For three years I’ve been tutoring students who are just starting their college writing journies in English 197, English 101M, and English 102 as a Learning Assistant. I sit in on their classroom sessions, I host out-of-class study sessions, and I take all the questions that students who are brand new to college writing are too afraid to take to the teacher for fear of letting their educator know what it is they have yet to learn. As a supervisor of both brand new and experienced LAs for other subjects, I often hear them offer their students reassurances like “Yeah, I struggled with that when I was in this class, too” and “I still don’t fully understand how to solve that problem, but we can work through it together”. I have never once said anything even remotely resembling these admissions to a single student of mine.
Obviously there was a point when I had a less than exemplary command over the English language, as my own personal Mrs. O’Neills have so readily pointed out, but I never once saw the value in letting my students know this. I never felt that they cared. In my experience at this position I have come to see the value in those humble reassurances because they let your students view you as a peer instead of an authority figure, but still, my tutoring style has not completely evolved to adapt this philosophy. One of my coworkers, an LA and Mentor for Microbiology, often admits to me, “I hate it when they ask me something and I don’t know the answer off the top of my head. They love it.” I feel her. English and Microbiology truly can’t be that different.
There is a degree of importance to writing badly. I can’t pretend there isn’t. But to me, that importance has always come through the process of correcting that bad writing. I’ve seen how anxious my older siblings get when they sit down with me and ask for revisions on the papers they need to put together for graduate school. I make jokes about their comma splices and vague pronouns. I hand them their papers and ask them to read aloud their awkward sentences, following up with smartass questions like, “Is that something you would ever actually say?” When my siblings write badly, they don’t get discouraged by my merciless quips (miraculously). They get a chance to see their ideas take a more cohesive shape when they listen to my feedback and take my advice, which is something they rarely do in other situations. And I get to make fun of them. It’s a grand time, but I promise, I don’t ever actually handle my students this way.
I know that those with less confidence in their writing skills need encouragement. I know how special it is when a student, especially those who are just getting accquianted with the English language and college-level writing, read over a simple 1-page freewrite, blind to all its sentence-level errors, and see the first inklings of a full-length research paper. I’ve never been anything short of touched when I see these moments unfold before me. I know that spelling and grammatical corrections can all come later, in the final stages of a draft, where the sense of accomplishment can fully fuel the editing processes, which is oftentimes dull to the fledgling writer.
But that editing process can be approached with the same amount of passion and thoughtfulness as the free and flowing first stages. In fact, I think it should. However accomplished a student feels with their final draft, those ideas will only extend so far if a teacher, elitist or not, can only struggle for so long to access the thoughts hidden behind a style that they find incomprehensible.
Last semester my advanced fiction instructor said to the class, regarding rampant sentence-level errors, “At best, it makes you look incompetent. At worst, it makes you look careless.” Savage, but true. And we could take it. We’d all been through numerous workshops by that point, and we would all bleed for our writing, if that would make it better. We knew how instantaneously even the most innocuous error could yank us right out of a draft. But however true that statement read to us, I wasn’t about to turn around and relay it to my freshmen. Like learning the chords of a guitar, you start with G, and the face-melting solo comes later. You must learn the joy of writing first, and the joy of writing perfectly comes later. However shit that chord is, it’s something, Jukebox Hero.
At this semester’s LA training, a sophomore and first-time Learning Assitant pulled me aside and relayed to me that she had met with the English 102 teacher she would be working with. Worriedly, she said “I was told not to correct their grammar. How am I supposed to teach them how to write if I don’t correct their grammar?” I bit my tongue and gave a partially honest response. You can encourage the flow of ideas, you can demonstrate the writing process, you can share with them readings you find useful or inspiring, but you can’t go against your teachers’ wishes, however strongly you disagree. At least not to their face. Even though you have free reign over your learning sessions, red-penning your students’ papers to a pulp is not in anyone’s best interest. Try and understand where your teacher is coming from, and expand your idea of what it means to ‘teach writing’. I added one last thing at the very end; if a student comes to you, begging for a yes or no on whether or not a compound sentence is structured correctly, please, for the love of god, give them a taste of the confidence that comes with knowing how to write perfectly.
If you know the answer off the top of your head.
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