"But we have all this content to teach."

The above is my least favorite comment that non-English teachers make when I, the ever-gullible sap, fall into the trap of giving suggestions to teachers in other disciplines who complain that their students can't write. They don't like that their students don't write well, but they do not have time to teach them how to write because writing is assumed to be something separate from a discipline like history or biology. It is not uncommon for people who have "subjects" to teach to think that all us silly English majors (we just sit around reading stories all day) are good for is teaching future people with real-world jobs how to avoid comma splices. At a conference at UC Irvine, the director of their upper division writing program, Dr. Jonathan Alexander, told us that he was asked by the business department if they had to teach a course in writing in their discipline or whether that could be, and I quote, "outsourced." Presumably to English teachers or a writing center (Writing Across the Curriculum, anyone?).

Even when I teach "just" composition, and I use nonfiction (which I often heartily enjoy; I am grateful that my career has introduced me to genres outside my specialty, especially now when there is a great deal of exceptional quality narrative non-fiction), you'd better believe that I'm teaching content. When I taught Enrique's Journey, you better believe I had to accumulate a lot of knowledge about immigration. As I prepare to teach Fast Food Nation, I realize that I know more about slaughterhouses than I ever thought I would. And I will be learning lots and lots more as my students write research papers and need help understanding and analyzing their research materials. So, yes, I, too, teach content, and I even manage to squeeze in writing instruction.

As distressing as it is that people in disciplines other than English seem to want me to teach their students to write because they are too busy teaching more important "content," now it seems that this attitude now pervades English departments themselves and those who make the rules for us. As a lowly community college teacher, I mostly teach composition. E.D. Hirsch warned long ago that reading, writing, and thinking cannot be divorced from content (isn't this why cultural bias is a problem in standardized testing? If inner-city students are not familiar with or interested in milking cows, they will not write very well about cow-milking), but nevertheless, composition is listed as its own type of course. The attack on literature continues with the advancement of the new Common Core standards (which have a heavy emphasis in non-fiction, whereas high school curriculum used to be almost exclusively fiction, poetry, and drama--"culturally significant literature," I believe, used to be the phrase in the CA State Standards) and streamlining tools such as the Early Assessment Writing Curriculum of the CSU, in which 12th graders are urged to read "real-life" stuff, like nonfiction, because literature is only useful for English majors. Stories that have enlightened us for centuries (and, by the way, humans transmitted culture and values through stories since the earliest times, long before essays and other expository genres existed), are deemed by today's experts to be a waste of time.

Teaching English no longer means teaching literature, especially if you teach anyone other than English majors. Instead, skills are treated as completely divorced from content. This is now happening not only with composition but also critical thinking. We literally have a class called "Critical Thinking," and this is not just our own craziness but is actually required by the CSU's and UCs. The reason this issue has recently come up to haunt my department is that we've recently been told that our introduction to literature course, to meet one type of critical thinking transfer requirement, must get a unit added to it because we are really trying to teach two courses (literature and critical thinking) in one. As if critical thinking or composition could be separated from content!

Diana Senechal, whose new book, Republic of Noise: The Loss of Solitude in Schools and Culture is becoming my new favorite book, discusses the shift in the pedagogy of schools of education from "what" to teach to "how" to teach. When I think about it, the shift occurred in my own family teaching history. My mom, who went to college in the 1970s, took Spanish language methods classes to become a Spanish teacher. In 1999, I simply took "Methods." All of our cohort, including would-be English, history, biology, and French teachers, were expected to be able to apply the same methods to any subject matter. Senechal explains, "When I began teaching at a middle school, there was no curriculum for ESL. No one told me what to teach, but there were many directives about how to teach" (Ch. 1). And, of course, what technique did the dominant school of education pedagogues want her to use? There it is: GROUP WORK!

