junkmail for blankets

popeyed pedagogy

so i started my new comp class this week, and i can say, with confidence, that, in terms of college writing classes, they rock. below are just a few snippets from the amazing batch of diagnostics they wrote for me today. and after that, if you have any interest in teaching, pedagogy, the blues, or michael polanyi, click on the "continue reading" link for two pedagogical essays i wrote for one of my classes.

::"We all start somewhere, and air guitar is the expression of the potential Rock God in all of us."::"My outline is very rough, often containing marks in pen, pencil and remnants of last nights dinner"::"Your Pedro the Lion shirt is HOT!"::"you are damn lucky to have ME in your class. I am superfly"::He's [Popeye] just a simple bloke with extraordinarily large limbs and a cursed eye"::"

::

Cryin’, Cheatin’, and Leavin’: Comp 101 as a Country Song

I sit at my homemade desk in my homely apartment and complain to no one in particular: “Why should I be up at 2:30 a.m. commenting on my students’ personal essays? What’s the harm in waiting another day? I already get them their papers back faster than most of the TA’s I know.” 30 minutes and half a paper later, I watch the minute hand on my antique wall clock stand upright: 3:00, Country Standard Time. If you hear 3 a.m. mentioned in a song, it’s likely country, and the singer has likely been crying, cheated on, or both, in no particular order. He has considered leaving, and he doesn’t know where he’ll go, but that’s of no concern at this hour.

What is of concern at this hour is that I’ve got eight papers left, and at an average of 45 minutes per paper, I’m not sleeping tonight. I want to yell out, to sing the blues, but if you sing the blues and no one hears it . . . ?

I decide that I need music to keep me awake. I scan FM, but everything feels so canned and shallow, and half the stations are contemporary, either country or Christian, and that will only add anger to my frustration. So I switch to AM and some real blues: 78 recordings of old gospel tunes. The gospel tunes, whose complaints were aired before its listeners but toward God, birthed the blues, whose singers still complained, and even though their complaints weren’t always aimed at the ears of the Almighty, they were giving structure to their complaints so that others could join along—essentially, the blues were a music of empathy. Now there’s country, and its singers complain—no, make that bitch and moan—for the sake of mere complaint, because they find it amusing, because, ultimately, it sells, and so many people are buying.

My students need the gospel, or even the blues—heck, I’d be glad just to get them to quit listening to Z94 The Chaw, or whatever country stations they listen to. The music’s seeping into the classroom. In two quarters of teaching Comp 101, I’ve had several students cry, a few cheat, and one leave. Why? Among other things, they need someone to model the blues for them, to tune into their frequency and sing gospel. They need empathy. This is what I do.

My first cryer approached me after class three weeks into my first quarter. Her friend, she said, made a 3.9 on her paper, and she, the cryer, made only a 3.8. She was, in modern country lingo, crying a river of tears. I gave her a tissue from my backpack and had her follow me to my office. I’ve cried over a 3.8 before, but they were tears of joy. With her, there was the issue of competition, to be sure, with which so many students struggle, but I figured there was more behind the crying than the competing.

There’s always a problem behind the problem. I knew better than to think that a 3.8 was the only issue here. So I empathized with her as college student: “How’s your first few weeks of school been? There’s so much to do, I imagine it’s pretty stressful. Is it what you expected?” She looked up directly at me for the first time and responded with something close to what I expected: “Oh, my gosh. My husband and I have been married for three weeks and his parents are mad at us and our house is a mess and he just lost his job and I don’t know how we’re going to pay the mortgage and . . . .” The blues. For some reason, whether former teachers or societal expectations or something else, she felt compelled to silence herself, to label her troubles as minor, to dampen her heartstrings. She thought it puerile to approach her comp teacher with the troubles she’s seen.

I’ve had one cryer since, this one prompted by a missed assignment. Behind the missed assignment, an image problem, and insecurity. I invited her to talk, and we did, for a long time, and she left, not necessarily feeling any better about her image, but confident that she had the freedom to approach me, to make mistakes in the writing she presented me, to fall short in some of the processes of writing for the sake of learning. She needed empathy, not a teacher complaining for the sake of complaining.

