Between Classes

As an English teacher, I’ve blogged about grading writing here, there, and everywhere. It’s a constant of the profession, and I’ve been thinking about the issue since before I even began to teach. Back in undergraduate school, the same professor taught me Teaching Writing and Methods of Teaching High School English. I don’t think he had done either in a high school. Instead, he came to The College of New Jersey from some kind of position at Princeton University. Previous to that, he’d been a performing arts reviewer for the New York Times. Before that? Who knows. At twenty, we thought him ancient at perhaps forty.

He taught us the cutting edge of writing process theory for 1993—Nancie Atwell, Peter Elbow, and Don Murray, to name a few. I can’t pinpoint whose writings first introduced the concept that students should write more than I grade, but my professor’s enthusiasm solidified the theory for me. In class, we utilized portfolios and journals. I remember him showing us his own drafts for a New York Times review of a ballet performance, from scratchy handwritten notes scrawled in a dark theatre, to typed draft after typed draft. “Never read a first draft,” he advised, “If students haven’t read it a second time yet, why should you read it at all?” Somewhere between those two courses I took from this professor, I began to understand one of the foundations of my teaching practice–that to write well, students must write, write again, and then write some more. My subsequent years of teaching have been a constant revision of the processes by which to monitor this writing, but I’m glad I didn’t start out thinking that my pen must mark each page students produce.