra and his music. I didn’t know enough about him to have selected him as my research person (though if I was to redo the assignment, I would pick Sinatra hands down), but enough to know that he was at the height of his popularity during the 1950s and 1960s. Through the reading I did for my paper, Sinatra’s name came up quite a bit, which cemented my interest. The impact my love of Frank Sinatra and his music has had on me is too profound to explain in this commentary, but suffice it to say, that it all came back to that paper I wrote about Audrey Hepburn.

            From what I’ve said about the paper so far, it doesn’t really sound like I learned anything about actually writing at all. That’s not true. I did learn, of course, all the technical aspects of writing a research paper, such as how to conduct research, citing my sources, properly quoting information, outlining, drafting, revising, editing, etc. However, the real value I got out of writing that paper, and what made the “technical stuff” fun to do, was what I learned about myself through the process and the influence of what I learned on the rest of my life. To me, writing that paper on Audrey Hepburn was an exercise in writing-as-discovery. It maybe wasn’t the traditional writing-as-discovery task in the sense that I wasn’t discovering what I thought about my topic as I wrote about it. I did do that, but in a larger sense, the paper provided me an opportunity to discover what I thought about myself by writing about someone else. That was an invaluable lesson for me and why I chose that paper to write about for my memoir.

            In writing this memoir, I tried to make the memoir reflect the far-reaching effects that writing the Audrey Hepburn paper had for me and how my personality and tastes have developed. I thought the best way to do that would be to write a series of vignettes that could reveal all of the different parts that came together for me in the writing of the Audrey Hepburn paper. I’m not sure it works. Though I wrote the vignettes in chronologically order, there is quite a bit of jumping in time that may still be confusing for the reader.

Another aspect that may be confusing is that I framed the vignettes with a conversation I had with my sister about how I liked “old stuff”. Coincidentally, because I was so engrossed in that time period, and she wanted to spend time with me, I eventually got my sister to like the “old stuff”, too. I wanted to use that frame to show that the effects of my writing that paper haven’t stopped with just me, that the influence has been felt by my sister, as well as my whole family.

I also struggled with the fact that the majority of my paper wasn’t actually about writing, or about the writing of the Audrey Hepburn paper. However, I realized that by including all the vignettes, I was mirroring what had happened when I wrote the Audrey Hepburn paper: I was discovering more about myself. I had forgotten many of the incidents I included in the paper, but when I sat down and actually thought about what I would need to include to make sure my reader was able to follow along, that led to a backward cause/effect chain that led me to remember several important moments for my story.

One of the things I love most about writing is the unexpected places it takes me. When I started this memoir, I expected to gain some insight into myself as a writer. I didn’t have any idea that it would take me on a journey through how one aspect of my personality emerged. However, I don’t think that those two things are exclusive. They are just the opposite, which I knew, but through writing this memoir, I remembered.

           

Response to Comment...

So...I tried to respond to a comment on my blog last week by commenting on my own blog, but alas, Blogger wouldn't let me. Very bizarre. So instead, I'm adding it as my post for the week!

The question by my commenter was if I felt that I got any benefit from sharing my writing with my students. The answer is of course YES!! I think whoever it was that made that comment misunderstood my reflection...maybe thought that our partnership was the only time I had exchanged writing with a student? I'm not sure, but I'll clarify.

I write with my students all the time! I think it is really important for me to write with the students for a number of reasons. First, I think that teachers should always do the writing assignments they assign because then they will truly know if it is a worthwhile assignment and how best to help students with the assignment. Second, it is crucial to model all assignments, particularly writing assignments, for students. It also helps make the invisible part of writing visible for them. I also like sharing my writing with the students because it makes them feel more comfortable sharing their own writing with others.

What I meant by my post is that I because I have my students about three of their four years of high school, is that sometimes I take who they are as people and what I know about them and their strengths/weaknesses as writers too much into consideration when I read their writing. While there is definitely value in knowing my students so well, it can also cause me to lose perspective at times in what I should expect from them and their writing.

