What Is the Sound of Teaching Without a Teacher?

Since its publication in 1973, Elbow’s Writing Without Teachers has served a dual function.  For general readers, the book functions as a self-help text offering suggestions about composing and writer’s blocks; for academic readers, on the other hand, the book’s critique of their profession is an invitation to dwell with an enigma.  

 

Can we become stronger writing teachers by resigning our postures of mastery and accepting our flaws—even our irrelevance to learning?  Can we build a writing curriculum and pedagogy that include interests and perspectives from outside the academy?    

 

 Writing Without Teachers, a book seeped in metaphor and affected by twin audiences (scholars and people outside of academia) continues to resonate with its multiple meanings, its ambiguities (but never its ambivalence). This ambiguity, however, has been often overlooked inside academia.

 

Undergraduate students usually have a fresher perspective on Writing Without Teachers and Elbow’s project than writing specialists.  They can see its oddity as well as the paradox of such a book existing inside academic settings. 

 

On several occasions when teaching Elbow to non-English majors who I would guess with near certainty are unfamiliar with anything about composition theory, the students have reacted immediately to the book title: they look downright quizzical.    

 

Elbow’s ideas have become so deeply embedded into our whole praxis as writing scholars and teachers that we often don’t recognize his influence.  Elbow is like using the same handout semester after semester that someone lent us during graduate school, the ink and the authorship of the handout becoming that much more ambiguous with each passage through the copier machine.    

 

For students, on the other hand, the title can open a whole new plane of thinking: that they could complete writing that a teacher doesn’t see—and perhaps more phenomenally—that their writing instructor would even raise this possibility.   

 

For scholars just starting their careers in the early to mid 1970’s, the approach of Writing Without Teachers did strike them as a total mind shift.  For Theresa Enos, Elbow’s book was the impetus for her selection of Composition and Rhetoric as her discipline.  One of her teachers in graduate school, Gary Tate, assigned Writing without Teachers to Enos, and she was “kind of blown away by the book” (interview with Enos).   

 

A brand-new teaching assistant, Enos began using freewriting in all her classes and found that “Elbow was so completely different [from the modes-based instruction at her institution].  You were actually working with the student, intervening in the writing process ( which was the whole point of the process revolution).  It was a 100% turn-around, and I could see the engagement of the students.  I could see the cognitive process.  I could see their brain working through this freewriting” (interview with Enos). 

 

Other established composition theorists including Duane Roen (interview) and Lad Tobin describe their teaching styles prior to exposure to Writing Without Teachers as somewhat benighted—and how Elbow’s work helped them perceive students and the purpose of teaching more clearly. Writing Without Teachers has functioned as a koan for writing scholars, leading us to consider paradoxes inherent in writing instruction.   

 

In the Eastern tradition of spiritual learning, the enigmatic figures prominently in the form of the koan.  Novices in Zen training approached master monks with a question to which the monk would reply with a seemingly inscrutable answer—either verbally or physically.

 

Zen masters were known to resort to hitting, beating, and even maiming students, but they also used incoherence, ambiguity, imagery, and repetition to instruct.  Together, the initial question and the monk’s response served as a form of independent study for the novice who would spend an unprescribed amount of time working toward its solution.   

As D.T. Suzuki describes the koan in Zen Buddhism, the koan is intended to develop Zen consciousness by surpassing the limits of logic and intellectualism: “the koan given to the uninitiated is intended to ‘destroy the root of life,’ ‘to make the calculating mind die’, ‘to root out the entire mind that has been at work since eternity’” (138).   

One learning outcome of the koan, so to speak, is an embracing of paradox and contradiction as part of the reality of the present, not tampered with by categories and intellect.  A classic example from eastern thought of such paradox, although not a koan per se, is the Buddha’s pronouncement at a summit of monks that “Form is emptiness, and emptiness is form.”  

Among the many paradoxes of Writing Without Teachers would be the yin-yang relationship of chaos and control, solitude and readership, creativity and analysis, doubt and belief.  
  
