Postmodern hermeneutics aside, some would say that the purpose of any act of writing is to create a vessel that contains something. My observation of the past construction of this course [English 613] (talking with Freshman English instructors from previous years) leads me to believe that for many years the emphasis of the course was on the "shape" of the vessel and not on what it actually contained. The Baker model showed students how to put together such a vessel, and (I guess) the bulk of classroom hours was spent on fine-tuning the potter's skill. Secondarily, it was the job of instructors to provide "background material," or perhaps "discussion," that would enable students to locate content material with which to fill the vessel they had made. Everybody, it was assumed, can come up with content. Everybody, it was assumed, has "ideas" at their disposal that they can use to flesh out an essay.

I have trouble with these assumptions. Number one, we are assuming that students have skills that we are not teaching them, and which, hence, they may not possess by the time of their first year at college. We assume that students can read the background material the teacher prepares (be it an article from the Daily Orange, a case study, or whatever) and then process it, so that they arrive at a personalized interpretation of the material and a "stance" toward that material. Yet instructors spend little, if any, time in developing these skills in their students. Furthermore, it could be argued that these skills are in fact quite mystical and cannot be taught. Most instructors would agree that their best students are simply students who "have ideas" or "have opinions about things." But I am at a loss to explain how or why some students have arrived at this state by age eighteen, while others have not. Is it family, rigorous high school training ... bible study? ... that enables some students to "have ideas about things?" Or is this a facet of personality? And if it is the latter, how do we possibly teach "personality?"

Instructors working from case studies or prepared background material probably are shocked at the lack of "content" in student essays, even though students have been given an ample quantity of what we might call "primordial content." One reason for the lack of content is probably the mental attrition that we all suffer from: we might read a five-hundred page book and yet we are able to reproduce only five to ten pages of the book's content (this would most probably be the case if students are not allowed to refer to the preparatory materials while they write the in-class essay). But I think a far more important reason for lack of content is the students' inability to perform the second phase of any critical act of reading: they do not know how to process what they've read in order to arrive at a stance toward the material. I've found that many of my students are quite able to write descriptive analysis--many of them are wonderful writers when it comes to rephrasing what they've already seen or read. What they seem unable to do is to engage in the critical act of "having an attitude" toward what they've been exposed to--and this is particularly a problem when the teacher asks for a critical act that is abstract (say, to ask students to respond to an essay they've read) rather than immediate (to argue whether or not their roommate is a jerk). I suspect this distinction (critical vs. descriptive mode of thought) is peculiar to college--in high school I remember being asked to write a book report on The Great Gatsby, but I don't remember being asked whether I thought the book was any good or not. (In any case, I'm sure I was told never to use I in an essay--as though my personal opinion didn't count. This is the problem I am facing in my teaching: having to re-teach students that, yes, what we are asking is for your personal opinion. Only you have to pretend it's not your personal opinion, but something larger and grander--which is the fundamental act of bullshit that supports the entire edifice we know as academe.)

I decided to orient my course around film, for a number of reasons: 1) I
assumed it was something students enjoy, 2) it provided a coherent theme, 3) it established a language that we use "to talk about" something, which I assumed would facilitate the transition to literature, and 4) I thought it would put all students on equal footing: that is, we would each be exposed to the same data, or background material, on which we would draw to produce our essays. What I found was that students were quite able to make fairly sophisticated analyses of character, plot, etc .... what their essays almost universally lacked was the ability to take a stance towards what they'd seen. No, rather: what they lacked was the ability to articulate how they arrived at the stance they arrived at, without resorting to descriptive tactics. A student, for example, may write a review that pans a film for its "lack of realism," but not write what I feel is a crucial detail: why do they feel realism is important? Have they seen other unrealistic films that were successful and, if so, why is this one different?

All this ties back, I think, to our classroom discussion on the essay topic involving euthanasia. We arrived at the bedrock of this problem of finding content when we addressed the question, how does one argue whether something is right or wrong? If I were to ask the student those questions I just listed in the preceding paragraph, he might come back at me and say, "Well, I just feel that realism is good and a lack of realism is bad." I can ask them to examine this assumption within themselves, but really I am asking them to engage in a task that is no less difficult than if they were to ask themselves whether killing is morally justifiable or not. Granted, many excellent essays have been written on subjects such as these, but I am arguing here that what we are asking students to do--no matter how simple the argumentative issue appears to be on the surface-is an enormous task. And furthermore, it is a task that has no grounding in absolutes, no right or wrong. You can ask writers to argue the ethics of killing until they are blue in the face, but they will, at the end, never prove anything simply because there is no capital-T-truth to prove. How do we make this clear to students who are used to providing multiple choice answers to their mathematics exams?

Any content that a student comes up with is ultimately the subjective opinion of that student. All content has a source of origin, be it from the student's parents, peer group, or a text. We as instructors naively assume that if we provide a student with "both sides" of an issue, she will somehow be able to come up with content that is at once synthetic and personal. Yet how many "sides" do we provide before we feel as though we have comprehensively covered an issue? And why do we feel that our actions enable a student to arrive at a "stance" toward what she's read--especially a stance that she can justify (and we ask for something we might term "empiricisim" in the arguments)?

What we are asking for in Freshman English 101 seems to be a denial of subjectivity. We are asking students to produce an "objective" text when we--sophisticated intellectuals that we are--know such a thing does not exist. (Here I mean "objective" not in the sense that what a student writes doesn't spring from personal opinion, but rather that that mystical act of arriving at a stance toward an issue can be justified by providing a series of two or three proofs.) Good writers don't provide proof, they only provide the illusion of proof. Another way to say this is that good writers don't provide a content, they only provide the illusion of content.

How do we explain this to freshmen in nine weeks?