Writing Lessons

Vicky Madden's New York Times essay "Why Poor Students Struggle" reminded me of my experience teaching at Lehman College in the Bronx.  It was one of the most thrilling episodes in a forty two year teaching career including stints at Yale, Stanford, and Boston University, thrilling because of the interesting observations I got to read on many of the interpretative essays I assigned my students to write.  But the other side of the coin was the hard work I put in reading and correcting these essays.  Most of my students were either foreign born or they were from disadvantaged New York City backgrounds where reading and writing were not part of their home life nor was the speaking of standard American English.  It was obvious that the New York City school system had not been much help in overcoming these obstacles.  So I devised a system in correcting the essays.  First, I was careful to read the work sympathetically, to meet the writer on his or her terms, and to append a critique of the ideas in the piece.  But then I systematically line proofed the piece, having asked that the student submit the paper typed with every fifth line numbered.  This way I could make easy reference as I typed out a response to the grammatical problems, the stylistic problems, vocabulary confusions, all the things that needed to be flagged in the writing of someone whose work was highly uneven and ill informed. Of course, I was also concerned to help each of them to identify and legitimate their idiosyncracies in writing that would make the writing their own. I generally struggled to hand back my corrective essays to the entire class at our next meeting, usually three or four pages to each of them.  Some grumbled, but others glowed with the understanding that they were being taken entirely seriously.  These were students who had not the first notion of how to write an essay, and if the reader put that fact aside, some of the texts were in their inchoate and stumbling way, filled with fabulous observations on the subjects assigned.  The three years I taught this course were constantly thrilling, if exasperating and headache making in the demands upon my time.  Sometimes there was a real laugh for me, as when a newcomer from Africa handed in something I immediately recognized as too polished to be other than entirely copied, and when I challenged him at the next meeting he cheerfully acknowledged this, saying he felt bad handing in something that would be crude and hard for me to read.  I remember those classes as thrilling for me as I participated in the awakening and discovery of the power of the English language and a self conscious writing style in people who did not know of these possibilities.  It remains one of the most treasured memories of my teaching career.