One of the very first articles we’ve read for the Composition course was “The Subject is Writing”, by Thia Wolf. I was not the only TA in class who loved the article, and sought to employ it in the courses I teach. The reading was succinct and offered a variety of exercises that I practiced with my students first chance I got, which was yesterday, wth mixed results (although I think the mixed effect was due to atmospheric reasons like the late hour and humid air, and because of overall hunger, as several students whined they were to hungry to think).
One of the activities that got the best results was the one where I asked students to write up a dialogue with someone they consider a teacher, in order to ask advice over a problem they’ve encountered. I did it myself, putting myself in the students’ place as I wrote my own dialogue with Yoda, of all master teachers. I asked Yoda what I should do to have money to get the required textbooks.
Yoda’s reply?
“Wash cars you must, young Padawan.”
And the students’ dialogues were all the more creative. Some asked questions of cartoon characters, former teachers at the schools they’d attended previously, and one even asked God Himself for answers.
Another activity that yielded good results was the “Letter from the Future”, in which a 25-year older version of yourself is writing your young self a letter, telling you about where life has taken you, where you live, what you do for a living, etc. I also wrote that myself when giving the activity to the students. I ended up living in a lovely house in Italy, with three children and a pet goat, and married to a well-to-do, intelligent man. I had a minivan for traveling with my children, but for my “Girl’s Night Out” with my friends, I used my fancy Aston-Martin. And my advice to myself was, “Take it easy, kid. Don’t procrastinate, but don’t beat yourself up too much. Things will work out.”
Some of the students had materialistic goals in the future (I wasn’t the only one with an European house, or with a fancy car), but many others wrote very inspiring things that I wish I could write here, things like “Use the reality you see now to build the future,” “Finish studying” and even “Be kind to Mom and Dad.” This was only an hour and 15 minute long class, and I had students thinking and writing, developing mental pathways and connections between the present and the past, what is real and what is imagined, and I truly enjoyed seeing that happen.
So I guess the opening quote from the article is dead-on:
“One use of the journal is to extend or explore your thinking in order to construct your own knowledge. Rather than simply restate or rehearse ideas shared in a course, you’re using the journal to reformulate and reflect on ideas in your own words. In that way, you’re assimilating these ideas into what you already know and believe . . . “
Richard Beach
