I just had the best paper conference with a wonderful student. Dan, if you read this, you'll know it's you, since I'm writing about sixty seconds after our conference, but I'll leave your last name out in case you're embarrassed by my frank description of your awesomeness.
Anyway, Dan's a kid I had last year for 10th grade and again this year for Research & Literature, and he's consistently been the kind of student you want in a class. He's always engaged, always prepared, and always enthusiastic about what he can learn in a class. One key thing that makes Dan great is that he wants to be good at understanding literature and at writing, and he wants good grades to come out of that mastery. He doesn't get confused on and focus on the grade itself.
Dan is already a strong writer, and as he says himself, he's good at structuring a paper and having it make sense. What he's struggling with, as all good writers do, is making a real revelation about a text when he writes an analytical paper. He can make strong, evidence-based points in a clear, structured way, but he doesn't always feel that his insights are deep enough.
He asked to conference this morning about his Death of a Salesman paper, and we talked about changing his approach. Usually, he decides on a direction and pulls quotes into the paper as he writes. Since he's a clear and effective writer, he gets a strong paper with this method, and it's a perfectly good way to write an analytical paper. However, (and here's the great bit of the morning that led me to write this post), he's not satisfied to repeat a moderately successful process over and over. He wants to shake it up and write a paper that's more than strong. He wants it to be clear and effective, to be sure, but he also wants his paper to be deep and insightful.
So, we talked it over, and this time, he's going to start with the direct evidence (the key quotations from his notes on the play) and he's going to try to pull his paper's direction from careful, nuanced reading of the subtleties of character he finds there. I cautioned him that letting the words of the play drive his ideas might make a mess at first, and that even if he has trouble structuring that mess, he should count it as a victory. With his strong skill at organizing his writing, he may be able to pull together deeper, messier insights into a clear structure, but he may also struggle, and he should be very happy if he has serious problems.
Sometimes, in writing, you need to abandon what has worked fairly well in pursuit of something that may work better, and you need to be able to recognize that failures along the way can actually be signals that your new approach is doing what it's supposed to do.
What a wonderful way for both of you to go into the weekend. I love the idea of getting messy with the writing as an avenue to a new approach. I've been doing some of my own writing and messing around with transitions and while the piece isn't as neat and refined as I like to produce it's much more playful and has a great tone.
ReplyDeleteI agree with Beth. I think it's great that your student wants to learn a new approach to his writing.
ReplyDeleteI also find it interesting because I was having an almost opposite experience with some of my students Friday afternoon. I was giving extra help on solving quadratics (they have a test Tuesday) and the problem in question would have been most efficiently solved by using the "square rooting method". The student immediately asked me which method she should use but instead of telling her I asked her to start solving it the way that seemed to jump out at her. After she finished solving it (she chose square rooting) she asked if she used the right method. We talked about how each step she made was valid and she got an answer so it appeared that her method was correct. That answer was not good enough for her...she wanted to know if it was the correct way to solve it. I felt like she was missing the point. She seemed more interested in picking the way "the teacher said to do it" instead of realizing that it wasn't about what I wanted, but what worked. Does that make sense?
Anyways, kudos to your student!
@Nickie: I think that's a really common problem. So much of school pushes kids towards the "official" way of thinking about something and undervalues the creative and personal yearning we naturally have. I usually have the opposite experience too. Kids learn a format of writing a paper that has worked relatively well, and they really resist throwing any of it out in the pursuit of something better.
ReplyDeleteThey also come to conference and really want to know where they should go with a piece, as if I have the official, sanctioned interpretation of a given text and I'm simply withholding it from them.