I start with what I call “fluency,” the ability to write quickly, easily, and thoroughly about nearly anything. Fluency is the subconscious skill that represents the deepest and most reliable abilities of the human brain. We are fluent in an animated discussion over dinner or when we feel suddenly “inspired.” Athletes are fluent when they are “in the zone,” and all human beings are fluent under pressure when they experience relaxed concentration rather than fear. Most people can write much better than they realize if they will simply relax and let their natural skills take over. However, getting in touch with one’s writing fluency is much more difficult than it seems, especially when one’s past experience with writing has been dominated by anxiety. I help students discover their fluency by encouraging them to “personalize” whenever they write. I tell them, “Write about what is genuinely important to you. Write about something you really want someone else to understand and feel.” Once the student is genuinely engaged in a real communication process, the writer is better able to access the best thinking he or she is capable of. Therefore, most of my writing assignments are flexible and open-ended so students can find their own angle of interest as the trigger for their writing. Without these crucial foundations of fluency and personalization, writing is just a silly school exercise, a “hoop” to jump through, an obnoxious obstacle, and probably a counter-productive activity. Fluency still comes slowly for some students (because the fear of writing can go very deep), but I show them another simple heuristic device for unlocking their fluency—asking questions. If you ask enough questions the brain will eventually give up its fear and attempt to answer the questions presented to it. Once the brain is rolling, success breeds success.
When the foundation of good writing is built on fluency and personalization, students can easily learn the magic of specificity. Writing always gets more exciting when it gets more specific, and writers quickly see how specificity works for them. More advanced strategies focus on how to write effective introductions, how to sequence paragraphs to make our thoughts easier for readers to follow, how to create strong “linkage” between sentences and paragraphs, how to write with a more exciting sentence structure, how to choose more interesting words, and how to write effectively with figurative language. We also learn about revision--a very demanding skill and the heart of polished writing. But we also spend a lot of time on a deceptively difficult and frightening aspect of writing—the ability to proofread carefully. The fear of making “errors” in grammar, punctuation, and spelling is often the ultimate source of the writer’s fear because former teachers have focused on this easily detectable aspect of writing. However, writing is not about making fewer errors. Writing is about communicating something the writer really wants someone else to understand and feel. Perfect spelling won’t, by itself, create writing that excites another human being, and student writers understand this, at least intuitively. They know that writing is about sharing exciting discoveries, insights, and enthusiasms. I reinforce that intuition but must always deal with the problem of distracting errors. Therefore, in the area of “correctness,” I focus on helping students catch all their “careless” errors. If they can learn to proofread slowly (a VERY difficult skill), they will generally improve their “correctness” without reinforcing the fear of writing.
In all my classes, then, we write frequently, revise often, and usually discover that writing is not only easier than we thought but an enormous amount of fun. When you have something that you really want to communicate with someone else, seeing that thought effectively embodied on a page is a thing of joy.
But good writing comes easier when it follows good reading and good thinking, so we spend a lot of time learning how to read and think more analytically. Often when students have trouble writing it is because they don’t have enough to say. They are trying to write from an “empty well.” Reading and thinking deeply can “fill the well” and make fluency much easier. Students learn that it is much more fun to write from a “full well,” even it involves more preparation than they are accustomed to. But students are understandably discouraged by long reading assignments, so when it comes to reading, I emphasize “quality” reading rather than quantity because I believe that reading without deep engagement and personalization is counterproductive. I would rather have students experience great success with a small amount of reading than have them feel buried, bored, and defeated under a mountain of assigned pages. If a student is genuinely excited by a single sentence, that excitement can stimulate enough fluency to create good writing.
To teach good reading, I introspect on my own reading skills and try to give students concrete and practical strategies for more effective understanding of what they read. I emphasize that writers are always trying to communicate rather than to confuse and that we can connect with the most difficult of writers if we will ask what the writer is trying to get us to understand. I teach students to focus on smaller and smaller parts of reading texts to help them feel the presence of the writer’s mind. And once again, the key is “personalizing,” finding a connection between what someone else has attempted to communicate and what we are already familiar with. Sometimes writers are just too difficult for us to understand, and my message to students then is to relax and find something else that is easier to understand. There is so much writing that we can connect with that we shouldn’t get too frustrated with something we have tried hard with but can’t understand. Thus, in class and in the newsgroup we share our many varied responses to our reading rather than expecting there to be just ONE way to respond to a text. In class, I make it clear that difference of opinion is a good thing. By keeping responses personal and idiosyncratic we discover the rich possibilities of printed texts.
