Snippets From NIWP Fellows from My Instructions about "Heat"

1
Wilted weed slumps
next to shimmering mirage

2
seed, far, far away from your home in the heavens.
You are lonely for your creator, separated by
galaxies and light years. You come to earth a spec
of dust and turned into a plant

3
The wicked witch melted
licked by the flames
of water--heat's nemesis

4
Hansel and Gretel
sent the witch away
cooking her

5
Warm milk at night is so much more than
another evening ritual. It is the heat of the
cream warming my lips, my throat, my being.
The heat of emotion--cozy and comforting like
my mother's arms after a thunderstorm

6
Descending lightly from its travels
it kisses my skin almost invisible
now it smacks my face, my chest
hard and strong whipping sweat from my pores.

Workshops! Wow!

In thinking about all the workshops I’ve participated in during this month at NIWP, I’m having a hard time not writing a lengthy letter of praise to each and every one of my colleagues. What an amazing collection of expertise, ideas, and personality I’ve been privileged to witness this month! I’m going to be a bit selfish with this reflection, and think about one thing I want to take from each person I watched present. Thanks to all of you, I will be a better person and presenter :)

Mercedes: an undeniable enthusiasm and belief that you can do it

Gloria: immersion in a subject to create an atmosphere for learning

Jill: a practical, optimistic, and innovative approach to negotiating the realities of testing in regard to student learning

Kelly: a passion for always keeping our activities grounded in and connected to what actually happens in the classroom

Warren: grammar is meaningful when it is infused in all aspects of writing instruction, not its own separate subject

Britt: use what students are already reading and engaged in as a way to springboard them to careful reading and meaningful writing

Tara: publishing doesn’t have to be time consuming in order to matter, and gives students a real rather than hypothetical audience for their writing

Lynne: strong, innovative, and interesting ways to help students be better writers and readers of their own sentences

Timothy: an strong reminder that everything is metaphorical and our students need practice in reading metaphors to be better readers of the world

And from everyone: a strong sense of professionalism, and a reflective and invigorated approach to the art of teaching! Thank you.

10 Things I Now (Think I) Know About Conferencing

1. Don’t hold the paper!!

2. “The one who does the work is the one who learns.” (Lain)

3. Sometimes the most important question I can ask is “How did the writing go?” If we get into this conversation in a specific, detailed way, all kinds of things are possible!

4. Conferences should be directed by the student’s concerns (with the teacher and student holding the goals of the assignment, class, etc. in mind.)

5. Conferences are more productive if students come prepared, and they are more likely to come prepared if I give them time and a structure to prepare (conference memo, revision memo, three key questions about their draft, etc.).

6. Identifying strategies that will help the writer not just the writing is like teaching a man to fish.

7. Sometimes the greatest gift I can give a student is to treat their draft as worthy of attention and revision. And what better way to do that than face to face!

8. There are different kinds of conferences: content, process, design, editing etc. These should be undertaken with purpose.

9. Simply taking notes and giving the student back what they have said about their own writing can be a way to illuminate their writing process and move them forward in revision.

10. Sometimes we (the student and I) can do more in fifteen minutes of conference than we can in a week of class.

Portfolios! Yay!

I have always required students to turn in a portfolio at the end of the course, and I have always weighted the portfolio heavily in determining the course grade. This portfolio model is one that was required of me by a pre-determined curriculum, but through both research and practice I have become a big fan of the portfolio in the composition classroom. As I see it, the portfolio should not be just a collection of all the work the student has done in the quarter. This method of viewing portfolios does not encourage reflection on the part of students nor does it offer them the opportunity to exercise rhetorical choices in the representation of their own writing. In the school setting, portfolios are often for the purpose of assessment. But this assessment need not be made only by the teacher, and this assessment need not be only of product. When I ask my students to assemble a portfolio, I try to make sure the following components are in place:

   · Product—at least one piece of writing in the portfolio should be “publication ready”

·    Process—there should be a variety of kinds of writing (different genres, informal and formal), and writing in different stages of the process included in the portfolio

·    Choice—within teacher determined parameters, students should make choices about what they put in their portfolio. Assembling a portfolio is a rhetorical act; students must make the rhetorical choices demanded by the genre if they are to understand that.

·  Reflection—there should be some element of reflection involved in the portfolio assignment. Indeed, this component might be the most important if the portfolio is to be a learning experience for students. I used to assign a reflective essay addressing the entire quarter. This assignment usually elicited “I once was blind, but now I see” narratives about English 101. Now, I usually assign four or five 300-500 word analysis reflections on “artifacts” from the course that students pick to demonstrate their learning and writing. I prefer this strategy because it produces focused reflection which helps students examine their own writing instead of providing me with a conversion narrative.

