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Sometimes, You Learn by Writing
Not a newsflash, but easy to forget
Far, far away, in a distant galaxy, I taught writing.
I worked as an adjunct instructor, so I usually taught one of two introductory composition courses with an occasional developmental writing class thrown in for good measure.
The one thing my classes all had in common was this: none of them were an elective.
When you teach non-elective — aka “required” — courses, most of your students don’t want to be there.
All of them have a real life somewhere else that they dream of and want to be, and that “real life somewhere else that they dream of and want to be” is never the classroom in which they find themselves.
The class you are teaching is a stop along the way; not a destination. It is a stepping stone they must traverse to get to where they want to go.
So one of the first things you need to do in a non-elective course is to persuade the students in the class that the material you are presenting will be of value to them, and that it will — despite what they think at the moment — prove useful in their life after college.
To that end, in the first lecture or two of every class, I always told my students that the magic of writing was this:
