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JumpingintheDeepEndIT’S NOT YET CLEAR HOW BEST TO TEACH WRITING AT SWARTHMORE.By ElizabethRedden ’05Few modernist authors espouse the possibilities of youth so fervently as Rainer Maria Rilke. Be patient,he writes in his letters—do not seek answers, but live the questions: “Resolve to be always beginning—to be a beginner!” 1 But in The Notebooks of Malte Laurids Brigge, Rilke delves into the anxietythat lurks beneath possibility, the pressure that inhibits wayward exploration: “There are no classes inlife for beginners; it is always the most difficult that is asked of one right away.” 2 How can we reconcileRilke’s exaltation of exploration with his acknowledgment that external pressures demand for youngsubjects to confront immediately that which is most difficult? (NEED THESIS!)Had this been an actual Swarthmorepaper, I might have identified 10 potentialproblems with this introductory paragraph,one of which would be, yes, the lack of a thesis.My peers, my professor, my internal editorwould tell me how to do better, and I’dreturn to my computer, turning what I saidinto what I should have said, or closer to it.Then, and only then, would I stand a fightingchance of figuring out what I know—about Rilke, about beginnings, about thatwhich is most difficult.Writing is inseparable from the intellectualexperience. By dancing with the unknown onpaper, students learn the steps. “It’s not thesimple transference of what I know intosomeone else’s mind,” says Rebekah Rosenfeld’07. “The process of making sure thatyour own communication is clear to othersinvolves your making it clear to yourself.”But, as for Rilke’s Malte, expectations forbeginning college writers are high, and thepool deep enough for some to sink whereothers can swim.A freshman writer is a novice acting asexpert, says Nancy Sommers, director of theHarvard Study of Undergraduate Writing, alongitudinal effort begun in 1995 to determinehow students perceive the academicwriting experience. “One could imagineanother pedagogical approach that recognizesfreshmen as beginners and asks themto write a series of exercises that are moretechnically suitable to their skills—to constructparagraphs or two-page reports,instead of being asked to write 10-page arguments,or even not to write at all,” Sommersand co-author Laura Saltz write in “TheNovice as Expert,” which appeared in theSeptember 2004 issue of College Compositionand Communication Online.However, the authors argue that bythrowing first-year students into the deepend, they’ll learn to stay afloat: “Even if askingfreshmen to do the work of expertsinvites imitative rather than independentbehavior, it is the means, paradoxically,through which they learn to use writing toolsof their own and grow passionate about theirwork.” Those students who enter collegethinking of themselves as novices, open to1 Rainer Maria Rilke, Rilke on Love and Other Difficulties, Trans. John J.L. Mood (New York: W.W. Norton & Company, 1993), p. 25.2 Rainer Maria Rilke, The Notebooks of Malte Laurids Brigge: A Novel, Trans. M.D. Herter Norton (New York: W.W. Norton & Company, 1992), p. 80.24 : swarthmore college bulletin
SOIZICK MEISTER/MEDIA BAKERYjune 2006 : 25
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