This quarter I will be teaching English 100, which requires the students to submit a portfolio to a panel. The panel then decides whether the student is ready to pass into English 101 or not. I’m interested to see how this purpose for building the portfolio influences student investment and choices.

I’m also wondering how to emphasize that the assembling of a portfolio is an opportunity for students to assess themselves. I tell them, but I’m not sure they understand or believe me.

Grades (cue ominous music)

Ah, grades.  I don’t know a single teacher who likes grading or doesn’t find it problematic.  So, what are we to do?  (Other than flee to the sanctuary of institutions such as Evergreen State College?) While many teachers would like to do away with grades altogether, the reality of our situations demand that we find a way to grade that leaves as good a taste in our mouths as possible.  Throughout the course of our discussions about grading, assessment, and rubrics I’ve begun to clarify a few things I currently believe about assessment in a writing classroom:

1. Students should receive only a few grades.  In a university quarter system, perhaps four during the term.  If I don’t want students to focus heavily on grades, I can’t grade every piece of writing they do.
2. A bulk of the course grade should be weighted in a final portfolio.  If I believe that students will learn and improve their writing over a quarter, I should place the greatest value on that improved writing.
3. Giving few grades does not preclude a great deal of feedback over the course of the quarter—from the instructor, from peers, and from the students themselves.  This feedback should be ongoing; it is my goal that students learn how to assess their own writing.
4. Rubrics can be incredibly helpful tools for instructors and students in facilitating learning and fair assessment.  In the past, I have given students rubrics about a week before a final draft was due.  After our discussions at NIWP and reading Heidi Goodrich Andrade’s article “Teaching With Rubrics: The Good, the Bad, and the Ugly,” I plan to revise my practice.  Andrade advocates using rubrics as an instructional tool:  they help clarify goals for the entire class, including the teacher. She (and Rodney) also advocate creating the rubrics in collaboration with students.  Assessment is more meaningful and helpful in learning if students are invested in the assessment.  Also, there is no reason students can’t assess their own writing and their peers’ writing using the same rubrics the teacher will.  If students have practice in applying a rubric, it will be more meaningful and more transparent to them.
5. I should always strive to be as transparent as I possibly can with my students.  My various assessments (including grades) should not be processes and judgments shrouded in mystery, but rather part of a dialogue about their writing (both process and product).

New draft (thank you Marti!)

Starting from Here, Where do We Move?

I am from cheeseburgers

and french fries, real

ice cream milkshakes, and

bleach rags, bleach rags, bleach rags.

By the back door, cooks crouch,

roll cigarettes, argue

about hip-hop and closing, stroke

each others egos.

I slide toward the dumpster while they

kick the edge of the greased glazed ice.

Soda drips on my shoes.

It’s been dark since

we got here. And I am from

tinny muzac and the long catwalk

with a stack of food. From

“order up” and “on the fly,”

from the cold slap

of the walk –in.

Becca and I dance with our hands

full, our hips swing around corners.

We are six more hours, three more

hours, one more. A fist

full of cash.

Process??

In her article “Writing Steps: A Recursive and Individual Experience,” Bonnie Mary Warne unpacks some of the baggage that comes along with the idea of “the writing process.” I hadn’t thought of how easy it would be for students to see “brainstorm, drafts, revise, edit, publish” as a linear step by step process. Obviously, we’ve talked quite a bit in the last two weeks about how the writing process is recursive. This concept is intuitive to me, so I can nod sagely when we talk about it. Warne illuminates how easy it is for students not to understand. And it’s one thing to tell them it’s recursive, it’s quite another thing to show them.

I’m very much like her student Nevil, who spends a lot of time just thinking before he drafts. I once had a professor tell me that my first drafts were like her forth ones. By the time I sit down to write, I have already revised my ideas a few times. I think the trick for me is to make sure to not think I don’t have anymore revising to do after I get the words down. And sometimes when I sit down to write, I end up in a completely different place than where the drafts in my head indicated I was going.

Reading this article reinforced what some of the other articles have said: it’s important to talk about your own writing process in the classroom. And to talk about new discoveries you make in writing. I think it’s also important to have discussions amongst the whole class about everyone’s varying writing processes. Hmmm…I just stumbled across a nomenclature I think I prefer: not the writing process, but writing processes. And I didn’t think I was headed toward that idea when I started :)

A Grammar Explosion!

