Getting Started

Dr. Miller’s first blog entry explains the hows and whys of some of the MC English Faculty’s decision to blog in connection with our comp classes this semester. Rather than repeat him here, I’ll jump in with something else. First, though, I’ll remind myself and my readers of our plan to blog about specific events we see connected with goals of development included in MC’s Mission Statement: intellectual, spiritual, social, physical, and emotional development. This blog’s event connects with intellectual development, certainly—both mine and my students’. And with the emotional, I suppose, as well.

After our breakfast meeting on Friday, I headed to my office to plan for a composition workshop we’re giving for our department’s faculty and graduate teaching assistants. On my things-to-do list was choosing a student-written sample essay we could examine and discuss during the workshop.

In a corner of my office floor, I sat cross-legged in the Cemetery of Dead Student Papers. Or rather, in the Cemetery of Students’ Dead Papers. I like to assume that the students who wrote them are alive and well. But the papers themselves are most decidedly dead: long ago written, printed, turned in, graded, returned to the students, and then returned back to me for departmental records. Then forgotten. For the workshop, one paper would have a new life.

As I browsed, the essays and names reminded me of faces and personalities from semesters past: the talented-but-lazy student with the creative spin on the men’s dorm bathrooms (he could’ve done so much more with that); the weak writer who tried so hard that grading her papers always broke my heart; the weak one who didn’t seem to try at all, for reasons I would never learn; the motivated one who attacked assignments like my horse attacks hills: lots of willingness, energy, power—enjoying himself every stride, confident hooves hitting treacherous ground in all the right places.

I’m not sure what any of them “got” from my classes, whether they were really all that better at writing or thinking when they left me than when they first arrived.

What struck me overall, though, was how arbitrary my assignments seemed. Why did I want them to write about X, or Y, or Z?—Because composition students have been writing about X and Y and Z for years and years now. That’s what they do; what we ask them to do; how it is. I was reminded, too, of how much writing I did as a student—and sometimes for my job now—that didn’t seem very useful or important or interesting.

It’s the middle of August, and I’m excited about the coming semester. I’m excited about my colleagues’ willingness to experiment with me, to try something different with our composition classes, to try to make the course more useful and important and interesting for our students. Realistically, as a writing teacher, I will always have a Dead Paper Cemetery in my office. But hopefully, my students will have benefited substantially from writing those papers—and from our time together, in general. We’ll see.