Gary, when are we going to do some writing?

An interesting occurrence in class today. After about 30 mins of talking about the Freud piece that we were supposed to be reading in preparation for a long writing assignment, one of the students, frustrated, asked me, “Why are we doing all this? isn’t this supposed to be English 101?” And I had a mini-coup on my hands.

People started piping up, “Yeah – when are we going to do some writing? All we’re doing is talking about ideas. We’re supposed to be writing!”
“Aren’t you going to tell us exactly what we need to do in the writing assignment?”
“We need to know exactly what the 101 course is about!”
“I don’t get this stuff. It’s just too hard. I need to get writing.”

I desperately tried to explain that we would get to the writing soon. But they weren’t appeased. After the lesson, a group stayed back and explained the situation to me.

Several had been taking ENGL 095, an even more basic writing course where they dealt with paragraph structure, points of grammar and essay structure very explicitly. They’d been told exactly what to do when writing an essay. They wanted the same thing. They wanted to write, or be told what exactly to write.

Which struck me as rather significant.

First – no student, in my time teaching in Singapore has ever stopped a class where we were having a discussion about ideas (and mind you, the lesson this morning WAS an animated discussion of ideas) to insist that we should be writing.
Second – the age old question: can we write without content? The students wanted to write BUT they did not get the Freud. How much understanding of ideas is required for writing?
Third – the pragmatics of the situation manifested itself.
• “Do you know it’s taken me two years to qualify for this class!” ie I’ve spend two years in remedial English and I need to pass this class!
• “If I don’t pass this class, I don’t get my financial aid and I can’t continue ...”

My compromise? Instead of discussing the passages some more – we were supposed to apply the Freud to a short story, I said we would do writing in the next lesson, based on the Freud alone. I actually don’t think this is a satisfactory situation because it means that people will be writing in a vacuum. But at least it’ll allay some panic about being prepared for the exam and it’ll get some work done.