My students can’t write a clear sentence to save their lives. It’s my job to help them change that.
I have taught writing for 10 years. Much like Joseph R. Teller, whose October essay criticizing how we teach composition riled many a writing instructor, I have “experimented with different assignments, activities, readings, [and] approaches to commenting on student work.” But my results have been very different from his. Rather than seeing my students fail repeatedly, I’m seeing more and more of them succeed.
Their success may stem, in part, from a mantra I’ve taken to heart: If students consistently fail at something in my classroom, it’s not their fault. It’s mine.
I teach at a community college in Texas, in a city where almost 20 percent of the citizens live below the poverty line. More than 30 percent of children in the city live in poverty. About 70 percent of my college’s students take classes only part-time, and 73 percent entered this year taking at least one developmental course. Most of them have lived and been educated in a system that has overwhelmingly failed them due to a focus on testing rather than learning. Most have taken time away from education to work, so what writing skills they did possess have probably atrophied.
Teller argued that the three pillars of composition pedagogy — that courses should “focus on process, not product,” that students should write on “complex issues rather than imitate rhetorical modes,” and that reading and writing should be combined in the same course — don’t actually work. But I find they do, and I’m not alone in thinking so.
