27 Evan Walters – Lessons from Learning to Write and Lives on the Boundary

Lessons from Learning to Write and Lives on the Boundary

“What do you mean my thesis still isn’t argumentative?” I asked, my cheeks burning.

My mom took a deep breath. “Evan, remember—for a statement to be argumentative, someone has to be able to disagree with it.” She looked down at the paper I’d handed her a few moments prior. “Is anyone going to disagree with you that Holden is judgmental?”

“Well…” I searched for a straw to grasp but came up empty. I sighed. Time to make my fourth trip back to the kitchen table, where my notes lay strewn about under my dog-eared copy of The Catcher in the Rye.

My mom touched my arm. “Hey, you’re getting closer. Build on what you have! Why do you think Holden is so judgmental? That’s not so obvious. Look back through your annotations, come up with a theory, and I’ll take another look. Oh, and you misspelled judgmental—there’s no e after the g.”

In the time between when I was in seventh grade and my sophomore year of college, variations on this scene must have played out a hundred times. My mom involved herself deeply in my journey to becoming a competent writer, sometimes spending a dozen hours in a week reading the book I was studying, helping me brainstorm what to write about, assisting me in crafting an outline, and reviewing draft after draft of the resulting paper.

As I read Mike Rose’s Lives on the Boundary, I compared my journey developing as a writer with those of Rose and his students. Our experiences are quite different but, in my view, suggest some of the same conclusions: that learning is a vulnerable act that, when it doesn’t go according to plan, can provoke strong negative emotions that teachers must account for; that interpersonal relationships and one-on-one instruction can propel one’s education forward like little else; and that the most effective means of learning to write is actually writing—not studying writing’s mechanics. In this narrative, I will compare my experience learning to write with the experiences of Rose and his students. I will also reflect on how I want my writing journey, in conjunction with Rose’s insights, to influence my teaching philosophy and practice.

*****

“Evan, you’re still not addressing the whole prompt.”

My grip on the phone in my hand tightened. The autumn air did little to cool my fraying nerves. I looked back towards the well-lit interior of Hawthorne-Longfellow Library, trying to take a deep breath before I spoke.

“What part do you think I’m missing?” I asked.

I didn’t understand why this was such a struggle. I thought I’d moved past my previous challenges with writing to the prompt my teacher gave me. This issue hadn’t come up at all last year in AP English Literature with Mr. Small.

“Well, the prompt asks you to connect your analysis to India’s history, but I don’t see anything historical here,” my mom said. “It’s clear why you think Amul’s advertising is effective today, but I’m not getting anything about why it’s also been effective in the past.”

I felt frustration welling up inside me. She was right, and I was angry about it. I didn’t understand why I was getting upset with her—she was helping me! I remained quiet.

“Sweetie, are you okay? What’s the matter?”

“I don’t get why this is so hard!” I burst out. “I thought I was done struggling with prompts.”

My mom paused before responding. “Evan, hun, this is some of your first college writing. It shouldn’t be a surprise you’re having some difficulty. Now, go back into the library, take a deep breath, and try writing out in your own words every question the prompt asks you to answer. Then, rewrite your introduction and make sure your thesis addresses each one.”

For me, learning to write was an emotional rollercoaster. The highs were incredible, and the lows were terrible. At its hardest, the process inspired feelings of deep frustration and even anger. When I was younger, my mom would bear the brunt of these feelings, and our writing conferences would often turn tense. As I grew more emotionally mature and realized how fortunate I was to have such a dedicated writing assistant, I pushed myself to better manage these feelings. I also began to feel confused by them. Why would I resent my dear mother, who was only trying to help me?

Lives on the Boundary has helped me answer this question. Rose makes clear that when someone seeks literacy, they go out on a limb. Pursuing an education is a vulnerable act and, as such, can cause strong negative emotions in a learner when they perceive themselves to be failing. To avoid such feelings, a learner may adopt a defensive posture, closing themselves off to learning. Rose documents this reality in his descriptions of his own schooling. He admits that, as a student, he would tune out when challenged scholastically: “I realize now how consistently I defended myself against the lessons I couldn’t understand… I got very good at watching a blackboard with minimum awareness. And I drifted more and more into a variety of protective fantasies” (Rose 19). Rose also describes how he observed other students find a different defense mechanism, embracing mediocrity: “Reject the confusion and frustration by openly defining yourself as the Common Joe. Champion the average. Rely on your own good sense. Fuck this bullshit. Bullshit, of course, is everything you—and the others—fear is beyond you: books, essays, tests, academic scrambling, complexity, scientific reasoning, philosophical inquiry” (29).

