The Story of Rob and the Writing Conference
Teacher’s Note: This story has been borrowed for classroom purposes only.
I meet with my College Writing students nearly every week in individual conferences. The early meetings can often feel tense; students sometimes seem cautious, shy, tongue-tied. As some have told me, seeing a teacher outside of class time carries the weight of discipline – reminders of detentions and other punishments. I think many students simply don ‘t know what to expect. What do you do, talking to a teacher for 15 whole minutes? (The night before my first writing conference in college, I broke out in hives from sheer anxiety.)
As the weeks unfold, I think students get more comfortable with these conferences. Students who are initially hesitant usually grow more confident as they begin to take a more assertive role in shaping our discussions. From course evaluations, I’ve learned that many students come to value this aspect of the class, even when they experience a rocky start.
Rob didn’t undergo this transformation. He was a kind of student I had grown wary of. Rushing a fraternity in his first semester, he wore baggy jeans and baseball caps pulled low over his eyes. He rarely offered anything beyond the briefest answer possible and never laughed at any of my jokes. In class, he had to be cajoled into joining group work, claiming he could do the assignments “better and faster” on his own. Week after week, our conversations felt stiff and uncomfortable: he didn’t seem interested in getting any more engaged and wouldn’t meet my eyes when we talked. And it only got worse from there. I asked Rob open-ended questions to get him talking about his draft, verbalizing his decisions about what went into the paper and his revision plans. Even students who didn’t “like” the class seemed to understand how to get by in conferences; Rob seemed uninterested or unwilling to even try.
“How did you come up with the idea for this paper?” I would ask, excited to hear about his first draft, thinking this would be the day we made a breakthrough. His drafts always did seem thoughtful, full of promise; either he had to loosen up or I had to ask the magic question.
“I had to write something, so I did,” sounding genuinely confused by the question.
“Well, what do you want this paper to accomplish?” A softball question he could surely answer.
Pause. “I don’t know. I just wanted to get it done.”
“Hmm. What do you think works well in the draft?”
Longer pause. “Not much. ”
And so on. This happened for six or seven weeks. This was why many of my colleagues hated conferences. We’d have a short, painful meeting, rarely making it to the 10-minute mark. Then Rob would leave without, I think, much happening for him or his writing. I would make a check in my grade book to mark that he’d been there, and then I’d add a tiny pencil mark (-) next to it, to remind myself of how frustrated I’d been, how spiteful he’d seemed. Luckily for me, Rob’s conference slot was bracketed by two enthusiastic students who would bring energetic revisions each week, convincing me that it was indeed Rob’s fault those 15 (or 10 or 8) minutes were so disastrous.
And honestly, I just couldn’t understand Rob’s hostility. After my initial angst, my experience with writing conferences as an undergraduate had been one of the most powerful learning experiences of my life. Rob’s classmates blossomed with the individualized attention I could never provide in a class of 24 students. I believe that seeing their writing and their questions taken seriously by a teacher was – I hate to use this problematic term – an empowering experience. So how come Rob couldn’t see it, couldn’t appreciate the opportunity he had? Even self-proclaimed “non-writers ” were usually won over by mid-semester, and we could have productive conferences that didn’t feel like dental surgery without anesthesia.
Rob’s conferences weren’t getting much better; if anything, they were getting worse. I began to resent the energy I was putting in trying to get him excited about his writing. Where was his resistance coming from? Did he resent a female teacher? One only a few years older than him? One who didn’t play a more traditional red-pen-wielding role? All of those things should have made me more approachable, but maybe they just made me look weak. I looked around the office that delineated my lowly status at the university – a room scarcely bigger than a broom closet, crammed with scarred desks and chairs and shared by three teachers, the steam-pipe running through the room providing unbelievable belches of heat, the flickering fluorescence of the overhead light – the residents of this room were clearly at the bottom of the institutional food chain.
Still, his resistance, his refusal to do this simple thing I asked of him – to talk about his writing – was infuriating. Why was I doing all the work?
Before long, I dreaded seeing Rob. One afternoon, I lost patience halfway through our tired, scripted dialogue. I asked questions; he answered minimally. I encouraged; he stared at the floor. My temper had worn thin and I was dangerously close to overreacting, I knew. But his resistance to me, to the class, to writing had suddenly, overwhelmingly become intolerable. I wanted to scream. I wanted to be that teacher I still remember from elementary school, whose mere presence was so powerful no one dared defy her. I wanted a principal’s office I could send recalcitrant students to. I wanted to yell, ” Give a damn about something!”
In a moment of which I am still ashamed, I couldn’t bear this, his resistance, anymore.
“Rob,” I snapped. “We ‘re not getting much out of this. Why don’t we just cut it short today?”
He finally looked at me, stunned. I was surprised to see his face. “What?”
“I’m really tired and you don’t seem to be fully engaged, so let’s stop for today.” He got up slowly. At the door he turned and looked back at me. “I’m never sure what you want me to say here.”
When he left, I closed the door and put my head down on my desk.