Suzanne Crawford

Throughout my years of teaching, I have discovered the need for balance between structure in maintaining an agenda (the day’s, the week’s, the semester’s) and spontaneity in being aware of my students’ needs from moment to moment. In one sense, I think my best teaching occurs when I make use of the offerings of the left brain—order, objectivity, discipline, planning, rules, policies—as well as those of the right—spontaneity, intuition, creativity, enthusiasm, humor, sensitivity. I find that the same is true for what I elicit from my students: an exemplary piece of writing often derives from the ultimate cooperation of such polarized dualities, whether that result is rich with cacophony or harmony.

To be an effective teacher, therefore, requires flexibility. One needs to sense, for example, when the day’s lesson on fragments or argument is simply not getting through and be receptive to what inspiration may come—that “a-ha” experience which provides the substitute plan, the one that better serves the moment and the students’ needs—such as Sentence Masters Quiz Show, where teams of students compete for the honor of being designated “Ultimate Sentence Masters” (and, of course, to win a pass on the next homework assignment).

My belief that teachers must be flexible and receptive derives from an epiphany I had many years ago when, upon walking into class one day, the room already filled with students, I experienced one of those moments all teachers dread: Oops—I brought the wrong bag, and everything I need is sitting on my desk at home.

I was wrong. As it turned out, I what I needed most was in my possession all along: the ability to evoke the “lesson” from those students. Instead of prepared handouts and examples, I tapped the creativity of those eager students. They invented fresh examples; through inquiry and experience, those students claimed the needed knowledge. The class ended up being more productive, more engaging, and more successful than many others that had followed their prescribed agendas and made use of neat and orderly handouts. That spontaneous, slightly “untidy” day helped me further embrace a belief I had already possessed: true education is not some sort of sterile distribution of information to students but rather is the dynamic and vital process of evoking learning from students. Today, most of my lessons allow for both the orderly structure of the planned and the spontaneous magic of the unplanned.

Overall, I believe in engaging students, while minimizing the time I spend as the “sage” in center stage. I endeavor to provide my students the opportunity to shine, as they learn and grow as writers.

For more information about me, please visit my bio pages at my website:

http://e-courses.cerritos.edu/scrawford/Bioinformation/Bio_info.htm

Inspired Writing:

As to inspiring literary passages, I could easily list a new one every day, depending on my mood. However, because it resonates with the theme of excitement about learning, here is a lengthy one from Malcolm X. His discovery of a love for words, for reading, and for books always moves me. Enjoy!

Many who today hear me somewhere in person, or on television, or those who read something I've said, will think I went to school far beyond the eighth grade. This impression is due entirely to my prison studies. . . .

I saw that the best thing I could do was get hold of a dictionary—to study, to learn some words. . . . that moved me to request a dictionary along with some tablets and pencils from the Norfolk Prison colony school.

I spent two days just rifling uncertainly though the dictionary's pages. I'd never realized so many words existed! I didn't know which words I needed to learn. Finally, just to start some kind of action, I began copying.

In my slow, painstaking, ragged handwriting, I copied into my tablet everything printed on that first page, down to the punctuation marks.

I believe it took me a day. Then, aloud, I read back to myself, everything I'd written on the tablet.

Over and over, aloud, to myself, I read my own handwriting. I woke up the next morning, thinking about those words—immensely proud to realize that not only had I written so much at one time, but I'd written words, that I never knew were in the world. Moreover, with a little effort, I also could remember what many of these words meant. I reviewed the words whose meanings I didn't remember. . . .

I was so fascinated that I went on—I copied the dictionary's next page. And the same experience came when I studied that. With every succeeding page, I also learned of people and places and events from history. Actually the dictionary is like a miniature encyclopedia. Finally the dictionary's A section had filled a whole tablet - and I went on into the B's. That was the way I started copying what eventually became the entire dictionary. . . . Between what I wrote in my tablet, and writing letters, during the rest of my time in prison I would guess I wrote a million words.

I suppose it was inevitable that as my word-base broadened, I could for the first time pick up a book and read and now begin to understand what the book was saying. Anyone who has read a great deal can imagine the new world that opened. Let me tell you something, from then until I left that prison, in every free moment I had, if I was not reading in the library, I was reading on my bunk. You couldn't have gotten me out of books with a wedge. Between Mr. Muhammad's teachings, my correspondence, my visitors—usually Ella and Reginald—and my reading of books, months passed without my even thinking about being imprisoned. In fact, up to then, I never had been so truly free in my life. (174-6)

X, Malcolm. The Autobiography of Malcolm X as Told to Alex Haley. New York: Ballantine, 1965.

Click on the book to read more about it at www.barnesandnoble.com!

Cerritos College

English