College students cry. Sometimes it’s from homesickness, sometimes stress, but whatever it is, it’s usually legitimate, and part of being a teacher means being empathetic, willing to sit with a student and act out concern for him as a human. There’s no room in a true university setting for those who would ridicule a student for crying, unless, of course, those people have been hired to impart facts alone. And facts are good, but divorced from human existence, and from, dare I say truth, all that we can expect facts to produce are robots, producers of hillbilly Muzak.

It’s 5 a.m. now, and I’d like just to slap a grade on the rest of the papers and be done with it. But that would be cheating. The work I put into commenting on their papers, above all else, is what I, as an experienced writer, have to offer. Were I to shortcut here, I would cheat them out of an education that they pay to receive and that I’m paid to provide. Were I to cheat in this, however, it would be a result not of malice, but of weariness, of burden.

Thus do I privilege my students with the benefit of the doubt: If they cheat, or I see them on the way to cheating, I want to know first what burdens they’re shouldering to depress their integrity enough to consider this infidelity. Surely some students cheat to impress a significant other or to earn respect from friends, or maybe just for the thrill of it, but even these, in their own ways, are burdens, and I, as their teacher, need first to sympathize.

One of my students this quarter was trying to cheat on her in-class essay for the midterm portfolio. She hadn’t actually “cheated” yet when I figured it out, so I decided to extend empathy before sanction. Before indicting her for a potential infraction, I asked about her social life, her grades, her parents’ expectations, only to let her know that I cared, and that I were willing to take the time to help her did she need it. She needed it.

I’m convinced that a majority of the cheating that occurs in college classrooms could be mitigated were the students convinced that their teachers were willing to take time to help them shoulder their burdens, even if that meant simply asking questions and listening compassionately. Some students ask only for an audience for their blues. When they feel like no one’s listening, that no one cares, they feel they can’t get on alone, so they release the pressure with an easy cheat, and as every blues singer knows, cheatin’, caught or not, always has consequences.

This student decided to leave my class. Maybe she was embarrassed, or maybe she didn’t believe that my offer was unattached to any strings. Maybe she had had people offer help in the past and not come through. Maybe she just needed to take one less class. Who knows why some students leave? As long as they know that I care, and I’m hitting the right chords, what it comes down to is whether they like the music. Most of them do, a few don’t, and there ain’t nothin’ to be done about that.

So I decide not to cheat on commenting on their essays. The sun is rising, and my students will ask me in 4 hours why I look like I slept on a park bench. I’ll say, “Because I love you so much,” and then I’ll laugh to cut the awkwardness, and they’ll laugh in turn, but what they don’t know is that behind my little joke, I mean it. That the reason I spend so much time on their papers is that the papers are their songs to me, their lyrics composed often amid stress and suffering and burden. They’re singing, for God’s sake, whether they realize it or not, and they need an audience, someone to say “Amen” and “Preach it, sister.” Someone to communicate, “If my saying ‘I care’ don’t convince you, then look at my park-bench eyes, look at my cramped hands. You’re still off-key at times, unfocused and undeveloped and slightly unorganized, but you’re singing, and I wanna hear it.” And when they get their papers back quickly, they’re that much more convinced that I mean it, that I care, that there’s no need for cryin’, no need for cheatin’, no need for leavin’. And that’s gospel in my classroom.

::

To Get a Story, Give a Story: Michael Polanyi and the First Five Minutes of the Composition Class

“But mom, my comp teacher looks like a child molester”—the opening line of my student’s midterm essay. Apparently my midterm facial-hair experiment had frightened more than amused. The purpose of the midterm essay was to push the students to analyze their first eight weeks of freshman composition and make holistic conclusions about their writing in the context of their public (non-academic) lives. In an effort to destroy the myth of an academic/public disjunct, I had begun every class with a story, or at least a quip, from the “outside.” In doing so, I was modeling for my students what I was attempting to teach them, that their extra-academic stories are deeply connected to and inseparable from their academic stories, and that any attempt to see them as unconnected results in voiceless, inhumane writing; that divorcing the two both insults the process of writing and robs them of the raw materials that give their writing integrity.

