When You Do Not Love Your Composition Class

Like you, I was once a first year composition student. And I did not love my class.

However bad you think your class is, mine was worse. In my composition class, assignments came like machine gun fire: Two essays due each week. Two essays returned each week, drenched in the red ink scrawl of our instructor—let’s call her Stacy—who I was sure hated me.

Week two our task was to write an essay extolling or condemning of a fruit. I kid you not, that was our assignment. After much thought, I decided to write about the grapefruit.  Most of what I wrote I don’t remember, but I do recall I had a strong thesis: “The grapefruit is a shameful waste of money.”  My supporting evidence was airtight, including an analysis of juice to pulp ratio. Stacy returned the paper with a red line right through “is” in my thesis, revising it to read: “The grapefruit shamefully wastes money.”  Grade: C-.

I was distraught. It wasn’t the grade—okay it was totally the grade. But my pride was hurt. I had come to like that essay in the process of writing it. You asked me to write about a flipping piece of fruit, I thought, and I nailed it.

I took my red-lined essay and teenage angst to my father who, with a parent’s misplaced desire to make their kid stop crying, assured me my version of the thesis was better than Stacy’s: “This makes it sound as though the grapefruit is walking up and down the street, tossing money around.” Next to Stacy’s correction he drew a plump grapefruit with legs, arms, eyes, ears, and a fedora, walking down the street throwing twenty-dollar bills in the air. We laughed, I stopped sniffling, and then we went out for ice cream.

Because I loved my father, but not my composition instructor, I told Stacy where she erred with the grapefruit at our next student-teacher conference. I even showed her my father’s illustration.  She was not nearly as amused as we had been: “You’ve got a real attitude problem,” she said. “You think you’re hot shit. I thought I was hot shit when I got 1580 on my SATs and got into Yale when I was sixteen.”

She went on. I heard nothing more. I was still thinking that I should have studied harder on my SATs. But then I wondered, why is she telling me her SAT scores at all?

In the weeks that followed, I stopped seeing my instructor as my adversary and started seeing her as a human being. And I could tell her life was no picnic. My class, an 8 am affair, was full of engineers who spent the five minutes before she arrived making fun of her squeaky voice—mockery she no doubt overheard at least once. She was a graduate assistant, which meant she had to balance teaching with studying for her doctorate in Victorian poetry. Given the pittance graduate assistants earn for teaching, her diet probably consisted of Ramen noodles and broth. And, if she still remembered her SAT scores, she may have been teaching for the first time. She was new at this, feeling her way and having to stumble before an audience of twenty jerks, including me.

I kept my mouth shut in class for the rest of the term. In truth, I now knew our instructor was teetering on the brink and might go over with the slightest push. I didn’t want to see that. Nobody does. I earned, through several long nights, one of only two A’s in the class. I learned a lot about writing—primarily about diligence—by taking the grapefruit-sized chip off my shoulder; I found that I could get the most out of every assignment by treating it as a professional writing challenge, as if a movie producer had called me up and barked into the phone: “I need five jokes about a carrot. Yesterday!”

I also learned invaluable lessons by observing what didn’t work—observations that I kept to myself. I learned, for instance, never to tell students they had attitude problems or to ask them to write about fruit. This would serve me well when I, not too many years later, would be that willowy, new teacher in front of a room full of students with attitude problems. But most usefully, I learned Stacy was right about me: I was too often the smartass student, sure I knew more than my teachers. Looking back, I wish I had been nicer, not just for the good karma, but because compassionate writers are better writers. They are compassionate enough with themselves to allow the long and imperfect process that is writing to run its course.  They are good academic writers because they can set aside their judgments long enough to consider that every story sounds good when you only hear one side.

So what do you do when you do not love your composition class? You learn anyway.