Axioms+and+Instigations

//This page contains a series of notions that I have gravitated toward, in 40 years of teaching writing. Taken together they form a kind of architectural framework for a pedagogical philosophy that I would describe as being radically simplistic. I think that in school students are often taught, in subtle and often unintentional ways, that writing is a certain sort of (schooly) thing that is done is a certain sort of (schooly) way for a certain sort of (schooly) purpose. This indoctrination seems to start in the middle elementary grades and gets progressively more severe as students progress through school, to the point where many high school students (and adults) feel not just that feel that writing is something that is not for them, or worse, that they hate it.//

//I'm reminded of an anecdote that I ran across in a book on art instruction. A university art professor was asked by his four-year-old daughter what his job was all about. He said, "I teach a class of adults how to draw." She looked at them incredulously and said, "You mean they forgot?!"//

//My thesis, briefly, is this: Writing is a natural activity, a self-expressive activity, an exploratory activity, with satisfactions and rewards that come from no other source. It is potentially a powerful and enjoyable and relevant self-teaching tool at every grade level and in every discipline. But somewhere along the line we teach kids to forget that, we make it into a compliance activity and we remove from it most of the things that make it most worthwhile. My mission is to enable students - and teachers - to recover some of the initial joy and energy and engagement that writing held for them before they arrived at school.//

//The "Axioms and Instigations" below are not intended to be taken at face value. Think of them as being provocations, invitations to a dialogue.//

You cannot teach anyone how to write. You can, however, create an environment in which students can __learn__ how to write.

Writing makes thinking visible.

Writing down first thoughts makes second thoughts possible.

Writing is a powerful self-instructional tool.

If what we do in school is not linked to what we care about and wonder about, if it does not arise from or connect to what we most care about, it won't stick, it won't be remembered, it won't matter.

Students are capable of far more than we give them credit for.

The practice of reading and the practice of writing have the potential to be mutually reinforcing. But that's not the way we usually teach them in school.

We ask students to distinguish between "creative writing" and expository writing. It's a false distinction. All writing is, or ought to be, creative. Exploratory. Investigative.

Revision begins with selection. Students should write more than they are asked to revise.

The teacher does not need to read and respond to everything a student writes.

If you know what you are going to write before you start writing, and you are successful in completing what you had intended to do, the result in all likelihood will be a merely adequate piece of writing. (Frost: "No surprise for the writer, no surprise for the reader.")

If you want to teach writing well, you need to be a regular writer yourself.

"I don't understand" and "I don't know" are non-helpful responses to the situation you are in. Can you phrase your lack of understanding as a question? Better to have good questions than good answers. (Chekov: "Only the individual who has never written and never dealt with images can say that there are no questions in his sphere, just a solid mass of answers...You are right to demand that an artist take a conscious attitude toward his work, but you confuse two concepts: resolving a question and posing a question correctly. Only the second is required of the artist. In //Anna Karenina// and //Onegin// not one question is resolved, but you are satisfied solely because all the questions in them are posed correctly.")