Anne Ruggles Gere discussed the importance of the extracurriculum in “Kitchen Tables and Rented Rooms: The Extracurriculum of Composition.” The extracurriculum she describes is the experience of writing outside the classroom walls and writing for love, “After all, as the Latin root amatus reminds us, members of the Tenderloin Women’s Writing Workshop of the Lansing, Iowa Writers Workshop write for love” (88). In the writing classes I took in high school, the extracurriculum was rarely experienced. In the majority of my classes, I was assigned to read a book in a given amount of time and then at the end, I had to write a paper discussing a major theme or problem that occurs in the book. I would read the book to get it over with it, sometimes just skimming because I found the novel boring. When I would receive my paper assignment, I would struggle to begin writing the paper because I had no clue where to start from. Nothing usually stuck out to me about being an interesting topic to write about, there was nothing that I could truly relate to. However, in my senior year of high school, I took an A.P. English class. Even though the class was supposed to be designed around preparing the students for the A.P. English test, my teacher made the class exciting. She would have different activities set for every set of books we read. With one book, she set up a debate. One half of the class would represent the one group described in the book we were reading and the other half of the class would represent the other group and then three judges would decide who won the debate. Another time, my teacher gave us a list of books we could choose from and then we could get partners to read the book together and in the end decide on a project we wanted to do. Some of the projects were papers, others were scrapbooks, and there were also some videos. She gave us options on how we wanted to learn; which was a nice change from the other teachers that did the usual process of assigning books for us to read and then assigning papers. I think, if teachers would try to make their students more interested in what they were reading, then they would be making the classroom more like the extracurriculum. Students would begin to enjoy the things they had to write about. However, I do not believe the wall between the classroom and the extracurriculum can ever be taken down because in the classroom you write because you have to, whereas in the extracurriculum you write because you want to.
Even though I enjoyed reading and writing in the A.P. English class, I still never thought of myself as a writer. I also do not believe I was taught unconsciously that I could not write. I have never thought of myself as a “good” writer, but I also have not thought of myself as a “bad” writer. I think I am fully capable of writing an “A” paper, but when it comes to writing, I have trouble being truly committed to a paper and proud of what I wrote. I usually just write to get an “A” and get the paper done with. I don’t spend time trying to make the paper really influential, I just write to get all the questions answered in the prompt. I have never been assigned a paper that would cause me to really “love” what I was writing, which is what happens in the extracurriculum as described by Gere. Most of the papers have to include literature that I never really can relate to, so it is difficult to be passionate about what I am writing.
My high school experience was very similar; get the book, read the book, and write a paper following assigned guidelines. High school, for me, was a very boring, mundane, and mentally drained process with little sense of accomplishment. I never had the capacity to take an A.P. English class but the one you mentioned seemed to have it right, in a sense of making learning interesting. Classes that allow varied presentations, especially video presentations, make it fun to go to class on presentation day.
ReplyDeleteIn your blog post you write how you can write an “A” paper and I have no doubt that you can do it, its just the way you think of it as an “A” paper. When I write papers I have never thought about it being an “A,B, or C,” probably because I never expect it to be, but I let my judgment of my papers be my judgment. I do this because sometimes I feel like I have written an excellent paper and get a bad grade on it and the other way around, and I know every teachers interpretation of my papers will be different. When I write papers I always compare them to the last one I wrote, sometimes it’s better and sometimes it isn’t, and when I think I have written a good paper and get a poor grade on it I don’t let it get to me and just move on to the next one. I could get a “D” in a class and have done what I thought is good writing all semester or get an “A” in a class and not really improve, but I know that “D” grade taught me a lot more than an “A” grade. A desire to improve helps in the classroom and creates an extracurriculum.