In “East Meets West: Peter Elbow’s ‘Embracing’ of ‘Contraries’ Across Cultures,” George Kalamaras describes the ways in which Elbow has engaged paradox throughout his career. Although Kalamaras is speaking of Elbow’s overall work with doubt and belief, Kalamaras’ description is also applicable to the 1973 book, how Elbow points to "the importance of remaining attentive to the interaction of what might on the surface be considered contradictory. This is similar to the use of Zen Buddhist koans (such as 'What is your face before your parents were born?,' whose paradoxical structure serves to sever the question from the answer (and, paradoxically, even from the questioner), reorienting one to a fresh experience of reality" (117).

And then there’s the question of the identity of Elbow’s “real” Writing without Teachers reader, given his choice to publish with a university press and given his own position inside academia.   

Does Elbow really mean that we should write totally without teachers, or is there some sort of half-way state?  If we are a teacher-reader of Writing without Teachers, does this mean we should cease all teaching in order to teach?   

In my next post, I will consider the paradox—or tautology—in that notion.

Poems People Wrote Using Build-A-Poem

Anyaka

Here are poems two people wrote using the Build-A-Poem post from November. Both poems were written within ten minutes and on-the-spot. Thanks to the two writers for sharing. 

Feel free to post your own Build-A-Poem creations as comments.

 

Temper by Cheryl Martin The whipping of the wind is neither going North West East nor South The hot slapping stinging wind fights to find its direction or purpose Overwhelming, boiling, frustrating, black, incapacitated blistering Small pieces of dirt and sand caught in its power struggling to be released to being come part of the world it came from Frustration is the grass, as it wants the soil ripped from it It is black and scary with little visible other than the shadows of the swirling soil in the air A pink pail lays abandoned on the ground that may have helped allowing the fierce wind to easily pick up the abundance of dirt Indignant Nana, her shadow is standing upright not hunch over struggling to stand walk or balance. The wind abruptly stops and the soil falls back to the ground Covering the grass Quiet

Change

by Alexandra Kirby

(Graduate student in my ENL 833: Overcoming Writing Blocks)

Miniature Daffodil, some blooms 

Freshly opened, green hues

The antithesis of how I feel

But delicate, vulnerable too.

 *

Soft smell, not too bright, 

But full of dirt and oxygen, 

Clean, natural, rich, 

Captured in glazed pottery, blue sky.

 *

Feuille, fleur, thin

Sexual parts, pistol, stamen, 

Powdery, silken juices, 

Macaronie and cheese.

 *

The broken pots down the stairs, 

Terra cotta shattered as much 

As it can be, earth tones, 

Abandoned for plastics.

 *

Gray. Sky through glass. 

Gray sky, gray earth, gray sod, 

Gray eyes, gray clouds, 

Hung low around late for.

  *

Life is like a broken pot that springs forth new life

Love is like the flower blooming.

Cliches are like gray sky.

Senses are like a…

 *

Sitting down with smoke 

Rising out of it, shadows,

Rippling as if reflected on a pond,

Hair long, not stringy anymore, 

Like her daughter.

 *

Crashing. Dissonance. Noise. 

Pollution. New life forms. 

Garbage truck compactor. 

Whirrrrrr.

 

Happiness

(Anonymous)

 

My happiness is like butterflies floating

The butterflies' wings flap, a soft clicking noise

Black, orange, monarch

The antennas move: left, right, up, down

The leaves in the background are swirling from the angry wind

The sun is warm, but the storm is coming

The ball rests under the tree

It is a circle of memory

The shadow is small - when did it change?

The sun is gone; the storm is near

 

Like Asking a Mountain to Sit in a Fish Tank

One of the ultimate high-stakes tasks: naming a book manuscript. It becomes a name rather than a title because you feel like you are naming an actual being, flattening his hair, turning her about-face, presenting him to the world.

It's fragmentary (a phrase or even one word or in the case of academic writing a shadow of a sub-title after a colon) but at the same time highly symbolic. 

The title is a metonym. It is representative of the content listed immediately behind in a fish skeleton of individual titles. It is also representative of yourself. It stands for you when you are not near your own words (bound to happen after publication).

It's a small portion of writing—no room for error.

Titles don't feel like they can occupy a Present moment. It would be like asking a mountain to sit in a fish tank.

I am trying to pin something down. Make it permanent. Make it resonate longer than a single moment.

