Years ago, when I was first out of college and waiting tables at a North Carolina brewpub, I had a coworker who always requested that any “difficult” diners be seated in his section. If they were grumpy, or complaining about the wait, or otherwise seemed unhappy to be there, he wanted them.
I finally asked him about this one day—why would anyone, especially in a job where we relied on tips, want the challenge of waiting on difficult people? His answer surprised me. It wasn’t an ego thing, and he wasn’t a misanthrope. But if someone was already having a lousy time before they even sat down, he believed they’d appreciate his ability to exceed their low expectations. I think about this sometimes when I’m teaching a First-Year Writing class. Not because my students are difficult or grumpy. Plenty of them are happy to be there—some enjoy writing; others know it’s something they need to work on and are hopeful the class will help them improve as writers.
But any time you’re teaching a General Education (GenEd) course required for all students at Temple, a certain percentage of your roster will come in with low expectations: it’s a box to check, something to get through. Like my brewpub colleague, I’ve come to enjoy the moment when these students go out of their way to tell me, either face-to-face or via their student feedback forms, that they got more out of the class than they expected, that they learned things that will stick with them for a long time.
It’s a challenge, but also a privilege, to teach so many Temple students who are at or near the beginning of their college experiences. They arrive to ENG 802, or any of our other FYWP courses, with an even wider variety of writing-related experience than you might guess. High school writing instruction, many of us teaching in FYW have learned, varies in quality from district to district. Some students have written lengthy, in-depth research papers on topics they proposed themselves. Others’ academic writing has been confined to brief reading responses or maybe the occasional personal essay. Some have been told often enough that they’re “bad” at writing that they automatically dread the thought of it; even opening a Microsoft Word document to start a paper might give them anxiety.
One hallmark of Temple’s First-Year Writing Program is that our courses follow a portfolio model. Students draft multiple papers during the semester and then revise them significantly before turning them in as a final project. The hope is that students begin to understand that writing and research are iterative processes, that “good” writing—like good thinking—requires a willingness to sit with one’s ideas, to push and prod at them until they begin to sparkle with mental and moral clarity.
I’ll often share with students an early draft of a writing project I’m working on, to help drive home the point that even “professional” writers start from a place of messy exploration. Perhaps this semester I’ll show them the first draft of this essay, several chicken-scratched pages on a legal pad with margin notes like “think about this some more,” or “too jokey?” or “make this better.”
In preparation for writing this article, I did the same thing I do when I’m trying to solve a problem in one of my classes: I talked to my First-Year Writing colleagues. We’re a chatty, collaborative group, which is one of the things I’ve enjoyed about my years at Temple. As one of those colleagues, Amy Friedman, told me, “We’re a happily nerdy bunch, united in our penchant for long discussions about syllabi, learning outcomes, and assignment design.”
When I asked some of those colleagues about their own classroom joys and challenges, a few mentioned the pleasures of teaching such skills-centric courses, where you can often see your students improving in real time. This is a benefit of the portfolio system, too: when students are sitting down to revise their work, they can really track how far they’ve come, even in the several weeks since they penned a first draft of a paper. I’ll catch them sometimes poking fun at the “earlier” versions of themselves who wrote those drafts. And with those improvements in skills—not just writing, but research, and learning to engage meaningfully with dense academic texts—you can see students’ confidence growing, too, in ways that one hopes will translate in their other courses as well.
Other colleagues strive to broaden students’ understanding of what “writing” is, and what they can do with the skills we’re helping them to develop. “I hope my students leave the class understanding that academic writing is not all stiff and boring, but there is quite a bit of creativity they can bring to it,” Gabriella Kecskes told me.
Rob Faunce wants his students “to understand that rhetoric is not just a stuffy Greek word but a concept they’ve known and used since they were a five-year-old crying crocodile tears to get a cookie before dinner.”
Another colleague, Rimun Murad, tries to get his students to see academic writing as “strategic thinking,” as opposed to “short-term thinking,” which is what makes it both challenging and worthwhile, particularly in a larger culture that too often rewards a “first thought, best thought” mindset, and doesn’t necessarily encourage the cultivation of deeper, more considered thinking.
The unique skills-based nature of FYW classes also means that the content of particular sections—the material students will read, discuss, and write about—varies from instructor to instructor. Many of us have taught in the program for a decade or more and come from different academic backgrounds. The program ensures consistency in learning outcomes with regular updating of a standard syllabus for both ENG 701 and ENG 802. First-time instructors (graduate students or new faculty hires) are required to use these standard versions. But more experienced faculty can craft syllabi around their areas of academic expertise or interest, so long as they still hit all the program-wide learning objectives.
It’s been fun, over the years, to see some of the syllabi my colleagues have developed, on everything from food politics to public art to sports and fan cultures. I’ve even seen versions of FYW courses in which students are studying college itself: its history in the U.S., and contemporary debates over who and what college is for.
In my own section of 802 this semester, we’ll be considering the ways narrative shapes our lives: from the personal narratives we craft on social media to the political and cultural narratives that inform so many of our beliefs and argumentative positions, even if we’re not fully aware of them. Students will also look at how misinformation is often built on the back of these established narratives, and how a longing for narratives that “make sense” of complex, difficult subjects can lead people down the rabbit hole of conspiratorial thinking.
When I asked my colleagues about the challenges they face, and what they find themselves worrying about, several mentioned generative-AI programs like ChatGPT, and the need to strike a balance between requiring students to do their own writing (and thinking!) while not simply burying our heads in the sand in the face of new technologies. As a program, we’re having a lot of conversations about AI, and the best ways to teach our students to harness these technologies knowledgably and responsibly.
Other colleagues mentioned increased class sizes, which can make it more difficult to provide individual attention, a hallmark of our program, to our students. Still others mentioned the ongoing pressures on the humanities, which feel underappreciated both inside and outside the walls of the academy. In my conversation with Faunce, he frames the issue as “a branding crisis, because too many [people] take for granted the value of critical thinking. Students just aren’t being trained to see the importance of process, and of developing their own insights, with so much spoon-fed to them by technology, the rise of social media, and the soundbite video.”
But the challenge my colleagues mentioned most frequently can also be an opportunity. We often encounter students at or near the beginning of their college experience, when they’re in the midst of a big life transition, and while we are teaching them writing, critical reading, and research skills, we are also teaching them “student-ing skills,” as Kecskes put it to me. Our relatively small, discussion-based classes are perhaps one of the best settings in which to learn these skills because of the camaraderie that can develop over the semester.
Friedman believes that “Many students may feel underprepared when they arrive in university classes.” But the way our courses are structured, she believes, allows students to develop core academic skills in a community of their peers. “As instructors,” she added, “we have the chance to offer both enthusiastic encouragement and tangible assistance to build more confident readers, writers, and thinkers as our students move into upper-level courses.”
It’s a challenge, of course, to pack so much into a single semester. If I’m being honest, it used to really stress me out. (I’ve been teaching here for nearly twenty years.) If I leaned into teaching students how to do deep-dive research, for instance, was I shorting them on writing instruction? Or, if we spent too much time on how to structure an analytical paper, how to move effectively through evidence and argument, would the students miss out on other important skills? I guess it’s true that we’re a nerdy bunch, that this is the kind of thing that would keep me up at night.
But as I’ve matured as a teacher, I’ve also mellowed out a bit and learned to be less anxious about what I’m not doing in the classroom. We only have fifteen weeks, after all. Years ago, a colleague told me something that’s stuck with me: in a class like ours, we’re planting seeds. Some may start to sprout during the semester, but others will need to be watered and fertilized by other courses, other experiences, and won’t come to flower until a student is long gone from our classroom.
