Why can't I stop correcting? Overcoming my resistance to changing how I teach.

Introduction

ACCORDING TO the general semantics principle of "self-reflexiveness," humans can gain some measure of control over their impulses by observing their own behavior. When we can stand back and observe ourselves in action, there is an element of choice in our responses to what we encounter. Through self-reflexiveness, apparently, it is possible to come to a fuller understanding of the ways in which our own actions determine the reality we live in (Lauer, 1999). When professionals in the college composition field speak of teaching writing as reflective practice (Hillocks, 1995), they are talking about observing oneself as a teacher as well as reflecting on what happens with students and their writing during a course. Schon (1987) has written extensively about the ability of a professional in any field, to "reflect-in-action," to observe what is happening in the moment and devise alternative approaches to a problem. Reflective teaching is a way of life for some practitioners who approach their work not as certainty but as inquiry. It's about "framing" a problem in order to see it more clearly. However, making a change in our teaching practice means dealing with uncertainty. As a case in point, I have recently been trying to overcome a resistance to changing my responses to writing errors, and it has not been easy. Helpful approaches to incorporating grammar lessons into writing instruction abound (Neulieb & Brosnahan, 2001; Weaver, 1996; Bartholomae, 1980; Shaughnessy, 1977), but little has been written about how writing teachers actually experience the struggle to learn to change their approach to dealing with writing errors.

Who Put the Curse in Recursive?

It is messy work to look at ourselves as teachers and consider changes in our teaching practice. We tell our students that writing is a recursive process, a matter of rewriting and rethinking that is neither linear nor formulaic. Of course, this response is not always satisfactory, particularly if a student is upset when a required rewrite of her essay is less successful than an earlier draft. But, this, we tell our students, is the process; this is how writers discover and refine their thinking. Perhaps making changes in how we teach writing is similarly recursive, marked as it is by uncertainty and messiness. Is it any wonder we feel reluctant to enter into this kind of process?

"See everything. Overlook a great deal. Correct a little."

POPE JOHN XXIII 

The above quote characterizes my latest resolution for changing how I work with writing errors. "See Everything" means that I put the pen down and read all the way through without making any marks. "Overlook a great deal" reminds me to read past the errors on the surface without letting these stop me. Then I can look for what is working in the essay and write comments that encourage the student to go further with this. This all sounds good, right? "Correct a little" tells me to select only one or two errors and correct one instance of each. Then, I tell myself, I can add a comment indicating that the student must reread the essay, discover other errors of these two types, and correct them on his or her own. I try to imagine a calmer "me" allowing everyone to work on their own while I make myself available to various students by walking about the room. Well, actually doing all this, it has turned out, is another thing.

My Name is Todd and I Can't Stop Correcting

Let's face it, freshman essays can make a teacher feel overwhelmed, bewildered, and just plain crazy. Where do we begin when there are so many errors in every sentence? Intellectually I understand how to respond to writing errors but sometimes I emotionally refuse to be guided by this understanding. Errors contain valuable information (Shaughnessy, 1977) about a student's writing, but I sometimes cannot wait to get rid of them. "I can't read an essay until I straighten out the sentences," says a colleague. Editing is best done at the end of the writing process (Elbow, 1981), yet I find myself correcting first drafts nevertheless. I suddenly shift into "automatic pilot" and stop thinking rationally. I am aware that it is counterproductive to rewrite a whole sentence as if the teacher, and not the student, were the author (Knoblauch and Brannon, 1983), but I sometimes do so anyway.