A student began her midterm reflection essay with a humorous statement on my facial hair, certainly not a traditionally academic way to begin an essay. But I, as a “gatekeeper of academia,” was delighted because she was applying what I had been teaching: We must not construct a wall between our public lives (thought, voice, epistemology) and our academic lives.

This student further corroborated her belief in this lesson two weeks after writing that essay. I was sitting on a bench on-campus waiting for a bus back to the city, passing the time with a cigarette and a nebulous stare. The student saw me and set herself down beside me on the bench:
“What does that [cigarette] taste like?”
I thought for a second (about lawsuits and the answer) before answering, “You know, I can’t really put it into words.”
She wasn’t satisfied with my answer, her exaggerated eye-roll signaling a cop-out, but she pressed on and began asking my advice on issues ranging from what to do about her annoying dorm-mate to whether or not to drop out and join the Navy. I was delighted to see her connecting her public life (everyday decisions) with her academic life (her comp teacher), so I followed her questions, attempting to offer sober, cautious wisdom, hoping she’d know that even if I couldn’t fix her problems, I’d certainly care, and that I were glad to listen and support her as much outside of the class as in.

After about 20 minutes, the conversation wound down, and I heard the bus pulling in, so I asked her how she thought comp class was going, and she responded, "After the first few days of class with you, I honestly didn’t think you’d be able to teach me anything [not what a teacher wants to hear]—what teacher comes into class and tells stories about what happens to him at the bus stop—but after the first week, I decided to listen because I like you. And I needed a teacher like that more than some smart asshole who didn’t know my name. Because of that, I know that I’ve learned stuff from you."
“Like what?” I asked. To which she grinned and said, wryly, “I can’t really put it into words.”

As humans, maybe especially as teachers, we all wrestle with the desire to want our students to like us: Is it okay to want them to like us? Is their liking us at all relevant to the effectiveness of our teaching? We all know the caveats—respect breeds likeability; be the teacher first and then the friend, e.g.—but are they true? Does it make a difference? Assuming that our students do like us, will that be enough to keep them from asking the dreaded “Why are we doing this” question after we give them an assignment? Based on my limited experience, I can’t imagine what kind of teaching could ultimately prevent that question; however, I imagine some readers will protest: “Actually, I’ve never had that question.” And I couldn’t question that claim, though I would question whether that’s a good thing, not having had that question in class. What does the absence of the “Why” question say about the way we teach? Some readers may be wondering even now, “Why are you telling us this?” to which I answer, “I can only ask you to trust me,” which is convenient because the first idea necessary to an answer is that trust is an inescapable aspect of all knowledge, of all teaching and learning.

Let’s start with theory. The word “theory.” Everybody say it – THEORY. Why did you say it the way you did? How do you know it’s “THUH” instead of “TH”? Maybe you could explain the rules that govern fricatives and diphthongs, but you didn’t come to learn the pronunciation by learning those rules; rather, someone modeled the pronunciation for you, and you practiced and trusted that that person knew the way to do things. Or a more frustrating example, The 3D Magic Eye pictures. How do we learn to see them? We rely on someone to “coach” us as we practice. Why? Because we trust that that person knows what he is talking about and can lead us to the answer. Even if we rely only on the instructions, there exists a person behind those instructions whom we trust has the knowledge necessary (Meek 4). I can’t see the 3D picture because I’m too proud to allow anyone to help me – I want to do it on my own. I could list example after example, but the point is this: Reliance on authority is unavoidable; we do not learn in vacuums; every act of knowledge, of learning, requires that we trust to some degree. Even scientific discovery, which we consider objective knowledge, hard facts, requires some sort of assent to something or someone who provides us with knowledge that we didn’t have before (1). We know that 2+2=4, not because we figured it out on our own, but because someone told us that this is true, and we trusted him as we understood why it makes sense. “Seeing is believing,” we say, forgetting that we have been taught to see what is there, that we have trusted an authoritative guide to teach us to see (5). This doesn’t mean that authority is more important than empirical evidence, but empirical evidence, which we unthinkingly label the source of knowledge, succeeds only as we are guided to understand it. Piano teachers and pitching coaches and pottery teachers help us to identify touch. Radiology students are led by their teachers to read and understand otherwise meaningless patches of dark and light. You trust the good cook when he tells you that when the milk starts to turn a certain color, it is starting to burn. These teachers, these authoritative guides, teach us to notice what we otherwise wouldn’t see. Learning takes place in a relationship of trust, and it does so because knowledge is personal; it is filtered through and formed by personal beings, who must assent to the truth (6). We use logic but we also give personal assent. Science begins with a theory, a surmise, not an empirical claim. Every time we make a truth claim we do so with the acceptance of a community of others who will, we believe, agree with our claims (Murphy 75).

