Form vs. Formula

I have been away for a long time.  One of the reasons—though certainly not the only one—is that I taught a January-term course this year.  In addition to the hectic teaching schedule, I prepared the class in South America, which proved challenging.  What spurs me to write at the moment is the fact that I received my teaching evaluations the other morning and have been thinking about them ever since.

First I’ll say that of a class of twenty, only four bothered to fill them out.  Instead of paper evals all the students fill out on the last day of class (where you can bribe them with food and the promise of early dismissal, as well as make a speech about how great they’ve been), the students have to go online during their own time and fill them out.  When only four of twenty do them, the proportion of extreme responses goes up.  One of the evaluations was outstanding and one was atrocious, I’m pretty certain the worst I ever received.  The other two were pretty good.  In addition to the number ranking, the students have the opportunity to write comments, which the angry evaluator took every opportunity to do.

That’s about all I want to say about them.  I introduce them mostly as an explanation for why my thoughts have gone in the direction they have.

The class was Advanced Writing: Exposition and Argument.  At this university, the writing courses tend to have a theme, chosen by the professor.  I chose, because it was something I was interested in and wanted to explore, Jeremiads and Manifestoes.  I didn’t know all that much going into the course, and I’m not sure how much I know now, except that I would love to study the same topic with a group of dedicated and curious writers.  I think it could be fruitful.

What I’m interested in now, though, is something I noticed during the course of the semester.  I’m not exactly sure how to talk about it, but what it gets down to is the difference between teaching a form and teaching a formula.

Here’s what I think I mean: the Jeremiad and the Manifesto are both forms of persuasive writing.  This means to me that it’s theoretically possible to find similarities between different examples of whatever form is under discussion (and less obviously, but perhaps more interestingly, writing that alludes to, samples from, or parodies the form), talk about them, and learn from them, with the goal of integrating some of the strategies into one’s own writing, for example, even if none of my students is going to go into a career as an old-testament prophet.  By talking about two similar but different forms, ideally that would force us to talk about the two in relation to each other, leading to perhaps a better idea of each one.

But while I was trying to teach a form, what most of the students wanted to learn was a formula.  By formula I mean exactly what it sounds like—a way of writing that offers a kind of mathematical precision.  Start with A, input B, C, and D, solve for X.  My initial response to this is to blame the students’ laziness.  I think, though, that a bigger factor than laziness is that so much they’ve learned about writing has been just like this.  Blame the five-paragraph essay.  Blame the goal of reducing the very real anxiety many people have when faced with a blank piece of paper.  Certainly blame standardized testing—any attempt to objectively measure writing can only reduce it to a series of parts (see letters above).  Blame the culture.  Blame the teachers (the culture and the teachers certainly like to blame each other).

It occurred to me that so much of my job as a teacher, as I perceive it, is trying to break the students of this idea that there is a formula (this feels related to the other important task I feel I have, which is to get the students to try to mean something.  Why it’s related is because there seem to be these word groupings that students will use in the place of meaning, or a certain kind of regurgitation that ultimately doesn’t say anything.).  But at the same time, I felt myself giving it to them despite my resistance.  Make sure you do this, this, and this in your manifesto.  Ultimately, I didn’t end up grading the papers all that much on how closely they’d adhered to the form; I just hoped the idea of the form would send them somewhere interesting (I consistently repeated that I was not looking for a reasonable argument but for a passionate one).  Some of them turned out great.  The final paper, which I was nervous about because I didn’t give much guidance, turned out well.  The assignment was to follow one of the manifestos we’d read in the final week.  I received poems, collage essays, even a guitar performance.  Given a full fifteen weeks, I think it could have been a great course.  In a month, it was rushed.  My biggest failure was that I didn’t get them their second papers back before the third was due—there simply wasn’t time to do it.  In a full-semester class, that wouldn’t have been a problem.  Anyway, the point is that in the third paper, instead of trying to give me exactly what I wanted (fulfilling the formula), most of the students tried to think about what they wanted to do.  Which is what I wish a writing class could be like all the time.  With students of such different levels of ability and desire, I just don’t think that’s possible, though.