STRANDED 101

This was an astounding experience.

I’ve never found myself in such a close, intuitive relationship with student writing. I’ve never felt closer or more useful to my writing students. I’ve also never felt so drained or taxed by a freshman composition course. I found it took more emotional energy and pedagogical focus, as well as more inspired improvisation, than any freshman composition course I’ve ever taught. The rewards were extraordinary: I saw more unambiguous, substantial improvement in student writing from start to finish than I’d seen before. The cost was also fairly high: students got more burned-out and had less space to themselves than they ordinarily do in my freshman comp classes, which are always very challenging but never so intense as this one.

At the end of it all, I’m still feeling a bit rocked by the experience. It’s difficult to convey how important this experiment became to me. It was the best chance I’ve ever had or imagined to see writing spring from the head and the heart, the imagination and the gut, in a group of smart but for the most part underexercised freshman. In this class, we got to higher heights than I’ve gotten to in ENGL101. Almost every day, class discussions, or the listserv posts, or my conversations with my teaching partner and co-editor Bill Kemp would bring fresh and startling and powerful revelations to me about teaching, learning, and writing, about the writer in relation to her audience, about the power of language both to get something and to get at something (rather like Theseus’ distinction between “comprehension” and “apprehension” in A Midsummer Night’s Dream V.i.).

I’m actually a little afraid of doing it again.

That said, I must also give my deepest thanks to the students with whom I made the trip. I miss you all, and I know today that there are many of you I’ll never forget.

Gardner Campbell
April, 1998