David Bartholomae, 1947-2023

Read composition pedagogy on the beach

One summer, about fifteen years ago, I was with a group of friends at a vacation house in Michigan. Amidst the talk, food, and wine, I remember everyone settling in to their vacation reads. For some reason, I had brought with me David Bartholomae’s Writing on the Margins: Essays on Composition and Teaching. I was a little embarrassed about reading a book so clearly about my work. We chastise students who see reading as a chore, but so many of us have the same reaction to reading about the thing we spend our lives doing. I remember telling them I was struggling with my teaching and wanted to get better, which was true. I’d had one seminar in grad school on how to teach writing (more than a lot of professors get), but it was so geared towards the particular approach of the program I was in it was no longer useful. I know I needed something new, but no idea how to find it. Like a lot of teachers, I was doing a mashup of what I’d been taught and what I’d seen others do. The one thing I had going for me was stubbornness - if something I did didn’t work, I wasn’t going to give up or become a “kids-today” dinosaur, settling in for thirty years of being one of those assholes who resents the students standing in the way of their “real work.”

What I didn’t say was that reading Bartholomae’s book was a great pleasure - so much so that, this decade plus later, I remember specific passages and where I was sitting in that house when I read them, the way you’d remember a poem, and keep coming back to even as my thoughts on teaching have evolved. It’s somewhat strange to realize this, because Writings on the Margins - which I think I stumbled on pretty randomly - isn’t a manifesto or a guidebook but a collection of process- and reflection- focused essays, something you’d probably normally read after you were already familiar with the author’s other work.

On second thought, maybe this isn’t surprising, because the things I remember mostly involve Bartholomae doing what everyone says essays should do but most don’t, or do badly - thinking through a problem on the page, showing how you get from one point to another. I remember him writing that, in order to figure out how to give students good feedback, he tried to remember the best feedback he’d given. He tells a story about writing some turgid pretentious stuff in grad school and his mentor in the margins writing, “Please don’t do that.” That’s it. No long argument about the value of jargon, just a gentle tap on the shoulder, an invitation back. And of course, he said, I knew what he meant and I didn’t do it again. The anecdote tells you more about the process of generously giving and receiving feedback than a dozen screeds about minimal markings or how to run a workshop ever could.

When I wrote last month about the Chat-bot freak out, I told a story about communicating something to my high school teacher when I proposed to write about Shakespeare’s sonnets via “my perspective as a non-beautiful person” and my gratitude looking back that she responded to what I was communicating, not the merits of this “proposal.” Since I’m on leave this year, I’ve watched from a distance other’s understandable frustration in getting AI-written essays. It’s hard to remember, but, as with other kinds of plagiarism, this too is a kind of message. We take it as an insult, a breach of the relationship we are hopefully trying to build, but often the message is: I’m confused. I panicked. I don’t understand what you want. I don’t believe you will notice or care. I’m worried my non-native English will get me in trouble. And so forth.

The other passage I remember most vividly from Writing on the Margins was a discussion of an early teaching failure. He’d given students some Sartre to read, and asked “If existence precedes essence, what is man?” Bartholomoe quotes one student’s response at some length. Some highlights:

“If existence precedes essence man is responsible for what he is. . .

Le us go back to survive, to survive it is necessary to kill or be kill, this is what existentialism is all about.

Man will not survive, he is an asshole. . .

I don’t care about man and good and evil I don’t care about this shit fuck this shit, trash and should be put in the trash can with this shit.

Thank you very much.

I lose again.”

Now, there are lots of things a teacher could say - and feel! - when getting a piece of writing like this. I can imagine many noting - as Bartholomae does - that the later part reads like something out of Howl. (Today one might say, at least we know a bot didn't not write this.) Bartholomae recalls:

“I was not prepared for this paper. In a sense, I did not know how to read it. I could only ignore it. I didn’t know what to write on it. . . although, in a sense, it was the only memorable paper I received from that class and I have kept it in my file drawer for 18 years . . .I think I knew it was not sufficient to read the essay simply as evidence that I had made the man a loser - since the document was also a dramatic and skillful way of saying ‘Fuck you - I’m not the loser, you are.’ . . . The “fuck you” paper was a written document of some considerable skill and force - more skill and force, for example, than I saw in many of the “normal” and acceptable papers I read.”

I think a lot about how some of the more “challenging” or “unsuccessful” teaching experiences I’ve had - where the discussion goes off the rails, where what they wrote was not at all what I had in mind - are the ones I remember, just as the books I remember best are the ones I read when I’m supposed to be reading something else, even when the “supposed to” was a beach read.

RIP to David Bartholomae, who unsurprisingly seems to have been a mensch as well. (I know, naive in a piece about writing to feel one can tell that from their writing. And yet.)