I somewhat agree with the Framework for Success in Post-Secondary Writing. It makes great points about teaching writing concepts in various ways and contexts, and I agreed with pretty much all of the writing, reading, and critical analysis experiences section. I also cannot overstate how happy I was to read “Standardized writing curricula or assessment instruments that emphasize formulaic writing for nonauthentic audiences will not reinforce the habits of mind and the experiences necessary for success as students encounter the writing demands of postsecondary education.” Oh my god I wish I could go back in time, print that section out a hundred times, and just wallpaper my AP Literature teacher’s room with it. It’s so unbelievably satisfying to see that in an article approved by hundreds of educators.
The part of the framework that I don’t fully agree with is the Habits of Mind. These are described as traits that are absolutely essential to being a successful writer in college. Most of them I agree with, and a couple I can understand, but a few seem simply out of place to me. Those that confuse me are Curiosity, Engagement, and Persistence. Curiosity is defined in the framework as a desire to know more about the world. Engagement is defined as a sense of investment and involvement in learning. Persistence is defined as the ability to sustain interest in and attention to short- and long-term projects.
These confuse me because, frankly, they are not essential. Something like Flexibility is absolutely essential to college writing and college in general, because if you try to last in college at all without the ability to flexibly adapt your time, your limits, and the standards you hold yourself to, you will not make it. Metacognition is absolutely essential to college writing and college in general because without it you are kneecapping your ability to grow and reflect and learn from your past experiences and the past experiences of those around you.
But I have absolutely written a ten page paper on something I was not curious about, was not engaged with, and had to physically force myself to make sporadically over the course of two weeks, and I still got a B. Heck, I haven’t been able to sustain interest in and invested thought about what I’m typing right now. There was a half hour break between nearly every sentence of this paragraph up to this point. I am wildly easy to distract and people keep texting me about things.
It’s well within the realm of possibility to be a variably above average student and write papers and research you do not give one single solitary shit about. Is it way harder without those three things? Absolutely. No doubt. But are they essential to success in college and college writing, even to genuine writing? No. Are they the dream of what educators would love to see in their students? Probably?
I have to address that I am biased about this though. I am not, uh, neurotypical, and I have never held a particular fondness for the institution of education because of the rigid cookie-cutter mold it expects you to be able to fit. The most important thing that I ever learned from all levels of schooling, including college so far, was not any of the rote memorization; the most important thing I learned was how to let go of the rigid methods expected of me and to find a way to succeed either despite or in spite of those expectations. I could never be the enthusiastic teacher’s pet who did everything the exact correct way and knew all the answers and could write without mixing up my words and letters and didn’t mix up my times tables and who never accidentally went on a mental tangent about how the fuck bird feathers were angled and layered to produce lift and totally missed like thirty minutes of class. As curious of a person as I could be, I was not curious about what my dense, dry, small-type textbooks had in them. As eager as I could be, I was not engaged with a classroom process that was the bane of my already nonexistent ability to sit still and focus. As dogged and determined as I could be, I was never able to persistently long-term attend to literally anything in my life, because that’s just not how my brain works. I couldn’t achieve those traits in a traditional classroom context. But I made it anyways. I think that a good, supportive classroom will encourage those things in students, but even then I think you can be a perfectly good student who adds to the conversation and does good work while still missing one or more of those three traits in your writing.
From both my past experiences and the experience of reading the Framework and writing this response, I would construct a hierarchy of the eight Habits of Mind like this:
Both in this class and in life generally, Flexibility, Openness and Creativity are what I value most. Creating new work that adds unique value to a classroom or essay requires those traits, and attempts at synthesizing various sources of information into a research project suffer irreparably without them. Metacognition and Responsibility are required to build on previous work, mistakes, and understandings and reach new and more interesting conclusions. The intro posts in this class, and many of the subsequent homework assignments, have required all of these previously mentioned traits in building a personal understanding of writing, and even in working out a topic to research to begin with. While all of these things could certainly be enriched in some aspects by the last three traits, they don’t have to be there.
As a final aside from this huge bout of rambling, I thought it was interesting that in the “Audience for the Framework” section, it is explicitly for teachers and educators (duh) but also says that parents, policymakers, employers, and the general public could find the information useful. To me, the interesting thing about that is that it doesn’t say “students” anywhere in there. Sure that could be part of “general public” but if you’re going to the effort to mention parents and even policymakers but not students it starts to feel somewhat intentional. Considering this is about methods that can help students learn, the omission of students as an audience is vaguely odd to me.