This need for correctness is not uncommon among my colleagues, one of whom says about correcting a set of essays: "I feel like I just cleaned my apartment." I feel a sense of urgency about establishing order on the page no matter what, and it is this need that interferes with my changing how I respond to errors. I know teaching grammar exercises separately from writing does little to develop writing skills (Neulieb & Brosnahan, 2001), but still find myself doing this at times. At other times, it is as if there were a voice in me saying, "I don't care what the experts think; I want an error-free sentence, damn it," and at such moments I can be a bit like "Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde" -- well-meaning yet possessed by an uncontrollable urge. At the very worst, I am like "Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Clean," transforming into a completely different teacher, no longer the dedicated Dr. Jekyll, but the ruthless Mr. Clean, who expunges errors without regard to the effect on a student's development as a writer. Studies have found that a student's writing is inhibited when the student knows it is going to be assessed in terms of correctness (MacGowan-Gilhooly, 1991; Bass, 1993), and that, in fact, mechanical accuracy can result from working to express ideas fluently and clearly rather than from focusing on correctness (Kasper, 2001). Still, I struggle at times to enact what I know is best for my students, which is not to react to writing errors, but to respond to writing in ways that help them discover and refine an idea.

Doing Time in the House of Correction 

The institution in which one teaches can also inhibit making a change in how one teaches. For one thing, "common sense thinking" pervades writing programs (Mayher, 1992). For example, a colleague says, "How will they know it's wrong if we don't correct it?" Common sense tells him to correct errors as a means of preventing their recurrence, yet anyone who has worked with college writers knows that there is little connection between teacher correction and student accuracy. Many of us focus on correctness because it is what we know best (Noguchi, 2001). However, after years of teaching, many of us know more, which suggests we should know better. A dedicated teacher carrying a stack of handouts called out to me in the hall recently: "Today they are going to get comma splices even if it kills us both." This person knows full well that a "skills and drills" approach to learning how to write sentences has drawbacks (Mayher, 1990), yet he resorts to handouts on sentence patterns. Clearly, there is something in many o f us that does not love an error. Studies have shown that both academic and business professionals react in a highly judgmental fashion to incorrect language use, even when this does not affect meaning (Beason, 2001). In fact, a person who makes written errors risks being judged as lacking in knowledge or intelligence. Recently, an experienced colleague referred a student to me saying, "He needs to repeat Freshman English." The writing sample she attached had twenty-seven errors circled, and this was just on the first page. Like me, she had an aversion to having such a messy, "incorrect" writer in her course. However, it turned out that this student was an accomplished writer, albeit not an error-free one, who was far too skilled for my freshman writing class.

Students can also keep us in our places as much as colleagues can. When I try to move away from extensive correcting, some balk at this and request more corrections, and some even request that we do grammar exercises of the fill-in-the-blank variety. Writing a draft and learning how to develop an idea are sometimes seen by students as "not doing real English." Naturally, many prefer having their writing corrected -- "Can you fix this paper for me?" -- to learning how to identify and work with errors on their own. Who wouldn't? However, the objective is for students to move toward relying on themselves; otherwise, we are prolonging their dependency (Lindley, 1993). Even more problematic, however, is the lack of support for change one encounters in and among colleagues. Some writing programs breed an atmosphere of false certainty in which it is assumed that professional teachers know what they are doing. This can create an environment in which teachers are reluctant to admit to "not knowing" something, so much so that they are loathe to engage colleagues in open dialog about how they might further develop as teachers. Joe MacDonald (1990) has termed this a "conspiracy of certainty" that stifles dialog among teachers in a department. Even writing this article feels dangerous; I may be seen as lacking expertise in my field. The times I have admitted to struggling with making a change in how I approach writing errors, I have received two kinds of responses; practical advice: "What I do is...," or reprimand: "What you are talking about is altogether too 'touchy-feely' and not what this department is about." In either case, this is the end of the discussion. Few of us want to remain in uncertainty very long, and the prospect is even less appealing when there is little support for reflection and change.

Revising Oneself as a Teacher

A teacher's actions have motives (Tompkins, 1997), and I am beginning to see that mine are not always objective or based solely in meeting student need. I have come to realize that my own need for correctness when reading an essay is often at odds with a student's need to make mistakes while writing one.

Good teaching requires more than classroom skills and mastery of subject matter; self-knowledge is also needed (Palmer, 1998). In the span of a career, teachers can evolve from learning to handle a packed classroom, to achieving a sense of curricular expertise, to trying to understand themselves as teachers (Lindley, 1993).

