7.2: . . . College

The first year of college is about making stuff up.

Maybe that’s a brash way to describe a time that is hyped by universities, held sacred by the extended families of first-generation college students, and analyzed by faculty whose bread and butter is in teaching required classes. Still, I’m willing to bet that it’s part of a larger truth about how new college students learn to survive higher education initiations. I remember doing it myself in the early ’90s, and I see my students doing it every year. You develop new ways to resist what you don’t like or don’t think you can handle. You find quasi-ritualistic ways to handle too much studying mixed with too little sleep. If you’re ever in the market for memory aids and survival advice, don’t consult the teachers you see a few times a week—they haven’t been in the college trenches for a while. Go visit a dorm hall full of new engineering students, and you’ll soon be exposed to a hotbed of coping and studying strategies that will leave you dizzy.

Gerald Graff, a well known English professor and author, borrowed a concept from social psychology, cognitive dissonance, to describe what new students experience at a university as they move from class to class, teacher to teacher, worldview to worldview, and theory to theory, with no one doing a very good job helping them see any connective tissue among the competing ideas. Such a dissonant environment breeds a divide-and-conquer strategy—find out what one teacher wants, deliver the goods, move on to the next teacher. To be fair, there is an intelligent type of adaptation that emerges from doing this, but also a practical one that works at keeping ideas segregated by class and subject area. Even in that setting, students are constantly “making stuff up,” socially as well as intellectually. You have found, or will find, supportive peer groups; you’ll create reasons to keep reading an article or book when you’re struggling to see its personal relevance; you’ll mark out favorite places on campus for study, for talk, for pause. Perhaps the one universalizing constant at every college campus I’ve seen is that students inject their identity into the surroundings—in the tinny music we catch from passing headphones, on organizational flyers, through fashion, in questions, even during the occasional foray into the teacher-space of a classroom or office. These moves—your moves—like any moves in an unfamiliar place, are full of stutters, dodges, successes, and hopeful repetitions; but through them, critical social and intellectual patterns emerge. And if invention happens everywhere at college, why not make it work for us in the writing classroom?

One way of engaging your inventiveness rather than choosing to sit back, modeling passivity by invoking that tried and tired excuse of apathy is to consciously imagine a different kind of writing class, one we can better understand if we think of it in terms of three questions being negotiated from the point of view of the teacher, the project, and you, the student. At minimum, you have a teacher who is trying to strike an odd balance between guiding you and prescribing to you.

 

TEACHER: How can I best help students without doing the
work for them?

You have a project your teacher has assigned, full of potential, that exists between the teacher and you. Even though its voice is a quiet one, it is still asking a question of both teacher and student.

PROJECT: How do I reflect what the teacher values and make
a space where students, as writers, can creatively resist, enact,
adapt, and experiment with those values?

And there’s you, the student, who needs to figure out the answer to the following question before you can take on any project with confidence and creativity.

STUDENT: How do I make this writing matter for me?