The thoughts below meander a bit. They're mostly aimed at those who teach First-year Composition, but may be useful to instructors in other disciplines. I was inspired to cast this bit of prose out into the blogosphere by the realization that the writers I saw in class were not the writers who were composing many of the papers I was reading. No, I'm not talking about plagiarism. What I mean is that I have come to see something of a split consciousness apparent in many of my students' approaches to writing. Many of them say and do one thing in class (or conferences) and then do something quite different when alone with their writing task, facing a deadline.

I wrote myself a note about this some months ago, and recently rediscovered the note. Apparently, some part of my mind has been mulling it over ever since, because what follows came pouring out in a single afternoon and evening, with dinner and errands in the middle.

Here's the point of what I say below: we as academics and teachers of writing are the weird ones, and we have a tendency to forget that. Our students are highly adapted writers, but they're mostly adapted to a different writing context. "Writing" is a word, and like all words highly indeterminate in meaning across discourse community boundaries. There's more that we ought to be and can be doing to narrow the interpretive gaps surrounding the sign "writing."

To most of us who read and write for a living (and I'm including all professional academics in this group, not just those in English, or in Composition), little can be more natural than the process of setting our thoughts down in words. When I recognized the insight about which I am writing today, my first thought was to get it down in writing. I think by writing, and writing is the focus of many of my waking hours. My second thought was to write to others and ask their opinion.

This tendency to respond to the world by writing is likely one reason why we are academics in the first place. We self-select because those who despise or fear the process are unlikely to choose a career in academia.

Our accustomed impulse to write is also probably the most profound barrier imaginable between us and many of our students. It lies athwart our ability to understand them, and therefore our ability to teach them. Why do I say this?

Because it's well nigh impossible for us to imagine what it feels like to dislike writing, to fear writing assignments, to have our senses go fuzzy when a teacher starts talking about a writing project we are going to have to complete. Yet this antagonistic and/or fearful view of writing is precisely what most of our students bring with them when they come into our classrooms.

Nonetheless, they must write, and must have written to get to college and into our classrooms in the first place. How did they manage? They adapted. Though it must have seemed something like swigging cod liver oil with a chaser of kerosene, needs must, and they found ways.

How did they adapt? In some cases, they learned to copy (and/or plagiarize). In others, they learned that if they were desperate enough—say, at 3:00 a. m. the night before the paper was due—something would spill out of their fevered brains. Many learned forms and models, and forever-after wrote exactly the same essays: five sentences per paragraph, five paragraphs per essay, with sometimes barely noticeable differences in topic and/or word choice. They learned to read their teachers, and to turn out the kinds of sentiments that teachers like to read.

Some few did, in fact, learn to like/love writing, and did it unusually well (the two are mutually reinforcing in an evaluative environment). After all, I don't mean to imply that all of our college writing students are anti-writing, only that many of them are. But I digress.

No matter what path they chose, they all adapted. And, if they're sitting in our college classrooms, the adaptation was somewhat successful. They got by. Maybe they even excelled. In many of their cases, they were told they were good writers. And so they were, for the audience to whom they were writing. But the adaptation became habit. The habit became set in stone. With steel rebar reinforcing it. Surrounded by an alligator-filled moat.

And whatever adaptation our students stumbled upon in primary and secondary schools, that's what the sign "writing" represents in their minds when they encounter First-year Composition. They come into our classrooms, and we tell them something to the tune of "This is a class where you will learn how to write." And there the communication ends, because one thing that is all but guaranteed is that our "writing" and our students' "writing" are homophonic signs for different realities.

"So?" I can hear you saying, "That's what school is for: to learn new things and new ways of doing old things. We teach; they learn."

Maybe. So we hope, anyway. So we must believe, if we're to maintain our faith in what we're trying to accomplish as teachers of writing.

And so it often appears, when we're in the classroom. We deliver lectures (always brief and never boring) set up small work groups, schedule workshops/conferences/tutoring sessions, lead discussions, read drafts, facilitate peer reviews, and in general throw every teaching skill, strategy, and/or technique we've ever seen or heard of into the 35-40 clock hours of instruction time we get with these students each semester.

They get it! They really do! (For the most part.) They learn to find good sources, use them responsibly, and draft and revise under our watchful gazes. They comment insightfully during peer reviews. They all pull together for the group assignments. All is well in FYC-land. Until, that is, they go back to home, dorm room, or computer lab to crank out the evaluation drafts of their papers.

This is where things go all screwy for many, many of our students. Because in that moment, they're not writing for us. They're writing for Mrs. Hill, their 5th-grade English teacher, or Mrs. Saunders, that nice literature teacher from their senior year of high school, who explained all the dirty bits in Shakespeare and told them their prose was wonderfully colorful.

When one doesn't know how to do something, our first adaptation to an environment demanding that skill is reasonably simple, especially for children. But when we've already adapted to a particular stimulus, already internalized a successful strategy, adapting anew may be the most difficult thing any human being ever attempts.

