Theories in Action

When I entered high school I already was pretty well versed in the template of the 5 paragraph essay and I felt it’s constraints. I had a very hard time formatting my essays to exactly match the structure that had been drilled into my head. And then a wonderful teacher enlightened me: The structure isn’t needed. She told me that what mattered was that my words made sense and that I had strong arguments. This totally changed my life. There were still teachers who wanted more structure in their essays, but knowing that I did actually have freedom in my essays opened me up to write much more compelling papers.

In my internship this week I was talking with some of the freshman as they were writing their papers and looking over each others papers, and it was interesting to hear their reactions to have been given almost no criteria for their papers. They had a prompt, but other than that, there was no minimum word or page count, they didn’t know exactly what Kim wanted in the paper. To some this was liberating, they said they were excited to be able to write however they wanted, in a more casual tone, but others were scared by this. These students didn’t like having no template, no structure. I tried to explain to them how it helped me become a better writer when I didn’t have to follow a format, but they were still skeptical, because I’m an English major so of course I’m already just good at writing. I found Mark Wiley’s article about resisting formulaic writing really interesting and it was kind of cool to see these theories happening in front of me as I work with the English 130P students. Actually, the most interesting conversation I had with a few students this week was when they were talking about the structure of the jumbo class and how much they like it. One student was saying how usually she wouldn’t like the large number of students in one class, but she likes the small groups and she likes how the learning happens, through discussion and working as a community. Her words not mine. I told them that there was a reason for all of it and that Kim was a genius (of course) who designed this class in a really specific way. They all seemed genuinely interested in it and it was cool for me to see all the theory we’ve been reading in action and that it was working and really helping the students.