Failure and Good Writing
I took a considerable chunk of class time today to listen to my students reflect on their first Learning Record assignment, a self-assessment in which I ask them to give themselves grades in each of our course goals, including failure! I learned some things that surprised me: for one, almost all (but not all) of my students believe they know when they produce good writing. What they were less sure of is whether it would meet a teacher's expectations. Lodged in that uncertainty is a fear that also haunts teachers: are there objective metrics we can use to measure the quality of writing, or is it all subjective--just a matter of pleasing one's audience, even imitating their ideas of themselves, especially in the case of teachers? Posing the question that way makes me think of Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance, in which a writing teacher withholds his students grades for the entire semester in an effort to focus them on their work and not their reward (sound familiar?). He also loses his mind trying to get beyond the subject/object dichotomy, which keeps getting in his way as he pursues that elusive thing he calls Quality.
I often think of the Learning Record as a grading system that helps my students internalize high standards for good work, but today was the third day of class, and most of my students already feel they know these standards well. How does this change my goals for the semester? Maybe it will help me encourage my students to experiment and take more risks in their writing, perhaps expanding their repertoire, and coming to think of pleasing a teacher as one possible rhetorical purpose among many. I want my students to leave my class feeling responsible for their own educations; I also want them to feel confident and experienced at meeting challenges with writing. My best ambition is to share with students what Lynn Worsham calls "an unteachable relation to language"--and to take risks myself in discovering what sharing such a relation in the classroom can mean.