// EVOLUTION OF A THEORY
I have always composed. One of my earliest childhood memories involves an illustrated story written in an atmosphere of feverish excitement after my first viewing of Milo and Otis. I was so inspired by this movie. I was like Wordsworth at Tintern Abbey. Okay, maybe I was more like Ralphie in A Christmas Story: overtaken by cheap art. Anyway, I remember large pages, probably construction paper, and some sort of binding or folding method that made it exquisitely book-like. To my 6-year-old self, this textual product was staggeringly beautiful. This work of Literature (one of my few creative pieces--I was always destined to be a critic) was lost long ago, probably during the move to our second house. However, I think of this lost book often. I would pay a good amount of money to see this thing again, to read my story, in order to better understand my origins as a writer. There have been other pieces since this lost tale of Milo. Countless diary entries, a second creative piece (science-fiction), aborted within the hour of its conception, and of course, school writing. My return to the halls of high school as a secondary teacher throws my own experience as a high school student into high relief, and I remember all too well the types of writing I did in school, and how lost I was and how pointless some of it seemed to be.
My entry into high school meant an entrance into "academic" writing, a type of writing that I never truly understood. The first recognizable "research paper" I did was in my senior AP English class. Ms. Simons. She gave us a long list of books and we were allowed to pick one and write a research paper on both the work and the author. Now, at this point, I had no idea how to analyze literature, why one would want to do such a thing, or what the purpose of such a paper was. To Ms. Simons' credit, perhaps she devoted an entire class to creating such exigency, but if she did, I wasn't listening (this was also the year text messages arrived on the scene). At any rate, I proceeded to attempt this task anyway, as my mother could be quite frightening if my grades slipped. I remember the class being ushered into the library, where the librarian gave a presentation about using databases to find credible sources. Oh, and by the way, I randomly picked Rabbit, Run by John Updike for my research paper topic. Piece of cake, right? Anyway, about five minutes into the presentation I was completely lost. I might have been able to do some sort of guerrilla research, if it weren't for the fact that all of our citations HAD to be on note cards. This process seemed so arbitrary and overly-wrought that any ideas I had about doing research were immediately negated by the idea of note-cards. But we HAD to do it that way. I imploded. Fast forward to the night before the due date, I pulled my first all-nighter. I made a pot of coffee (also a first), and proceeded to write ten pages of absolute incoherent, circular nonsense. I did go outside at 3 a.m. to watch a meteor shower. I don't remember my grade. "Failure can be an important part of writing development" (NWWK 62). In this case, I learned first hand how a lack of purpose and exigency can disrupt learning in even fairly bookish kids. I also learned that I can write quite a bit without saying much of anything.
This experience was such a disaster because I never knew why I was doing anything. I had no purpose, no motivation, and no exigency. Thus, no learning occurred. I just tried to produce something that resembled a paper, something papery. I was just filling space. It felt awful. Now that I am in the role of Ms. Simons, I deeply understand the need for students to have rationale for each and every assignment, one that goes beyond "Its on the STAAR test!".
Fast forward to my freshman composition course. Almost no memory. I wrote things. Did minimal, if any, research. I got an A.
Sophomore year. Declared English as a major yet no idea what that meant or what I wanted to do. Survey course in English. 300 students. All lecture. Spotty attendance. Somehow got a C. (For more on the alienation underclassmen feel in their first and second years on campus, and how this impacts retention, look here and here. Writing Across Contexts also focuses on the crucial first year in terms of FYC.)
Junior year. Struggling academically. Disinterested in school. Distracted. Reading too much Kerouac. Decide to BE Kerouac. Withdraw from UT.
Return. Fail again. Shame. Drugs. Anything to forget.
A year goes by.
I meet Trevor Holmes.
Re-enroll at UT. Refocus. Make some goals. Learning starts to happen.
