The Toolbox: The Art of Teaching Across Disciplines

I push the bag of chocolate—Trader Joe’s acai berries—to the other side of the desk that we have been sharing for the last six weeks. They have been sitting in sight, but out of reach for the last 25 minutes. 

“Good work today,” I offer. Amber smiles and shrugs her shoulders in relief. 

“You always do this to me, Sarah. You make me think too hard about my writing, but then you give me a treat at the end.”

“But it works, doesn’t it?” I ask.

“Yes, it works” she concedes. “And at least you bring good chocolate.” 

Amber is a freshman in college—a first-generation student. She is self-admittedly unsure about her major, but she has put herself on the pre-med track. She is less admittedly unsure about being a college student at all, but that is a problem that we never quite solve during her time in the writing center. When I ask her why she decided to sign up for regular tutoring sessions, she responds with list of struggles that she faces as a writer: strong thesis statements, brainstorming, and confidence. This is a story about Amber’s time in the writing center, her inexperienced tutor, and how we both gained more confidence in our roles… with the help of chocolate.

It’s unbearably hot on the first day of the fall semester, even for August in Iowa. My students wander into the writing center one by one, where they at least seem to find some relief in the air conditioning. For many of them—freshmen—it is their first day of college. It’s understandable that they would be nervous in this new place, which in turn represents a completely new chapter of their lives. On the other hand, I’ve been a college student in some way or form for many years (I’ve lost count at this point), though I’m the one who is tapping my fingers nervously as we sit catty-corner at our desk. I’m a fifth-year DMA (Doctor of Musical Arts) candidate, who has never even been in the English-Philosophy building before today. This is not my usual scene, and I find myself suddenly thrust into the role of writing tutor with nothing but a few degrees in cello performance—not helpful. I’ve been teaching music for more than a decade at this point, but I feel woefully unprepared for this new assignment, which feels like it is going to be a sink-or-swim situation. Guided by nothing more than a chapter in The Bedford Handbook that I had just read the night before, I start each appointment by initiating a game of twenty questions to break the ice.

“Where are you from, what are you studying, what are some of your favorite things… How can I help you with your writing?” 

I sound like a broken record for the next three hours.

Some of them ask me questions too. “How long have you been a writing tutor? How do you start doing that?”

“Well…it’s my first day here. I’m working on a doctorate in music.” Then I turn away to avoid the no-doubt disappointed look on these students’ faces as they have just realized that their tutor has no idea what she’s doing.

Like many of my other students on day one, I have Amber dive into a prompt called “Self as Writer,” which asks the student to reflect on their personal experiences with writing. But unlike most of my other tutees, it isn’t the content of her answer that draws my attention. I never even read what she has written. It’s her process that catches me off guard. I’ve given Amber ten minutes to respond to this prompt, but she’s only come up with two sentences. “What happened?” I ask, trying to hide the bewilderment in my voice. I was sitting right next to her the entire time, listening to Amber’s keyboard clickling and clacking away, so I can’t figure out how there are only two sentences there. 

“I delete a lot when I write,” she explains. “I don’t know what to say.”

“Yes, I see that now.” Writing is clearly not a process that she is comfortable with.

Over the course of the next few weeks, I find a number of other issues that Amber and I can work on together. She is what I would refer to as a delightful challenge. While we develop a wonderful rapport and working relationship over the weeks, her writing is behind what it should be for a college student—and she knows it. The challenge I am faced with here is how to help Amber improve both her writing and her confidence. It’s a delicate balance, because to improve on anything, you first have to be aware of what is not working. It’s something I tell my cello students all the time. 

“My job is to help you hear the issues in your playing,” I’ll say. “Because if they bother you enough, you’ll go fix them yourself. If I do my job right, you won’t need me anymore.”

Two things can happen from here. First—ideally—the student becomes aware of what is not working and takes tangible steps towards improving it. Everyone is happy. But… you also run the risk of entering a vicious cycle: critical awareness feeding into crippling doubt. 

For my own benefit as a tutor, I try to write down some notes on what the issues are in my students’ writing. It makes it easier for me to figure out how best to work with them. The problem that I run into is that the writing issues are hard to clearly define and the lines between them are blurry at best. I knew that challenges with students’ writing would not come neatly packaged, tied up with a little bow and ready to be solved one by one. No big deal. This ain’t my first rodeo. Hardly anything you teach in music is objective, and the things that are—pitch, rhythm, hand position—don’t come with a sure-fire method to make them better. You don’t teach a student how to play with good pitch—you can’t, and believe me I’ve tried. You teach them how to practice it. You teach them the process. I feel emboldened by a quote from a chapter in Bean and Melzer’s Engaging Ideas: The Professor's Guide to Integrating Writing, Critical Thinking, and Active Learning in the Classroom: “The problem with traditional writing instruction was that it led to a view of writing as a set of isolated skills unconnected to an authentic desire to converse with interested readers about real ideas.”

Lightbulb. It may be first day here, but I might have some useful tools in my back pocket for this writing tutor thing. Teaching music and teaching writing—they aren’t as different as I thought they would be. The goal is the same: communicate your message to the audience. Maybe my music background is not so useless after all.

The practice of becoming a better communicator—whether it’s writing, speech, or music—is to identify the tools you have to get your message across, to practice the skill of using each tool, and to incorporate each of those tools into your communication genre. 

When I teach music, I often use the metaphor of an actual toolbox; you know, one that is filled with actual tools.

The toolbox metaphor looks like this:

Step 1: Identify the tools you have

Young writers (or musicians) might have just a couple basic tools in their box—let’s say *metaphorically* a hammer and a screwdriver. It is important to identify the tools that the student has, so that both the writer and the writing tutor can set reasonable expectations for what can be accomplished. With these tools, building a deck would not be a reasonable task, but hanging a picture might be. In the same way, a student like Amber—who comes to the writing center, with only a few tools in her writing toolbox—is not going to be equipped to tackle the essay prompts in her rhetoric class on her own. We have to improve the tools she already has, but we also have to add new tools. My role then becomes to share the tools I have in my own toolbox and show her how to use them.

Step 2: Practice the skill of using each tool

The tools in the toolbox only work well if you know how to use them. Whenever we discussed the different aspects of an academic paper, Amber almost always replied with “yeah, we talked about that in high school.” She had heard of the tools before, but there is a difference between talking about what each of these tools are and knowing how and when to use each one. For example, you could certainly try to use a chainsaw to put a nail into the wall—it might even get the job done—but most people would agree that a hammer is the better choice here. It seems like a silly comparison, but I found that Amber (and several other young writers) immediately pulled out their most complex writing tool to accomplish a simple task. It was, as a 1980s Shoe cartoon that Bean and Melzer quoted, an attempt “to disguise total ignorance with good writing.” To be good writers and good communicators, the students need to know what a tool is designed for and practice using it before they can effectively tackle a project with it.

Step 3: Incorporate the tool appropriately

This is a difficult step. It is difficult, because it requires a multi-level awareness of the project at hand. Let’s say you are tasked with building a deck. You have to have the ability to imagine the design, anticipate the materials needed and know where to find them (sources), be familiar with the tools needed, and have an idea of a logical order of steps from start to finish. And if say, you have a deadline for this project, you need to be able to reasonably guess how long each of these steps will take you. 

The toolbox is a metaphor that I found particularly helpful when working with Amber, because she initially struggled to read between the lines of any written or spoken message. The toolbox made sense to her, because it took a complex task (like writing) and simplified it into a collection of skills that were more tangible. Consequently, it also allowed both of us to see her time in the writing center as being just a small part of a much longer journey. The goal switched from tackling writing-centered issues and fixing her papers—which felt overwhelming to both of us—to expanding her writing toolbox. 

Bean and Melzer outline the symptoms that appear in student writing which lacks critical thinking. Their ideas on how to design prompts and exercises to help develop critical thinking skills became irreplaceably important in my meetings with Amber. But for her, I think what became equally important as critical thinking was critical awareness. Developing an understanding for what it looks like to join a conversation with academic writing wasn’t enough for her to feel like she was improving. She needed to know where she was in the very process of doing that—even if that meant admitting she had a long way to go—and feel like she could take steps forward from there. Improvement in the writing itself was not a useful goal for her. Instead, we focused on critical awareness of the writing process itself.

Process. A few weeks in, I ask Amber to freewrite on her topic for the next several minutes. We’ve done this exercise before, “but there’s a new rule this time,” I add. 

