At one point in life I ran from my position as a Disability Advocate because the burden of responsibility overwhelmed me. Every time I lost a case I felt like a failure. People looked for me to save them, to change their lives, to make something positive out of one kind of catastrophy or another. It was too much. I fell into my books and swore I'd never be responsible for someone else's survival again. I was wrong.
Most MFA in English graduates eventually look to teaching as a way to shore up their income while developing as a writer, and most first time English Instructors are given Developmental Writing classes to teach. For me, it was a matter of once again shouldering the great cloak of responsibility for someone's surival. Developmental Writing students didn't or couldn't pass the essay assessment for college level writing and pay full price to take a class which gives them no college credits and which they must pass in order to move on to College Composition, which is a requirement for any individual obtaining an Associates Degree. Developmental Writing covers the most basic building blocks of writing -- sentences, paragraphs and essays laid out in a logical sequence using grammar correct enough to not detract the reader from the meaning of the writing. It's what every student should have learned in high school, but many didn't.
My class was made up of working adults trying to support families while going to school, housewives trying to take classes during or after raising children and caring for homes, and men and women who had completed military service and were now looking to complete their education. Many of them had been laid off of jobs and were looking for careers. Over half had been born in another country or been raised by parents born in another country and not fluent in English. Others might as well have been born in another country since their language was an urban vernacular that blended street talk, English and idioms from multiple populations of diverse languages. All of them were giving up three hours on Thursday night plus multiple hours studying during the week to learn in 15 weeks what they hadn't learned in 20 to 45 years; all of them were driven by a firm resolve to succeed.
Four members of my class were well spoken professionals who fell apart every time I said the words quizz, exam or test. It wasn't hard to figure out what had happened when they wrote their assessment essays in the first place. One had had a nervous break down when he tried to go to college the first time -- something he confided in me one night after class when I was trying to drill home the basics of a paragraph outline and he broke down. Another student, a lovely French speaking woman who had raised her family while her husband obtained his PhD, confided in me that her husband had laughed at her when she enrolled in the class, saying, "What are you doing that for? You know you can't pass."
There were stories -- heartrending stories -- that came to me in written form, bared in simple paragraphs and essays while each individual struggled to remember what verbs and subjects are and how to stay in one tense. And they were my peers -- people who worked everyday in responsible positions. Professions represented: housewife, pre-school teacher and vocalist, electrician, army sharp-shooter, police officer, surgical technician, loan officer, elementary school developmental aide, physical fitness instructor, plumber, and two gentlemen who had worked in some type of technical field and been laid off. One of those was from India and had completed college there but needed an American degree and the other was a brilliant man from Albania who had spent years as an illegal alien before obtaining his US citizenship. The student from Albania could speak five languages.
Countries represented: India, Africa, Jamaica, Albania, Trinidad, Harlem and Philidelphia. If you don't think Harlem and Philidelphia should be in the list, spend some time helping students struggle with English and you'll change your mind. Some individuals from various parts of our cities speak a very different form of English and struggle when they attend college. That conversation, the one about our schools and what they teach, or rather, don't teach, is for a different post.
The barriers my students had to overcome were humbling. I received essays about illegal immigration, alcoholic parents, parents who were imprisoned for drug abuse and physical abuse of their children, teenage pregnancy, cancer survival, controlling husbands, and clinical anxiety. But I also received essays about faith and family, wisdom obtained through maturity, and great determination. If I were a psychology major it would have been a fantastic study in the resilience of human nature. As an English major, it was overwhelming. I am thankful for all those years working in disability and welfare. I was at least somewhat prepared to balance multiple backgrounds and experiences and to give much deserved respect to the students who were so honest and forthcoming.
So, back to the topic of feeling responsible. As each student put their life story on paper and spoke to me in private, I felt that mantle of despair falling like lead on my shoulders. It was up to me to give them the tools to succeed. They were willing to do their part; I was obligated to do mine. Fifteen three hour sessions hardly seemed like enough time to provide so much knowledge, no matter how dedicated the individuals in my class were.
As a teacher, I faced a different type of barrier. Like many writers, I had never had to work at the English language. It came naturally to me, like drinking water or eating food. Before I ever went to school I was reading Longfellow, Wadsworth, Whitman, and many more of the great writers. In junior high school I hid Shakespeare behind my text book during history class like other kids hid comic books. My first poem was published when I was 10 years old. It is very difficult to explain something you've never gone through the process of learning. I, too, had to study for Developmental Writing, only I was studying methods of defining verbs, subjects, pronouns, punctuation and tenses. I learn in huge blocks, not in individual bricks. When I was in school, teachers would lecture and and on and I would be waiting for the punch line; until I had the whole picture nothing made sense. Now, as the instructor for Developmental Writing, I had to break everything down into little, tiny steps and help students build, one brick at a time. For me, it was a new way of thinking.
