Be Careful of Teaching What You Love: Part One

I love writing. I love talking about writing. I love telling people what I think about writing, and what I know and what I “feel” is true. It’s one reason I’ve done quite a few nonfiction pieces on writing, including my book, Write With Fire. Many of the writing related pieces I’ve produced began because I wanted to understand some concept myself, and I learn best by writing about it.

Because I know that writing about something is a superb way to learn about it, I always wanted to incorporate that element into my teaching.  In the early 1990s at Xavier I saw a way to do that. Du Bois Williams (Irvin) and I got a small grant to create a writing guidebook for our psychology students.  Writing in Psychology was the result, and it soon became a class. Because we had so few faculty, we weren’t able to offer the class very often but when we did I typically taught it. I’ve taught it most years since then, and as we’ve added faculty and rearranged our curriculum we’ve been able to offer it more frequently.

I wanted to teach writing. I think many people hope for a career where they can do and be involved with the things they love. It seemed, once we had the course developed and once the “Guidebook” was published officially as the textbook for the class, that I had arrived at that high point. Every other semester I was going to be able to teach a whole class focused on something near and dear to my heart.  How could it get better?

Unfortunately, I was very naïve.  Today, the writing class is the least favorite of all my classes. I won’t say I hate it; I will say I dislike it. I imagine that if I do it for another four or five years the dislike may well turn into hate. I know exactly why my feelings have changed. It isn’t just one reason, but a number of them. In part two of this post I'll go into the reasons.

NOTE: I give a test tomorrow so my blogging may be sporadic in the first part of the week. I also get my second set of papers in the writing class on Thursday, and give another test on Friday, so at the end of the week I'll probably have another forced hiatus from blogging.  Just giving everyone a head's up

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Some Classroom Errors

One thing I’ve done for my writing class this year is give them specific examples of common errors made by students who’ve taken the class in the past. Of course, I don’t include the names of the students whose works/mistakes I feature. I thought it might be interesting to show you some of these examples. All of the examples below were turned in for my Writing in Psychology class. I've indicated the primary issue in bold print. These are not terribly extreme, but if there is interest, at some point I’ll publish some of the more egregious errors I’ve seen. All with names left out, to be sure.

FAT:
1. It is believed that the easier and more quickly we can bring an example of something to mind, the more frequently we believe it occurs.

2. Therefore, it is apparent that we must rely heavily on our skills and abilities of social perception and attribution to correlate behavior with its causal source.

COMMA SPLICE:
1. Due to the recession a lot of businesses are going bankrupt, one of the most publicized is that of GMC.

VAGUE TIME REFERENCE:
1. At one point in time you could not watch television without seeing a commercial about the virus.

AGREEMENT IN NUMBER (Plural vs Singular problem):
1. The Psychoanalytic Theory attempts to look at the person’s family life as an explanation of their homosexuality.

SENTENCE FRAGMENT:
1. Many question if the reason why serial killers exists.

WORD CHOICE ERROR:
1. Skin color differences have transcended throughout history.

REPETITION:
1. If peer pressure influences adolescents’ decision making, then adolescents who are influence by their peers tend to let their peers influence their sexual attitude.

STATEMENT OF THE OBVIOUS:
1. People usually go through a lot during a normal daily routine.
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Writing Class on Style: APA Style That Is:

Today in Writing class we focused on APA Style, which is the set of rules developed by the American Psychological Association for presenting a paper to psychology journals. We require all our classroom papers to be turned in using this style, to prepare the students if they go on to a graduate program in psychology.

APA style is pretty boring to discuss, but it’s one of those apprenticeship things that psychology majors need to learn. When I was in undergraduate school at Arkansas Tech University, back in the early 1980s, we weren’t required to use APA style. I didn’t learn it and, as a result, the first paper I turned in for a graduate school class came back with a “D” on it. The teacher told me the content was worth an “A” but that APA style was part of the requirement and it was on the syllabus, in the fine print. Indeed it was, and that was the last time I made that mistake. I got hold of a manual, the 3rd edition, I think, and learned the style on my own.

We’re on the 6th edition of the style manual these days, and it’s four times as thick as it used to be, partly because of the need to talk about electronic and online sources. I tell the students that they don’t have to memorize APA style but they need to memorize where and how to look up the answers to questions they have about the style. And, I tell them they need to take it seriously.

About five years back in a Physiological Psych class, I had the students do an APA style paper and I got one paper turned in at the end of the year that had completely ignored the requirement. I’d been much more directive about it than that first graduate professor had been for me. I not only put in the syllabus in bold, underlined print, and called attention to it all of the first week, but I covered the basic style information in class and stated, very clearly and loudly, at least five times during the semester, that their paper had to be APA style. The paper in question was a “B” paper but ended up with a “D” because of the style issue. The student came in to complain. I asked him if he’d paid attention to the syllabus and he said, “Yes, “but….” I asked him if he’d heard me say time and time again that APA style was required, and he gave me a, “Yes, but….” I asked him if he hadn’t heard me say numerous times that I was going to take off points if the paper wasn’t in APA style, and he said, “Yes, but I didn’t think you meant it.”

I meant it!
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My Writing Class

I haven't talked about my Writing in Psychology class as much as I thought I might this spring, but I just gave my class an assignment that I hope will turn out interesting.

I told them I wanted them to write a "tip article" directed at a novice writer. In other words, I asked them to write an advice column/essay about writing. Tell someone else what you think is an important thing, or the important thing(s), that someone new to writing should know. I hope this will really make them think about what we've covered so far this semester and about whether it was good advice or not.

I did this last time I taught this class as well, several years ago, and I got some really good pieces. I even edited two of the papers and published them in my Writer's Block column for The Illuminata. Those students were very excited to see their names in print, and those papers deserved to be there once they were given a bit of editing.

I didn't mention this to my current class, but if I get some good articles I might do the same this year. It all depends on what I get. The fact is, writing out one's thoughts remains one of the best ways to truly understand and clarify one's thinking. It also helps you learn the material better. It's why I started writing articles about writing in the first place, so that I could myself understand what was important about the act of writing. And it's why the core of ideas that I first explore here on the blog sometimes get written up more formally later for my column.

I sometimes think I don't really understand anything until I can write about it. How about you?

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