For example, this semester I am teaching a Shakespeare course and we will begin our work with the recognition that much of Shakespeare’s text is difficult to understand. However, I will demonstrate that he is easier to understand than we generally expect. He is, after all, desperate to communicate with us. Breaking down the mental process of understanding Shakespeare’s words involves understanding his blank verse line and the way he “chunks” phrases, inverts syntax, and uses figurative language to fill the demands of that pentameter line. We will eventually “translate” Shakespeare into our own experience and find ways to connect with the richness of his fictional world. Once students discover that they can become more “fluent” in reading Shakespeare, they will be able to “fill the well” and write adeptly about their discoveries in reading him.
A similar kind of process occurs in my film classes, where I give students a vocabulary to talk about an experience that has dominated their lives—watching movies. We talk about mise en scene, composition, editing, cinematography, camera angles, lighting, color, sound, and dozens of other film elements. Once students gain a new, analytical terminology for what they have always enjoyed, they discover that they have more to say than they ever imagined about movies. They end up having even more fun watching film. By the middle of the semester, my students often say that they will never look at movies the same way again. Their lives will be forever enriched by a relatively painless educational experience.
But in this process of reading, writing, and thinking, we are also engaged in important “life skills.” Ultimately, these life skills might be the most important and lasting things that we learn. We learn about genuine engagement, the joy of doing your best at whatever task we face. We learn about bulldog tenacity. We discover that we are never bored when we are learning something personally meaningful. We learn that relaxed concentration will get us in touch with our genuine capabilities. We learn about following directions, time-management skills, prioritizing, meeting deadlines, and the dangers of procrastination. We learn about being precise, careful, and thorough. We learn about attendance and that simply “showing up” is a significant part of success. We learn about self-motivation, teamwork, and cooperation. We learn about taking responsibility for academic choices as a rehearsal for taking responsibility for life choices.
But with learning objectives this intense, I must create a very supportive, relaxed, informal, spontaneous, energized, and exciting environment for the students—both inside and outside of the classroom. This starts with my personality, which is gregarious, fun loving, attentive, and caring. In the classroom I am the cheerleader, always finding something to PRAISE. We have FUN in class. We always sit in a circle so everyone can see everyone else’s face and no one is automatically the center of attention. The students talk as much or more than I do. I believe that no matter how spellbinding the teacher might be it is more important for students to be active participants in their learning. Thus, I am an improvisational teacher. I go into every classroom with planned activities, but if the student response to course materials leads the class period in another direction, I shift gears and follow their lead. I must listen, read body language, interpret the classroom atmosphere, and be ready to respond and create every moment. I believe that I am most effective as a teacher when the students are learning from one another and from their own exploration as much as they are learning from me. I am like a coach. Of course, I design, maintain, and stimulate this atmosphere, so I take credit as the ultimate architect of the students’ learning, but we are a community of learners both inside and outside of class.
The very personal and informal nature of my teaching leads naturally from time to time to very intense mentoring relationships. Currently, I am probably actively mentoring about a half-dozen students. I am sometimes like their father, uncle, or big brother. I am willing, of course, to serve as a mentor to any student, but that special chemistry starts with the student’s individual needs. The student is always the one to choose whether or not I am going to be a mentor. My most enduring mentoring relationship is with Will McIntyre, a member of my freshman composition course in the spring of 1973. He and his wife, Deni, are international travel photographers living in Winston-Salem. I wrote the nomination that named Will the 1999 WCU Alumnus of the Year.
A very successful mentoring relationship in recent years has been with Margie Koch, who completed her Masters degree in our English Department last year (I directed her thesis). As we were finishing her Masters work, I helped Margie land a very prestigious job as the Director of Weekend and Evening College at Southwestern Community College. Margie is the most adept young teacher I have ever seen, maybe one of the best of any age, and she models her teaching on many of the qualities I strive for in my classroom. I have also become very close to a number of freshmen in my Composition classes in the last few years, especially those in my spring, 2000, 102-44 course newsgroup. In recent years, my strongest mentoring relationships include those with Brittany, James, Alyssa, Nick, Chris, Jason, John, Kelly, Neuman, Damion, Dustin, Sid, Daniel, Austin, Joe, Brendt, Kristin, and Ryan. With these student friends I have: