Hidden Garage Door Openers and Expectations

My brother is an electrician. But he is more than an electrician. He does things with wires, electrical devices, random gadgets, and pieces of scrap metal that I know I could never do. Let me rephrase that: I could do, but won't ever do 1) because I don't care enough to try and 2) would have to spend the better part of my life trying to study enough to gain a certain "know how" that only true experts understand. He's installed a computer in his truck (not like the tower/monitor you might be thinking of); he figured out how to wire the mother board, processor, etc. through the seat of the passenger side, underneath the floor, which connected to a small computer monitor he found in a junk store. He's been known to wire my family's garage door so that you can step on a rock in the yard, and the garage door (magically) opens--I'm talkin' "open saysame" kinda stuff--real "impress your date" or "confuse your out-of-town guests" material. His latest invention is a small-scale Rube Goldberg machine that begins with a piece of wood, the remnants of an electric car key opener, and ends with a freshly brewed pot of coffee. So you get it: the kid is smart. And extraordinarily creative.

When my brother introduces me to his latest invention, I always ask him, "How in the hell did you figure out how to make that thing?", he usually responds: "I don't know; I just figured it out." If we're talking about the cognitive process of writing, I couldn't help but think about my brother and his non-chalant response to his latest spark of creative genius: "I don't know; I just figured it out." When Britton, et al. suggested that "highly effective writing may be produced in [a] spontaneous manner," I wondered if invention, in many contexts, was as spontaneous as a writers' ability to piece together words into unique patterns and utterances. Beyond an understanding of semantic and syntactical structure, how much of our writing process is intuitive and spontaneous? Flower & Hayes define this process as discovery, yet they maintain that "discovery" is not simply finding something hidden somewhere within a students' text or memory. Instead, discovery takes place when a writer is "hard at work searching memory, forming concepts, and forging a new structure of ideas, while at the same time trying to juggle all the constraints imposed by his or her purpose, audience, and language itself" (Flower & Hayes 467). If I think about my brother and his inventive strategy, would I be on the right track if I applied this definition of discovery to answer his response of "I don't know?" In some realm of certainty, he does know. He just doesn't know he knows what he's doing.

My overall impression of Britton, et al., Flower & Hayes, and Brand's observations regarding the cognitive process of writing allows me to consider that writing is both a process of memory and intuition. Memory connotes an understanding of the structure of language. Intuition refers to the feeling which tells the writer what detail to include and how those details should be arranged. To be sure, according to Flower & Hayes, a "good" writer intuitively understands the intention of each sentence--that in its final construction, a piece of writing will produce a particular effect by its structure and content.

Conversely, I have to think of the writers who are deemed more "basic" writers. I think about my brother who clearly demonstrates an above-average aptitude for mechanical invention, yet claims that writing is far beyond his comfort zone. Does this mean that this type of basic writer is unable to participate in the "cognitive process of discovery?" Absolutely not. In fact, I think that Brand points us towards an understanding that there is no "best" way for a writer to compose; there are many ways and that no model "is better than the other." To be more straightforward, if there are different types of thinkers, there are certainly different styles of composing (Brand 710).

I know that none of our theorists explicitly say this, but as teachers in the public education system, what are our expectations of students who are considered basic writers? Are they meant to write the next great American novel? I don't know. Is writing only a piece-of-the-pie example of a students' cognitive ability? I would argue, yes. Students have talents that stretch across the curriculum, so why do we all need to be experts in writing? How do we marginalize students who do not excel at writing? For the students like my brother who can piece together intricate electronic circuits and mechanical systems, who am I to say that his participation is limited in society if he can't piece together equally intricate phrases with the materials of pen and paper? I guess my impression of this weeks' readings led me to consider the importance of writing, or more so, what teachers can do (or are doing?) to access a similar pattern of thought for all students, the "experts" and the "basic" writers, alike.