[Englecturers] RE: Devoid of Content--Form and Function

[englecturers at lists.ucr.edu]

Hi All,

Hope you're well.  Allow some heresy from me.  If we take seriously the
proposition that writing is a process, it seems logical that the teaching
of writing is a process.  My dissertation (a model of something or other
for someone, I'm sure, or at least a good place to store postcards and bits
of paper) credits my parents, school teachers, college professors, and
committee for teaching me to write.

Fish is merely emphasizing a different part of the process, one that,
frankly, was handled quite well for me by drills required of first-,
second-, third-, fourth-, fifth-, sixth-, seventh-, eighth-, ninth-,
tenth-, and twelfth-graders at Butterfield-Odin public school in Minnesota.

In college, I made up a gnomish language (derivative of Tolkein's work, of
course) and wrote a poem with it.  I actually learned an understanding of
grammar by living in Germany and learning that language.

Fish is correct that students can better learn to think by discussing
issues in dorm rooms than by discussing issues in classrooms.  I am right
that students can better learn sentence logic by learning another language
in another country than by making up a language in the classroom. 

Composition is a necessary discipline predominantly for the discipline--an
instructor in a class helps police the learning so that those students who
don't really want to learn must do something, those students who haven't
learned in other ways have an opportunity to learn now, and those students
who would wander off topic or would simply be wrong have some guidance.

Writing isn't taught; it is learned.

---  
--- Benjamin Harder

PS: Naturally, student evaluations are driving pedagogy at this time, but
cost considerations are as well.  Our classes are expensive, worth the
money if we were training society's leaders, but completely over budget if
our administration is correct that we are actually training tomorrow's lab
technicians and lower-middle managers.