The work of teaching writing - Joseph Harris 2020

What can that mean?
Beginnings

I find it telling that one of the terms most often used to describe writing assignments is prompt. The word suggests that an assignment is something a student moves away from—and thus that the task of the teacher is simply to give their writing a nudge or a push, to get the ball rolling, the words flowing. This would seem to gainsay the idea that writing worth doing might have its roots in a set of questions, problems, ideas, or texts that students and teacher return to and think through together. You prompt an actor or politician to deliver a line or a singer or musician to perform a song. But you draw someone into a conversation, an exchange. As a teacher, I don’t want to prompt students, I want to talk with them. It strikes me as a bleak irony, then, that we should describe the act of asking students what they think as a cue for them to perform, a prompt.

This is, of course, much what I have just argued in chapter 1—that the flaw of the dead poets and wonder boys as teachers is that they inspire and exhort but do not reply. Teaching writing involves more than assigning it. A good assignment needs to be more than a simple prompt. And yet . . . there is still the question of how to begin. In a celebrated 1985 essay, David Bartholomae suggests that a key task facing students as they enter college is one of “Inventing the University” as writers, of learning the distinctive moves and strategies of academic writing and making them their own. (Think of Rita as she revises her essay on staging Ibsen.) Bartholomae goes on to argue that the defining stance of the academic writer is oppositional, that these writers position themselves in some way against what is commonly thought or said. As teachers we thus need to find ways of helping students not to repeat what the culture has told them but to gain a critical distance from its maxims. This is an upbeat take on what many other commentators have noted less approvingly—namely, that academics often seem to use deliberately arcane language to set themselves apart from everyone else. But whether academic writing is seen as critical and oppositional or as obscure and elitist, the question remains of how you begin to make it your own.

That question is the focus of this chapter. How do students make the leap from one kind of writing to another? To find out, I look at four accounts of students trying to write their ways into the academy: David Mamet’s 1993 Oleanna, Alan Bennett’s 2006 The History Boys, Bel Kaufman’s 1964 Up the Down Staircase, and Sapphire’s 1996 Push. Bennett, Kaufman, and Sapphire offer hopeful stories of learning to write. The History Boys follows a group of suburban British schoolboys who must navigate the conflicts among their teachers as they prepare to write their university entrance exams. Up the Down Staircase shows a set of urban teenagers who slowly become more fluent as writers while their young teacher also struggles to find her own voice within a maze of bureaucratic demands and constraints. Push shows a young woman who, with the help of a remarkable teacher, battles horrific obstacles to learn how to write. In each of these works, new possibilities of writing are opened up. But in David Mamet’s Oleanna, they are slammed shut. A student is silenced; a professor is impugned. Let me begin here by asking how that happens and what we can learn as teachers from Mamet’s cautionary drama.

What can that mean?

Oleanna dramatizes a teacher-student relationship as it careens from bad to awful. The play begins with an undergraduate student, Carol, sitting in the office of her professor, John, who is talking on the telephone. Carol has come to ask John about her grade in a course she is taking with him. She is doing poorly, perhaps failing, and repeatedly asks John to re-explain ideas and terms from his lectures. Self-absorbed and distracted, John often talks over Carol as she fumbles to speak and breaks off their conversation several times to answer the phone. Finally taking note of her increasing anxiety, John suggests a “deal” in which the two of them will start the course over, with Carol getting an automatic “A” on the condition that she comes to meet with him several times in his office (25). When this proposed deal fails to calm her, John tries to put his arm around Carol, who moves away from him. The first act ends with seemingly nothing resolved between them.

The second act begins with John asking Carol to withdraw a formal accusation of harassment she has made to his tenure committee. The two are once again in his office, but Carol has become far more composed. She now corrects John and refers to a mysterious “group” whose concerns she represents (51). When it becomes clear that their conversation is going nowhere, Carol tries to leave his office but is restrained by John. The act ends with her shouting at him to let her go.

The third and final act of the play shows John shamed and bedraggled. He has been dismissed from the university and lost his bid on a house. For the last several days, he has been sleeping in a hotel. Meeting with Carol for a last time in his office, he learns from her that when he does return home, he will face criminal charges for attempted rape. But now Carol offers him an “exchange” (72). If John agrees to have his own book removed from university reading lists, her group will withdraw its charges. Enraged, John attacks Carol, beating her and throwing her to the floor but stopping just at the point of rape, shouting “I wouldn’t touch you with a ten-foot pole” (79). The play ends.

