The work of teaching writing - Joseph Harris 2020

A mean socratic method
Work in progress

But these are not necessarily the goals of every writing teacher. For instance, in The Plural I (1978), William Coles describes a class that seems quite deliberately no fun at all. Coles is an unusual figure in that he was not so much a novelist who taught composition (there are plenty of those) but a composition teacher who wrote novelized accounts of his courses. The Plural I is a detailed, class-by-class account of a required writing course Coles taught in the late 1960s at Case Western Reserve University. Coles required his students—all science majors, all men—to write a short essay for each of the thirty meetings of the course. He tells us that he has reproduced the assignments and student essays featured in the book exactly as they were written; the rest is, in his words, a “novelistic account of teaching and learning” (4). Each of the thirty chapters dramatizes a class meeting. Each of those classes focuses on a couple of student papers written in response to the latest assignment Coles has given. The assignments are sequenced to prod students to think in increasingly complex ways about what it means to be a professional or an amateur. The student essays are always discussed anonymously, even though their authors are sitting in the room. And so each chapter of the book shows us Coles aggressively leading his class in a conversation about the work they are all doing right then and there as writers.

The Plural I is the work of a curmudgeon. Coles constantly scolds and harangues his students, upbraiding them to pay closer attention to the particularities of the essays they are discussing (and writing). He is flatly not interested, as he says early on, in “Making Friends” (34). Rather, he wants students to give up a game he feels they have all learned to play only too well in school, in which the point of writing is to be clear and correct and to please the teacher, and instead to write in a way that expresses something of who they actually are, of their own voice or style. For Coles, though, forming a style is less a matter of letting go, of freeing yourself up, than of resisting influence and convention. Originality results from struggle. Like Roman in All Is Forgotten, Coles is suspicious of reducing writing to technique; unlike Roman, he believes most of us are capable, if pushed, of doing something more.

And push is exactly what Coles does, over and over. His encounters with students in The Plural I are true bludgeonings. Here, for instance, is an exchange from early in the term. The class has just read a student essay defending the role of the amateur in a world of professionals. It’s a competent yet vapid piece, the kind of thing that could be written by almost anybody. Coles begins by asking students to comment on the voice they hear in the writing:

No one, of course, had any idea of what I was talking about.

“I think he proves his point pretty well here.”

“Yep,” I said. “No question. It’s well-organized. It’s Clear, Logical, and Coherent. It’s neat. Is that what you mean?”

“Well, yes.”

“OK. But could we let that kind of talk ride for a minute? Would you mind taking up the question of who’s talking in the paper?”

He just looked at me.

“Or isn’t that part of the game?” I said.

“I don’t know what you mean.”

“I didn’t cross you up, did I? I didn’t get out of the mold with all that business about voice? You know, the English Teacher mold?”

“I’m not sure . . .”

“Look. Read the first two sentences of the first paragraph out loud. Just read them out loud.”

He did.

“’It is somewhat irrational,’” I said. “How much is ’somewhat,’ would you say?”

“I guess he could be a little more concrete there.”

“’A little more concrete.’ My God. Look, how old do you think the writer of those two sentences is pretending to be?”

“How old?”

“Well how big then? Do you think he’s really the size of the Jolly Green Giant?” (21)

The conversation goes on, with Coles continuing to badger his students to admit what he is convinced they can all already see—that this writer, like almost everyone else in the class, was simply writing to fill up the page, to get the assignment over and done with, and thus that his voice, to the degree that he has one, is an attempt to sound smart without really doing much thinking. Coles will have none of that. Class after class, he hectors and cajoles students to distinguish between the glib and the thoughtful.

In the class meetings that follow, Coles offers praise sparingly but not begrudgingly. A good sentence or two over the span of an essay is noted as an achievement. The quality of the student writing improves, and even more, so does the quality of their discussion. Notice how, in the conversation I’ve just quoted, Coles leaps on the tentative comment of a student in the class—“’A little more concrete.’ My God”—with a vehemence equal to his criticisms of the anonymous essay they are discussing. That sort of battering diminishes as the term goes on and as students learn to read for the unexpected, self-reflective phrasings Coles values as a sign of individual voice.

The Plural I is a hard book to categorize. Coles was a teacher of college composition, and his book is addressed to fellow comp teachers. (He was one of my senior colleagues when I taught at the University of Pittsburgh in the 1990s.) He speaks in his own voice throughout and claims to be working with documents written by actual students. But his aims seem less scholarly than novelistic. He does not, that is, try to present data about teaching collected in any sort of rigorous manner or to argue for a certain theory of writing. Rather, as he puts it, he is interested in “the actual doing, on how a given theory of rhetoric or approach to the teaching of writing feels as an action” (3). Like a novelist, he hopes to offer insight, not fact. It thus seems to me that The Plural I is best read as fiction—as an attempt to evoke the lived experience of a certain kind of intellectual work.

In The Plural I, that work takes place not in the library or at a typewriter but in the classroom. It shows Coles actively thinking through a set of texts with students, not simply presenting information to them. And it suggests the extraordinary level of effort and focus involved in returning, class after class, paper after paper, to the question of how a particular writer creates, or fails to create, a sense of their own voice on the page. Coles drives his students relentlessly and works himself even harder. Exertion serves as proof of caring, of seriousness. The Plural I offers the best sustained account of teaching as intellectual work that I know of. It is also clearly a book written by an obsessive. The Plural I doesn’t make me want to teach like Coles. But it does suggest what it would feel like to bring his kind of intensity, rigor, and creativity to the writing classroom.