Reflection on Student Partnership

I thought my student partnership went well overall. My writing partner was enthusiastic and timely about getting her responses to me, which didn't appear to be the case for a number of other people in our class, so I consider myself lucky in that regard! I very much enjoyed her writing and I hope I was able to help her, at least a little bit.

Because I have my own classroom and my own students, I was hesitant about this partnership at first. I felt that I could have been spending my time responding to my own students. BUT I only felt this way at the very beginning. After I started corresponding with my student, I realized that it was a good experience for me to have a student from a different school that I don't know so well to respond to. I feel like sometimes make comments to students based on what I know of them and not necessarily what I know about their writing, so I found this partnership helped me focus back on the student's writing instead of the student.

Writing-as-Discovery Should Be Explicitly Taught

Early on What a Writer Needs, Ralph Fletcher discusses writing-as-discovery (21). I loved that he includes this section because I think that writing-as-discovery is a particular skill in writing that needs to be explicitly taught.

I usually discuss writing-as-discovery with my students when we talk about how to write an introduction. Some writers get so hung up on making their introduction perfect, it freezes them before they even start writing (which is why I really liked Fletcher’s title for this chapter “Freezing to the Face”). I was one of these writers: I was so intent on coming up with the perfect introduction that I would waste hours trying to get my introduction just right, with an brilliant thesis, and then by the time I finished writing the rest of my paper, what I actually said in the paper was far different from what I thought and didn’t match my introduction at all. I’d have to go back and rewrite my introduction. It took me until I got to be about a junior in college before I figured out that I should write my introduction last. I wish someone would have told me that, or at the very least, suggested it to me as a way to help me get started—when I think about how many late nights I spent agonizing over introductions, I want to cry.

My point is that I figured out what I wanted to say by actually writing it out—what Fletcher terms “writing-as-discovery”—and I think that is an invaluable skill to teach our students. Whenever I tell my students to just get a general idea for a thesis and then forget about the introduction until the end, they look at me like I just told them I want to kill their pets. However, when they give it a try, they find they write much better papers. Sometimes it just takes someone pointing out the obvious to get a person moving in the right direction.   

Depth vs. Breadth and Peter Elbow

In his article “Embracing Contraries in the Teaching Process,” Peter Elbow discusses one of the many paradoxes of teaching: helping students learn verses upholding the standards of the discipline we teach.

In my own experience, I feel this paradox constantly. The time-old debate of depth vs. breadth is still a difficult one for me. I want them both. As a teacher who controls her own curriculum—which amounts to 75% of the English curriculum in the high school—it’s a debate I don’t take lightly. I struggle with it constantly.

On the one hand, I feel like the depth approach is the way to go—making sure all students have tackled and grasped certain skills/content before moving on just seems like common sense best practice.

But on the other hand, there is SO MUCH content and SO MUCH my students don’t know, that I feel like I’m doing them a disservice if I don’t try to cover as much as possible. Of course, I know that realistically there’s no way I can cover everything. However, in the face of such an overwhelming amount of content, it’s very difficult to not give into the “breadth impulse”.

When Elbow wrote that “our commitment to knowledge and society asks us to be guardians or bouncers: we must discriminate, evaluate, test, grade, certify” (2), he was referring (I think) to college instruction, though I feel the same sense of responsibility as a high school instructor.

Read differently, from the perspective of a high school teacher, I think that we must be discriminate about what we actually teach, how we evaluate, what we test, how we grade, and how we certify. As high school English teachers, we are not cranking out future English majors, but we are sending out future English communicators into the world and we have to think about the fact that for many of our students, high school is the last time they will receive any explicit instruction in how to communicate, whether through reading, listening, speaking, or writing. So our instruction has to be good. It has to be thorough. It has to have depth and breadth. Otherwise, our students will be have to spend too much of their time and energy floundering on their own, trying to navigate their way through making themselves understood. (Granted, we all have to do a little of that anyway, but you get my point.)

I really like Elbow’s article because he makes the case for alternating between both approaches, which I think is essential to not only achieve balance in our teaching, but also to achieve some clarity of mind when faced with the often daunting task of teaching.