What is one thing that every writing teacher should know?
How to wait tables. My advice? Get a serving gig that allows you the potential of attending to (at minimum) nine tables at once during the busy shifts. Ask, as well, to be scheduled during the slower shifts where you’d have the potential, in case of a fluke off-hours rush, of tending to as many as 27 tables at once. If possible, get a job that requires that you, more often than not, also take on (while/between waiting tables) hosting, bartending and cashiering duties. This will, I am suggesting, at least to start, teach you more about (and give you more experience with) matters related to interpersonal communication, communicative alignment (or lack thereof), invention, arrangement, style, memory, delivery, ethos, persona, voice, problem-solving, code-switching, multimodal communication, time management, production, consumption, reception/response, good pensmanship, various ways of reading/analyzing (i.e., people, situations, contexts, body language, gesture), revision, collaboration, etc. than about anything else I can think of.
Sunday, March 04, 2007
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2 comments:
do you recommend that writing teachers do this before, after, or while engaging the theories of writing/rhetoric/communication alluded to in your list of terms?
j
Depends, I guess, on the opportunities one has and, with this, learning styles. I waited tables for 10 years before I decided I’d go back to college, and it was 13 years of waiting tables before I started teaching and (still later) discovered that Writing Studies/Rhet-Comp existed. For my way of learning, it was helpful to have experienced these things in another context before I began thinking about them, reading about them, learning to name and define them, (re)experiencing them, etc. in this one.
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