You turn the strongest contender over in your mind and also let it rest on your tongue. You catch yourself off-guard, hoping for fresh perspective. You tape it onto walls and surfaces in your home hoping the household context will provide a new angle. You try to ambush the different title possibilities, say, the top two or three, during the days leading up to sending out the manuscript.

There's a great deal more superstition around making a title than writing the poems or chapters.You don't share working titles with the wrong people, and with the right people (author-friends you admire) you weigh each response. 

* When we named our second child, a family member stayed silent over the phone for several seconds. *

* Then said that the first child's name, now that one was lovely. *

It's more feeling than logic. It's like getting a Tarot card reading because you are trying to anticipate the future.

* Hospital staff push parents to name a child as fast as possible or at least before leaving the hospital grounds. Then the name is permanent. It has to be legally changed. *

Like a child, the book has siblings, one's previous publications. You imagine them lining up for a family portrait, you hear them summoned in italics on your CV or before a reading.

* We had to go to court and spend $60 to legally change the second child's name. Despite the unpleasant experience of having our initial choice critiqued, we feel we "got it right" with the new name. *

The amount of ego involved in drafting a book title is amusing.

No matter how fluid I've left the writing process—the year or two of generating new pieces—finding a title remains a high-stakes task: one in which imaginary future audiences are highly present.

At this point in my exploration of mindful writing, it is nearly impossible for me to treat titling as private writing.

A Pen That Annoys

roy.luck

 

 It’s like writing with a rickety fire tower or construction scaffolding, the mechanical components of the pen shifting loosely inside.

 

Using an awkward pen like this one this morning, a fountain pen with a dazzling rim of rhinestones and a jet-black exterior—all polish and shine promising a swift writing experience but instead a toppling tower in my hand—the sensation is that various pieces are falling apart, that writing is falling apart, the tower is about to fall over, the pen cap jiggling, the components rattling, the ink well needing to be pushed to work, only to cause huge beads of ink which threaten to drop onto the notebook. 

This pen is some sort of fire tower, an observation tower. It helps me be aware. It gives me a view of the edge of mindfulness. It simulates that sensation of being on the very edge of writing—standing close to the state of flow but being held back by the details of the present moment, including its irritations—the sense of still being myself, still being aware of myself. It helps. Why? 

Because it also duplicates that moment of restlessness I often feel right before “getting an idea right” or “finding an idea.” It is as jagged and rusty as a sentence fragment, as unfinished as a phrase, cropped by the unconscious, passing through my mind—and so it is part of the construction of a whole. Anything that heightens my awareness of the act of writing, the physical side of writing, including a pen that doesn’t let me forget its presence, well, that helps.

For Students at the Start of a Semester

Since some of us are beginning a new semester, I'm returning to this post from August--slightly reshaped.

I can look around the room on the first day of a semester and get a pretty good sense of who is deeply unhappy to be in Comp I or Comp II (or any writing class). What I notice is how many students are not actually perceiving me in my recently laundered Ann Taylor suit but who are instead staring at a stack of teachers immediately behind me. They’re all the teachers and critics from their past.

The quick overview of the syllabus and the fly-by past upcoming writing assignments ratchets these students’ tension levels deadline by deadline, date by date, and the voices and gestures of those teachers-behind-me get louder, more dramatic, and occasionally, I’m sure, obscene.

For some students, no matter what I do or say, I won't actually be present the entire course. Instead, their seventh-grade English teacher who liked to give part of exam questions in Old English is in the room. Or the one who crossed out whole lines of their poems in red ink. Or the professor who told them during office hours that their writing gave him a headache to read.

For most of us, teachers have been our primary readers throughout our lives because we don’t share our writing with other types of people and also because most of our writing is initiated by teachers and their assignments, as Peter Elbow, writing theorist, has pointed out. 

Teachers have become our main association with writing.

Though it’s not always teachers that people are carrying around—could be a parent, maybe one who looked over your shoulder as you wrote every high school essay, or an unhelpful friend, jealous colleague or spouse, or a disorganized boss who couldn’t clearly explain what he wanted and so sent you into a tailspin of drafts and rewrites.

When most of us write, even if we are not students, a similar thing happens. We start writing to imaginary people.

