FoolsCap

Something’s been bugging me for a week or so now about Joe Harris and A Teaching Subject and I think I’ve finally articulated what it is.  I’m gonna go ahead and write about it at the risk of ruffling some feathers I’d rather not ruffle.

So: Yes, I think Harris’s aim of encouraging analytic thinking and recognition of one’s place in the midt of competing discourses is a great model for teaching comp.  Further, it’s probably even the model I will use for my first few semesters as a new instructor.  (Assuming of course my funding is renewed after Winter 2006.)  But what has been nagging me about it?

Working in the writing center the other day (Tuesday), I helped a student, a middle-aged woman (very nice), who was coming back to school after marraige and three kids, having graduated high school 40+ years ago.  She wanted some help on improving her writing generally, not just on a specific assignment.  Nicole has the good idea to have her spend a few minutes writing a brief page on her return to school, which I then used as the basis for the lesson.

First: her writing wasn’t half-bad.  True, there were problems to work with: simplistic sentence structure, subject-verb agreement, adjectival forms misused, punctuation errors. . .but she also had a strong sense of paragraph organization, and was in fact able, at one point, to build a complex sentence that made correct use of a colon and had all sorts of various clauses and whatnot.

As I tried to work through her writing sample with her, I found myself confronting a sort of painful realization: I recognized a lot of her errors, and could fix them for her, but I didn’t really have the body of knowledge, the simple know-how, to explain to her why they were errors, what the errors were called (in fancy grammar-talk), or necessarily how to explain the "correct" way of doing them.

This is what brings me to Joe Harris.  As compelling as his model is, when I think about using it for my own classes, it seems. . .lazy.  Not that you couldn’t build a rigorous, demanding syllabus from Harris’s model, but that deciding to focus on the analysis and thought behind student writing seems like a really easy out from having to memorize rules and guidelines about subordinate clauses and future perfect tenses and all that jazz.  I know I’m a lit/cult guy, so maybe I can give myself a pass, but I really feel like not knowing this stuff diminishes what I can achieve with my students.  What use am I to them if I can only tell them what errors they’ve made without being able to tell why they’re wrong and how to fix it? 

I’m not feeling sorry for myself here the way I was in earlier posts about my various multiple countless personal defects.  I’m trying to pose a real question about possible pedagogical models: When you decide to focus on one approach, what are you omitting that may benefit your pupils?  Or: Is choosing one approach an admission of inability in another?

Obviously not all instructors will bring the same strengths or interests into their classrooms.  One of my colleagues will likely move on to do great work with service learning and student advocacy and other great things that I just don’t have an aptitude for.  Conversely, said colleague may not ever teach a course on the boundaries of the novel, as I’d like to some day.  (Which is not to say you couldn’t, oh dear colleague of mine.)  To restate my question once more in different fashion: How and when do we acknowledge our shortcomings (or maybe we can say our own learning opportunities) as pedagogues?