Oleanna was first produced in 1992 against the backdrop of the Clarence Thomas/Anita Hill hearings and campus debates over free speech and political correctness.² At that moment, it seemed clearly and almost exclusively a play about sexual politics, as critics and audiences debated over who was the real victim: John or Carol. This clearly remains an issue in the age of #MeToo. But viewers have also begun to see the play as a parable about the politics of language and teaching.

This newer perspective improves the play. Mamet’s take on sexual politics is clumsy and exaggerated, as with each act Oleanna falls deeper into melodrama. Carol’s transformation from an insecure student in the first act to a forceful accuser in the second is implausible; her gnomic references to her “group” are comically sinister. Meanwhile, John seems to be learning how to speak like a man in a David Mamet play, shifting from fastidious academic jargon at the start of the drama to shouted expletives at its close. But however real his flaws as a teacher may be, they do not merit the harshness of Carol’s accusations. And however exaggerated her charges may be, they do not justify his assault. Mamet sets up his audience much as Carol appears to set up John, seizing on a problematic exchange between a man and a woman, a teacher and a student, as a pretext for airing a set of grievances about gender politics.

But the actual setup is worth attending to. The first act of Oleanna offers a close and nuanced study of a failed conversation between a student and her teacher. Carol and John simply can’t figure out how to talk to each other. Much of this problem stems from John’s unwillingness to take Carol seriously—as a person and as a writer. Carol has come to John, she says, because she feels baffled by the language of his course (6). But while Carol actually pays very close, if at points perplexed, attention to the language John uses, he shows almost no interest in her attempts to speak or write—and in fact instructs her several times not to write. He seems unable to imagine that she might have something to say to him, and in failing to do so, he shuts her out of the very discourse he claims to teach. A few moments from the first act make this clear.

Oleanna begins with John speaking brusquely on the phone as Carol sits waiting, unable not to listen in on his personal conversation, which is about the details of a closing bid he and his wife are making on a house. The first words Carol speaks are to ask John about something she has just overheard him say: “What is a ’term of art’” (2). John replies with a tentative definition:

It seems to mean a term, which has come, through its use, to mean something more specific than the words would, to someone not acquainted with them . . . indicate. (3, original emphases)

This seemingly random exchange is, of course, deliberate, as the rest of Mamet’s play revolves around John and Carol’s inability to understand each other; they are, as it were, speaking different languages, using different terms of art.

Carol picks up on this gap immediately, telling John that while she takes notes in class and tries to do “what I’m told,” her problem is with “the language, the ’things’ that you say” (6). When John dismisses her worries, patronizingly telling her she is “an incredibly bright girl” (7), Carol tries to explain that she comes a different socioeconomic class. But John barely allows her to get the words out. Instead, he picks up from his desk a paper Carol has written for him:

Sit down. (Reads from her paper.) “I think that the ideas contained in this work express the author’s feelings in a way that he intended, based on his results.” What can that mean? (8)

This flip response drives much of what follows. True, Carol’s sentence does not appear, on the face of it, to mean very much. She is struggling to write in a discourse she does not yet control. And all that she seems to have managed so far is to mimic something of the rhythm of academic prose, without yet being able to put those rhythms in service of an argument of her own. But still, John’s condescension is astonishing. As a teacher, he makes no effort to learn what Carol might be trying to get at in that sentence or in the rest of her essay. Instead, he dismisses her language as meaningless and then tries to fill in that void with his own words.

And so, when Carol pleads with him to “Teach me. Teach me,” John’s response is to turn not to her work but to his own, asking her to point to moments in his book that she doesn’t understand (11). This, predictably, leads nowhere. For Carol is still stuck on his scathing response to her paper. To say her writing has no meaning is to imply that she is stupid, she tells John. When he demurs, weakly, Carol insists that she actually agrees with him:

No, you’re right. “Oh, hell.” I failed. Flunk me out of it. It’s garbage. Everything I do. “The ideas contained in this work express the author’s feelings.” That’s right. That’s right. I know I’m stupid. I know what I am. (14)

Carol repeats almost these same words in the last lines of the play—at that point in response to John’s calling her a “little c**t” (79): “Yes. That’s right . . . yes. That’s right” (80). The intellectual violence at the start of the play prefigures the sexual violence at its close.