I realize that this idea (trust as an inescapable component of all knowing) is more complicated than it appears here (see Meek and Palmer for a more thorough treatment), but whether or not you comprehend or agree with the particulars, at least consider the idea that knowing involves trust, which is the main idea.

Assuming the former, that trust is an essential component of knowledge, the question is begged: What are our criteria for knowledge? What do we require of someone to say that he “knows” something? This is where I turn to one of my teachers, Michael Polanyi, whose model of knowing has changed the way I understand my role as teacher, as guide to 21 Comp 101 students who are expecting to know something about writing as a result of my class.
Imagine that I ask you the question “What is this,” then hold up a toy landspeeder from the Star Wars movies. Unlike most of my students, some of you would recognize the toy and call out “landspeeder.” And how would you have come to that conclusion? As you answer, are you consciously thinking, “Well, it’s brown, it has turbine engines, it looks like a Subway sandwich”? Are you aware of those things as you arrive at the word “landspeeder”? If you fly home for Christmas and walk out into the waiting area to meet your family, you will know your mom when you see her, but when you see her and think “Mom,” do you consciously think of all the features of her face, her posture, her clothing, that comprise “Mom”? How many of us know what a cigarette tastes like? Can we explain it without simply making comparisons to other things whose taste we know, which, ultimately, we could only explain by making a comparison to something else? When someone taught you to drive a stick shift, how did it happen? You focused on the dynamics of clutch and gas pedal, maybe even how much pressure you had to exert with each of your legs. Now you know how to drive a stick, but how often are you conscious of the pressure you exert with your legs?

Per Polanyi, no matter what kind of action we are performing (and we are never not acting), we depend on two kinds of knowing, or awareness:
1. Focal awareness
2. Subsidiary awareness

Focal awareness is the purpose of our action, or the intention. Identifying “Landspeeder” and “Mom,” or driving a car, is the focal awareness, the aim, the purpose of our action.

Subsidiary awareness is instrumental knowledge, the separate elements that we rely on to get us to the focal awareness, get us to the aim, the purpose of our action. Another way to say it is that subsidiary awareness is the skill that we have learned that we employ to help us achieve our end. “Brown and turbine and Subway sandwich,” “Baggy eyes and round chin and 5’6,” “more pressure on the left leg and less on the right” – all subsidiary awareness.

So there is the focal awareness, the thing we are cognizant of, aware of (driving), and subsidiary awareness, the things we rely on without being cognizant of them (without focusing on them: pressure on the clutch). This is the Polanyian version of James Kinneavy’s “modes of discourse.” In A Theory of Discourse, he says, "The aims [focal awareness] of language are the reason for the existence of all the preceding aspects [subsidiary awareness] of language. Sounds, morphemes, syntactic patterns, meanings of all kinds, skills in speaking and the other arts of discourse, narratives and other modes of discourse—all of these exist so that humans may achieve certain purposes [focal awareness] in their use of language with one another" (37-38).

In every act of knowing, we are focally aware of something and subsidiarily aware of other things which we are directing our attention from and through.
By way of another illustration, think of a baseball player in a batting slump. When he first learned to hit, someone showed him how to hold the bat – holding the bat was his focal awareness, and closing his fingers, flexing his muscles, etc., were subsidiary awareness. After practicing, he eventually knew how to hold the bat. Then he focused on the swing, and holding the bat, which had been a focal awareness, became a subsidiary awareness. Over time, he changed his focus to increasingly more complex activities, until he knew how to hit the baseball, his original intention or aim. At that point, all those things that had at some point been focal awareness are now subsidiary awareness. When he steps into the batter’s box, he doesn’t focus on those things – he focuses on hitting. But when he finds himself in a slump, he goes to his batting coach (teacher) and refocuses on some of the subsidiary particulars (the way his shoulders are positioned, the way he grips the bat), until he figures out what he’s doing wrong. If, while he were batting, he tried to focus on all the subsidiary aspects, he would be frozen, like a piano player at a recital focusing on her individual fingers – everything would stop.

