Dear English
Composition students,
Congratulations kiddos! You have successfully finished a year worth of a college writing class and most of you are on your way to the next chapter of life: actual college. This past year, our theme as been about embracing the chaos and uncertainty in our worlds. We focused primarily on the chaos and uncertainty of going to school, growing up during a pandemic, and surviving the best we could mentally with all the challenges that have come up throughout the year. One thing I have consistently preached (yup, got on that soap box and beat it into your hearts and minds), has been that failure is a necessity for proper growth and you must take chances in this crazy world, especially when it comes to learning and being successful. Sometimes you might be thinking that Heller is off her rocker and full of it, and somethings I am slightly looney about certain things. But the one thing I continue to be transparent about is how you must fail to succeed, and you must embrace some of that chaos, grit your teeth, and work hard. And folks, there is actual empirical science working in my favor with this sermon.
The cognitive world calls this kind of grit “desirable difficulties”. Desirable difficulties, coined by Elizabeth and Robert Bjork, are “difficulties that elicit more effort and that slow down learning… compensate[ing] for their inconvenience by making the learning stronger, more precise, and more enduring” (p. 68), or “short-term impediments that make for stronger learning” (p. 69). According to the Bjorks and the whole cognitive learning community, the way we slow down our learning and make it more “effortful”, is through spacing our studying (instead of cramming) and interleaving the topics where you mix up various contents in a day. Most of you have found school quite easy because you love learning or have been given the tools by your family or good teachers on how to make studying easier for you. Additionally, most of you are deeply afraid of failing and instead of trying something that is difficult for fear of that failure, you avoid doing it all together. People: failing is part of life and learning! Just because something is easy does not mean you are being effortful with your learning or succeeding; in fact, it means you are going through the motions with something you are already good at or have mastered and you will continue to plateau in your learning. According to researchers Peter C. Brown, Henry L. Roediger III, and Mark A. McDaniel, easier isn’t better! In fact, “the easier knowledge or a skill is for you to retrieve, the less retrieval practice will benefit retention of it” (p. 79). This means, if it is easy to recall in your memory, you will not practice it. However, the more “effort you have to expend to retrieve knowledge or skill, the more the practice of retrieval will entrench (ingrained) it”. Struggling with content helps you learn the material better.
Although I believe
embracing effortful struggles and desirable difficulties is a lesson that can definitely
be applied to life, I stick to my lane of teaching writing. Over the last year,
you all have written a considerable amount of research essays, and many of the
times the prompts were challenging. Especially with the Empathy Paper, getting
yourselves to embrace an alternative perspective was quite difficult for two
reasons: 1) It was something unfamiliar to you, and 2) You have never written
in this particular form before. Through the Empathy Paper, we created a
desirable difficulty called generation. Generation is “the act of trying
to answer a question or attempting to solve a problem rather than being
presented with the information or solution,” (p. 87). By you generating three
differing perspectives on your topic and having to emphasize with each one, you
attempted to solve a problem through deep processing which encoded it into your
memory. There was not a single rough draft submitted that did not initially “fail”:
all of your drafts collectively had tons of edits. However, because you
embraced the difficulty and generated your own writing, even when you knew it
was wrong or not done correctly, you were creating the appropriate writing paths
for future papers. After you received the feedback and reflected on what you
needed to improve, the papers got better because you had figured out how to “tackle”
the task the first time. By writing the papers, you generated your own solutions,
and this will strengthen your writing memories for next year and beyond. Generating
is how we overcome the voices that say this is too hard or we cannot do it. It
is also how we overcome writer’s block when we feel like we have nothing to
write.
“…puts the thing aside. You get in the car and drive home. On the way, your mind is still knitting at the words. You think of a better way to say something, a good phrase to correct a certain problem. Without the drafted version—if it did not exist—you obviously would not be thinking of ways to improve it. In short, you may actually be writing only two or three hours a day, but your mind, in one way or another, is working on it twenty-four hours a day—yes, while you sleep—but only if some sort of draft or earlier version exists. Until it exists, writing has not really begun.” (p. 221)
When McPhee is done writing the letter to his mother, he deletes the “Dear Mother” and all the whining about what he is unable to write about and he has an essay. This example does not just work with writing but can work in all classes or subjects where you struggle. Sometimes you just have to struggle through, fail, and then you will find your way to success.
My point my
students is this: you will never have the essay if you never write it and will
never have a life if you avoid trying to live it for fear of failing. So go
write the essay and go live the life and make them both effortful!
<3 Heller
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