At the risk of riding a hobbyhorse, though, I’d point out that at this still early moment in their conference, Carol has offered John yet one more chance to respond to her work. If he really doesn’t think she’s stupid, then what advice can he give her about revising her paper? But instead, John once again decides to talk about himself, launching into a meandering story about his own struggles to learn. This digression does not inspire so much as vex Carol, who eventually steers the conversation back to its starting point—her worries about her grade. And then John makes the egregious mistake of proposing his “deal”:

Your grade for the whole term is an “A.” If you will come back and meet with me. A few more times. Your grade’s an “A.” Forget about the paper. You didn’t like it, you didn’t like writing it. It’s not important. What’s important is that I awake your interest, if I can, and that I answer your questions. Let’s start over. (25—26)

It’s hard to keep track of all the ways this proposal is a bad idea. It slights the intellectual work (whatever that may be) of John’s course and field. It mocks any sense of fairness. It denies any obligations John may have as a professor to his school and its standards. It is flirtatious and possibly coercive.

It also tells the student to be silent. Carol is not to work at her writing anymore; rather, she is to stop writing. John is strict on this point. When, as they begin to “start over,” Carol checks her notes, he instructs her not to (27—28). He restates this command a few moments later:

John: I spoke of it in class. Do you remember my example?

Carol: Justice.

John: Yes. Can you repeat it to me? (She looks down at her notebook.) Without your notes? I ask you as a favor to me, so that I can see if my idea was interesting. (29)

The job of the student is thus reduced to remembering and repeating. Indeed, John seems to suffer from what I’d call xenographophobia—a fear of the writing of others. John is proud of his own status as an author, eager to explain and add to what he has written in his book. But he will not discuss Carol’s “meaningless” paper. He will not permit her to make notes, he constantly interrupts her, and he answers his own questions. And to some degree, his fears prove justified. It is through writing that Carol goes on to ruin him.

In the first act Carol asks John for instruction in writing but instead gets something more like a sexual pass—an embrace and a proposal that they continue to meet in his office. But the second act centers on a written text John is forced to respond to: Carol’s complaint to his tenure committee. Threatened, John grows orotund. The act opens with him speaking at length about his love of teaching, his skills as a classroom performer, and his “covetous” pursuit of tenure (43—45). When he finally turns to the matter at hand, John begins, characteristically, by trying to evade what Carol has written:

I know that you’re upset. Just tell me. Literally. Literally: what wrong have I done you? (47)

Carol insists, however, that her answer is “in my report” (47), which John will thus need to read. And so he does, commenting in a professorial vein as he scans her text. His first response has a familiar ring:

I find that I am sexist. That I am elitist. I’m not sure I know what that means, other than it’s a derogatory word, meaning “bad.” (47, original emphasis)

But now Carol denies his authority over her writing. She tells John that he no longer gets to decide what a word or text can mean or not.

Carol: We do say what we mean. And you say that “I don’t understand you.”

/. . . . /

John: You see. You see. Can’t you . . . You see what I’m saying? Can’t you tell me in your own words?

Carol: Those are my own words. (49, original emphasis)

This is a powerful moment, if also a problematic one. John voices a suspicion shared in some way by many teachers—that while students may speak to us “in their own words,” the texts they produce are somehow less reliable or authentic. Let me quickly say that I think this is a disastrous view for a teacher to take, that we need instead to assume that the texts students write are as much—or as little—their own as the words they speak. But I also suspect that John’s xenographophobia is not uncommon among teachers. Students tend to be pliant and agreeable in person—as speakers and especially as listeners. It is tempting to think that when we talk with them in our classrooms or offices, they are presenting themselves to us as they really are. But the texts they write often seem intractable and maddeningly difficult to understand. How can it be that students who seem so bright and pleasant in person go on to produce papers that are so vague, flawed, and tendentious? Why don’t they just tell us what they think in their own words? Or why don’t we, as John proposes, simply dispense with writing altogether in favor of that welcome and easy sort of conversation that, as teachers, we are always routinely granted the pleasure of leading? Student writings disrupt our control over the smooth flow of talk in our classrooms. They force us to confront the thoughts and words of students in whatever unruly forms they may happen to take on the page rather than glide past them in conversation to the next comment or speaker.