So, in all acts of knowing, we have focal awareness and subsidiary awareness, not only in the batter’s box, but in the composition room, as well.

Next, Polanyi “maintains that all human activity lies somewhere on a continuum between the poles of bodily activity and conceptual activity,” bodily activity being nonverbal and conceptual activity being verbal (Sorri 16). But no human activity is exclusively one or the other; because we are embodied beings, “no activity could be absolutely conceptual” (purely verbal) – contra Plato, we can’t leave our bodies at the door; on the other side, our bodies couldn’t function without mental activity of some kind, either. And in any activity, both the bodily and the conceptual are involved in making judgments and decisions, or, to use earlier language, placing trust in the way that the world functions (16-17). As we drive, which involves both bodily and conceptual activity, we’re forced to make constant judgments and decisions based on weather and other drivers and our previous experience. And our bodies can act on these decisions while our minds are focused on something else, like the awful music on the radio or the Big Gulp about to topple over.

In many ways, I could explain conceptually, or put into words, what’s happening when I drive a car, but eventually, I’ll get to the point where I can’t put into words exactly what I know. I know bodily that I’m driving a stick, but I can’t explain to you exactly what’s happening in my tendons and ligaments and brain, all of which are part of my knowing how to drive. Just like I can’t put into words what a cigarette tastes like, though I can say that I know what it tastes like. As Polanyi says, we “always know more than we can tell.” This dimension to our knowledge, the part that we can’t put into words, is called “tacit knowledge.” In every act that we perform, we depend on tacit knowledge, or, as he also calls it, “personal knowledge.” According to Polanyi, in every act that we perform, we depend upon both explicit knowledge (that which we can put into words) and tacit knowledge (that which we can’t). “Joseph Eng is the Comp Director at Eastern Washington University” is explicit knowledge, something that I can articulate conceptually and even prove empirically, which, starting with Plato and running through Empiricism and still present today, has been considered the only kind of valid knowledge (again, this statement is too big for this paper’s britches, but Polanyi, among many others, handles it well). And yet I can say that I know that Joseph is a nice guy, for which in some ways I can provide evidence, but in other ways I can’t put it into words. But does this mean that I don’t know that he’s a nice guy? Because I can’t put the taste of a cigarette into words, does this mean that I don’t know it? No – it just means that it’s tacit knowledge rather than explicit knowledge. All of our actions, our knowledge of a skill, involve tacit knowledge. Riding a bike, driving a stick shift, playing the piano, all involve skills that we have, things that we know, that we can’t put into words. You may be able to give me all the theories and concepts for riding a bike, but if you can’t hop on a banana seat and pedal down the sidewalk, you can’t say that you know how to ride a bike. So having explicit knowledge of a skill by itself is not sufficient, or even necessary, for tacit knowing (18). I don’t need to be able to explain it in order to be able to do it.

So tacit knowing occurs when subsidiary awareness and bodily activity combine, and explicit knowing occurs when focal awareness and conceptual activity combine. And since there’s no purely conceptual activity, and focal awareness always depends on subsidiary awareness, there’s no explicit knowing without tacit knowing. In every act of knowing, every performance, every activity, we rely on tacit knowledge, things we know that we can't put into words. Or, as Polanyi says it:

Things of which we are focally aware can be explicitly identified; but no knowledge can be made wholly explicit. For one thing, the meaning of language, when in use, lies in its tacit component; for another, to use language involves actions for our body of which we have only a subsidiary awareness. Hence, tacit knowing is more fundamental than explicit knowing; we can know more than we can tell and we can tell nothing without relying on our awareness of things we may not be able to tell. (Personal Knowledge, Preface)