Anderson says something in this article that seems key in understanding why some students who love to tell stories and to explore ideas still hate writing: they see writing as “a way to be wrong.”  They have spent so much time being corrected in the little spelling errors and mis-punctuation that they cannot see that writing can be a way to explore an idea or express themselves.  I don’t know how many times I’ve had a student enter a composition classroom expecting to learn about grammar, and anxious at the prospect.   They feel liberated when I tell them that I am more interested in what they have to say  than a few style errors.  Further, they seem more willing to explore complicated ideas in their writing when they don’t sense the red pen hovering over their shoulder.  The problem I run into is that I always feel like I give grammar and style short shrift in my classroom, and I know that students will need those skills. 

 

I like Anderson’s idea of the Strunk and White explosion all over his classroom.  Instead of painstakingly correcting every little mistake in each student’s draft, he surrounds them with grammar guides on posters large enough for them to read from where they sit.  I am reminded of the science lecture halls at my university, all of which had a giant periodic table permanently affixed to the wall.  After three quarters of chemistry, I rarely had to look at the chart.  But it was comforting to know it was there should I need it.  I was a better student of chemistry for it.  I wonder how I could go about creating a Strunk and White explosion in my composition course.  I can’t actually physically put posters up all over the room unless I want to cart them around all the time.  Maybe there might be a way to create a class wiki, and have the students all contribute to it.  Even if it isn’t always on the walls, it could be on our course Blackboard page.

"Re-Vision"

In "Revision Strategies of Student Writers and Experienced Adult Writers," Nancy Sommers illuminates one of the biggest struggle for both myself and many of my students: how to see revision as revision rather than as merely editing.  She cites students’ sense that  “something larger was wrong,” but they didn’t know how to fix it.  They “didn’t think it would help to move the words around.”  Students are reluctant to see a draft as something whose thinking can be valuable but whose words can be jettisoned.  I sometimes advise students to open up a brand new word document for their second draft of an essay instead of “moving things around” in their existing draft.  They balk at this idea.  I probably would, too.  I’m beginning to understand that this reluctance to begin again, to “re-see” a draft, is linked to the amount of work it takes to even produce a messy first draft.  As writers, we are reluctant to discard our words.  We slave over them, and we want that work validated.  What better way than to keep the words!  It’s difficult to understand that the value of our writing might be in the thinking it helps us do, in the way it can create a path into an idea.  Sometimes it is best to begin again.  My question now is, how can I help my students be comfortable with a more conceptual concept of revision while still validating the work and the words that go into an early draft?

A Response to Stephanie Dix's "I'll do it my way: Three writers and their revision practices"

As I am re-reading this article, what strikes me most is the difference between the kinds of changes the students made in their poetic writing versus the kinds of changes the students made in their transactional writing.  Dix claims, “the writers revised their poetic writing more often. They appeared to have greater ownership and flexibility to make choices concerning language and sentence structure so that they could experiment with words to create a desired image or effect.”  What I’m wondering now is:

 

• Why is it that students feel greater ownership over their poetic writing?  It seems intuitive that it would be so.  I know I feel more ownership and authority when I’m working on a poem than when I’m working on a cover letter.  Is it because poetic (and I’m assuming she’s using James Britton’s definition of poetic here) genre’s have built into them the idea that the writer has this authority? 
• Assuming that students do feel more authority over and, therefore, more confident in revising their poetic texts, how do we facilitate an extension of that ownership to the transactional context?  I wonder if teaching students to investigate genres might help here.  Maybe if they figured out the “rules” of a genre for themselves, they might gain ownership of that genre.  Further, if they had this ownership, might they feel more confident in “breaking” those rules?
• As a composition teacher, how might I build poetic writing into a course in order to facilitate that ownership without giving short shrift to the transactional writing I’m supposed to be teaching?

To freewrite or not to freewrite?