And so, when Carol tells John that the words of her report are hers, she is insisting that he take her seriously as a writer, student, and person—that he respond to what she has to say. This moment would be more stirring, though, if it were clearer that she actually had written the report. For Carol has seemed to turn into an almost entirely different person in the second act of Oleanna. Where before she struggled to write a term paper for an undergraduate course, now she has evidently composed an articulate and damning report for a university tenure committee. And where before she seemed unsure about the meaning of familiar words like “hazing” (27), now she critiques John’s “protected” and “elitist” use of the term (52). She mocks his “taste to play the Patriarch in his class” and lectures him on his use of a sexist phrase—“to overlook it is to countenance that method of thought” (51). In short, she is suddenly and scarily in charge. To underscore this transformation, several productions of Oleanna, including the 1994 film version directed by Mamet, have Carol change from her undergraduate uniform of jeans and shirt in the first act into a kind of business suit in the second.

How do we explain this dramatic change in personality? One possibility is that Carol has been playing a deep game all along—that she entraps John in the first act with a pose of girlish insecurity as part of a deliberate plan to expose and shame him. But such a calculated scheme seems farfetched and unmotivated. What I find more plausible is that in seeking some way to explain what happened in John’s office, Carol has somehow stumbled upon her mysterious “group”—“the people I’ve been talking to” (54). This group seems to offer her two things that John does not—a sense of being listened to and a language to use in understanding her situation.

Unfortunately, this language—at least as Carol deploys it—proves as clichéd as John’s academic jargon. Throughout the second and third acts, Carol often seems to be reciting phrases she has just been taught—“paternal prerogative,” “protected hierarchy,” “a sexist tinge,” “removed from inclusion as a representative example of the university.” In repeating such shopworn phrases, she does not invent the university so much as ventriloquize one of its discourses. We hear her group speaking through her.

It seems reasonable to guess, then, that the group has also helped Carol write her report. And indeed, in the third act, Carol refers repeatedly to the list and statement she presents for John’s signature as something “we” have produced (71—73). She is thus twice denied a voice as a writer over the course of the play. John shows no interest in what she has to say, and the group exploits her as a mouthpiece. Near the end of the play, Carol shouts that what she wants is not revenge but “understanding” (71). Once again the —ing form is important. For Carol no longer wants, as she did in the first act, simply to understand John. She now wants to reach an understanding with him, to be heard and understood by him. But this never happens.

Mamet shows little empathy for Carol as a person. On the contrary, over the course of his play she becomes ever more a caricature—an aspiring academic feminazi in a business suit. Still, though, he draws a clear portrait of her vulnerability as a student, of her position outside of discourses that John and her group control. This power of teachers to accept or exclude has been seen as the real tension driving the play by several critics who read Oleanna as commenting on the aggression that lies just beneath the surface of much university teaching. For what can really be learned in a conversation whose unstated goal is to reaffirm the authority of one speaker over the other?

Drama scholar Lee Papa offers a quirky and revealing take on this problem in teaching in his 2004 article “Mamet’s Oleanna in Context.” Trying to help students in an Intro to Theater course see how John uses his authority as a professor to intimidate Carol, Papa stages a classroom reading of several scenes from Oleanna. What is peculiar, though, is that Papa decides to play John himself while asking a student he identifies as the “teacher’s pet” to take on the role of Carol. Not surprisingly, almost everyone in the class is made uncomfortable by this arrangement—especially Jenn, the young woman asked to act the role of Carol, who was required to rehearse scenes, in a disturbing mimicry of the action of the play, alone with her professor in his office. Papa is sensitive enough to realize that he overstepped boundaries with this exercise, but he also argues that it had two positive effects. Students who had until then seen John simply as the victim of a calculated setup, he tells us, now began to see how he is also a kind of intellectual bully. And Papa (2004, 228) himself began to recognize “the exploitative and exhibitionistic qualities of the performance—exploiting Jenn by asking her to rehearse this, exploiting the students by asking them to view it.” Ironically, much like John, the character whose flaws he aimed to demonstrate, Papa’s eagerness to be the star of his own classroom makes him deaf to the anxieties of his students. His article thus shows, perhaps more than he had hoped, how hard it can be to alter the power dynamics between teacher and student.

I think one way we might change those dynamics is through writing. When student texts are taken seriously, when a teacher becomes not only a lecturer of students but a reader of their work, when “what can this mean?” is heard not as a dismissal but as a question calling for response, then a new relationship between student and teacher becomes possible. The insight of Oleanna lies in its repeated suggestion that the conversation between John and Carol could have gone otherwise, that they might have talked with rather than struggled against each other. Among all the other questions it raises, then, the play poses an urgent, practical problem in teaching: How can we help students like Carol write their way into the university? This is a question taken up in its most literal form by Alan Bennett in his 2006 play The History Boys, which centers on a group of British schoolboys preparing to take the entrance exams to Oxford and Cambridge.