Wednesday

Thinking about things:

Good writing disturbs. It creates dissonance.1.

I am off to campus in a few minutes. To meet with my students for the last time this semester. They will turn in their portfolios with 15 pages of their most excellent writing on Friday at noon.

Today we will sit together and work hard to figure out how to revise their papers so that they will meet the University Composition Requirements. Each of these students will do his or her best to find and resolve the dissonances that are holding up his or her papers. I will help my students find them.

Finding and resolving dissonances is a metaphor I use to teach my students to take time to notice the places in their writing where there are incongruities, uncertainties about their ideas and arguments and evidence and so forth.

This revision they need to do will take lots of time and struggle and determination and discipline. It is hard to keep working on a paper, to see what is there, to decide what to do about it, and then to do it.

And just so you know, my students have read and written about some very important ideas. They have read beautiful words and sentences and paragraphs and chapters and entire novels and stand alone articles and examined how authors place their ideas amongst the word they choose to write. They have thought about author's ideas and placed their own ideas right next to them.

My students have read non-fiction and fiction by some very excellent writers who write about how people live their lives within particular circumstances and also about writing itself: Paulo Freire, Richard Rodriquez, Ernest J. Gaines, Harper Lee, E.B.White, Strunk & White, Sherman Alexie, Bartholomae & Pedrosky, Langston Hughes, Amy Tan, Brent Staples, Barak Obama, David Brooks and so on.

My students have written essays about dignity and integrity and compassion and justice and injustice and racism and bi-lingual education and public education and the power of language and how taking time to honor and understand other people's perspectives can bring about meaning making and change. And, perhaps the most important notion, about how to partake of the "pull between someone else’s authority and our own, between submission and independence...and how to define ourselves [and themselves]" within spoken and written texts" [1].

Teaching is such good work to do.

1. Nancy Sommers