Blog Entry 1 January 25, 2013

Writing as Doing, Saying, and Being?

Currently, most of my writing is connected to my teaching: writing prompts, reflections, models.  As much as I would like to write, I find I don’t really have the motivation and focus required to sit down and write after teaching and all that goes with it.  As we discussed in class, most of what I’ve learned about writing I’ve learned in order to teach, either through teacher training or independent reading and research.   As a student I had very little writing instruction.  My school writing consisted of elementary school book reports, response to literature in high school, and MLA documentation in college.  I did come up with one memory of a writing assignment in eighth grade, though, that I think may be relevant to this class.

Write about your most embarrassing moment.  My current eighth grade students might not have a problem with this assignment, but I thought it was bizarre.  I went to a Catholic school in the seventies.  There was no talking in the halls, separate gym classes for boys and girls, and strict tracking: you were an A, B, or C student. In class, you wrote down what the nuns told you to write, memorized it, and regurgitated it back to them.  This was not a creative or open environment.  I was a good student, I even enjoyed diagramming sentences, but there was no way I was going to open myself up to potential ridicule from classmates and teachers by telling them about something embarrassing.  I copied a story out of a teen magazine about a girl who confused Yogi Bear with Yogi Berra.  Done.  I got a good grade and went completely unnoticed.   Mission accomplished.

Not everyone had the same reaction, though.  A boy in the class, Alex, wrote a very funny story about diving into a lake and losing his bathing suit.  Sister Ann Jerome had him read it in class and even laughed when he wrote about “retrieving the lost item.”   That was shocking because I’m pretty sure that no one had ever seen her smile before.   So why would one student embrace that assignment, and one avoid it?  Clearly it had to do with factors beyond the writing.   Alex (now my husband of twenty years) was outgoing and friendly.  He had gone to the school since first grade, lived in the neighborhood, and was completely comfortable in his environment.   I had transferred from public school, lived in a fairly distant neighborhood, and was never quite comfortable in any environment.   The underlying emotional aspects of writing became crystal clear to me as I thought about the dynamics of personality, temperament, and circumstances involved in our distinctive responses to this prompt.    Although this was supposed to be a “creative” writing assignment, it did not inspire creativity in me.  In fact, I was as uncreative in my response as possible because I was so uncomfortable with the topic.  I simply gave the teacher what I thought she wanted and moved on, quickly.   Actually, figuring out what the teacher wanted became my primary goal in completing writing assignments and it worked pretty well for me.  So while I’m still not quite clear about what Writing as Saying, Doing, and Being means, perhaps it has something to do with the reasons two writers in the same class might approach the same assignment so differently, and figuring out what the writer wants to say as opposed to what the teacher wants to hear.