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Like Writing a Bike

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By John Lemuel

Summer teaching assignments at my college are typically light. So light that some of my colleagues don't make an appearance on the campus until August. My only student this summer was repeating the senior seminar class he had failed in the spring. Missed deadlines plus missed classes added up to one big missed opportunity.

As the last required course in our major sequence, the senior seminar is a hotbed of senioritis. Students who have excelled in prior classes start to coast, disdaining this final formality. I team-teach it with a colleague, and we inevitably end up agonizing over which student lapses to overlook and which to prosecute.

This student gave us ample cause to lower the boom. Because he rarely made it to class, I had to invite him by e-mail to come and discuss his options: Either repeat the course next year, or take it as an independent study this summer.

He chose summer, which was OK by me. I didn't want his slacking to undermine morale in next year's class. And I actually get paid an extra pittance for teaching in the summer. Sure, it reeks of self-interest, but it's also good for him to seize what little momentum he had from the spring to lay the requirement promptly to rest.

As summer session started, I also began teaching my 5-year-old daughter to ride a bike. We waited too long with her older sister, whose fears and center of gravity both shifted upward as she got older, making it harder to learn. Training wheels similarly slowed her progress, so this time we chose a hands-on approach over mechanical assistance.

I committed to meet my student as often as he needed to move his project along. I also promised my daughter that we would practice every day until she got it and that I would never let her fall. Both of them had initial misgivings.

My student found it no easier to function in an unstructured class. We met at the library, which was open on a limited basis this summer. I hoped the quiet environs and available resources would help him be productive. Often enough, I found him in a seminar room, with laptop and research materials spread on the table, watching international soccer on the wall-mounted TV. With no Internet access at home, he also used library time to go online.

There are many ways to teach writing. Not knowing which approach might stick, I tried several. He would e-mail sections of his document to me, and I would highlight awkward sentences for him to fix, insert comments about his argument, suggest changes he should make, and sometimes model those changes with examples of more effective prose. "OK," was his constant reply as we went over the draft line by line.

"Now fix those things by the end of the day, and send it to me," I usually said. "See you tomorrow at 10." That's when the library opened. It closed at 4, and he brought lunch, so it seemed reasonable to expect several hours of effort from him. But the next morning, the document usually seemed to have less than an hour's worth of revisions made.

At home I would ask my daughter if she was ready to practice bike riding. A typical exchange went like this:

"Actually I was thinking today we'd take a break," she would say.

"Well, I was thinking we could do it now, instead of later when you like to watch your TV shows," I countered.

Then she would agree, and we would walk a block to the church parking lot, a fairly level and usually empty space.

Compared to teaching writing, showing someone how to ride a bike is easy. Conceptually it boiled down to a few simple maxims that we drilled each session: "Control the bike," I prompted. "Or it will control you," she finished.

"What happens when you stop pedaling?"

"You start falling."

"Where do you find your balance?"

"It's in the middle."

Walking the bike to the parking lot and back taught her how simple leverage and momentum determined steering. "What happened?" I asked, when the bike buckled and fell, half pulling her over. "The bike controlled me," she responded, with an almost clinical objectivity.

She knew this stuff backward and forward.

My repeat senior, on the other hand, resisted catechizing, despite the fact that I frequently repeated myself with him. "When you start a new idea, ... ?" I would ask leadingly.

"Change the subject?" he guessed.

"Well, OK," I would sigh, "but 'start a new paragraph' is what I keep telling you."

He forgot that he couldn't rely on the computer's suggestions. On a brief point about ticket scalping, his paper mentioned "tickles" fans, which evidently meant "ticketless."

"How did that happen?" I asked.

"Must be something spell-check did," he shrugged.

But spell-check didn't do it automatically, I reminded him. "You selected that change. Twice in the same paragraph." He shrugged again.

On the other hand, his unassisted attempt at spelling "camaraderie" looked like a trade name for synthetic corduroy.

Beyond grammar and composition basics, he struggled with the conceptual level of the project. Meeting the required length -- 20 pages -- was easy because he filled those pages with long quotes, not always referenced by a source and, in one place, not even identified as a quote.

Plagiarism had been explained to him following suspect work in previous classes, to no avail. "You don't write this well," I reminded him. "If you can write this well here, then I expect to see it throughout the paper." Fix it, I said, and left it to him to figure out how to proceed.

His own assertions in the paper were few and bland, his quotes too many. Patching quotes together is not writing, I would explain; it's compiling, a euphemism for "ripping off." Scholarship involves interpreting, challenging, and refereeing the views of others.

His problem, he insisted, was how he took notes. "I type the good stuff from my sources into the document so I don't have to look for them when I'm writing." Obviously he then found it hard to exchange such good borrowed prose for his own less-perfect phrasing.

It's time to be the expert, I told him. "You know a lot about this topic, right?" He nodded. "So write what you know. Don't make others write for you, or they'll get the good grade and you'll get an F." I used the strikeout font to mow large swaths across each page, leaving instructions to replace it all with his own summary and analysis. "Leave your books in your bag. Write without looking at them."

I felt as if I was channeling the seventh-grade teacher who first introduced research papers to me. Some things you never forget.

"Do we meet tomorrow?" he asked. I had to draw a line. "Send it to me when you've fixed all that. Then we'll meet."

My daughter, meanwhile, progressed steadily with her bike riding. The strategy I used worked for both daughters: Don't hold any part of the bike because it will throw off her sense of balance. Instead, put a hand under each armpit to support her as she pedals. The first few laps killed my back, but each day she leaned on me a little less, then managed with support for only one arm, and finally rode with my hand in the middle of her back, just for reassurance.

"You don't need me. You can do this yourself," I kept repeating. At first the words made her panic, but soon enough they proved true. I ran home for the video camera, to capture this moment for the grandparents.

I would love to say my repeat student had a similar breakthrough and stood on his desk shouting, "O Captain! My Captain!" Maybe next time.

What he had discovered was that his own writing, double-spaced, filled the page much quicker than the single-spaced blocks I had made of all his long quotes.

"I fixed it all but that one section," he reported, alluding to the plagiarism that dare not speak its name. "I don't know what to do about that."

"That's easy." I found that part of the document, highlighted it, and pressed delete. "Now, write whatever needs to be said there." The message, I hope, was clear: You can do this yourself.

My colleague and I pronounced a C+ upon the final draft. The student thanked me for all my help. I wonder whether any of it will leave a lasting impression.

Riding a bike is the definitive example of something you learn and never forget. Writing seems like something you can spend a lifetime learning and a Sisyphean eternity trying to teach. But at least one thing I taught this summer will be remembered.