Why Don't They Apply What They've Learned, Part I
By James M. Lang
For two years I taught in a special program in which the same cohort of students took two consecutive courses with me: freshman composition in the fall and introduction to literature in the spring. In the composition courses, I worked hard to help students move beyond the standard strategies they had learned in high school for writing introductory paragraphs: Start with a broad statement about life ("Since the beginning of time, people have been fighting wars ...") and narrow down to a specific topic.
In both years that I taught the two-course sequence, I was startled to see many students come back from winter break and—on their very first papers in the spring class—revert directly back to those tired strategies that I had worked so hard to help them unlearn in the fall.
One such student came into my office early in the spring semester to show me a draft of her paper, and it included a lame reverse-pyramid (i.e., general to specific) introduction. "You have to rewrite your introduction," I said to her. "Why aren't you using any of the introductory paragraph strategies we worked on last semester?"
She looked up at me in genuine puzzlement: "You mean that the stuff we learned last semester applies in this course, too?"
D'oh!...
Read the whole article here
I always enjoy reading your insightful and stimulating thoughts about teaching. But here's a (ok, maybe snarky) response/question about the specific problem you mention.
Is the problem specifically beginning with generalizations about *life*, or just the standard move from general to specific? If it's the former, then you can ignore the rest of this post.
But if it's the latter (general to specific as a rhetorical strategy) I wish more of my students would come in with a grip on it, because it's extremely useful and, I'd argue, educational.
In fact, let's see: you begin with "For two years I taught in a special program in which the same cohort of students took two consecutive courses with me:"
And then you move from cohort to more specific, many: "I was startled to see many
students";
And then you move to more specific with both numbers and time: "One such student
came into my office early in the spring semester."
This doesn't seem a tired strategy to me at all. It may not be the only strategy, but it's a very solid one. Could it be that the students were simply transferring the better rhetorical strategy?
My Own Take
Most of us have a tendency to think that we are fully aware of how we use language - how we speak and even how we write. This exchange, however, clearly exemplifies quite the opposite. We can make conscious decisions to choose the words and the expressions we use, to censor some while privileging others, but the organizational schema of our thoughts mostly remains below the level our consciousness. This is why Lang, in this very episode, is using the same organizational schema -from general to specific - he is indeed critiquing.
The teaching of writing calls for writing instructors to know the aspects of language that are used in a conscious manner and the aspects that are rather automatic and instinctive. While the former could successfully be subjected to prescriptivism, the latter, however, requires participation in discourse communities where the targeted forms are used. That said, in order for Lang's students to successfully use different models of introduction, it would not be sufficient that they merely be introduced to them. It requires participation in discourse communities where these models of introduction are used in a prolific way. Through participation and exposure, these models of introduction will become an integral part of the discourse of the students and will naturally appear in their writing.