Taking Risks

Emig forced me to think: what do I really want my students to learn? Which then forced me to reconsider: where do I perpetually fail as a teacher from semester to semester? And here it is: I struggle to get students to acknowledge the value of intellectual risk-taking in writing. For the most part, from one semester to the next my students are pretty decent writers. The writing isn’t horrible, though it is far from exceptional. Just average. And my, they are content with mediocrity. Why should they see any value in writing when mediocrity is the pinnacle of their academic ethos? I must admit to being slightly annoyed by Emig (though perhaps unjustly so, and perhaps I’m interpreting her out of context) when she writes, “…most students are not permitted by most curricula to discover the values of composing, say, in dance, or even in film; and most students are not sophisticated enough to create, to originate formulations, using the highly abstruse symbol system of equations and formulae.”

While I’m prone to agree with the general sentiment of this statement (though the curriculum restriction claim is, I believe, historically dated), and while I see her point is to emphasize the accessibility of writing as opposed to other graphic symbol compositions, there is an across the board expression of doubt in student sophistication. Clearly, the argument has its merits. On the whole, I must admit to doubting them. I get cynical quickly. But, I’d like to have a little more faith in student sophistication. But how? How to foster that intellectual risk-taking in writing? And Robin Williams-style, Dead-Poets-Society-Inspirational-Crap doesn’t cut it.

While pondering this I was struck by the following paragraph: “…the right hemisphere [of the brain] seems to be the source of intuition, of sudden gestalts, of flashes of images, of abstractions as visual or spatial wholes, as the initiating metaphors of the creative process.” So, question: How do I teach my students to follow their writing intuition, to seize those sudden moments (Boice would be so upset)? And beyond that, not only how to teach the pursuit of intuition, but how to get my students to engage with the fickle nature of intuition—that there is a utility to failure, how to recognize lucky accidents, the need to push through discomfort, when not to trust intuition…

There is some kind of relationship here between following intuition and engaging in intellectual curiosity and risk-taking. I just don’t know what it is.