Hot Topic: Owning the Text
As readers, it’s easy for us to neglect ownership of
texts–especially difficult ones. Throughout The
Literature Workshop, Blau points to examples of literature students
assuming that their teacher will parse and analyze the text for them, and then
most importantly, present the correct interpretation of difficult scenes and
passages. According to Blau, the writing assignment is a vital and effective antidote
to this pedagogical problem, and it is effective for both students in the
classroom and teachers preparing to present a text.
Before discussing the merits of writing assignments, I
want to note two comment of Blau’s regarding the problem with writing
assignments:
Most
commonly, however, we get papers that are so vague and imprecise in our
language, so incoherent or illogical in their arguments, so misguided in their
thinking that we feel misplaced in our teaching assignment, or suspect that the
students were misplaced in our class or that we need to lower our expectations
of what our students can and should do.
…It
is pedagogically wise, I believe (even if sometimes unrealistically generous to
our students), for us to assume that we generally get the papers we deserve
(153).
I agree that Blau’s assumption about student writing is
both unrealistically generous but also pedagogically wise, and I deeply
appreciate his impulse as an educator. Personally speaking, I am a student who
has always loved to write, but I have also written some truly terrible papers.
If Blau were my teacher and he were assessing my body of written work, he would
find some badly written papers that were no fault of his, and rather were the
result of procrastination or laziness. But he would also find some papers that
were bad because I was confused, either about the assignment or about the text
overall. Or, I was confused about the purpose of writing a paper–in some
classes, particularly high school, students can believe that the point of a
paper is to parrot back what the teacher has been saying. Teachers that do
nothing to correct this belief (and those who enforce it, even) will probably
receive some papers that lack engagement. And it comes back to Blau’s assertion
about firsthand knowledge, and the need for students to create their own
understanding through writing.
When I think back to some of my most meaningful
educational moments, I realize that a good number of them happened in front of
a computer screen, alone in the library at 1 a.m., writing term papers. I can
still remember the feeling of actual elation as I wrote a term paper about Tom
Stoppard’s The Invention of Love, and
realized, to my knowledge, I was saying something new about the text–something
I hadn’t read in any of the critical essays about Stoppard or any of the book’s
appendices. It seemed elementary–and at the same time, so exhilarating. I still
remember the text well to this day–and the experience of reading it was
completely transformed for me. Writing about it–while a challenge at
first–allowed me to get there, and I’ve always remembered that feeling of
ownership of the text. Of course, educators can scarcely required lonely nights
in the library for every text, and for some students, it will be years before
they write a term paper. But I wholeheartedly agree with Blau’s message–that
writing not just encapsulates but creates knowledge, and however that can be
accomplished, with even the shortest of writing assignments, is fruitful for
students.
—Gemma
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