Fossilization and Growth

The best aspect of graduate school and multiple readings is the forced reflection process you undergo as you read through a series of methods, strategies and experiences in your field. Oddly, I found that while reading about the inner world of the immigrant child, I had to stop several times to think through the ideas which I was immediately connecting to in the text. The following paragraph was particularly meaningful for me...and the reason I am writing. "Our challenge as teachers is to know how to reach these children, to teach them, to know what to do when they reveal--or cannot express--themselves to us. But with every challenge successfully undertaken, I believe we contribute to the world. Teaching, then, becomes purposeful."(Cristina Igoa 3 1995).

I have been deeply fortunate in the past few years to work with a student population that I can reach - often finding myself in a position of advocacy as a writing instructor and writing advisor trying to provide a place of refuge and understanding. Being in the same place for five years has helped me to see the growth of my students. The ones who spoke haltingly in writing advising sessions now stop to talk to me in the hallway or on campus to share how their classes are going. I still receive emails from former students around the world and I have written countless recommendations, reviewed statement of purposes and worked as a liason to students who are now confidently pursuing their undergraduate or graduate education. In their growth and maturity, I have found my own.

Like my students, I have been in the position where I have had to struggle to reveal myself and work from a position of vulnerability and confusion. Also, like my students, I have come again and again to moments when I cannot express myself. In language acquisition there is a term known as "fossilization" which refers to when a student's language ability is static - a student may continue to make progress in certain areas, and yet return again and again to the same error. Thus, for example, we find advanced students who communicate with great skill and who make very few errors, but still do not master a certain aspect of knowledge. In my own life, I have fragments and pieces of myself that have fossilized.

Narrating Our Lives

I was reading a narrative essay this evening. My student turned it in late...this student always turns things in late. I'm reading through, tracking changes, giving grammar suggestions and comments about clarity and content and I get to the thesis statement and get confused. So I read further, hoping that I will understand the organization by the time I read the second paragraph, and then the third...and I finally give in and just read through it in its entirety. And this essay that shifts back and forth and uses incorrect pronoun references and doesn't connect ideas in any way I can decipher just stuns me. The story transcended the form. He wrote about being invisible in highschool and then having a person befriend him...and at the beginning of this friendship, this person asked him to drive to the next town to meet a girl he'd fallen in love with. Move forward 3 weeks...after the two of them were arrested for driving without a license...and he finds out that his father is sending him to the U.S. if he doesn't get into the top 10 universities in Thailand...and he begins to study around the clock to stay in his country. His friend asks him to drive to the next town once more to see the girl who broke his heart...and he does...but he is so tired and sleep deprived that he hits a corner...and his friend is paralyzed in the accident. He ends the essay with this question "The reader, do you really want to fix something in the past?"

He reminded me that within each of us is the capacity for endless joy and unceasing despair... and these worlds can coexist, carried within the people we interact with and believe we know each day. He is a student I have had many times and I have always been frustrated by how he doesn't seem to care about his studies...or surprised by how he is always smiling and so happy. A few more fragments added to the unfinished picture of my understanding.

I can't review this essay unless I do it in person now. It's not an essay; it's his life - his story. He could have written about any event that happened in his life yet he chose to write about the worst incident, the one that leaves him the most open for censure, the one that he is still simultaneously questioning and haunted by... and I have to still grade this using a damned rubric with points for grammar and mechanical details but no category for courage and transparency. How do we honor the writer while criticizing the writing? There must be a balance here...