I remember the first essay I wrote in the Master’s program as a process where I confronted several hurdles. Before entering the MAEE program here at Colegio, I had been out of the Department of English for more than a year. I had been taking Teacher Preparation classes, and my last year as an undergrad was spent taking classes in which the writing tasks were menial, almost. It was simply a matter of collecting materials already written, and elaborating objectives using Bloom’s taxonomy. So once I got here, back into my beloved Department of English, I had to really struggle to come up with a paper that didn’t begin with “Given enough practice on the given subject, Wilmarie will be able to . . .” There was research, there were active book discussions, enough work that I actually thought I wouldn’t be able to cope with the mixed efforts of both managing the groups I was teaching as a TA, and the three classes I was taking at the same time. I had to reinvent myself as a writer, and I realized that most of my writing skills hadn’t left me, but had been overshadowed, or oversimplified, as it were, mixed into what I did with my students, and the problem here was that my students were tenth graders.
I know my case isn’t the norm, that many other people are teaching basic school, and still manage to write scholarly papers. I don’t know what happened to me! But eventually, I woke up from this lethargic state and managed to come out on top by employing some strategies I never used before. As mentioned in class often, most of the time we don’t practice what we preach. We don’t highlight the thesis statement in out papers. We don’t free-write, pre-write, sketch a Venn diagram, or do any of the other silly processes we so eagerly teach our students every semester.
We don’t write the perfect five-paragraph essay.
But that is what I did, how I began regrouping my thoughts and ideas in order to come up with a cohesive paper. So yeah, I suppose I agree with the idea that writing is indeed a process, even if we don’t necessarily follow the guidelines and plans offered in our own teaching courses. We might not use outlines or graphic organizers, but very rarely is the first draft we write the final one we hand in. We cut stuff out, shuttle more stuff in, we add quotes, we subtract ideas that don’t fit in with the new directions our thoughts have taken. And that, in and of itself, is a process.