Rose’s experiences have helped me realize that the frustration and anger I would feel with my mom resulted from how she made me confront my persistent points of confusion and difficulty; those feelings were a defense mechanism. For example, I struggled with addressing the prompts my teachers gave me for a long time. My mom would point this out to me, and, honestly, sometimes I resented her for it. I understand now that my resentment was a defense against having to face the reality that I still wasn’t carefully breaking down prompts and responding to them. If I confronted that reality head-on, I risked feeling dumb and inadequate.

When faced with their pupils’ defensiveness, my mom and Rose modeled two behaviors that I want to adopt. First, they refused to give up on their students. My mom could have felt indignant—and reasonably so—that, in her efforts to assist me, she sometimes had to fight such an uphill battle. Similarly, when working for the Veteran’s Program, Rose might understandably have felt put off by his students’ self-sabotage. Instead, “once [Rose and his colleagues] began to understand the fear of failure at the origin of the veterans’ troubling behavior, [they] refused to give in to it” (154). This is a lesson I want to take to heart: when I experience my students’ defensiveness, I want to empathize with it and refuse to be dissuaded by it. Second, my mom and Rose made space for the feelings to which being challenged scholastically can give rise. When my mom would sense that I was becoming emotional, she would check in with me. Likewise, Rose discusses how the tutors under his direction would often need to “spend their first session working through the various emotions [that receiving a low grade] produced” in their tutees (173). Following these examples, I intend to make space in my classroom for the feelings that being pushed academically can provoke. I want my teaching philosophy to recognize that education can be as much an emotional experience as an intellectual one.

*****

In Animal Farm, by George Orwell, three pigs, Snowball, Napoleon, and Squealer, take over Manor Farm, owned by Mr. Jones, and rename it Animal Farm. A self-satisfied smile on my face, I reread my thesis statement. Perfect. It was roughly the same length as the ones we came up with in Ann’s^[1]class and had a similar structure—I remembered those naming the book’s author and identifying some of the major characters, too. Paper in hand, I got up from the kitchen table and ascended the stairs to where my mom’s office was. She’d be impressed; we had only recently started learning about writing theses at the Blue House, and here—already—was such a fine example of one.

I entered her office and handed her my thesis proudly. She read it a few times.

“Has Ann talked to you about the difference between summary and analysis?” my mom asked carefully.

I was momentarily taken aback. Not the “Great job, sweetie!” I was expecting. I racked my brain, trying to recall. “Yeah, I think so. But I don’t remember what she said.”

My mom closed the laptop on her desk. “Okay, well, what happens in Animal Farm?” I recounted the book’s plot for her.

“Good. You just gave me a summary of the book—that is, you told me, in your own words, what happens in it. Now, an analysis is different.” She paused, thinking. “Let’s see, earlier you were saying that, by the end of the book, Napoleon walks around and dresses like a person. Why do you think that is?”

I stared at her blankly.

“That’s a trickier question, isn’t it? It’s harder to answer because it requires you to interpret, to use evidence from the book to answer a question that it doesn’t provide a clear response to. In other words, it requires you to analyze the book. Your thesis should be an analysis of the book, not a summary. Does that make sense?”

I nodded quickly. “Yeah, I think so.”

It didn’t. I would wrestle with the difference between summary and analysis for years. My mom would explain it to me at least a dozen more times and would spend countless hours helping me find the space between making an obvious assertion and making one that was too far fetched to defend. Eventually, thanks to her tireless efforts, I got it.

Now, years later, I wonder how I would have learned to walk this fine line—or mastered any of the other myriad skills one must acquire to write competently—if not for her efforts. At some point in high school, I realized how fortunate I was—indeed, what an advantage it was—to have a skilled writer sit down with me individually for hours upon hours to help me improve my writing. I consider all this time spent one-on-one with my mom foundational to my becoming the writer I am today.

So, as I read Lives on the Boundary, I could relate not only to Rose’s appreciation for the teachers who took the time to work with him individually, but also to his descriptions of the significant impact these teachers had on him. In Rose’s narrative, Jack MacFarland and Ted Erlandson stand out in particular. MacFarland pushed Rose in a way that reminds me of how my mom would push me. Rose details how “One day in the December of my senior year, Mr. MacFarland asked me where I was going to go to college” (34). As a result of that gentle prod— and of MacFarland’s interventions on his behalf—Rose ends up attending Loyola University.

Similarly, my mom would push me in my writing, encouraging me, say, to develop my thesis further or make my organization tighter, and then would support me as I attempted to rise to her challenge. Rose’s recollections of Erlandson also remind me of how my mom approached my writing tutelage. Speaking of the struggles of fledgling writers, Rose remarks, “The botched performances, though, are part of it all, and developing writers will grow through them if they are able to write for people who care about language, people who are willing to sit with them and help them as they struggle to write about difficult things. That is what Ted Erlandson did for me” (54). I could complete the same statement with “That is what my mom did for me.”

