Waiting for Surprise (from What To Expect When You Are Expected To Teach)

Rereading my own words, written in 2002, just before i entered the PH.D. program, there are a lot of things I notice. The essay begins:

One of the most frustrating experiences I've had teaching freshman composition is reading essays that can't pass what Donald Murray would call the no-surprise-for-the-writer-no-surprise-for-the-reader test. In these essays, students usually tell the story of a "significant moment" in their life and then attempt tot impose some sort of "moral" or "life lesson" upon the story (or sometimes impose none at all). What makes these essays unsatisfying is the fact that, at the moment when the student put pen to paper of finger to keyboard, he or she already know the outcome of the story and had usually already processed the moral of life lesson, which was gleaned from the significant moment. (20)

I then go on to discuss the genre of the sports narrative, "Always written by former athletes and usually written by males (but increasingly popular among female students as well), the sports narrative [...] concerns itself with some kind of adversity the student conquered on the playing field or arena, usually during high school. Its setting is the BIG season, the BIG game, or the BIG play. Its "moral" or "life lesson" is predictable and ranges from "this experience taught me that no matter the obstacle, you should never stop reaching for your goals" to "from this experience I learned that anything is possible with teamwork." (20)

I go on to ask the question why I "cannot stand reading such essays" despite the fact that I, myself, was, once, just the kind of college student who may have written one.  I talk about how, in becoming an English major in UNH, I had to become a new kind of person, the kind who could crank out a more fulfilling essays that more effectively conformed to the moves of the genre.

I note the lack of sources! Just one!!! No Works Cited. Was this the norm for the collection? (It's in the back)

Near the end of the essay, after reflecting on my own experiences in school and coming to forgive my students for not producing more engaging essays for me to read, essays that were full of Murray's surprise or which enacted the self that Newkirk explains such pieces must enact (the writer must be shown in  a "staged process of self-actualization" "the writer needs to present a more malleable self, one that can be 'affected' significantly by experience" (22)) I reach an interesting moment. I began with complaint and gripe. By reflecting on myself and my own experience, I reach the point of understanding and acceptance. And then I write, "So where does this leave me, as an instructor, today" (22). It's an interesting and important question and my answers are telling.

First, I imagine, I might just ban sports narratives from my class.

But then I reject this notion because it's not so much the sports narrative that is the problem as it is the larger genre of the personal or expository essay. The genre, I write, requires the writer to both surprise the reader, to offer him or her something unexpected, some new wisdom or insight about...whatever, and it needs to do this in a way that is clever, interesting, and engaging. Students, I conclude, have many many other things on their mind that take precedence over saying something new or surprising for their English teachers (and I was no different).

Having eliminated the first solution -- I don't want to ban any topics from my classroom. I'm not that kind of teacher, I settle for a solution that is far from satisfying. I will wait (hence the title, "Waiting for Surprise"). I will wait for the students to learn how to surprise me and I will "try to be more patient with those sports narratives." I close with this:

I have learned this: that to expect my students will learn how to "surprise" themselves in writing--how to make discoveries through the act of writing--in one semester, when it took me several years to learn is simply unrealistic. Like my students, I, too, will have to wait for the surprise to come, and while I won't give up on the importance of discovery and surprise in a piece of writing, and I won't give up trying to foster it in my students' work, I won't be disappointed if, in the span of a single fifteen-week semester, it doesn't come. (23)

The solution that I seem to come to here is that the problem is actually NOT my students or their writing. And the problem is not the sports narrative. The problem is me. I'm impatient. I need to be more realistic about what I or we who assign this genre of writing to our students are asking them to know how to do. It takes time, I am saying. Be more patient. Wait.

On the one hand, this seems reasonable. It's a taking stock moment and teachers do this all the time. Is this thing that is bothering me about me or them? I am asking. It's about me, I am concluding.

On the other hand, what is notable to me as I reread my own words a dozen years later is the lack of other options that I seemed to see in my situation. When I write, "So where does all this leave me, as an instructor, today?" I don't seem to be able to entertain the notion that a freshman composition course might not include an expository or personal essay. I am so invested in recreating for my students my own experience, where I came to relish the experience of discovering what I had to say, frequently about myself, through the act of writing, that I can't imagine what else I might ask students to do with writing in a freshman composition class. I have learned enough, via the work of Tom Newkirk, about why my students may be struggling to write engaging essays (i.e. they aren't yet the kind of people who can create, on the page, a "staged process of self-actualization," who can present a "malleable self" that can be "affected significantly by experience"). But I can't imagine what else I might ask them to do or what else, if not self-actualization and the shaping of a more malleable self, a freshman composition course might be about.

But I was about to find out...