So then, how do we obtain this tacit knowledge? How we acquire explicit knowledge is obvious: We read books, listen to people with experience, gather information. Tacit knowledge, on the other hand, does not come from consciously absorbing data. It comes from “indwelling,” another of Polanyi’s terms. Indwelling is an active, willing engagement of the body with all the things that make up our subsidiary awareness. We acquire tacit knowledge through trial and error, through imitation, through sitting at the feet of someone with experience and trusting that he knows how this thing works and committing to the particular parts of that thing, and whether that thing be playing the piano or reading x-rays or driving, it requires that we submit to the authority of a teacher. And as we indwell the various facets of these skills, we begin the process of integrating all of these particular skills into an integrative whole, the thing at which we’re aiming. As we learn, we focus on individual pieces, but after having learned those things, they become subsidiary to a higher focus, become clues or pieces to the puzzle, until eventually we know how to do the thing we set out to do. At the point when we know how to drive, or see the 3D Magic Eye puzzle, we have successfully integrated formerly meaningless particulars into a recognizable whole. The things that were once focal are now subsidiary. Though we still rely on those things, we no longer focus on them, nor are we necessarily able to put them into words, yet we know that we are doing the thing we set out to do.
Obviously, we have to practice with the clues, with the individual pieces, before we reach the whole, perform the skill – we learn to drive by practicing the particulars of driving. We don’t learn to drive by memorizing the physics and chemistry of car driving. We can’t explain tacit knowledge, but we can demonstrate it. I can’t tell you how I know, but I can show you that I know. The taste of coffee, for instance, is tacit knowledge – I can’t explain to you how I know it, but blindfold me and put it in my mouth, and I can show you that I know the taste of coffee when I correctly identify it. Richard Murphy says it well:
Our knowing is personal—and not finally formalizable—not simply because it is inarticulate but because we know it. What we know requires an act of personal investment: we know it because we dwell in it. What we know requires an act of assent: we know because we believe. Any statement of our knowledge minus that indwelling faith is incomplete, and no statement can be at once a statement and a statement of our belief in it. For Polanyi, that is, our knowledge is fundamentally passionate, and the passion is forever beyond our words. (80).
And, as Sorri says, “[M]y body frequently knows more than my mind can explicate. . . . All human cognition [per Polanyi] is to a large extent bodily in nature, acquired through a kind of absorption, as it were, and known in a way that largely escapes articulation by the knower him- or herself” (15).
So, briefly, what does this look like for writing as an activity? How, very basically, do we learn to write? Assuming that we learned to speak first, we then focus on the rules of grammar and on syntax and on paragraphs and on theses and on illustrations and narration and so on and so on, and we are always learning, learning by trial and error, indwelling the writing. Cognitively I can tell you the rules of writing, but that alone doesn’t mean I know how to write; I know I write by writing, and I show you I know by showing you my writing. And I can do that because I have listened to other writers (whether in person or by reading them), have practiced integrating the particular clues into a whole. I can write an essay for you, and be sure that I know how to write one, but I can’t put the essay writing process entirely into words for you.

This is why I don’t stand up in front of my comp students and expect to tell them how to write. Since so much of my (and anyone’s) knowledge of writing is tacit knowledge, I can’t put it into words anyway. This is why I write with my students, why we workshop, why we conference, why we collaborate, why we focus on process (Reither 38). I can give them all the rules and theories, but until my students indwell them, practice them, trial-and-error them, they won’t gain tacit knowledge. Certainly I direct their focus to certain particulars, like a thesis, or a claim and reason, or an illustration, and they practice that until, one day, they no longer have to attend focally to it (thus “knowing” how to do it), until they have turned those particulars into the whole of an essay.

Moreover, as writers, all of us, trying to teach writing, are teaching something that is largely tacit, something which we can’t entirely put into words. Yet for some reason, when we begin making assignments, we think that if we can’t fully explain, or put into words, exactly why this assignment is good, or exactly how it will work, then we’re not allowed to use it. We anticipate the student’s “Why are we doing this,” and despite the fact that we know tacitly why we’re doing it, since we can’t put it into words we feel that we have no right to assign such a thing. We’re placing limits on academic knowledge that we don’t put on the rest of knowledge. And when we do that, we’re not allowing students to indwell writing, allowing them to learn writing the way they learn anything else. We are placing a purely rationalistic rubric on what constitutes effective assignments. But all knowledge is personal, whether it be in the comp class or in the pub. And we are not teaching if we allow a divorce between the two in our classrooms. Our students will learn to write the same way they learned to drive—we must not demand that they win the Indy 500 before giving them the chance to burn the clutch out.