We’re usually completely alone but yet we think that our Reader is sitting right in front of us, capable of reading our words as soon as we type them…or even of hearing our thoughts! These Readers don’t delay with giving us their feedback—doesn’t take them weeks to return a mid-term paper. No, they give us their input on-the-spot, judging our fetal thesis statement, the last four nouns we used, the length of our sentences, whether we breathe through our mouths or our nostrils, our understanding of the chapter reading, and the next ten papers we’ll write in the future. We think or scribble something down, and it’s like a factory assembly line—it travels a few inches to the right for delivery to the Reader on her stool for her immediate critique.

We don’t see what’s actually going on in our present moment.

The teacher is not your audience. The teacher may be your eventual audience, but there’s a big difference between the two. If I am your teacher, for instance, I am not (and may I add, Thank God) perched on your university-provided dorm room desk, my legs crossed, sipping at my Starbucks iced coffee, watching you and the posters which are already slipping off the cinder block walls. The Reader in your head is also not your audience.

I don’t care how nasty this Reader was (and we’ve all had them). I don’t care if she actually sacrificed your hamsters for their blood to fill her enormous red-inked fountain pens or if she rejected your manuscript from her prestigious journal by putting it through a shredder and sending it back to you in your self-addressed stamped envelope.

I also don’t care how well you know this eventual audience, this person you’re supposedly writing for. Barring an extremely rare exam-like occasion in which the recipient of your words literally watches as you write and awaits your words two seconds after they’re born, you are completely and totally alone.

Any ideas you have of your Reader’s response are 100% in your head and of your own making.

People often think they’re not very creative, but yet when they sit down to write, they make up whole scenarios and plot lines complete with dialog and action in order to talk to that imaginary Reader. Most people, no matter what they’re trying to write, no matter if it’s as hum-drum as a memo or as seemingly uncreative as a five-paragraph essay, are actually great screen play writers.

It's like a story a friend of mine told me about a guy whose car gets stuck in a snow bank on a wintry night in Montreal:

The guy is stuck by himself beside the road in the middle of immense cold fields with only one house in sight way off in the distance. All the lights are on in the house, so the man decides to approach the house to see if someone can give him a hand (this is before cell phones). As he’s trudging, he begins to think of the future, of what might occur in the next thirty minutes. He sees himself knocking on the door of the house. He imagines a warm vestibule, dry jackets hanging on hooks, shoes and boots in a row. But what if no one answers? What if no one’s home? What sort of fool leaves all the lights on in their house if they’re not home, he thinks and frowns a bit. He keeps trudging. He rubs his cold hands together to warm them. What if he knocks on the door and the person just closes the door in his face? Well, he is a stranger after all.But then again, what sort of person (insert expletives) would not find out what’s wrong on a night like this? And so forth. By the time he actually arrives at the house and the door is opened, he yells, “Why don’t you take your stupid shovel then and shove it!”

We're constantly telling whole stories like this when write--constantly talking to non-existent audiences.

Writing anything actually enhances the sound of people talking because for one you probably are hearing your own voice say the words as you type them, you may even feel your tongue moving a bit in your mouth as though you are speaking.

When we write, however, we tend to anticipate our readers’ reactions and this impacts us in the moment of writing. We make different choices, letting our imaginary conversations affect—or even stop—our immediate writing.

Mindful writing proposes that in fact audience is always at least in some part—and especially at the beginning of writing something—imaginary. Mindfulness helps us see what’s really present—and because imaginary audience isn’t really there, we are reminded of difference between speaking and writing and are able to use our solitude to our advantage.

How do you tell if you’ve got audience-in-the-head? Well, it’s a safe bet that if you’re doing any writing, you’ve got audience-in-the-head syndrome. It’s not necessarily a bad thing; it’s part of that endless babble or “discursive thinking” that runs through our heads all the time, unless we’re on a meditation cushion.

If you’ve been hesitating to write, putting it off, suffering from a block, or even finding yourself slowing down a bit in your usual production, turn your mind toward your mind. Who have you been thinking about in the past few minutes? What sorts of bits and fragments of people (because the Reader is never a whole person but a prop, a playing-card image that we briefly sustain with our imagination) have appeared in front of your thoughts? Whose face, however abstract, has appeared on your computer screen?