I make some serious progress in my writing. My senior year I enroll in a WI course, a senior seminar, with a very talented, young assistant professor, fresh from Stanford. She foregrounded the writing process, encouraged us to read in a way that was meaningful to us, and stressed the connection between our writing and our discipline (See NWWK "Writing is a way of enacting disciplinarity). Each writing assignment built on the previous one, offering structure yet also encouraging open expression and unique analyses. Yet more than anything she did in class, I benefited most from her focused, thoughtful, and constructive notes she would leave on my papers. I will always remember how she addressed her emails to us: "Dear Ecocritics." It was in this course that my sense of writing as a social activity (NWWK 17) in which I could play an active role first started to form.
Since then, I've realized my calling in academia, a calling that was really there all along but that I ignored. If you want to know how my theory of writing changed after this course, go here.
And by the way, I still love Kerouac.
My entry into high school meant an entrance into "academic" writing, a type of writing that I never truly understood. The first recognizable "research paper" I did was in my senior AP English class. Ms. Simons. She gave us a long list of books and we were allowed to pick one and write a research paper on both the work and the author. Now, at this point, I had no idea how to analyze literature, why one would want to do such a thing, or what the purpose of such a paper was. To Ms. Simons' credit, perhaps she devoted an entire class to creating such exigency, but if she did, I wasn't listening (this was also the year text messages arrived on the scene). At any rate, I proceeded to attempt this task anyway, as my mother could be quite frightening if my grades slipped. I remember the class being ushered into the library, where the librarian gave a presentation about using databases to find credible sources. Oh, and by the way, I randomly picked Rabbit, Run by John Updike for my research paper topic. Piece of cake, right? Anyway, about five minutes into the presentation I was completely lost. I might have been able to do some sort of guerrilla research, if it weren't for the fact that all of our citations HAD to be on note cards. This process seemed so arbitrary and overly-wrought that any ideas I had about doing research were immediately negated by the idea of note-cards. But we HAD to do it that way. I imploded. Fast forward to the night before the due date, I pulled my first all-nighter. I made a pot of coffee (also a first), and proceeded to write ten pages of absolute incoherent, circular nonsense. I did go outside at 3 a.m. to watch a meteor shower. I don't remember my grade. "Failure can be an important part of writing development" (NWWK 62). In this case, I learned first hand how a lack of purpose and exigency can disrupt learning in even fairly bookish kids. I also learned that I can write quite a bit without saying much of anything.
This experience was such a disaster because I never knew why I was doing anything. I had no purpose, no motivation, and no exigency. Thus, no learning occurred. I just tried to produce something that resembled a paper, something papery. I was just filling space. It felt awful. Now that I am in the role of Ms. Simons, I deeply understand the need for students to have rationale for each and every assignment, one that goes beyond "Its on the STAAR test!".
Fast forward to my freshman composition course. Almost no memory. I wrote things. Did minimal, if any, research. I got an A.
Sophomore year. Declared English as a major yet no idea what that meant or what I wanted to do. Survey course in English. 300 students. All lecture. Spotty attendance. Somehow got a C. (For more on the alienation underclassmen feel in their first and second years on campus, and how this impacts retention, look here and here. Writing Across Contexts also focuses on the crucial first year in terms of FYC.)
Junior year. Struggling academically. Disinterested in school. Distracted. Reading too much Kerouac. Decide to BE Kerouac. Withdraw from UT.
Return. Fail again. Shame. Drugs. Anything to forget.
A year goes by.
I meet Trevor Holmes.
Re-enroll at UT. Refocus. Make some goals. Learning starts to happen.
I make some serious progress in my writing. My senior year I enroll in a WI course, a senior seminar, with a very talented, young assistant professor, fresh from Stanford. She foregrounded the writing process, encouraged us to read in a way that was meaningful to us, and stressed the connection between our writing and our discipline (See NWWK "Writing is a way of enacting disciplinarity). Each writing assignment built on the previous one, offering structure yet also encouraging open expression and unique analyses. Yet more than anything she did in class, I benefited most from her focused, thoughtful, and constructive notes she would leave on my papers. I will always remember how she addressed her emails to us: "Dear Ecocritics." It was in this course that my sense of writing as a social activity (NWWK 17) in which I could play an active role first started to form.
Since then, I've realized my calling in academia, a calling that was really there all along but that I ignored. If you want to know how my theory of writing changed after this course, go here.
And by the way, I still love Kerouac.
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