Personal Narrative: Teaching Students to Enjoy Writing

Writing is something that always came relatively easy to me. I was not the best student in High School, though that was primarily due to my lack of effort and enthusiasm. I was certainly capable of doing the work, though baseball and Atari always seemed to come first. But with writing, I was most often able to produce the quality of work my parents expected of me in a short and painless amount of time.

As I set such a scenario for you, two problems are clearly recognizable. The first lies in the lack of effort I put forth in my early schooling, and the second is that I recognized very early what my parents expectations of me were, though I failed to explore my own subdued expectations. They were bubbling just beneath the surface of my false façade of a student. It was not until my years in college, and my subsequent experience, although it is still in its infant stages, of teaching High School English that I began to appreciate writing and reading as a useful tool rather than a mechanism for keeping a smile on my parents’ faces. When this released enthusiasm became part of my life, the latter of the scenario’s problems quickly solved the former.

He was a professor at SUNY Cortland, Ross Borden. And it was only by a twist of fate that my path was fortunate enough to cross with his. As I signed up for Early British Literature as an undergraduate, I expected simply to carry on with my typical style of enduring English, for my major was in the sciences. I had known from the time I graduated from High School that I was probably most apt to succeed in English, though my personal restraints pushed me away from it. Nonetheless, as I walked through the door to Early British Literature, I had expected a woman professor, as my schedule...

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...everal times the same word, definition, or phrase because he or she had acted inappropriately or missed a question. While the punishment is perhaps effective for some teachers, it instills in the student the ideology that writing is a punishment. Thus the student will continue this attitude until someone, like Ross Borden, is effective enough to change it.

While the difficulties in teaching students not only to be good writers, but also to enjoy writing are easy to complain about, they are not immediately changeable. Consequently, as a teacher of young writers, one must find a way to make the system work. Ross Borden found a way with me, and I feel I have found a way with many of my students, but not all of them. So I continue to read, and I continue to write, and I continue to teach, though I also continue to struggle with the many problems surrounding the field.