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THE SECRET OF TEACHING ENGLISH COMPOSITION

Although I have taught English composition and remedial writing courses for more than fifteen years, the
task still remains challenging. During that period, I have regularly redefined my relationship with students
in an attempt to pay allegiance to two apparently contradictory demands: (1) the requirement to maintain
high academic standards to insure that students learn to write competently and (2) the human need to
maintain positive person-to-person bonds with students to keep them involved with the class. The task is
not easy, nor have I always been successful in performing it; but I think I am finally getting the hang of it. |
am sharing this experience because I think it is an important issue for college professors who have a
profound love for their academic discipline and the teaching profession, as well as a persistent concern about
their performance in the classroom.

I have learned and continue to learn that to be an effective writing teacher I must consciously integrate
three roles that are always in tension: evaluator, teacher, and friend.

The emphasis at my community college is on specifying learning outcomes, writing clearly understood
course goals and objectives, and thoroughly evaluating student performance. The feeling is that students
need to know what the English staff expects of them; the assumption is that once students know what is
expected of them, their maturity and motivation will drive them to do the necessary classroom work. If
students lack motivation, and fail, the responsibility rests completely on their shoulders.

I remember one English staff meeting where we compared and contrasted our evaluation guides. The
critical issue was whether professors should specify paragraph length in the body of the essay or be vague.
| wanted to be very, very specific about the length of development in the body of the essay because when I
corrected papers I did look, in fact, for certain characteristics before assigning a grade. I felt comfortable
with my evaluation guide because it seemed so logical and orderly. Well-organized students also
appreciated and used the evaluation guide intelligently.

Unfortunately, some of my students found the evaluation guide intimidating and were a bit overwhelmed
by the sight of their returned essays and the attached evaluation sheet. My student evaluations hinted that |
was being perceived as the archetypal (and hated) English teacher who cared more about comma splices and
run-on sentences than students’ feelings. That made me feel uncomfortable. Although I knew as a result of
the basic skills tests (required of all New Jersey students) that the students coming into my English 101 had
poor reading skills, abysmal writing skills, inconsistent study habits, and very unclear plans for their futures,
I did not take these academic and psychological realities fully into account. Intellectual knowledge had not
become emotional awareness.

While the majority of students complimented me (when completing their anonymous student evaluations)
about my organization, teaching style, etc., there were persistent complaints from some students—especially
when the questions on the student evaluation forms were whether "I would enjoy taking another course
from this teacher," or "A partnership in learning existed in this class."

At first, I reacted defensively about these student comments. I did research on the validity of student
evaluations and discovered that they are not valid because of their sensitivity to lenient grading practices and
a host of other factors, wrote a long-winded memo to the vice president of the college about the injustice of
being denied promotion on the basis of less-than-excellent student evaluations, and then focused on why
student perceptions of me were the way they were. I accepted the fact that teaching is like politics:
perception is reality.

What helped me in this undertaking was understanding the marvelous humanity of the teaching-learning
process by listening carefully to my children’s day-to-day reactions to their own teachers in elementary and
middle school. The teachers that my kids related to best were the ones whose humanity was on display.
My twelve-year-old daughter felt comfortable with her language arts teacher because they talked about
clothing fashions in class, and my ten-year-old son liked math because his teacher doubled as an intramurals
coach. I asked myself, "Are my students so much different than my own children?" and concluded that on

 

Tan
Kop Community College Leadership Program, The University of Texas at Austin, EDB 348, Austin, Texas 78712