English 521: Composition Theory and Pedagogy

     As a kid who spent most of her time playing basketball or catching turtles in the pond, my first realization that I had somewhat of a penchant for literature came in the seventh grade. Of my own free will, I read Margaret Mitchell's Gone with the Wind. It took me a month of reading, every night after school, and it seemed at the time like a major accomplishment. With that single effort, I felt the seeds of academia spring forth. From my perspective, Mitchell's novel was capital "L" literature. After all, it was really long. And there were words I had to look up in the dictionary. And parts were in dialect.

     I thought little of Literature for quite some time after Gone with the Wind, though I didn't stop reading. On the contrary, I continued to read quite extensively on my own time, but I didn't think of the books I read, even the long ones, as literature—perhaps because they made sense without a mental struggle. Of course I did read various books, poems, and plays in class that were important, like Shakespeare and The Awakening and Jane Eyre. And I remember something about my interpretations of "Mutability" being completely wrong for reasons I still can't quite understand—something about chimes and time representing something or other, which made no sense to me. I became somewhat disinterested with literature after a while, not because I didn't like it, but because I felt no sense of ownership. I never got it right. Not to mention that only certain authors and books, poems, et cetera, were worth reading, and I had no idea of who or what those were or how they got to be that way.

     One incident in particular stands out as shaping my approach to literature and teaching. I remember, with great clarity, getting in a dispute with my eleventh grade English teacher Mrs. Jennings over the movie Deliverance. I had previously seen part of the movie late one evening on cable television and been so terrified I turned it off, so when it came up in class discussion randomly and for no apparent reason (though I found out later that Mrs. Jennings husband taught the book in the local community college), I said that I didn't think kids should watch the movie. Let me emphasize that I said "kids"—not adults, not the elderly, not dogs, but "kids." And at that time, "kids" to me meant, since I was all of sixteen, fifteenish and younger. I also remember that we were in the library that day, and Mrs. Jennings took me aside and expressed her disappointment. She said, "Allison, I'm very disappointed in you. Of all the people in this class, I didn't expect you to try to tell people how they should think." Since I typically received mostly positive reinforcement from my teachers throughout my high school career, I was devastated. Not to mention that my witty comeback of "But isn't that what you're doing?" fell on deaf ears . . . mainly because I thought of it later that night while brooding over the experience at home. The impression was, never the less, deeply ingrained.

     Surprisingly, as poorly as I thought I had done in English during high school (at least in comparison to my 100 averages in the sciences), I scored high enough on the A.P. exam to place out of freshman English in college. I instead took an honors English class with Grace Bauer in which we read, among other things, Charlotte Perkins Gilman's The Yellow Wallpaper and Ntozake Shange's For Colored Girls Who Have Thought of Suicide/ When the Rainbow Is Enough. I didn't necessarily wholly understand every poem or short story we read, but our instructor explained that our interpretations and explanations could be varied and depended on context. Moreover, the formulaic bounds of high school English dissolved to include more experimental and controversial styles. It was actually exciting to go to English. Of course, it didn't hurt that I could also identify with the social and historical relevance of Joyce Carol Oats "Where Are You Going, Where Have You Been" more readily than with something like "The Nun's Priest's Tale." And yet, identification with the more recent texts bolstered my rather minimal confidence in literature, which in turn encouraged exploration into the earlier works I had previously thought were useless for someone who couldn't understand Wordsworth. I even began to read a little poetry here and there, and the next year I was bold enough to take a creative writing class with Nikki Giovanni.

     It wasn't until I ran into Mrs. Jennings again that I found out who Nikki Giovanni was. During a brief visit to my high school after a classmate died, Mrs. Jennings, who was taking money for the evening's basketball game, stopped me to ask about the tragedy. She also asked about school and I told her that I was a business major, to which she replied, "What happened to science?" The inference that I could do nothing outside of science bothered me. When I told her that I was taking Giovanni's class, she got more enthusiastic than I had ever seen her and exclaimed, "you mean you actually get to take classes with her?" I didn't see what the big deal was. Prompted by Mrs. Jennings' shock, I looked up Nikki Giovanni in the library when I returned to the university, and I found out that she was, and is, a poet. No, not just a poet, but a POET—and a rather renowned one at that, who had been influential during the civil rights movement and has continued to produce book after book of poetry. In class we discussed ways to write and did some interpreting of poems and stories, but for the most part, Nikki seemed extremely laid back and willing to discuss any way of viewing literature. She could also talk about any subject, for any length of time, and have it sound like there was significance behind every word she said. And she wasn't even a dead, European, white, male. Later in the semester someone asked her to explain one of her poems. She told us that it wasn't necessarily important what it meant to her as the author, because when we read a poem it became, in a sense, ours.