The weakness of The Plural I has to do with its portrayal of students. There’s no question about Coles’s commitment to his students as writers; he quotes and analyzes dozens of their texts. But we’re never offered backstories for any of the students, and all of their essays are discussed anonymously. In addition, Coles rarely identifies the other speakers in class by name, and much of the dialogue in the novel has a wooden feel. So we are left trapped, as it were, inside Coles’s head, his version of the class.

I suspect that Coles himself felt this as a limit, since in a later book, Seeing through Writing (1988), he essentially reverses this emphasis. Seeing through Writing is clearly fictional—although its aims are also more plainly didactic than those of The Plural I. (Coles intended the book to be used in college composition courses.) The novel tracks the efforts of several students to respond to a sequence of assignments (only twelve this time) exploring the question of what it means to really “see” something. Ironically, the author of this sequence, a teacher nicknamed the Gorgon, is never directly seen or heard from except in the words of his assignments and in remarks repeated and puzzled over by his students. And in sharp contrast to The Plural I, the novel does not include a single classroom scene. Instead, each chapter depicts students at work outside of class on the assignments set for them by the Gorgon—drafting, revising, outlining, note taking, arguing, procrastinating, pondering, responding to each other’s writing. They are shown in study groups, pairs, and alone. And they all have histories or at least pocket bios—the math whiz, the mom returning to school after years spent raising kids, the addict in recovery, the college girl who still loves The Wizard of Oz, and so on. But the narrative thread of the novel soon becomes hard to follow, as the focus of each chapter shifts unpredictably from one student to the next. And on top of that, the book is visually over-complicated—using several typefaces to set off the Gorgon’s assignments, excerpts of published works, typed student essays, and footnotes from the main text of the novel and then adding to that mix of fonts still more reproductions of handwritten essays, notes, and comments on papers.

I admire the experiment, but in the end this layering of texts fails to make up for a set of earnest and flat characters. The Gorgon remains by far the most interesting figure in the novel, perhaps because everyone else in it spends so much of their time trying to interpret the aims of his labyrinthine assignments and the meanings of his cryptic utterances. And I suspect that Seeing through Writing might have been a more interesting novel if it didn’t try to be a textbook at the same time. (The idea was that actual students would also write in response to the Gorgon’s assignments and compare their efforts with those of the characters.) Still, Coles’s work remains an unusual and intriguing attempt to use fiction to teach academic writing.

Alison Lurie’s deft and moving first novel, Love and Friendship (1962), offers a cautionary backdrop for reading Coles. Love and Friendship tells the story of Emily, a young woman slowly falling out of love with her husband, Holman, an instructor of writing at Convers College. Holman is part of the teaching staff of Humanities C, a course that is clearly based on English 1—2 at Amherst College, where Coles taught for several years at the start of his career. Headed for decades by a legendary taskmaster, Theodore Baird, English 1—2 influenced the work of many noted teachers of writing. Its structure provided the template for the course in The Plural I—students wrote for every class meeting, responding to a series of questions centering on problems of definition. (The terms and concepts at the center of the class changed each year.) In Love and Friendship, Emily describes the course as “conducted by a kind of mean Socratic method” (18), in which teachers refuse to provide answers to any of the questions they pose, on the theory that students will only learn how to write through formulating those answers on their own.

But this is not to say that the questions allow for a range of responses. Rather, as Emily puts it:

“The meaning of this word (or line) depends on the other words (or lines) which surround it at the time I use it,” was the basic answer to the current set of questions, but the students had to find this out for themselves, and nobody was allowed to tell them. (18)

Bright but jobless and bored, Emily asks Holman to share the assignments he writes for Humanities C with her in the evening as they have drinks together, and she tries to figure out what the desired response would be. The result is that the two slip into an unfortunate parody of classroom talk, with each statement Emily makes met by a question from her husband:

“Well, but. Oh, I see. If you want to put it that way. Is that what I’m supposed to say? That the photograph is a kind of map?”

“What do you mean by a ’kind of map’?” (20)

This is, of course, no way for two adults to talk with each other. The more Holman retreats into the peculiar discourse of Humanities C, the more Emily draws away from him. The rest of the novel explores the consequences of this widening emotional gap between them with considerable insight and finesse.

Love and Friendship suggests that when taken outside the classroom, the habits of talk promulgated by courses like Humanities C may actually become destructive. (This is also the thrust of Wit, Margaret Edson’s fine 1999 play about a literary scholar facing terminal cancer.) The sort of course described with skepticism by Lurie and with enthusiasm by Coles proceeds with a calculated aggression. The classroom becomes a kind of surgery, as old ways of thinking and writing are rooted out so new ones can take their place. There is no move to make the classroom a space of equals; the teacher is always several steps ahead. The appeal of this approach lies in its intellectual rigor and sense of mission, and for those reasons I was much drawn to Coles when I first started teaching. But the mode of address throughout his writing is always that of master to disciple. He thus has little to suggest about how people might talk together as equals about writing.