The Written or the Spoken

You know them early in a class: the speakers.  Once they out themselves, some categorizing is in order: the verbal processors, the salesmen, the cover crops.  Some students process verbally while the rest of us wait for them to find their thought; some take the topic and sell it back to you, for a grade; some are just trying to cover and they expect that volunteering anything at all will float them through, but the oats they sow in what they say burns up under the sun of cross-examination since the soil underneath is all clay and stone.

Some teachers are big on the risk needed to learn--everyone talks, everyone must process aloud and join in this group endeavor.  I dreaded classes where I would be outed.  I came to the study of literature due to that dread.  Sometimes, I didn't know what I thought, found those who did to be messengers of God himself.  I was forced to try my hand and it worked out for the best but man was it uncomfortable.

But write my responses--that was a piece of tiramisu.  Give me time and a pen or keypad, however, and I was much more at ease.  And found I did, in the end, have thoughts. What can you say in twenty-minute class discussion compared to a five minute writing exercise?  A lot more.  I process as a writer.

A colleague of mine recently taught The Things They Carried, a Vietnam war book.  He failed to call on the one Asian kid in the class--rightfully so--to see if he had any "special" knowledge on the place.  Then, after the fact, the student volunteered that indeed he had been to Vietnam and scene the tunnels dug by the Vietcong.

How could he have gotten the student to volunteer this information?  We speculated as to how it might have been done--and whether it would have happened more easily in writing.

As I enter online teaching, I know the written response will play a major role.  I like that idea; then again, that's how I process, in the written word--and, more specifically, as this blog shows, in one form of the written word which is increasingly the long written form.

But that should give me pause as well--as I consider the speakers and those for whom the written word, the keyboard, the long form is forbidding and ominous.  

And this brings us back to all the intuition that's central to teaching:  to figure out quickly who your students are, how they're trying to manage, what's their natural language, the written or the spoken.