The Mommification of Writing Instruction: A Tale of Two Students

Abstract

The questions explored in this paper grow out of a long career in the teaching of composition, and out of relahonships with literally thousands of students. Centering on two allows an especially complex dimension of such relationships to be treated with some necessary depth. The issue of teacher as mother is with most of us, students and teachers alike, from the first moment we set foot in a classroom. Indeed, the issue of mother as teacherand, by extension, woman as nearly everyone's first teacheris one that has abided with us for as long as humans have abided as a race. The way in which this picture of woman as primal teacher speaks to so many of us in composition may not abide for as long, but is in no danger just now for good or ill -of fading. When I began teaching composition 10 years ago, I don't think I even considered the question of whether I would be some kind of mother figure to my students. Looking back now, though, whether I consciously thought about it or not, I most certainly counted on it in order to do the kind of work I wanted to do with students. That included a good deal of personal writing-often separate from their academic writing, and other times, in tandem with it. This meant not only a lot of autobiographical papers, but the keeping of daybooks (Donald Murray's more expansive and liberatory version of the journal) in which students, not infrequently, shared some pretty intimate confidences with me. It did not occur to me at the timeat least, not as a fully conscious question I could ask myselfthat perhaps, their willingness to do so meant that I represented some form of the maternal to them. I still can't know with absolute certainty if this was so, given the multiplicity of meanings and resonances the very word maternal has for most people, but my recent explorations into this long, multi-faceted metaphor of my teaching experience confirm it. Indeed, I am now convinced that the female teacher often finds herself located in some subset where the teacher's universe intersects with the Ann Tabachnikov has been teaching college composition for over ten years, most of those years spent at The City College of New York, where she received both her BA and MA in English and Creative Writing, respectively. She has also taught at several other City University of New York campuses, and at the Fashion Institute of Technology. As a doctoral student specializing in Composition and Rhetoric at the CUNY Graduate Center, she is working on a dissertation on issues of identity in collaborative learning groups in the composition class. ©journal o(Basic Writing, Vol. 20, No. l, 2001