I am a firm believer in learning by doing. I believe that people learn through sight, sound and muscle memory, so everything has to be seen, heard and done. We always started with grammar. I would assign a reading on nouns, review the information in class and have them do the exercises in their workbooks in a round-robin style in the classroom. What I found out is that reading about nouns, if you don't know anything about them in the first place, doesn't seem to help. The same goes for placing commas, beginning and ending quotes with quotation marks and staying on subject when you write. My plan to break class into one hour of grammar review, one hour of paragraph discussion and one hour of writing fell apart. I had no idea that the simple sentence is the hardest concept to learn for people who have been speaking but not reading for a lifetime. Class changed. I, the instructor who had promised at the beginning of the semester not to lecture, lectured. I wrote on the board, starting with the most simple sentences possible, and we identified a subject and a verb. As soon as a phrase that also had a subject was introduced, half the class honestly couldn't answer when I asked who or what we were talking about. We were one third of the way through the semester when I gave a grammar test and 50% of the class failed it. That was my darkest hour. I was sure that I couldn't teach in any way that would be affective. I informed my class that we were going to spend a lot more time on grammar and started from scratch.
Another thing I learned was that, even in this day and age of technology, very few people in the class knew how to use a computer to write. Even those who were computer savvy didn't know how to format a paragraph in wordprocessing. Many did not have computers of their own. The first writing assignments were often handwritten and on one occassion I received a paragraph that had been written on a cell phone and texted. For that reason nearly half of our scheduled classes were held in the computer lab.
I rearranged my thinking on class organization. We wrote first, I reviewed and commented on their work, and then we reviewed the writings together, going over each grammatical error as a group. As the class worked together, they started really talking about the errors, challenging my revision suggestions and asking more questions about similar sentences. I had to be careful about how much was revealed because as the students got to know me they started writing those wonderful, painful, personal paragraphs and essays. Often I would ask permission to share a sentence because it was so perfectly expressed, and often I would warn a student that I was going to use something they had written as an example of what not to do. That system, the forewarnng system, broke down a lot of barriers. As I introduced the idea of workshopping and peer review, they were willing to share their work with each other because the idea had already been implemented. By the end of the semester the students were turning to each other spontaneously to ask opinions and share ideas. I believe that sense of being "in it together" and supporting each other made a huge difference.
As the semester drew to a close I panicked. I was convinced that each person had given 100% and that I, being new and still struggling with strategies, had let them down. In one class as I, once again, pointed out the lack of articles (a, an, the) in a piece written by the man from India, he threw his pencil at his book. The teacher/singer started coming to class with such a quiet, sad attitude that I asked what was wrong, at which point she spouted, "I hate this class! I hate it! I cry all the way here!" We went through her completed paragraphs so I could show her how much progress she had made and assure her that she was succeeding. We did get past the class drop deadline without her quitting, but just barely.
What I couldn't share was that I, too, was in a panic. The average success rate in Developmental Writing is 50% and I knew I couldn't accept that result for this wonderful, handworking group of students. There wasn't one person in the class that didn't have something huge at stake in their own mind, including the high cost of the class and books. I tried to take an objective look at the work that had been done so far and at the essential mile stones required. That led to one of the hardest conversations I had to have all semestser. I had to let the gentleman from India know that he could, but most likely wouldn't, pass the class. He just didn't have enough understanding of the English language. We talked about ESL (English as a Second Language) and he told me that his wife was in an ESL class and when he saw the material it was so simple he thought it was a waste of time. I showed him the college ESL books and his eyes widened. "Yes, that would help," he said. His understanding of paragraph and essay organization was perfect and I told him that. I suggested he take the ESL class and then request to be retested for Composition rather than go through Developmental Writing again. I was relieved when he seemed to accept what I was telling him.
For all of the students, I started arriving earlier and earlier, and staying later and later. Security guards and cleaning people developed the habit of stopping by to see if I was alright and to ask when we would be done. An hour before class time students would start arriving in the room and at the end of every class students lined up to ask questions. Our three hour class became a five hour class and then some. Paragraphs and essays were written and revised and written and revised and written again.
Because I was a new teacher, the Assistant Dean periodically reviewed the student portfolios. Approximately three quarters of the way through the semester she asked, "How do you know they are writing these? Some sound like they could be copied from something." I assured her that, for the most part, the writing was being done in class, but I knew that if all or most of my students passed they would be under scrutiny and so I built what I hoped was a fool-proof plan to verify each written piece was an original.
First, each student wrote an essay, built around a paragraph they had submitted earlier and chosen by me. They worked the first draft together, following an outline I had provided. They rewrote the essays according to what had been discussed in class and turned them in. I made revision suggestions and had them rewrite them again until every student at turned in a credible essay.
