She is a model student. Always on time for class. Never skips. Turns in each assignment with confidence, having started them all at least two weeks before the due date. Her course load is challenging, her GPA high. In the staff room, where teachers always talk about their students, her name is only mentioned in moments of praise. Yes, she is a model student. But a model of what?

Has anyone ever asked her what she really thinks about the subjects she studies? Have her instructors, so admiring of the bright, hard worker who is “a joy to teach,” ever given her the opprotunity to explore her own growth as a reader, thinker or writer? Have they acknowledged the agonizing effort she exerts to produce the “well-developed, critically aware” discussions of their subject matter?

Is she even human?

In most cases, no. Her teachers are not like Bloom, Glenn, Greene, Elbow or Lovitt. They are mechanical apparatuses, seeking to profess the knowledge they have obtained through years of study and thus stamp out little versions of themselves. She is a gifted reader, a gifted writer. But only because of what they gave gifted to her.

Perhaps my feelings on the matter are biased, tainted by my own experience as a “model student” followed by several years of employment in the mechanical institution I have previously railed against. I would like to think that I am simply jaded, but sadly I fear that is not the case. Writers and teachers like Bloom (et al) have for thirty years been writing about and teaching in the mode of self discovery, creating and espousing environments wherein the student is treated humanely and the authentic development of her knowledge base held paramount. Yet the prevailing sentiment remains – “IT’S LITERATURE! ALL HAIL THE WRITTEN WORD – so long as it’s canonical, anthologized and definitely NOT written by you.”

So what do we get? Graduate students who have submerged rich throughtful voices, only to be resurrected through challenging exercises in creative nonfiction and personal discovery. Glenn’s students who, so enamored with the novelty of conferencing, line up outside the professor’s door just to talk about their writing because, for the first time, someone will actually listen. And we see “readers” initially unable to connect their own lives to a text until allowed to step out from under the authority of academia and the auspices of analysis.

Glenn is right. When writing teachers teach literature, we honor the process, not the machine. We encourage our students to interact with the text – analyze it, own it, become one with it and in so doing transform it in their own critical, creative way. We help them learn to silence the judge – that voice that tells them they are not good enough, not bright enough, not wise enough to navigate safely through the difficulty of a text and write deeply, passionately about its (their) meaning in the world. We open doors for our students, inviting them into a community that respsects individual progress and values the social nature of reading.

We honor their abilities. We accept and treasure their humanity.

I don’t have a higher tolerance for failure than my students. I agonize over every reading, every assignment, every word on the page. So help me if I have – or ever will – instill that sort of fear in one of my pupils. I don’t want any model students. I want readers. I want thinkers. I want writers.

I want human beings.

-Ginny