Write
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“What we call education and culture is for the most part nothing but the substitution of reading for experience, of literature for life, of the obsolete fictitious for the contemporary real.”
I want to focus here not on learning to write, but on the experience of writing and the experience writing communicates. We have made a fetish of the written word and it serves students poorly. Students view “papers” as a big deal, but emphasizing what they write over experiences worth an essay misplaces entirely what is important. There is no doubt that writing is action, offers agency and requires a student to develop their powers of discernment and expression, all laudable educational goals. Writing is an exceptionally useful tool in life. It is, however, not life.
John Berger, in Ways of Seeing (1972, p.15), showed how fixating on artifact, a painting by Frans Hals for example, obscures the emotional meat of the matter: Hals’ interaction with his subjects. Viewed as an invitation to understand that interaction and the power of that painting to evoke it still, is what makes the artifact worthy of our time and respect. If a critique merely focuses on the painting instead of the experience from which the painting stemmed, then it misses the juice.
Writing similarly produces an artifact. Lab report, book critique, history essay: what we should care about is the experiences that inform them. Evoking those experiences will come more naturally with feeling. Before asking students to write anything, give them an experience worth writing about: an emotional experience. The exact point at which a student begins to feel something: that is the point where writing might profitably begin. Cutting the excess and polishing the artifact are separate lessons easily conveyed.
Consider:
How visceral are the experiences you offer your students, whether they write about those experiences or not?
To learn to write is to learn how to think, you protest, and so worthy of independent emphasis? Perhaps, but Piaget discovered that thinking far out-paces writing. Per Eleanor Duckworth, who worked with him:
“Through watching the development of sensorimotor intelligence, before the development of language in a small child, [Piaget] found that the roots of logic are in action and not in words. He followed the development of this logic of actions through to adolescence, finding at every step of the way that children were able to carry out activities that demand a good deal of intelligence without necessarily using language that reveals this. In sum, his early insight was that language is a misleading indicator of the level of a child’s understanding; a second insight was that there is a good deal of logic in children’s actions that is not revealed by their verbal formulations.”
Duckworth argues, based on Piaget’s work and her decades as a teacher of teachers, that language development is not responsible for the level of thinking: it is the effect.
“...there is no need to give children “language tools” in order to facilitate clear thinking, intelligence, or greater knowledge. Their own use of language will always be adequate for their own thinking.”
The more powerful the experience, the more there is to think about, the greater the invitation to emotional involvement: language will naturally follow. A teacher’s job: to see that students are emotionally or aesthetically moved. Inspire them or invite them, cajole them or coerce them, tempt them or tease them, but make them feel.
Consider:
How often, in your classroom, do you find your students moved (math and science teachers included)?
How can we help students learn to write with crisp and compelling language? Joseph R. Teller, a professor of English at College of the Sequoias, suggested English Composition class is not cutting it:
“In 10 years of teaching writing, I have experimented with different assignments, activities, readings, approaches to commenting on student work - you name it - all to help students write coherent prose that someone would actually want to read. And as anyone who keeps up with trends in higher education knows, such efforts largely fail.”
As Professor Teller appears to attest, isolating writing from experience leaves us with nothing but the experience of writing. For many people, that can be dry and unproductive stuff. Having offered an emotional experience worth writing about, however, what can we do to make writing itself a powerful experience? An obituary for Toni Morrison offers one way to proceed. When Dwight Garner (2019) writes that Morrison “bent language to her will”, he evokes a visceral, physical confrontation between writer and written word. To bend, to pulverize, to demolish, to twist, to mash, to beat, to frag, to disfigure, to punish, to sharpen, to distill, to compress: could these all be writing exercises?
Writing is a climb in any case, a sometimes arduous process requiring ingenuity and stamina. The following, in my experience, also makes it more visceral and less cerebral:
1. Agency: Choice makes emotional investment possible. In choosing emotionally, we engage more fully. The abstract becomes personal. Passion becomes possible. Let students choose their topics.
2. Interaction: Planning and pruning essays need not be lonesome even if writing is. Working with partners inspires storytelling, conversation, and listening. Writing partners and circles energize the work.
3. Sensation: Planning a written piece can be a multi-sensory affair. Vision boards, illustrations, conversations keep writers engaged visually, aurally and socially.
4. Emotion: Writers have to feel something. Caring emerges only from empathy and conflict, feeling and fighting, no matter what the topic, STEM included. Embody: be the molecules for that lab report.
5. Environment: Controlling distraction, maintaining continuity and offering inspiration: a room can be a powerful ally. I go to coffee shops to write, however, just to feel connected and out in the world.
6. Reward: Some grade on a paper is no celebration of the effort required to write it. Intrinsic satisfaction is important, but no substitute for joy. Better yet: make the student work count. Help students effect change. There can be no better reward.
In his dissertation An Exploratory Study of Peak Experience and Other Positive Human Experiences and Writing, Jaleh Fatemi asked if writing could even offer a “Peak Experience”, offering joy, heightened awareness of reality and clarity of perception and vision. 44% of Fatemi’s sample reported such an experience while writing. What triggered it? Fatemi (2004, p.137) found “self-expression, realization, free writing, creative/inspirational writing, introspective/reflective writing, and completion of difficult and meaningful tasks” were the conditions most likely to promote profound experiences, “self-expression” the common theme:
“...the single common factor in all these trigger conditions is self-expression (in some shape or form). This consequently highlights the importance of self in connection to writing.”
The experience of writing turns to dust in the absence of self. It is a bore to read as well.