In the next to the last class we met in the computer lab and I had every student free-write an essay on a topic I chose. I was surprised and dismayed to find out that four of them caved under the pressure. One of the best writers in class sat at the computer and cried -- she couldn't write spontaneously. Two others couldn't write with any noise in the room, and one had to hand write her outline before she could type. She didn't finish the essay. The Indian gentleman simply sat there until I asked him questions that served as prompts. I was more worried than ever about their ability to write an essay in class that was indicative of what they had learned throughout the semester.
The last day of class is often a general rehashing of the semester and carries an easy work load. My students didn't have that luxury. I was determined they would be prepared for the final exam -- a full essay, written in the computer lab without the benefit of discussion or revision. I handed out a list of five topics to choose from for their final and gave them the class period to write their outline. They had to finish the full outline, take home a copy to help them prepare for the exam and give me a copy. For the final, they were allowed to use the outline as given to me that day and grammer worksheets we had covered in class. There could be no extra notes and no extra books on their desks. I hoped with all my heart that having a week to think about what they were going to write would remove the stress related to free-writing and exams in general. I also needed proof that they had formulated the essays themselves.
What I wear to teach has laughingly been callled my uniform. My students, particularly the African- American ladies, had had a great deal of fun at my expense talking about my limited fashion sense. Every class day I appeared in jeans, a turtleneck and a blazer, all in muted tones of navy and brown. One student went as far as to comment that she would hate to have my wardrobe. Since two of my strongest fashion critics also happened to suffer from exam anxiety, I decided to help break the tension by providing a diversion. I showed up for the final in a red dress and pumps, with my hair styled and my finger nails polished. It worked. As the students arrived in the computer room they laughed, commented, complimented, and in a couple of instances even applauded. My unexpected appearance was a perfect stress reliever. Even the men made a point of saying how nice I looked.
If I ever decide teaching is the wrong road for me I might take up relationship building. As students finished their essays and left, they hugged, shook hands, took contact information. It was amazing to me to hear them express such warmth and appreciation of each other. Several stated that they would miss this class. As they left I felt, even more accutely, the burden of helping them move on through a successful final exam. Did I fail? How many would be notified that they hadn't made the cut and so could not move on? When the last paper was turned in and I gathered the files I felt physically drained and a little ill.
I couldn't sleep that night. It was too late to grade papers and I was too emotionally charged to be objective. I finally put myself to sleep after midnight with a healthy dose of brandy and NCIS. I was back up at the crack of dawn and on my way to the faculty resource room where I would grade the essays, have them reviewed by the Assistant Dean, and enter final grades on the omputer system.
The essays were surprising good. Some were so good, as a matter of fact, that the Assistant Dean looked up at one point and asked, "And you're absolutely sure they wrote these themselves? There was no way to cheat?"
"No way," I told her with absolute confidence. I outlined the process with her and she agreed that they had to have been written by the students.
There were funny errors -- a sudden move to past perfect by a student who struggled with tenses, a couple of run-on sentences from another student who had struggled with fragments and articles placed in front of every noun, whether it was needed or not, by the man from India. And there were essays that brought tears from the woman whose husband had told her she couldn't pass the class and the man from Albania. Beautiful, heart felt essays written in correct form and order, one after the other, making me proud, relieved, humble and happy.
I started out with nineteen students. Three withdrew without ever coming to class, three tested out and moved up to Composiiton at the beginning of the term, two were withdrawn by me for missing too many classes, and that left twenlve. Out of those twelve, eleven passed. Two finished with High Pass, indicating their work was above and beyond what was required. The Assistant Dean and two other more experienced English instructors debated about the essay by the student from India and finally determined that he had to be recommended for an ESL class. I am happy to say that that decision wasn't unanimous. I was present when one of the instructors argued that he had met the requirements and should be allowed to move up. The Assistant Dean insisted, probably correctly, that to pass him at this level without an ESL class was setting him up for failure in Composition I.
As I entered their final grades on the computer, I envisioned every face, every sigh of relief, every exclamation of excitement. By the time I left Delaware County Community College and headed home I was jubilant. I
was a teacher! I
was successful! That final exam was a test for me as much as it was a test for the students taking it. The burden that I had been carrying fell from my shoulders with a nearly audible "thunk." I was validated. I wasn't a failure. Most importantly, I hadn't let those wonderful people down -- the ones who had put their trust in me to teach them what they needed to know.
I will teach other classes. I will have students who don't care, who don't try, who don't throw everything into their work and who choose not to learn. This group of people who came together in my classroom was a blessing. As much as they were afraid they couldn't learn and were determined they would, I was afraid I couldn't teach and determined I would. We helped each other move on. When they passed, I passed. We rejoiced together. I will be forever grateful.