In “But What If I Can’t Freewrite?” Chapter Nine of Lane’s After the End, I am again reminded that there is no one right way to write. If there was, we would be out of jobs. And people probably wouldn’t be so in love with words written and spoken as many of them are. Lane’s discussion of how useless it is to ask some students to free write (or whatever exercise you would like to insert here) makes me question some of my classroom practice. I am always careful to let students know that I don’t expect every writing exercise I introduce to be useful to all of them, that I am trying to give them tools they can utilize if they work. And I am confident that all of them will walk out with a few tools they feel confident can help them in their writing. However, I do expect all of my students to make a good-faith attempt at every exercise we practice. And a good-faith effort often means pushing through for awhile even if it is difficult. I am unsure of whether Lane would agree with my practice. Frankly, in a ten week quarter, we often only get to explore a handful of exercises and practices and we only get to try each one out a few times. Within this structure, I am not sure how else to ask my students to attempt the writing process. Every once in a while, a student will ask me if they can do something a little different because they know freewriting (for example) doesn’t work for them, so they want to use a different model for a reading response or pre-writing. If we’re further along in the quarter, I usually say okay. I wonder if I should make this an option for everyone instead of waiting for a student come to me. Or if I should give them an option of two every time. Maybe I will try this out next quarter.

A few notes on conferencing

As I read back through chapter seven “Don’t Fix My Story, Just Listen to Me” in Barry Lane’s After the End, I am reminded of what Sheryl Lain says about conferencing (and I think this applies to all learning). “The one who does the work is the one who learns.” This seems to me to be a large part of what Lane is advocating in the chapter. It is not our job to be “teacher correctors” but interested readers who ask thoughtful and specific questions about the writing. I think it is one of the lessons that I’m still trying to learn; sometimes, I don’t feel like I’m doing my job unless I comment all over student writing. Even if I’m commenting as an interested reader, sometimes all the comments and questions on the page can be overwhelming to students. And it also takes part of their opportunity to learn away as many students passively receive comments rather than viewing them as a dialogue.

Lane indicates that we should let our students control the direction of the conference. Obviously, as a composition teacher, I have a responsibility to the rest of the university(both the students and my colleagues)—and there are certain practices and genres I must expose my students to and have them practice. But within those parameters, I must remind myself, I should let the student speak to me about their concerns and what work they have done with revision. It is difficult, however, to get a college freshman to direct their own conference. It requires more work on their part (ah, there’s Lain again!), and most of them don’t want to do that work.

I’ve used a couple different strategies for getting students to take more ownership of their conferences. One is a conference memo—usually about half a hand-written page where they choose a few things in their draft they want to address in their conference. I’ve left it pretty open to them or asked them specific questions depending on the dynamic of the class. They write these in class before they turn in their drafts and then bring them to conference. Another strategy is the revision memo—they point out a few key revisions they’ve made, and talk about how it changed their essay. (Side-note: a key revision is one that deals with more than just fixing errors or editing). The students who take these memos seriously and write them thoughtfully—the quality of their conference (from both our perspectives) skyrockets!

Lucy Calkins is awesome

In Lucy McCormick Calkins book The Art of Teaching Writing, her chapter “Don’t be Afraid to Teach” just blew me away. She argues, “we have been taught that there is something wrong with ‘lecturing’ to students. We therefore turn every little speech into a fill-in-the-blank exercise by using the question-and-answer format…but mini-lessons become diffuse and clumsy when we teachers persist in the question-and-answer mode that is so pervasive in our schools.” If I had only read this before I ever stepped into the classroom! When I started teaching I was so careful of not taking learning or ownership away from my students (and we do need to be careful of this) that I fell into this trap. It took me quite some time to realize that it’s okay to lecture sometimes and it’s okay to be directive sometimes. In fact, at certain times, it’s even preferable. Calkins provides an excellent example of a neat, succinct lesson about titling your work. And then illustrates how disastrous it would be if the teacher relied on call-and-response. Now…if I can just figure out when to let my students muddle through and when to succinctly lecture. And never make any mistakes that rob my students and me of our precious class time. Any tips on how to figure it out?

Write/Right

A few thoughts I have as I finish reading Linda Rief’s “What’s Right With Writing?”

1. Well, hell. In my last response I praised a teacher for dealing with the realities of standardized testing in a practical way.  And now, here I am finishing an article in which the writer repeatedly states that testing is one of the biggest problems with how we teach writing.  What am I to muddle out?  Which one is correct? Should I be fighting the good fight against testing?  Isn’t that what Parker Palmer would do? (I’m seeing an opportunity for macramé bracelets, here.)  I think I can agree with Rief that standardized testing is a problem, while continuing to appreciate Lain’s gratitude that her students’ scores improve through writing workshops.  After all, that isn’t Lain’s focus, and it only verifies what she already knew: that students become better writers if they workshop.
2. “We have forgotten that a person can read without writing, but cannot write without reading.  If we neglect writing while focusing our attention almost exclusively on reading, it is also at the expense of reading.” What writer hasn’t avoided writing by reading another book?  In grad school it was an ongoing joke that the best way to procrastinate is to say “I still need to read more.”  I find this reminder very timely for myself as a writer and not just as a teacher.  I’ve spent much of the year since I finished school reading and very little of it writing.  And as a result, I’m not as careful of a reader as I used to be.  When I’m thinking like a writer, I pay close attention to all words!
3. Circling back to my first musing: “In an era of test-mania, we tend to forget, or dismiss, the importance of writing.  If we allow that, others will do our thinking.”  This is the single most important reason that we must value the writing process: it helps us become better thinkers.  And our writing can initiate dialogue that in turn pushes our thinking even more.  And that is something worth believing in and fighting for, regardless of it’s affect on test scores