     Even though I had declared my major as business by my sophomore year (but that's an entirely different story), I realized that I performed better in all my classes when enrolled in at least one English class. My British Lit instructor, Anne Shaffran, told me I should be an English major, but I dismissed the idea without too much deliberation. I really liked English, but it seemed impractical (the only career choice seemed to be as a teacher, and though my English teachers in college had been mostly wonderful, my experiences in high school made me more than a little apprehensive). Still, I took a literature class whenever I had a free elective. My American Lit teacher, Mrs. Smith, was instrumental in facilitating my affection for southern literature. We read various stories by Flannery O'Connor, Raymond Carver, Anne Tyler, and William Faulkner. Moreover, she provided not only an openness to her students' ideas, she helped us to understand how interpretation could vary and still have very real parameters. In other words, there are, indeed, wrong interpretations. For instance, "Good Country People" has nothing to do with the Red Scare.

     The summer before my senior year I studied abroad to England and Scotland, and subsequently more than fulfilled the requirements for an English minor. I finished my business degree the following year and went to work in Guatemala in small business development. I knew before I left the country that I would return to get my master's in English, and when my normal enthusiasm for traveling was cut short by thoughts of study literature, and yes, even teaching, I knew I was ready. I would not be a Mrs. Jennings.

     With only a few credits keeping me from a full major in English, I returned to college (after a few months of substitute teaching in high school) with renewed engagement. I again took a course with Anne Shaffran that proved to be paramount to my conception of literary theory and interpretation. The course focused on women writers and included Margaret Atwood's The Robber Bride, Toni Morrison's Beloved, Alice Walker's The Temple of My Familiar, Laura Esquivel's Like Water for Chocolate, and various selections from the Norton Anthology of Literature by Women. I had read Esquivel's novel once before and enjoyed it, but the second time around, using a more critical eye, my opinion changed dramatically. I read Beloved twice before the course was over, and between the post-it notes in The Robber Bride and the underlining in "In Search of Our Mother's Gardens," I realized my analytic and approach to reading and preparing for papers resembled the intensity I had in the sciences and emphasized my political mindedness.

     However, as comfortable as I was becoming with the field of literature and somehow felt a part of it (whatever it was), I was anxious when I found out my last course was on Paradise Lost. Poetry, years after "Mutabilitiy," still intimidated me, and the widespread and fatalistic undergraduate rumors concerning Milton were even worse. To my surprise, it didn't kill me. In fact, I not only thoroughly enjoyed the book, I enjoyed the rigorous classroom discussions, never feeling my comments were overly simplistic or ineffectual. I attribute the agreeable atmosphere to the particular group of students, but mainly to professor Esther Richey. She was not what I would consider an imposing figure, and every now and then I would even forget she was directing the conversation—though I now realize she did so subtly and masterfully. (I've found that when I'm teaching, the most difficult part for me is keeping my mouth shut and offering astute guidance. )

     Which brings me to my masters degree and beginning as an instructor. As an inchoate graduate student I accepted a TA position during my course work. And even though freshman composition wasn't Literature or theory, it was a good place to start. Once I got my MA, or possibly a Ph.D., I would teach southern literature, African-American literature, or feminist theory. Yet looking back, I have to admit it. I was supremely naive. The knowledge I had gleaned in college didn't prepared me for teaching freshman comp. Or so it seemed at first. During our composition theory class halfway through the first semester, the question was raised: "Are you teaching your students how to think or how to write?" My answer was an unequivocal "how to think." We were reading texts and interpreting, discussing, debating, and arguing for a position. My reasoning was that if my students could think analytically, and sufficiently substantiate their assertions, their writing would simultaneously improve. And I was reading and learning so much that I felt enthusiastic regarding my own intellect, which I thought surely would make me a better teacher. But after my students turned in the second paper of the semester, I started second-guessing my intentions.

     One day solidified my fears. We were going over a Flannery O'Connor story, and a couple of the students put forth an interpretation that I didn't follow, nor did I rush to accept it. Instead I challenged them to show me where in the text they were getting their interpretation. We went back and forth a few times before class was over, and I was certain they just weren't reading closely enough. When my next class made a corresponding claim, I realized that I had simply overlooked the interpretation in my arrogance. Their failure to show the evidence I requested was probably partly due to an intimidation factor. In other words, they thought I was looking for a specific answer. And in a way, I guess I was. I wasn't necessarily teaching them how to think, I was telling them what to think. The lecture Mrs. Jennings had given me all those years ago had its repercussions. I thought I was a good teacher because I not only was enthusiastic, I really wanted to be a good teacher. But at that point I decided I needed to work more diligently. Mrs. Jennings had probably not realized the scope of her instruction either. But more ironically, after rebelling against her, I have to say that she really has had a positive impact on my teaching, even if she didn't foster it in a way to which I responded agreeably.

     As part of my new more self-reflective method, I started watching my teachers' approaches to teaching more intensely and realized that I owed so much to those teachers who had helped create both the positive and negative experiences in English. Moreover, I have decided to focus primarily on composition theory. Whereas I continued to engage intensely with my theory and literature classes, more than anything I want to teach writing. In the classes I taught, once I shifted my focus to teaching writing—in coordination with a typical learning curve of going from novice to not entirely an amateur as a teacher—there seemed to be a greater improvement in my students' writing. Additionally, the students were more responsive and energetic, and I felt much stronger about the class as a whole. Class was less argumentative and more fun. More knowledgeable now than when I started, but with a long way to go, I have devoted myself to continually reassessing my methodologies and approaches to teaching students to write and enjoy English in its varying textualities.

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