The Great Debate: What the *&#% Do I Teach My Students?

We’ve all been in classrooms, as a teacher or a student, and heard:
“I hate this writing assignment.”
“What’s the point?”
“What’s a thesis? Oh, I can’t do that.”
“TELL ME WHAT YOU WANT, AND I WILL DO IT!”
“How do I get an “A”?”
“Can’t we write something else?”
Most students in first year composition classes hate writing, or at least think they do. So how do we engage students in their writing? How do we motivate them to write? How do we give them assignments that they don’t “hate” while teaching them what we think they need to know? John C. Bean, author of Engaging Ideas: The Professor’s Guide to Integrating Writing, Critical Thinking, and Active Learning in the Classroom, suggests in his book that we assign students a variety of different assignments that range from what he calls “personal” writing to “professional” writing.
Personal writing is often left out of FYC classes. It can range from journal entries and free-writes (what Britton calls “expressive writing”), to personal narratives and short stories. Often teachers don’t see the merit in this type of writing. Free writes and journal entries are often a chaotic form of writing. Teachers who are looking for structure, logical arguments, and organization often cringe at encouraging this type of writing in a classroom. These teachers would rather teach students professional writing, academic prose, writing that will get their students published in academic journals, and prepare them for grad school. The problem with academic prose is that it often hinders student writing with its limited word choice, rigid structure and organization, and rule-governed expectations. Their voices get lost in the jargon (48).
Which type of writing, then, personal or professional, is most beneficial to our students? Bean argues that both are important and serve different functions. Personal writing often helps students discover their voices, engage in their writing, and have a personal investment in their papers (52). These are things academic prose does not often offer; however, when writing academic prose, or “thesis-governed” texts, students work on focus, clarity, structure, and the formation of logical arguments in not only their writing, but also in their thinking (46). So how does a teacher decide which to teach? Bean suggests that the teachers ask themselves two questions: “(1) what kinds of assignments will most benefit my students, and (2) what kinds of assignments will best fit [my] own values, teaching style, and available time?” (38) To do this, the instructor must take an inventory of his students and of himself.
So how do we take inventory of our students? As Bean states, we have the most diverse classrooms in the history of education. We have different ages, races, culture, classes, levels of intelligence, personality type, etc. It is impossible to tailor every assignment to fit the needs of every student in every class, so as teachers, we must be aware of the differences in our students, and assign a variety of assignments to meet the different needs in the classroom. Bean uses an interesting example. He talks about how different personality types, according to the Myers-Briggs Type Indicator, tend to prefer different types of assignments. For example, I am an ENFP according to Myers-Briggs. According to Bean’s discussion on pages 39-41, because I am Extroverted, I would prefer assignments that allow me to work in small groups and talk about my writing in class discussion; because I am Intuitive, I would prefer to work on assignments that are open-ended rather that rigidly structured; because I am a Feeler, I would prefer assignments that allow me to use emotions, voice, and personal experience; and because I am a perceiver, I like to have time to play with many ideas when working on assignments. I found this to be an accurate description of the type of writing assignments that I prefer. I found it interesting, however, that most students are Sensors rather than feelers (unlike their professors), and would rather have structured assignments. So, as we see, what students want and what teachers want often times do not match up. This becomes a problem when we as teachers try to motivate our students. The best way that I see to motivate students and meet their diverse needs is to be aware of how different personality types respond to different assignments, different cultures respond to different assignments, etc. Since we can’t all give our students the Myers-Briggs Personality Type Indicator test and learn everything about our students’s cultures, races, backgrounds, etc. we should just vary our assignments to accommodate the diversity. I think it would be better to have every student invested in at least one assignment throughout the semester rather than having a small group invested in every assignment throughout the semester. I think we would reach more students that way. Of course we have to figure out where we stand, and what we think is and is not important to teach our students because if we aren’t motivated to teach, students will not be motivated to learn.
Bean argues that we can get the “mixture of professional and personal writing” that we need in our classrooms by using “three different categories of assignments:
(1) Nongraded exploratory writing
(2) Thesis-governed academic writing
(3) Essays written in other styles ad forms that stand against conventional academic writing and create different ways of ‘seeing.’” (52)
In what percentages we do each is up to the teacher. A teacher must examine the class, the objectives and goals of the class, and his own personal goals to decide this. It’s all about balance.