Just something I've been working on

Here, Behind the Restaurant, What Do You Want to Remember?

 

The thick sheet

of  ice, gnarled and

grease slicked? 

 

I am from cheeseburgers

and french fries, real

ice cream milkshakes,

bleach rags, bleach rags—

bleach rags and orange clean.

 

Beside the back door, Jonny and John crouch

rolling cigarettes.  They are arguing

about music and stroking

each other’s egos.  I slide

toward the dumpster.

They kick the edge of the ice slick and

soda drips on my shoes.

 

Here, it’s been dark since

we got here.  And I am from

tinny muzac and “Anna,

order up,” the cold slap

of the walk –in. 

 

The dance of the server starts slow

and halting.  We look before we move.

 

I can do this half-asleep.

I can do this with my eyes closed.

 

This ice slick happens every year.

 

 

 

Some Practical Advice from Sheryl Lain

A Response to "Reaffirming the Writing Workshop for Young Adolescents"

One of the things that has really struck me this week is how very real the pressures of testing standards are for teachers.  I sort of understood in a vague way that “teaching the test” was a problem, but I think I thought it was more of a philosophical or abstract one.  Instead, the teachers at the summer institute have made it very clear that it is a constant source of tension in their schools and classrooms.  And that it complicates that search for integrity as a teacher that Parker Palmer indicates is central to what we do.

 Which is one of the reasons I liked Lain’s article.  I understand that some teachers might ultimately want to get rid of or reform the standardized testing in place in most states.  And that articles dissecting the pro and cons of standardized testing would probably be beneficial for me to read.  But in the meantime, I appreciate Lain’s practical advice about and rational for the writing workshop.  She acknowledges the pressures of time and testing on teachers, and very clearly spells out why she continues to take the “healthy chunk of time” that the writing workshop requires.  And she spells out the advantage from a perspective that teacher’s can appreciate: her students learn more and own their learning.  And acknowledges that one of the advantages is that her students score higher on standardized tests.  I appreciate that she doesn’t make the writing workshop sound like pie-in-the-sky, but a concrete and practical process that works.

 I’m also realizing that much of the practical advice she offers could transfer directly to teaching composition in college.  I’m adopting her mantra of “the one who does the work is the one who learns” for myself when I conference.  I often find myself doing more of the talking when I conference with the student.  I probably learn a lot!  But I’m not sure that my students always do. 

 

 

So, How Do We Make Magic Happen?

A Response to Janet Emig’s “Non-Magical Thinking: Presenting Writing Developmentally in Schools”

There are two things I want to take away from this article:

1. The reinforcement that “persons who don’t themselves write cannot sensitively, even sensibly, help others learn to write.”

2. And the idea that “Developmental errors contrast readily with mistake in that developmental errors forward learning while mistakes impede it. Developmental errors have two characteristics that mistakes do not: 1) they are bold, chance-taking; 2) and they are rationally intelligent.”

The first item on the list is something we’ve spent much time talking about in the last week; indeed it is a central tenant of the National Writing Project’s philosophy. In order to teach writing, we must practice writing (a nice antithesis to the old put-down “those who can’t, teach”). It is also something I had previously come to understand as a student…it just didn’t make sense to me that I should pay any attention to someone leading a poetry workshop if they didn’t themselves write. What possible wisdom could they impart? Further, Emig’s assertion that teachers must also “introspect upon their writing, since without reflection there has been no experience” seems a key distinction (and one I wholeheartedly buy into!). Her succinct statement makes explicit something I believe has been implicit in many of our conversations (and also in many of our assignments—like these reading responses). We cannot understand our own processes, our own learning, unless we take the time to reflect on it. Note to Anna’s teacher self: give students time (and assignments) to reflect on their writing and learning!

