I am a writing teacher, a new one at that. Fresh into the school system full of energy and great ideas on how I want to teach my first writing class, I have always loved writing and teaching is becoming a passion of mine as well. I studied writing and rhetoric while in college and have this great sense of how I want to teach and what students writing should look like. I “was” so excited to get into the classroom and start working my magic.
The first day came with much disappointment.
It was as if someone has burst my balloon and all the air deflated out of me when I came upon the curriculum and say the students writing first hand. I was no longer a writing and rhetoric teacher, I was a “writing instructor” I use those terms for a particular reason, I had some idea of the strict writing forms that I need to follow to prepare students for standardized testing but had no idea it was run with military precision. It was like the school system didn’t want the students to think for themselves. The creativity, the focus, the purpose of writing was all for a score. Where has the education system lead us? Are we helping or hurting the student’s with this kind of writing instruction.
With my discoveries of the lack of substance in the writing curriculum and the eagerness I still have on starting my first job I was going to find a way to fulfill both the schools needs in their writing “style” and well as mine.
I decided I was going to start slow with the students, not even mention that I was doing anything different than other teachers. The students had just finished their summer reading, I was going to use this as my stepping off point. The first concept I introduced to related to rhetorical thinking was audience. I had them define it for me, what it meant to them and then its purpose in writing and reading. I then began with the instruction.
The curriculum called for a five paragraph theme on the main ideas of the summer reading. I decided to follow that but put my rhetorical twist on it as well. With the student’s new knowledge of audience I introduced the assignment as it is written. Then came the bombshell. I told the students that they had to write this theme as they were writing to a different audience someone outside the school system that had no knowledge of the book. They had to write it knowing that the person reading it will have never read the book and does not know the assignment.88
Changing the audience for a piece of writing is one way to have students approach writing the piece using rhetoric theory without them completely being aware that they are doing so. When changing the audience from the teacher to someone outside the school they have to consider different approaches of writing the same ideas and concepts but in a deeper more thoughtful manner. This drives at the heart of what rhetoric is all about, being able to create sound discourse that the audience will be able to understand and possible agree with. In studying rhetoric in my college classes the major focus was on the triangle of rhetoric as we called it. Speaker (the writer)-audience-subject. In this assignment the subject does not change but the other two corners do. The students are still accomplishing the same task but at a higher level of thinking. Instead of just repeating basic ideas and themes from the book they have to thoughtfully consider that the audience has never read the book before and the means in which they transfer that information has to be more thoroughly thought out and written.
To even push the envelope further, after this previous piece is written another concept of rhetoric can be put into play. Just by simply having the students take the previous paper and have them write it in a different style is pushing them to think rhetorically. For example, have the students write about the same concepts form the previous assignment in the format of a newspaper can draw on new skills. They will learn not only about the material in the book but also on how to approach the assignment from a “real life” practical approach.
By simply focusing on the audience of the discourse the students are working on can help develop the students thinking at a higher level. This will help them learn more about the text but also provide them with skills they will need outside of academic writing.
As a first year writing teaching, I am ambitious and my student’s writing will be as well.
Signed,
Not so deflated first year teacher. 7
7 Credit to ideas in above passage, many ideas drawn from multiple sources (see sources page) and University classroom lectures
8Larson, Richard L. "Teaching Rhetorics in the High School:Some Proposals." English Jounal. 55.8 (1966): 1058-1065. Print.