We're not getting tabulae rasa in our First-year Composition classes. We're getting experienced writers. Highly adapted writing animals, if you will. And no matter how well things seem to go in the writing classroom, when they sit down — alone — to write, those writers are often not the same people we see in the classroom thrice a week. They may learn some or all of what "writing" signifies for us, because they're motivated in most cases to work hard for our approval. But when the pressure's on, they're likely to revert to what "writing" signified for them before they ever met us.

For some lucky few, the two concepts are near enough kin that they do well in terms of grades. Then there are those who are blessed with unusually adaptive minds, who really do internalize useful bits of our carefully crafted classroom activities. But for every student who seems to readily adapt to the demands of college writing (and they are demands, not suggestions, and not criteria), there are a half dozen who get their papers back with grades unlike anything that nice Mrs. Saunders ever gave out.

Then the despair sets in, and those despairing join the ranks who tell their friends "writing's not really my thing," and "I hate English classes." I won't even go into the negative and self-defeating behaviors spawned by this mindset, the unnecessary pain and suffering. Because now those who despair are adapting again, all right. They're adapting to the impact of a teacher's disapproving pen, though, and not to the demands of college writing.

For the most part, though we who teach are generally an empathic lot and can feel their pain, we just don't get what's going on with our students at this point. All of our classroom activities went so well! And look! Susie's writing improved by leaps and bounds this semester! Clearly, Johnny just isn't trying. "Sure wish those high school teachers wouldn't send us such under-prepared students," we think — and often say.

In many cases, though, it's not the students who are under-prepared. It's we, the teachers. They did their part. They adapted to the environment in which they were educated in primary and secondary schools, and succeeded well enough to get into college. They were taught to the test, and they passed it. They got here, into our classrooms.

But when they got here, they encountered a strange phenomenon. Those weird kids, who read all day and wrote poetry all night—the ones our students maybe even mocked for their love of English class—are the ones in charge of the academy. That tiny little minority who can't imagine fearing and loathing writing assignments are the very ones who end up teaching writing. And for the most part we can't imagine what it's like to not be just like us.

So we teach. Often, we love the job, and are good at it. But all along, just under the surface, lies the unspoken dissonance between "writing" and "writing." It's not at all like two people who love ice cream disagreeing on the qualities of the best ice cream. It's more like we're pointing at something and calling it ice cream, when many of our students can plainly see that it's a pile of fried liver, topped with spinach and Brussels sprouts.

This leads us to the real task of writing instruction: translation. Learning to recognize what "writing" means in all the varied lexicons in which our students are already fluent when they encounter us in their first year of college — and finding ways to translate.

We talk a good fight about recognizing our students' lived experiences and disparate discourse communities, and as far as cultural criticism goes we probably do a fair job. We rarely apply that cosmopolitan openness to the lived experience of "writing" that our students bring with them, though.

It's not the writing student in our classrooms we need to work to understand better, the one doing all the homework, participating in peer review, and raising his or her hand to answer the questions we pose during "discussions." It's the experienced, highly adapted writer that student becomes when he or she sits, alone, facing the blank page or the blank computer screen whom we need to work harder to understand. They might as well be two different people, and that makes things dicey, because it's hard for us to get a good look at that other, private writer.

We know from experience. Our discipline has tried to get inside the brain of the working writer, to let her tell us what she's thinking as she writes — but the results are far from conclusive or convincing, in my opinion.

Maybe what we ought to be doing is studying the contexts in which our students first learn to write. Are there courses out there for Compositionists and other writing specialists, where we can ourselves be taught what teachers in primary and secondary schools call writing? It's a big field, so someone somewhere is probably doing this. I just haven't heard of it yet.

The other action we can undertake isn't something that can be taught. It's a paradigm shift, and those don't come in books. We — stop; let me say what I mean.

I need to stop seeing my students as people who can't write. I need to work at perceiving them as highly trained, highly adapted and specialized writers who have been working in a different context than the one we now share.

I need to work at translating between the "writing" I see and the "writing" they see, and figure out how to help them reconcile the differences, so that they can succeed in this writing context.

I need to try harder to remember that, in the big scheme of things, I as an academic am the one who's unusual or odd, and that my students who view school-type writing antagonistically are solidly in the majority. (Probably for a very good reason, since the stuff is mostly deadly dull and lifeless.) And that's okay, too. It's not my job to try and engineer conversion experiences, and I couldn't if I wanted to.

I need to look for ways to help my students recognize patterns in their private-writer paradigm that aren't working in their current writing environment.

And I can never forget that, no matter how splendidly I do my job in the classroom (and I have my share of doubts on that score) somewhere out there my students are sitting alone in front of a blank computer screen, and there's a good chance it's Mrs. Hill's or Mrs. Saunders' voice playing in their heads, not mine. It's my job to adapt to that reality every bit as much as it is theirs to adapt to mine.