by Jake Knox
Working as a WIP TA has been a wonderful opportunity for me to really explore my beliefs about teaching. More than anything I think this experience has shown me the value of personal connections in the learning process. I’m working with two courses—ecology and fish/wildlife management—and doing both essay edits and conferences for each. My previous TA position involved plenty of writing instruction, but it was always done at a distance through edits on paper. Relying only on that sort of remote instruction is a disservice to students though. Writing should not be learned through marginal comments any more than biology should be taught with flash cards; it is that back-and-forth dialogue of discussions—the chance to ask “why?”—that really allows students and teachers to explore the true depth of a topic. For this reason I am truly grateful for the conference format that WIP promotes.
This has sometimes been difficult for me to accept though. I am too often a cynic who assumes that many students will not care about a topic no matter how a teacher tries to reach them. And while this is definitely the case sometimes, I have been truly surprised by how most of my conferences have transpired. Instead of seeing silent confirmational nods until I finish talking, I’m hearing “Well what if I try this instead?” and “Oh, so that’s why my teacher said that in high school!” It’s clear that most of them really do care, but they have been missing the vital provocation that personal interaction brings.
Seeing this potential, I have really tried to push my conferences to be discussions that stimulate deeper exploration of writing topics. I always give students an opportunity to explain their thought process and describe their paper—what did they like about their writing, and which parts do they think could use some revision? Usually they are overly critical of themselves, but that gives me a great opportunity to bring up what I liked about their writing. Establishing this rapport makes the conference a dialogue rather than a one-sided critique, and I almost always hear something from the discussion that I did not see in the essay.
I hope to build on the idea of being a “writing coach” by creating more opportunities for students to work through problems themselves.
Next semester I will be helping with the same ecology course, so I expect to be working with a new group of students. While I would enjoy progressing to more complex topics with the same people from this semester, it will be interesting to see how I am able to approach this ecology course a second time. I hope to build on the idea of being a “writing coach” by creating more opportunities for students to work through problems themselves. Seeing students succeed without my direct instruction is not only rewarding for me as an educator but also better for them as writers.