Certain writing requires it though. Journalism and technical writing demand “objectivity”, as if there were such a thing. Science experiments require that we precisely describe our methods and results. A lack of bias supports our claim to accuracy or validity. We erase the self in service to some greater goal. The risk is obfuscation, not elucidation however. Climate, vaccines, tobacco: industry seems to buy the science it requires to sell stuff. It would be far more convincing to qualify our truths by acknowledging our perspective, so that others may understand the limits to our claims. Why are we writing this? Why should the reader care? Convince them with transparency and radical honesty.
Convince them as well with accuracy, and this requirement spans every writing genre, fiction or non. Is the language precise? Is it evocative? Is it authentic and true? Writing demands feeling, and the words to convey that feeling precisely. This is why teaching vocabulary abstractly, as words empty of emotion, offends me as such a heartless endeavor. Far better to read and encounter the words in context, so the connection bridges word and emotion and not word and more words. That science experiment: let the description convey the results, but also the awe it inspired.
Consider:
Awe. What do you do to evoke awe?
Caution is due I suppose. In fiction there is nothing more intriguing than lies or that vaporous place between truth and lies. It is marvelous as a reader to be led through the mist and into the light. Conduct the journey with obsessive regard for the psychological truth though, or the reader is lost. Fail to convey passion on the page, and the reader won’t stay. Were I to teach writing, I might start students with theater, drama, storytelling or simply talking, because emotions register more easily that way. It is easier to sense where feeling resides and to mark it. This is how to identify what matters, a dependable foundation from which to build a powerful essay.
Storytelling is also a way to evade the noun dominant nature of the English language, or at least how we seem to use it. Journalist Robert Koehler offers this:
“Our disconnect from one another, from ourselves and from the natural world is embedded in the Western languages, which break the world into millions of discrete, manipulable pieces, called nouns.Westerners control reality through language, but they don’t evoke it. Indigenous languages in contrast are verb-based, intrinsically linking speaker and object in a “flow” of motion that cannot be linguistically sliced and diced. ”
Finally, I want to argue for independence, not just from nouns but from anything that saps vitality. Independence bears more than passing attention in school. It is a cliché of adolescence, that struggling to differentiate when you want to belong and standing out while craving acceptance or validation. The courage and fortitude to take this on bears acknowledgment. I’ll admit as a teenager that I never felt courageous, and it would have meant a lot to have heard and felt otherwise. School fails to teach independence when it demands acquiescence and not resistance, and rewards obedience in lieu of curiosity or even subversion. A malodorous aroma of coercion pervading school, and it is hard to overcome. It makes arguments for independence sound terribly hollow. To decry acquiescence while demanding it is not compelling or inspiring. It is hypocrisy.
This fundamental tension needs attention and expertise that I’m unprepared to offer, but the answer will lie in examining exactly what school is required to offer: safety and inspiration may be all there is to it. These conditions may not require attendance at all, in which case coercion and accountability may well be limited resources squandered.
Independence, in any case, is fundamental not just to writing but to growing up. We can nurture it so that it yields productive results and not ruin, or we can pillory the counter-example:
““Koverny”, a Russian clown whose job in the olden days was to keep the audience laughing while the circus arena was changed between acts. If he failed to make them laugh, the ladies and gentlemen booed him and the management sacked him.
Almost the entire present generation of Russian journalists, and those sections of the mass media which have survived to date, are clowns of this kind, a Big Top of kovernys whose job is to keep the public entertained and, if they do have to write about anything serious, then merely to tell everyone how wonderful the Pyramid of Power is in all its manifestations.”
So opens the book of final dispatches by Anna Politkovskaya, murdered Russian journalist. I read her book to investigate truly independent writing, and expected to find a woman fully aware of her courage and fortitude. Instead, I discovered something else entirely, a woman who felt herself “a servant and a slave” to truth. This is a much simpler lesson than courage. Pledge allegiance to principles, come what may; that is Politkovskaya’s lesson. Be an activist instead of just a puppet, an idealist instead of a clown.
Consider:
Truth, Beauty, Justice. Do you help your students to build a relationship with principles?
Do you help them to apply them?
Letting students know their writing is crap, by the way, is not what I’m arguing against. I spent 2 years writing a novel so boring that it crawled into a drawer and died. I am still grateful for the critic who called off the resuscitation.
References
Berger, J. (1972). Ways of seeing. British Broadcasting Corporation and Penguin Books.
Duckworth, E. (2006). The having of wonderful ideas and other essays on teaching and learning. 3d edition. Teachers College Press, Columbia University. New York and London.
Fatemi, J. (2004). An Exploratory Study of Peak Experience and Other Positive Human Experiences and Writing [dissertation]. Texas A&M University.
Four Arrows, England-Aytes, K., Cajete, G., Fisher, R. M., Mann, B. A., McGaa, E., & Sorenson, M. (2013). Teaching Truly. A curriculum to indigenize mainstream education. Peter Lang.
Garner, D. (2019, August 6). Toni Morrison, a Writer of Many Gifts Who Bent Language to Her Will. New York Times.
Koehler, R.C. (2010). The next 500 years. https://www.islamicity.org/7803/the-next-500-years/
Politkovskaya, A. (2007). Is Journalism Worth Dying For? Final Dispatches. Translation by Arch Tait. Melville House, New York.
Teller, J. (2016, October 3). Are We Teaching Composition All Wrong? The Chronicle of Higher Education, http://www.chronicle.com/article/Are-We-Teaching-Composition/237969
Your thoughts on this journal post are highly valued, as I continue to build and refine my perspective on schools and the school environment. Please share your own experiences and perceptions of the school environment below!