After years of focusing on "what" to teach, a teacher may want to know "who" is doing the teaching (Palmer, 1998). I have reached a point in my career as a college composition teacher where I want to understand what is preventing me from changing how I respond to freshman essays. However, I am beginning to see subtle changes in myself, and these have come about by applying Pope John's sage advice ("See Everything. Overlook a great deal. Correct a little.") to making corrections, not only in student writing but in my teaching as well. At another level, these three statements inform an ongoing inquiry into how to work with writing errors. "See everything" reminds me to continue to approach teaching writing as a reflective practice. "Overlook a great deal" helps me remember to be kind to myself in the process. I tell my students that it is okay to be imperfect, since becoming a writer means one is a work-in-progress, and perhaps the same can be true of my teaching. "Correct a little" lets me consider small chang es in my teaching. It has taken me years to be able to do less correcting, and I have only been able to make this change incrementally.

Lately, I am noticing new signs of improvement. Those nightmares about immigrant students leaving out articles (a, an, the) have practically ceased, and I no longer think the English department is "enabling" me as a correction addict. I can even pass a sign reading "Have Nice Day" and no longer fantasize about returning later with a red marker to correct it. In all seriousness, it can be inspiring to approach one's teaching practice as a series of drafts moving toward something clearer and more effective. Recently, on days when I don't set the agenda primarily in terms of correctness, I find I have more time to help students work on developing the ideas in their writing, and they seem a little less timid about making a mess while pursuing an idea from draft to draft.

REFERENCES

Bartholomae, David. "The Study of Error." College Composition and Communication, 31 (1980): pp.253-269.

Beason, Larry. "Ethos and Errors: How Business People React to Errors." College Composition and Communication, 53 (2001): pp.45-73.

Elbow, Peter. Writing with Power. New York: Oxford, 1981.

Hillocks, George. Teaching Writing as a Reflective Practice, New York: Teachers College Press, 1995.

Kasper, Loretta Frances. "ESL Writing and the Principle of Nonjudgmental Awareness." Teaching Developmental Writing. Susan Naomi Bernstein, Editor. Boston, MA: Bedford/St. Martin's, 2001.

Lauer, Rachel. "Crisis for Educators: An Opportunity for Service." ETC: A Review of General Semantics, 56 (3), 1999.

Lindley, Daniel. This Rough Magic: The Life of Teaching. Westport, CT: Bergin and Garvey, 1993.

MacDonald, Joseph. Teaching: Making Sense of An Uncertain Craft. NY: Teachers College Press, 1992.

MacGowan-Gilhooly, Adele. "Fluency Before Correctness: A Whole Language Experiment in College ESL." College ESL, 1.1 (1991): pp.37-47.

Mayher, John S. Uncommon Sense: Theoretical Practice in Language Education. Portsmouth, NH: Boynton/Cook, 1990.

Neulieb, Janice & Brosnahan, Irene. "Teaching Grammar to Writers." Teaching Developmental Writing. Susan Naomi Bernstein, Editor. Boston, MA: Bedford/St. Martin's, 2001.

Noguchi, Rei R. Grammar and the Teaching of Writing: Limits and Possibilities. Urban, IL: National Council of Teachers of English, 1991.

Palmer, Parker. The Courage to Teach. San Francisco: Jossey-Bass, 1998.

Schon, Donald A. Educating the Reflective Practitioner: Toward a New Design for Teaching and Learning in the Professions. San Francisco: Jossey-Bass, 1987.

Shaughnessy, Mina. Errors and Expectations. New York: Oxford University Press, 1977.

Tompkins, Jane. A Life in School: What the Teacher Learned. Reading, MA: Perseus, 1996.

Weaver, Constance. Teaching Grammar in Context. Portsmouth, Nil: Boynton, 1996.

Todd Heyden *

* Todd Heyden, Ph.D., teaches in the English Department at Pace University, New York City.