The second item on my list is something that I thought vaguely about before, but Emig has given me the words! I know that in order for learning to happen, we must try and fail. And that our attempts are often “chance taking” and “intelligent.” What I’m wondering now is, how is a teacher to recognize the difference between a developmental error and a plain old mistake. I’m sure I could recognize some—like misspellings of unfamiliar words using patterns of familiar ones. But I’m sure there are plenty of others I might miss. Is it highly dependent on the student? On the shape of the assignment? How do I recognize them? And how do I best utilize them for further learning? Anyone out there in teacher land?

A Timely Reminder

Response to James N. Britton’s “Now That You Go to School”

I must admit that after reading any article about teaching, pedagogy, rhet/com theory, etc., my immediate reaction is “how can I use this in my classroom.” I am guilty of some of the very bad habits I try so carefully to rid my students of. I rush to judgment, to utility. I neglect to dwell in the details of the article. I don’t always give it the time necessary to figure out what it is saying, not what I think it is saying upon a first quick read. I leapfrog over thorough comprehension straight to utility.

Perhaps that is why I initially struggled with Britton’s categories of expressive, transactional, and poetic writing. And, more specifically, what he calls the participant and the spectator. I read through the article, struggled with the ideas, and then left them alone. I found the exercises we did in the NIWP Summer Institute yesterday particularly valuable (thank you, Christy, for not simply answering my question, but asking me to go through the activities first to see if I could figure it out myself!).

The funny thing is, the process of trying (in groups) to come up with ways to explain his categories to the rest of the class is something I frequently ask my students to do! Like the article we read today (Anne Elrod Whitney’s “Opening Up the Classroom Door: Writing for Publication”) suggests, in synthesizing ideas to present to others, we can better come to understand the ideas we are working with in the first place. If I had just taken the time to try to summarize Britton’s ideas, I might have come on my own to the minor victory I arrived at yesterday in class:

When Britton says that “transactional writing is writing in the role of participant fully differentiated to meet the requirements of that role: and poetic writing is fully differentiated to meet the requirements of the role of the spectator,” there is a specific function of the words “participant” and “spectator” and their relation to “transactional” and “poetic.” Namely, that participants are the audience for transactional writing because transactional writing is always trying to do something, and needs its audience to participate in that doing. Poetic writing only needs spectators, the audience need only read.

I’ve been constantly reminded this week of how important it is to occasionally do what you ask your students to do!!

Response to James Moffett's "I, You, and It"

“There is a real place for reading in a composition course, not as subject matter to write about but as a source of experience and as a repertory of discourse.” –James Moffett

In Moffett’s “I, You, It,” a foundational essay concerning written discourse as it relates to the classroom, I find myself coming back to his statement about reading in the composition class. I am intrigued here because Moffat is addressing a tension I’ve noticed as an English 101 instructor, both when speaking to other instructors and when dealing with students. (I find this especially interesting as the essay was written over forty years ago—I wonder if this conversation has been ongoing, or if we’re circling back to it.)

In a supposedly “contentless” course, what role do the texts students read play? It was no secret amongst the TAs in my graduate program that our favorite days to teach were the days we discussed the readings in the course, not the days we devoted to writing instruction. Perhaps it was because most of us were products of literature programs. Perhaps it was because writing is hard, and our students were more enthusiastic about talking about what they’ve read than writing about it. Ah, there! I just committed the very sin Moffat cautions against in the above passage, and the very thing I tell my students on the first day that we are not going to do. We are not going to write about what we’ve read. We are rather going to write using what we’ve read (amongst other kinds of experiences).

“So, what’s the difference?” I can already hear my students asking. I’m still struggling to articulate this to myself. Perhaps it might be useful here to turn back to Moffett and part of his argument leading up to the statement quoted above. I can find it in the distinction he makes between “a chronological to an analogical discourse…the student must forsake the given order of time and replace it with an order of ideas.” Moffett uses the story of the cafeteria, so I’m going to stick with that one. In a chronological discourse, I might tell someone a story of what happened in the cafeteria—I am writing about the cafeteria. In an analogical discourse, I might posit that certain seated postures are more inviting to strangers than others and might use observations made about where people chose to sit in the cafeteria as evidence for my idea—I am writing about body language using the cafeteria. In an excellent essay, students would use a variety of texts and experiences to develop a theory, “some combining and developing of generalizations…some general assertions previously arrived at by analogical thinking are now plugged into each other in various ways according to the rules of logic.” In other words, I am asking my students to utilize and synthesize information/experiences from a variety of “texts” to form a theory/idea of their own, not just to tell me about what they’ve read. And that’s the difference.

This never fails to make me laugh.