I believe my experience and that of Rose point to how one-on-one instruction—and the interpersonal connection it creates and reflects—can propel one’s education forward like little else, an insight I wish to act on in my teaching practice. When I assume responsibility for teaching English to entire classes of students, I want to work to cultivate relationships with the individuals I instruct. I might accomplish this by arranging one-on-one meetings with my students throughout the semester, by establishing office hours, or by involving myself in school-sponsored activities that allow me to interact with my students outside the classroom. Reading Lives on the Boundary, I noted that Rose draws on similar strategies in his teaching practice. For example, after one of his classes for struggling writers at El Monte, Rose invites his student Harold Morton—who, he seems to sense, might benefit from some individual attention—to help with cleaning up the classroom (116). Harold obliges, and the ensuing interaction begins a relationship that benefits them both academically and personally. Like Rose, I want my teaching philosophy to account for the power of interpersonal relationships and one-on-one instruction.

*****

I flipped through the pages of the manual, a sinking feeling welling up inside me. Independent clauses, dependent clauses, coordinating conjunctions, subordinating conjunctions, misplaced modifiers, appositives, singular pronouns, collective nouns, relative pronouns, predicate nominatives, parallelism. The grammar jargon washed over me, and I felt like I was drowning in it.

I’d sat down a few moments earlier to create my first lesson plan; I was to have my first tutoring session in a few days. I had completed training about a week ago, and it had been helpful. I had learned about scaffolding, about the typical structure of programs, about how to adapt my instruction to a learner’s needs, and about what topics the ACT and SAT test the most.

Now, it was this last bit that had me concerned. Apparently, the exams thoroughly tested students’ grammar knowledge. Much of the “English” section on the ACT was devoted to it, as was the “Writing” section on the SAT. The funny thing was I knew grammar. Or, at least, I had an intuitive grasp of it. I’d just had to take the ACT twice—once when I applied for the job as an ACT/SAT tutor and again after training—to prove that I was familiar with the material it covered. Each time I had missed just one question in the 75-question-long English section. But, I was quickly learning, just because I intuitively understood grammar didn’t mean I knew how to teach students to “do grammar” on a test.

So, I sighed and began reading.

I never received much in the way of explicit grammar instruction. I vaguely remember diagramming sentences with cut-out shapes (a triangle for a noun, a circle for a verb, etc.) in elementary school, but I think I mostly enjoyed playing with the cut-outs. When my mom and I would work on my writing together, she would never tell me, say, that I needed a comma before that and because I was joining two independent clauses—clauses that have a subject, predicate, and complete thought—and that otherwise I’d have a run-on sentence. No, instead she’d have me read a sentence slowly and pay close attention to where I paused naturally, suggesting I put commas in those places. So, I remained fairly oblivious to my lack of formalized grammar knowledge until the moment came when I suddenly had to teach grammar to others formally. Then, I had to teach myself a crash course in it.

Given my experience, Rose’s assertion that belabored grammar and spelling instruction does more harm than good makes a great deal of sense to me. Rose contends that the tendency of English curricula—especially those designed for remedial students—to harp on linguistic minutiae results from “The assumption that error can be eradicated by zeroing in on the particulars of language. And that assumption seems to rest on a further assumption that grammatical error signals some fundamental mental barrier to engaging in higher-level cognitive pursuits: until error is isolated and cleaned up, it will not be possible for students to read and write critically, study literature, or toy with style” (141). I believe my experience offers compelling evidence that these assumptions are fundamentally flawed. I was writing at a college level before I realized that college is spelled with an e and not an a—it wasn’t until my junior year of high school, when I was enrolled in AP English Language and Composition, that I realized that I wasn’t beginning the collage process but rather the college process.

Considering this insight, when I become an English teacher, I want to I look past my students’ struggles with grammar and spelling and engage with the substance of their writing. Granted, truly underdeveloped grammar and spelling skills can impede one’s ability to make oneself understood. However, Rose’s experience demonstrates that students can still make meaning even when they are far from mastering the grammar and spelling minutiae. This being the case, I will avoid belittling my future students by refusing to see past grammatical and spelling errors to the substance of their writing. I want my teaching philosophy to center substance over the particulars of delivery.

*****

In sum, my teaching philosophy will recognize emotions’ impact on education, leverage the power of interpersonal relationships and one-on-one instruction, and prioritize substance over delivery. In this way, I intend to draw on my experience and that of Rose to become a more effective English instructor.