Writing to Think...Thinking to Benefit Society.

Ask yourself this question: How many times, when you were in high school, were you asked to sit down with a pen and paper and write in response to your own thoughts? If you are like me, almost zero tangible memories come up. The closest moments I can think of in regards to this type of writing came from my creative writing classes where I was allowed to write original short stories and poems. Naturally, many of these creative pieces stemmed from intimate places within my own thoughts, but rarely was I asked (if ever) to directly address what I was thinking in or through my writing. The concept of “writing to think” was never introduced to me- at least not in a manner that resonated enough to remain in my memory- so I never used writing as a tool to create organic thought. Writing, as I perceived it, was meant as a tool to respond to other people’s thoughts. More specifically, writing was meant as a tool to respond to more important peoples’ thoughts. Shakespeare, Mark Twain, and all of the other “classic” authors I read while I was in high school were established as the "authorities of thought." They did the thinking and because of that I was told to position my thinking in response to theirs. More importantly, I was to center all of my writing around their ideas, meaning that the truly gifted “writer” was the student most capable of connecting other peoples thoughts in a cohesive and organized manner.  As I reflect on these experiences now, I often ask myself what the overall point was to this type of mechanistic writing. It is important to remember that this type of reading and writing practice in high school influenced me enough to not only apply and get accepted to college, but to be an English major and ultimately an English teacher. But I have begun to view myself as the exception. What were my classmates’ experiences like? What about students that went to “worse” schools? What about minority students who were forced to almost exclusively read and respond to white male authors, aside from maybe the occasional inclusion of additive books like “Beloved”? How did the “traditional” English classroom impact their life-long literacy practices? If the goal of an English teacher is to promote literacy, did their English teacher do his or her job?

With this handful of questions in mind, I have enjoyed reading Randy and Katherine Bomer’s many ideas about the true purpose of the modern English teacher and his or her relationship with the teaching of writing. In chapter 10 of Randy Bomer’s book, he flips the traditional idea of audience on its head, positioning the writer as his or her own audience, in order to establish a form of writing that is meant specifically to generate thought. This does not mean that teachers should remove the practice of writing with an intended outside audience from the English experience, it just means that students can benefit greatly from the practice of “writing to construct thought” (p. 167). Bomer takes his point a step further as he explicitly addresses the ideas I presented in the earlier parts of this post, writing, “I believe it’s not enough just to write in response to other authors’ texts. Part of a school curriculum should involve asking kids to pay attention to their own thinking, to notice when they have a thought, when they begin making an idea” (p. 167). These two sentences jumped off the page at me, as it seems so simple and so clear that this should be the purpose of today’s English classroom. If the goal of public education is to, as Dr. Bomer once told us, “create a public,” then shouldn’t the goal of a public education teacher be to allow students the space to generate organic thought? Our modern society is so quick to crucify the public school system and blame it for the failures of our adult citizens, yet we still allow students to spend 12 years in public education without ever being treated as important thinkers whose thoughts and ideas have the potential to change the outside circumstances of the world. In my classroom, I would prefer hearing my students’ original ideas, as opposed to constantly reading the mechanical regurgitation of themes and motifs they have pieced together from authors like Shakespeare. Regardless of the success or failure of public education, the system itself will continue to release students into our public. Meaning, even if our students are failed by the public school system, they still leave the classroom eventually and join the public as adult citizens. With this responsibility in mind, we need to ask ourselves as English teachers how we can best serve the American public during our brief encounter with its youngest members.