Tell Me A Story

Twenty-five years ago I began teaching writing at St. Mary's College.
I'd gone to college under one model of writing which was the five paragraph essay based on topics handed out with little explanation by a professor. I would hand in my work, take my grade, and move on. In graduate school I encountered the beginnings of the process writing movement, a shift in the model of how to produce significant pieces of writing based on the personal focus of the writer as he or she attempted to communicate.

My teaching career has been a process of moving from the old model I was taught and the new model which I saw demonstrated in grad school. As part of my own transformation as a teacher, I've begun to ask students for writing based on their own life stories rather than academic topics. I have found such a focus is still amenable to learning the niceties of paragraph structure, sentence craft, and thesis, but it also allows students to discover that they have significant ideas to explore based on their own lives.

What I continue to find is that everyone has at least one story to tell that is so important for the integration of their intellectual life, that to not tell that story leaves students stuck throwing around language and ideas in a haphazard fashion, hoping something will stick to the wall. Once students have told their stories and rewritten them into pieces of writing that communicate to an audience, they take on a new overarching perspective on the purpose of their academic life at the College and often have insights into their evolving role in the life of their own families and communities.

Some of the early writers were military men from the Base. One young Marine wrote of fueling up a plane which his buddy took into the air the next morning. The plane never returned, and the Marine wrote of the nightmare of worry over whether he had tightened the cap on the fuel tank. In a piece about the history of his family's move to the United States from El Salvador he wrote about his grandparents' stories of entire generations of young people who disappeared under military rule. A Viet Nam vet, asked to describe his home, could not write a description past the front porch of his parents' house without triggering flashbacks of jungle, noise, and blood. The first student went on to major in political science, the second became an artist.

The assignments in my courses now trace the students' paths away from home as

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