Author's Note: My copy of Uptaught arrived this afternoon, just in
time to coincide with the worst of my current head cold. At the time I am
writing this, I am only on page 55. Provided the Black Plague lifts its grasp
on our house, I will be finished with the reading and in class tomorrow. If
not, it is because I have no desire to be a living contagion for the rest of
you.
On to business, I suppose what comes most
readily to mind as I begin this book is the last of my Honors College classes
at this fine University. The class is called Honors Read and the objective is
for my class to decide on one (or two) new texts for the next year's freshman
seminar. While this in undoubtedly among the most noble of calling's for MSU
students, my classmates (and by extensions, I suppose, myself) are more than a
little pretentious and plenty self-involved. We took this class because we, like
Macrorie, knew something was missing from our Texts and Critics curriculum and
by God we knew how to fix it.
The first week of classes has been filled
with unlearning our own preconceptions of what makes books worthwhile and good
and what things we desire in our literature. Like Macrorie and his students, we
need to let literature happen to us, at least for a little while, rather than
telling our books and our classmates what is best. I anticipate this will be
tricky because it requires a combination of certainty that our book (or film,
article, or paper) is a great fit for the class, and the open-ended faith that
Macrorie learned to teach his students, the willingness to welcome discomfort
and alien presence into our lives and allow it to change us.
I am better by far at certainty than I am
at flexibility, which is why Macrorie's writing gave me pause.
What he encourages his later students to do to find their voices
is to relax themselves and let the writing happen to them. The idea that not
only does everyone have a story, they have the capacity to share it is sadly as
alien to me as it was to the teaching student who told him that writing could
not be taught. Like Macrorie’s students, I have grown up believing that a bad
writer could become passable, maybe even tolerable in a field he enjoyed, but
never good.
What Macrorie’s Third Way achieves is a system for encouraging
storytelling as an extension of feeling rather than a method of composition.
The difference being, as visible in his approach, that his students are all
storytellers in one way or another, but few of them believe in their ability to
be compsers.
Compositions are great art. Beethoven was a composer. Shakespeare
was a composer. Joe Shmo might amount to a hack if her works for it.
But we tell stories all the time. Fairy tales for children who won’t
fall asleep. White lies to our parents or teachers. Fishing, hunting, drinking,
partying, living stories.
For me, the power of Macrorie’s message is that we should not
harness people skills of memorization and composition, but give them a chance
to set their stories down and unravel them, to find out what makes them good
and enjoyable.
To end, I will leave you with this. As a freshman in college, I
was appalled when, in my first class with a teacher (let’s call her Professor
A), I received my first essay and it was bleeding red. I was a champion essay
writer. It was my thing. I did not fail essays. Frantic, I flipped to the back,
where the rubric was, and found a cheerful (for all the blood colored ink) 92%
with lavish praises for things I had done well. That was the first time I had
ever really received constructive criticism on a paper. High school teachers, I
have come to assume, can’t labor over “sufficient” papers to make them excellent,
so they gave me my “A” and sent me onto the next level. Professor A took every
opportunity to make me a better writer and I appreciate that “good” writing was
never enough for her. She, and later professors, subscribed to Macromie’s
disdain for dead sentences and pushed me beyond her own rubrics and onto better
papers.
Author’s Note, the Second: Here, I end my now bizarre rambling’s,
because my Nyquil is making the screen do funny things.
After going through my own Honors Read experience last spring, I came away with a new sense of what a classroom can be for students. The course serves as an excellent case study in the Third Way Macrorie describes. What happens when you let a room full of students decide what they are going to read? What will happen when they are left to determine the criteria for evaluating creative works with almost no guidance from the professor? How can a group of largely pretentious students pit some of their favorite literary works against each other without creating copious amounts of conflict? I think one of the values of a Third Way approach is that it lets students discover the answers to such questions through experience.
ReplyDeleteI also do not think that the value of such experiences ends in the classroom. Most college students will eventually end of collaborating with others professionally on a relatively regular basis, and questions similar to those listed above will emerge as each person seeks to contribute and be valuable to his or her employer. I think many of us have already been in such situations regularly. By mirroring professional environments, I think Third Way classrooms offer a way for students to feel like their work has a significant impact on those around them. It is vital for students to feel this way in classrooms if they are to produce work that is alive and showcases both professionalism and authenticity.
I had a similar experience based read of Macrorie. I like your translation of writing happening to students, rather than them making writing happen for educational purpose alone. I agree with a lot of what Macrorie has to say in this regard, but I cannot say this experiential way of writing is the only way of writing. Composition can be artful, but it can also be of a basic means to communicate. One might argue communication is an understated form of art, but let's not get too carried away. A memo from boss to employee is not art. It's an order and is appreciated as such. I think Macrorie sets up the creative writer for great success. The professional writer? Not so much.
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