My students are troubled by freedom. They gripe about what they are expected to do in my colleagues’ classrooms; yet, when I tell them during the first week of school that they have to come up with their own topics, I am met with cries of frustration: “I can’t think of anything to write about,” or, “I don’t have anything interesting to say, nothing has ever happened to me.” Yet when they sit and talk to each other, and are unaware that I can hear what they are saying, my students tell incredible stories: full of import, meaning, depth, and humor. However, the prevailing attitude is that what they have to say, because it is about them, cannot be of any value. So they write simple narratives that lead the reader through a series of fairly inconsequential events: “and that was my day at the water park,” or “. . . my new car made me so happy.” They have had the native sense of storytelling beaten out of their writing by teachers who demand their students follow a formulaic writing style which the teacher and the student thinks is the correct way to write an essay.
From the time I went back to become certified to teach in the mid-1980’s, the “five-paragraph theme” and its permutations has been derided, yet it thrives like kudzu in the high school classroom and beyond. After my professor, in a well respected East Coast graduate program, explained what he expected in an essay, I argued with him telling him that he was simply asking for a more glorified five paragraph theme. To my horror, he agreed, and did not see anything wrong with that description, even though in the composition classes next door the profs contradicted his view. Virginia Wolff described the essay as a mind tracking itself. The writer is engaged with exploring the topic before her. The essay is a way for ideas to be developed and for the writer to discover meaning in the topic that they did not see before they began writing. The essay is not a pre-determined form to fill with gooey words, wait for them to solidify, and then show it off like some easy bake oven cake.
And that is the problem. It is not that my students don’t have deep concerns, nor are they as ignorant as some of my fellow teachers think. They have very rarely been given the time or the occasion to write, think seriously about, or to make meaning out of the world they see around them. They have been enmeshed in what Paulo Freire calls the “banking system” of education, where we teachers deposit bits of trivia and formulae into their heads, then they spit it back out like ATM’s on a test. One of the constant gripes one hears in the press about the school system is that our students aren’t prepared, they can’t problem solve. Yet, the solution that is offered is usually more-of- the- same: more of the same kind of education that has led us to the very problem people complain about. Fixing a problem by increasing the amount of activity which caused the problem in the first place is not a solution.
Learning, real learning, where students engage with the subjects they are expected to learn about by engaging in the type of activities people in those fields of study actually do is a solution. (Situated peripheral learning) In English Language Arts, my field, students are expected to learn to read and write. Once they have moved past decoding letters and words, students need to read and write. Real readers and writers, read and write and think about reading and writing. The ability to make meaning from text and to create their own meaning through writing should be the goal of every high school English class. This is not done through endless worksheets where students underline “tone” words, or reading a book out loud to the whole class (because “they won’t read it on their own”), or having the students memorize a list of random words for a vocabulary test on Friday. The students must read and write.
And that is the problem. My students are troubled because they don’t know how to choose a book to read, because the teacher has always told them what to read; or they have become stuck in a single genre. They see writing as a way to feed back pre-fabricated ideas and opinions to the teacher who gave them the ideas in the first place.
