Personal Writing and Meatball Sandwiches

Over lunch with a colleague the other day, I tried sanity checking my semester thus far. What better way to test whether things are working than to say them out loud between meatball subs and people we trust. Perhaps there's a magic to naming the things we're struggling with -- putting our worries into words -- that makes them poof into vanishing. Because of course, that's exactly what happened.

All of a sudden, in both of my writing classes, things started making sense. To the students. And to me. And I started thinking less about whether or not my materials were too hard or not interesting and thinking more about how true it is that things take time.

But something else came out of that impromptu lunch chat. Our conversations got me thinking about why I have chosen to move so far away from personal writing in first-year composition classes. I write all of my assignment prompts so carefully in this regard -- to leave the personal approach open, but to never under any circumstances require any personal content or information.

I spent the last week or so thinking about this choice. As a writer, I enjoy personal writing and in fact have engaged in personal writing to deal with the world most of the time. In fact, in the first-year composition classroom, starting at the personal makes so much sense. How can we understand the world, for example, if we can't understand ourselves in the world.

My mentors, perhaps, lent me this leaning. But try as I might to unearth the precise moment for my current position on the personal, I could not find its location. And then several unconnected things happened. One of those things was a lecture that I attended regarding LGBTQ issues in the region of the world where I live, which brought back a flood of emotions about this notion of 'sharing things about ourselves as a requirement for grades' and why I am really so opposed to that kind of classroom activity.

There are always going to be learners who will not want to share things about themselves. I was one of those students, and so I don't take the topic lightly. I was the author of an anonymous blog for over a decade for many issues related with this topic. I was one of those people. Full stop. Not wanting to share things about ourselves with a group of people we don't know and don't trust -- especially things we will receive grades for -- is a reaction that far too many students might have. And I'm not willing to put students into dangerous positions or ask them to compromise themselves or, in some cases, lie about who they are and how they spend their time.

It didn't occur to me right there during lunch. But there it was when I thought about the many people that I've loved who have had to live life full of lies and pain because they didn't fit in. Because being who they are could mean exile at the best of times. Death at the worst.

It occurred to me when I thought about how long it was that I lived my life like a lie, because I was too afraid to say exactly who I was. It took me 30 years to grow into myself. And I certainly wasn't ready to make that happen during freshman comp, all those years ago.

Is there a place for personal writing in the composition classroom? Of course. But like all things we ask our students to perform and try out, it should always be their choice.