Manifesto

My Brief and Telling Subject A Panic

By Martin Brandt

It had seemed like a good idea at the time: a trip to San Diego, a chance to meet colleagues from around the state, a hotel with a bar. ISAW, the conference was called, for “Improving Student Academic Writing.” I would receive training in the principles and practices so that I could turn around and someday (soon) offer ISAW training myself. Sure, I said at the time. I’d really like to do it. Anything to help me become a better teacher.

True, I did have to fly, and I hate flying. No, check that: I used to hate flying. After September 11, 2001, there’s no word in our language which properly denotes my hatred of airports, airplanes, Grisham-choked booksellers, and most especially that vague feeling of guilt—however innocent I may be—which always accompanies me as I load my belongings onto the security conveyer belt, walk with arms held high through the metal detector, and busily don my jacket and shoes again, huffing and puffing like some hapless factory worker whose shift quota has just been increased.

But fly, I did, and it had all seemed like a perfectly good idea until I took my seat in one of the basement meeting rooms of the Doubletree Club Hotel that Saturday morning. It wasn’t the fluorescent light or the carafe of bland hotel coffee that discouraged me. No, it was the writing assignment in front of me, which extinguished my enthusiasm for the days’ work.

I’ve been to enough of these types of conferences to know that writing pretty much comes with the territory. It’s not called the California Writing Project for nothing, after all; to hold a conference on writing without asking participants to write themselves would be a little like having a high school exit exam based on mastery of junior high school skills. You know–just plain stupid.

So I came to the conference ready to write. In fact, I like writing a lot. But usually the writing in these conferences is of a much more informal, personal nature. (“What was your favorite line in the poem?”) What I was being asked to do here—on a lovely fall Saturday morning by the sea, no less—was, well, kind of like what I ask my students to write all the time. It was a basic University of California, Subject A Exam-type prompt: write a formal essay explaining the author bell hooks’ point of view; state whether you agree with it; add any relevant personal observations or experiences to validate your opinion.

We were given twenty minutes to complete the task.

Oh, that’s all! To add a faint stench of hypocrisy to my whining, I should probably mention here that the assignments I give of this sort usually come with a healthy dose of admonitions like, “Piece of cake!” “It’s easy!” and “C’mon, concentrate!”

Concentrate? Me? I don’t feel like concentrating on anything on Saturday mornings. If anything I’d prefer to concentrate on a cappuccino, or college football, or a bicycle ride. bell hooks’s eloquent ruminations on class and education were thought provoking, but need they provoke my pen to paper? Couldn’t I just play with them in my head for a while?

Nineteen minutes to go. I felt a genuine moment of panic. My table companions were busy writing away, but from my pen, nothing. It occurred to me even that I could not do it, that I had perhaps become that teacher I’d always wanted desperately not to be—that one from the adage who can’t do and therefore teaches. Come on, concentrate you bastard, concentrate!

Twenty-five minutes later—you can always wangle another five minutes or so in these workshops I emerged, relieved, and with a certain bemusement at my earlier panic. What the hell were you panicking for? I asked myself. Perhaps I’d make a good method actor; here I was, eighteen years past college, surrounded by experienced colleagues in a hotel conference room, fretting about a fictional Subject A assignment as if my future actually depended on it.

As it turns out, an awful lot of futures depend on it. Not on my successful submission—in the end, nobody even read it—but on my ability to understand the challenges of such writing assignments and to translate this understanding effectively to my students.

In this regard, ISAW offers some of the most powerful tools for writing instruction I’ve ever experienced. It does not prescribe a single plan or method of instruction. No copyrighted or trademarked series of steps. Instead it drew on the finest aspect of the Writing Project’s philosophy: that beautiful, oh-so-rare trust in the abililty of classroom teachers to fashion meaningful writing instruction for their students.

So the morning was followed by a grading session of student papers, using an excellent, teacher-created rubric. (Unlike many writing rubrics, this one did not rely on vague adjectives to distinguish discrete scores, but instead on clear, strong verbs. The effect was enough to help me overcome my earlier rubric trauma.) Sunday we were treated to presentations by some brilliant colleagues who helped deconstruct the typical prompt, and offered promising lesson strategies. Everything was spiced generously with student samples, and the only complaint I heard was that they didn’t have enough time to do justice to their work.

Clearly, I’ve sipped the Kool-Aid. But the Kool-Aid’s had such an effect on me because the Writing Project is the only aspect of my professional life in which I am not given top-down orders, coerced into doing things which I know to be useless or ultimately harmful to my students, or patronized by trainers who cannot believe that I could actually come up with meaningful curriculum on my own. In short, the Writing Project treats me like a grown-up.

I flew home that Sunday afternoon—past security, past putative shoe-bombers and the temporary conquest of gravity—quite delighted my weekend, barely aware that I was flying and that I would have to fly back December for the next session.

It is my highest compliment.