Teaching and Judging: More on Elbow

“We must teach ourselves and our students to have more than usual privacy in writing; and more than usual publicness.  Conventional teaching is just about as bad as it can be on both counts. Almost no privacy: everything a student writes is read by the teacher, (usually in a judgmental light); it's so bad that students have come to feel bad if you DONT collect what they write: to ask students to write and not collect it, you have to fight their resentment” (50).

This freewrite, or maybe we should call it a free-rant. is from Peter Elbow’s “Toward a Phenomenology of Freewritng,” and I want to use it to open what I hope will be an occasional series of posts on the question of how and why we give feedback on students’ writing. What are we aiming for? How do our assessment techniques help? How do they hurt? What processes or experiences have helped to make us better writers, and how might we us the classroom or our assignments to help foster something similar for our students?

In his essay, Elbow is trying to show how the practice of freewriting can help students access the conditions of writing that, in essence, make good writers. Here, he thinks about a kind of dual-mindset he sees as common among many good writers—a way of writing that is at once intensely private and audience-aware. He talks about this duality in terms of writers’ temperaments (he thinks many great writers deeply value their solitude but also love to perform, to ham it up, to be the center of attention) and habits (the great writers he knows carve out chunks of private time in which to write, yet they are often deeply connected to others). 

But here he is calling attention to a major paradox of the classroom. Good writing has to be, at least in part, intensely private; the classroom, at least traditionally, demands that the student hand in that writing—and not just to have someone read it, but to have someone (the teacher in this case) judge it.  In a sort of Foucaultian dynamic, he claims that students internalize a desire to be judged—to write as if someone is watching even when no observer is present.

Elbow’s answer is to train students to freewrite their way into a greater sense of privacy. Freewriting for him is at least in part a strategy that lays out a kind of judgment free zone in which the student can write through the false starts and junk til they achieve that kind of nirvana-type flow—that fire, that passionate compulsion in which no mode of recording one’s thoughts is fast enough to keep up—that characterizes the best writing moments Elbow and others describe. This is what good writing feels like, he says, and teachers (and the judgment they impose) are more likely to get in the way than to inspire this feeling.

And yet, our job as teachers (at least as teachers of writing, which I would argue we must be if we are to be teachers of literature) is also paradoxical: we want our students to become good writers, yet we also are required to judge them, at least in the form of a final grade, and more often in the form of grades throughout the term.  There are, of course, many ways to grade, to judge, to assess; in future posts I’ll discuss what I see as some pros and cons to some of the systems I have tried in my decades-long attempt to deal productively with this paradox. Most important, I have come to believe, is to set up assignments that are themselves process-oriented, and in which feedback on one assignment (or on a step of a multi-step assignment) can help the student do better work on the next iteration of the assignment. Whether or not grades are involved (more on this in the next post), using assessment to help the student do better in the future is the best  option I have found thus far.