Humor: Life's Great Bandage
We learn a lot of contradictory things as children. You can't talk to strangers, but you can dress in a costume once a year and ask politely for their candy. You can't say bad words, but you can sing the lyrics to horribly offense songs. And, one of the most pervasive, you can't lie, but you can tell someone a white lie to avoid hurting their feelings.
It's a wonder we ever make sense of our world at all. That being said, it is understood that white lies are told, usually to avoid confrontation. Dana Elder's comp tale in Chapter 2 is a terrific example of how although we avoid any and all confrontation like a plague, it is sometimes necessary to enact a positive change. In her example, the student's essay clearly had too many flaws to be considered meaningful writing. If she had followed her current lesson for the class about the compliment sandwich, that student would've suffered academically. This tale notes a few interesting phenomena at play.
First, it challenges the idea that every lesson a teacher attempts to put into action is infallible. Clearly in this example, the theory of the compliment sandwich did not follow through in the practice. Second, it notes that coddling a writer is doing nothing but creating a false sense of skill, which may mean he/she will not continue trying to improve. Elder could've found something to spin into a compliment, but the student's own assertion gave her the confidence to agree that his writing had no real praiseworthy merits and that lying to him would solve nothing. Finally, this experience highlights that sometimes (perhaps more often than not) a student knows where his/her work falls on the spectrum of writing skill. They are merely trying to receive effort credit for work that they know is garbage, but that maybe got them through high school. If Elder had praised this paper, she could've been simply playing into the games of undeserved academic entitlement.
I can relate to this tale in a couple of ways. One, as a tutor in Writing Centers the past three years, I have seen many papers along the spectrum of academic writing. Some were incredibly impressive, others moderately decent, and some horrifyingly broken. I am a firm believer that shame and harsh judgment are the quickest ways to shut down a writer, so I turn to humor. Humor is more useful than the compliment sandwich in that it is often times more sincere. I can ask a student, "Okay, so what are you trying to say here?" and follow it with, "Okay, that's good! But right now it seems generic." Body language plays a huge part in this. It has to say that while I am enthusiastic that they have something worthwhile to say, they have not gotten there yet.
I think Elder is right in saying one of the worst things a teacher can do is lie to a student. College is expensive and time-consuming. We at least owe it to the students to find and hone our personal strategies of creating better writers and thinkers, not just better papers. Because if there's one rule from growing up that wasn't contradictory it is: Do unto others as you would have them do unto you.
-O
Olivia, I liked reading your post… It's always impressive to me when people can begin a paper with an analogy and then return full circle to it to make their point in the conclusion.
ReplyDeleteOne of your comments stood out to me because it's something I've been thinking about lately as a person who is invested in writing center work: you referenced the writing center maxim that the goal should be to improve writers rather than just their writing. The reason I've been thinking about this idea, and also they way in which it's related to your overall post, is that it has a potential to be contradictory. Clearly, in its original context, it was meant to say that consultants need to look at the bigger picture when working with student writing--and that bigger picture is the student writer herself. But sometimes, I think, the way into improving the writer's abilities is very much through a focus on their individual text. In other words, I don't see improving writing/writers in quite such a hierarchical or linear way.