When I teach, I am focally aware of what I want my students to learn, and I can make that explicit, but that focal awareness is dependent on subsidiary awareness, which includes things like the personality of my class, the architecture of the room, my previous teaching experience, the questionnaire which I handed out the first week (which should be just as important as the syllabus), a sense of whether the class is going well or if I need to push a draft back a day or two (Murphy 80). I am aware of these things only subsidiarily, and my knowledge of teaching is as tacit as it is explicit. Based on that, I shouldn’t shy away from making an assignment or having my students do an exercise just because I can’t explain to them why it’s helpful or exactly what the reason is for it. On the other side, I shouldn’t require of my students that they be able to explain how writing works, as long as they can show me that it works.
I realize, of course, that most, if not all, of my students don’t give a rip about Michael Polanyi and tacit knowledge, so what do I do say when they ask the “Why this” question? If it comes to this, and if I have built a relationship of trust with my students, then they are more willing to press on without an answer, more open to learning, even if I can’t explain exactly how it’s going to happen.
So how do we build this sort of trust? Simply put: Tell stories.

Our students come into the college environment with the idea that there is an academic language that is divorced from their ordinary language, and we in academia do a good awful job of perpetuating that. But if all knowledge is personal, and all acts of knowing are the same, then we must not teach in a way that encourages them to divorce their public lives from their academic lives.
How do we, as teachers, teach each other and learn from each other? Mostly, we tell stories. In my program at Eastern Washington University, all TA’s are required to take a first-quarter pedagogy class; we usually start class by allowing the TA’s to tell our victories and successes. We sit around like comp nerds in the pub and tell stories about what has worked and what hasn’t in our classes. If we are teaching well, then we think and act the same way in our classrooms as we do in our cars and on our karaoke platforms. More and more comp journals are devoting space for teachers to tell their stories, because we live in story and we live by story (81). We learn our earliest lessons through stories. We share our humanness and our embodiedness through story. Computers don’t tell their personal stories, but we do, and in doing so we establish our humanness and connect ourselves to each other and to our students; and when our students see that we live lives like theirs, then they are more willing to trust us. Until they’re willing to hear what we have to say outside of class, on a bench waiting for the bus, maybe, they won’t be willing to hear what we have to say in class. If they don’t like us in class, they assume they wouldn’t like us out of class, either, and they won’t be willing to listen to us in class or out.

Though I can’t always make explicit what I know about writing to my students, I can tell them stories that at least hint at what I’m trying to express. Our students have around 18 years of rich experience, of complex tacit knowledge, but when they put it on paper, it may come out impoverished and simplistic if they see in our lives a disconnect between the public and the academic sphere, and, thus, imitate us. Our students’ knowledge is embodied and personal, and if we teach in a way that leads them to think that this isn’t allowed in academia, then we should expect nothing more than flat, simplistic writing.

One practical way I avoid this is by assigning a “raw materials” notebooks at the beginning of the quarter as part of the students’ final grade. They are to be constantly observing their surroundings outside of the classroom, writing down things they notice, see, think, possibly (though not necessarily) to be used in their writing in the classroom; thus, they’re being encouraged to reconnect their public lives with their academic lives. Instead of asking a student to write about living, as if it were something that can’t happen in the classroom, I get him to see that writing, at this moment, is his life, no less real or important in class than out, just as my life is no less real in than out. So during the first five minutes of each class, I tell them the things that I’ve written in my notebook the day before, tell them my story, make it part of their lives, and in doing so, I show them that I know the value of our time together even if I can’t explain it, and they learn to trust me, even if they can’t explain it, and it’s only then, after earning their trust, that I can give them assignments that I can’t explain but that I know will help them learn to write.

On the first day of class, I told my students that the three keys to writing well are to read well, to live well, and to be willing to write poorly. Or, in other words, allow for tacit knowledge, don’t divorce the academic story from the public story, and indwell your writing—trust me, if only because you like me, and despite my facial hair.

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