Responding "yea" or "boo"

After reading the Anson chapter in McDonald, I wrote on my personal blog reactions to Leang’s piece. Leang is the student from Cambodia, and I found his account touching. As Elbow would say, I “liked” what he wrote. In fact, I cringed at the possible response that this was written to try to win teacher sympathy and an easy good grade. Yikes – this seems hard to imagine as a response when the voice of this writer sounded authentic and the story rang true. I guess one would need to know the student to know if this was a sympathy piece or authentic writing. But I was reminded of Leang’s essay when I read Elbow, p. 406: “Only if we like something will we get involved enough to work and struggle with it. Only if we like what we write will we write again and again by choice—which is the only way we get better.” Do I agree? As a student, I see it true for myself and classmates. If we work on papers that we do not like, do not like what we are doing, we have a hard time continuing the work. Sometimes I move from not liking a paper to liking it, and then really wanting to work more on it. However, if I never get over the “liking” hump, it is hard to care. It is then I am writing for a grade, for the assignment. Elbow’s comment about students needing to “like” what they write makes me think how we can help students like what they write. I suppose by trying what he suggests: freewriting, response from peers, response from teachers about what the teacher likes. This brings up the second point of “liking”: Teachers need to like student writing (and students). Recently in the course I teach, we read 9th graders’ four-paragraph essays over Of Mice and Men; neither the teacher nor the pre-service teacher evaluators liked the writing. Thus, a dilemma. How can teachers enjoy student writing if the writing is consistently bad or in the form of specified paragraphs? To return to Elbow’s suggestions, students need to write first about what they know and care about – themselves and their own chosen topics. Knowing your students helps, as he points out. Good writing teachers know how to talk about what they like within student writing, even if the writing is poor. I guess I liked this section of Elbow’s article because I found it affirming. I worked with some pretty reluctant and struggling student writers, yet most all of these students I really liked, and I always tried to find something to like about what they wrote. This was where analytic assessment vs. holistic assessment helped me. I could comment more specifically and find areas for work and areas for applause.
I asked in class last week what the role was for publishing in English 1000. I became a huge proponent of publishing student writing (reading aloud in class, sharing in small groups, creating a class anthology, publishing a class newspaper/newsletter, etc). I found the extra work provided students motivation through purpose and audience. They started to care that their work was good, and they started to choose the pieces of work that were their best. This became an authentic form of evaluation, I guess. It seems more difficult to have that kind of publishing opportunity in a college class because the time with the students is much less. Still, I wonder about the possibilities.