Can't Fight History

The beating heart of my job, at one time, was teaching: local, actual, at-your-door, what-are-we-going-to-do-tomorrow-in-class-with-25-students teaching. I and my colleagues trained graduate students to teach in a year-long course. In small groups we worked through the baptism-by-fire that is a first year teaching freshman writing. We brainstormed brainstorming, conferenced conferencing, and graded grading. Teacher/writers taught student teachers, and our authority came from years in the classroom along with our reflections on teaching to improve practice. And we tried to make student writing meaningful; we read literature because it raised human questions, invited students to consider perspectives other than their own, and, at its best, pushed students into zones of discomfort, new ideas, and pointed toward writing as a way to create knowledge, insight, perhaps empathy for ways of knowing other than one's own. We wanted to make our students think, and also to feel; to be thoughtful citizens, better human beings. Our teaching workshops were messy collaborations where we shared materials, trouble-shot student conflicts, mulled over the nitty-gritty questions of what makes good writing, developed critical awareness of how language can be shaped for effect; we worked to create a community (both teachers and students) that wrote its way into understanding that was beyond the teacher, beyond the text because that was what writing was supposed to do: shine a light on big questions.  By today's standards, the workshops were low-tech, paper-intensive, anecdotal lessons and discussion that seem quaint by today's "professionalized" teacher training. Authority has been transferred to the "experts." Now, grad students read scholarly articles -- written for scholars -- about teaching in lieu of sharing lived experience. Our classes are driven by vague, hugely abstract rhetorical SLOs, and we use a corporate textbook instead of our in-house anthology. We don't teach the features of the essays and genres that we actually grade, but instead the thinking about notions of context, audience, purpose, and how all that works. Nothing wrong with that if there's something to stand on underneath it. But we don't give students much help in building the stairway to those lofty abstractions. We don't actually instruct students how to narrate narratives, or to show rather than tell, or to craft an analysis. We point to the tools and say "have at it; you're on your own here." The core now, (I can't call it a heart) is administration, and is more "about" writing than actual writing. Teachers "keep track" of things, just lay out vague ideas, point to pages in the text. We don't much model or practice ourselves. Craft, process, student engagement, attention to language, real care about subjects is pretty much accidental if it happens at all. Such is the freight train of new way and it has run me over, left me bloodied and broken in the ditch as it moved on into our vague, assessment-driven, centralized, unaesthetic, sanitized future.