Tobin: “Reading Students, Reading Ourselves”

I like Tobin’s honesty in addressing the biases and assumptions that writing teachers have toward their students. I also found fascinating Tobin’s comparison of the teacher-student relationship to that of psychotherapy. Tobin says, “By attempting to edit feelings, unconscious associations, and personal problems out of a writing course, we are fooling ourselves and shortchanging our students”.  Moreover, he says that “The teaching of writing is about solving problems, personal and public, and I don’t think we can have it both ways: we cannot create intensity and deny tension, celebrate the personal and deny the significance of personalities involved”.  A distinction can be made here, however. When I taught high school English, I found that professionalism and propriety was the pinnacle in which I arranged the discussion and execution of writing. However, in college there is a lot more freedom. Like Tobin’s student Nicki, college students may write about abusive relationships. But I think the essence of his argument is that the student relationship is not “decontextualized”.  I agree that our own personalities and egos create a dynamic of transference, and that this needs to be acknowledged and negotiated in order to achieve effectiveness. Tobin’s discussion is important because writing teachers are human too, and so are our students. Hence, tensions are not exempt in the writing classroom.