Yes, you may have been wondering how this angry English teacher rant was going to turn into a discussion of introversion v. extroversion. Some parts of the literature learning experience, such as reading, close reading analyses, and an in-depth focus on one topic, do not lend themselves well to group work or discussion.  (Anyone who has tried to write a document in a committee meeting can attest to this.) So if the goal is no longer to interpret literature but to make sure students know how to do group work, a key part of our very subject matter gets lost. Yes, I'm going to say it: some fields of study are suited for introverted behaviors! Our society wants everything to be extrovert-friendly, but not all important things are extrovert-friendly. Some very key activities in life, namely contemplation, still require introversion. We are not obsolete yet. And if our society and our schools keep treating us that way, valuable parts of the human experience, and the disciplines through which we make sense of the human experience, will be lost.

Now, of course, the mainstay of any literature class is group discussion. But then there are the parts of literary study that you must do alone, in solitude. Discussions can only go so far. There is a certain depth of analysis that can only be done alone, by sitting and re-reading and writing and thinking for a long time. If the solitary part of the literary experience gets lost in the quest for group experiences, then part of the discipline itself is lost.

The danger of the current educational philosophy that says it's not what you teach but how is that it suggests, wrongly, that as long as the activity is student-centered, as long as students are actively learning and critically thinking and composing, the lesson is good, no matter what they are group-work-ing, critically thinking, or composing about. I've lumped all these things together because they're all about the "hows," not that "whats" of teaching. I take issue with all of those who act as if the subject matter did not significantly shape the type of methods used in teaching it. (A particularly apt quote expressing my position comes from Parker Palmer's The Courage to Teach. In Ch. 1, Palmer recounts how a workshop attendee declared, "I am an organic chemist. Are you going to spend the next two days telling me that I am supposed to teach organic chemistry through role playing?") Senechal describes the focus on teaching in a certain way rather than covering important material: "The lesson was supposed to focus on a strategy, and students were then expected to apply the strategy to the books they were reading" (Ch. 1). She also talks of books as being "used" (Ch. 1) to teach skills, as if skills were the end goal. Rather, traditionally, skills are used to understand content. I write an essay or have a discussion to understand and formulate an opinion on literature and, by extension, life. The means have been confused for the ends! We don't use books to learn to write. We write so that we can learn from books.

What a culture shock it was to go from being an English major, someone who spent hours on end reading, writing, and thinking, to a teacher, where I was supposed to somehow teach others to appreciate literature using completely different methods than those I had used as a learner. A substitute teacher once told my 10th-grade students that she was shocked that I expected them to read the entire period (50 minutes), as people should not be expected to do the same thing for that long a period of. Instead of lengthy, sustained, solitary, creative tasks that require self-motivation, literature was supposed to be taught in a series of quick and jauntily-paced collaborative activities with pre-determined outcomes specified to the number by me (anyone who has ever had to write student-learning objectives, or SLOs, knows what I'm talking about).

My introverted personality is not only suited to foster the development in my students of the introverted behavior that my discipline often requires, but it is also perfectly valid because it is my personality. And to teach well, I must be authentically myself. Parker Palmer's The Courage to Teach (1997) is based on "a simple premise: good teaching cannot be reduced to technique; good teaching comes from the identity and integrity of the teacher" (Ch. 1). My introverted ways do not make me an inferior teacher, even if many of my students are extroverted. I try to mix up my pedagogy so that people with different learning styles of mine can learn comfortably those parts of my discipline that are amenable to those different learning styles. But when I can't or shouldn't, they can still learn from me. Another encouraging finding from Parker is that students can learn from teachers whose teaching styles do not necessarily match their own learning styles; he found that the enthusiasm and present-ness of the teacher has proven more important than the teaching technique or method. He writes, "in every story [of students describing good teachers] I heard, good teachers share one trait: a strong sense of personal identity infuses their work. 'Dr. A is really there when she teaches'...'Mr. B has such enthusiasm for his subject'...'You can tell that this is really Prof. C's life.' One student I heard about said she could not describe her good teachers because they differed so greatly" (Ch. 1). Therefore, "I no longer need suffer the pain of having my peculiar gift as a teacher crammed into...someone else's method and the standards prescribed by it. That pain is felt throughout education today as we glorify the method du jour; leaving people who teach differently feeling devalued" (Ch. 1).