“You can’t touch the delete button.” 

She throws a heavy side-eye in my direction. “What do you mean?” she asks. 

“Don’t touch the delete button. For the next five minutes.” I wiggle my fingers in the air while motioning to my keyboard and repeat, “No touchy.” She ponders what I’ve asked of her for a few seconds before allowing the edges of her mouth turn up into a slight smirk. “But what if it doesn’t make sense?” It’s a coy comment that alludes to how much she’s gotten to know my tutoring already. Over the past several weeks, she’s heard me say a version of “this doesn’t make sense” on countless occasions. It’s a sign that, while the problems are still there in her writing, she’s becoming more aware of what to look for.

“It doesn’t have to make sense.” I smile back, perhaps with a bit of playful smugness.

Her grin disappears. “Fine!” she snaps at me. “You’re always so difficult.” She’s able to maintain her character for just a few more seconds before she laughs and starts working.

My goal with this exercise is not to provide some sort of purposeless parameter for Amber’s free-writing process. On the contrary, it is an attempt to prevent her writing from inhibiting her thinking. At the beginning of the semester, Amber had voiced that one of her hurdles with academic writing was brainstorming. She gets so caught up on coming up with a topic to write about, that the writing itself feels impossible. 

This is where the toolbox metaphor helps me to justify and explain the purpose of the task. We are learning about a tool that can help with brainstorming. It’s a part of the writing process that Amber has already admitted to being uncomfortable with. The thing about learning to use a new tool is that you are not going to worry about your other tools at the same time. You aren’t going to handle a circular saw for the first time while holding steadfast onto your hammer that you have been wielding for years. “It’s ok to let the other things go right now,” I tell her. 

We practice this in other ways too. Sometimes we close our computers and simply have a conversation about her topic. Some days, we draw diagrams. Other days, I ask Amber to write a rant about a topic she has strong opinions about. “This one is my favorite!” she announces gleefully. We work on different tools that can be used for brainstorming, but that alone doesn’t improve her writing. The key here is that it doesn’t have to.

Amber writes much in the same way that she thinks—laterally. Her ideas are promising, but they are often only related in that they fit under the same umbrella of a large topic area. It is brainstorming that has been turned into prose. This makes it challenging to maintain a larger focus within any of her essays. The ideas come to her randomly, so she often drops information or quotes without relating them back to a thesis or topic sentence. Her transitions are jarring, because the only tool she has for that so far is to drop a phrase like “in addition to” and keep writing. By the time we get to the conclusion, it often looks so different than her introduction—the one that last appeared four pages ago—that I wonder if I might be reading a different paper. 

I understand why this is happening. Amber is working with the tools that she has available to her. So far, we’ve been working on coming up with ideas. Organizing and communicating them is still not a skill set that Amber feels comfortable with as a writer, and so our toolbox metaphor helps us see that as something that is still in progress. As we continue on our critical awareness journey, one of the tools that is most challenging for Amber to figure out is envisioning her audience. It’s something we’ve been focusing on in every meeting together.

“You have to understand Sarah. I hate people.” I look up, a little startled by the blunt statement. “Except you,” she adds.

“That is the nicest thing you’ve said to me all semester.”

Amber is a self-described “opinionated person.” But like many other first-year students, she reads most everything in her textbooks—and online—with equal weight and truth. 

“People lie, Amber.”

“I know that!” she retorts.

“And they exaggerate.”

“Yes, Sarah, I know.”

Then I say something she has to think a little harder about. “People who are published writers also lie and exaggerate.” She stares at me as if I have just destroyed her trust in the world. “Not because they are bad people,” I add. “It’s one way of getting your message across. Rhetoric is all about how you get your message across.”

We have this conversation while working on a speech for Amber’s rhetoric class. She is speaking about the deeper meaning that she has found in the movie Pride and Prejudice.

“I’m supposed to start with a hook, but I can’t think of anything.”

“Do you know how the book starts?” I ask.

She looks it up and reads it to me: “It is a truth universally acknowledged that a single man in possession of a good fortune, must be in want of a wife.” 

She glares at me. “I can’t say that!”

“Why not?” I challenge her. 

“Because I don’t believe it! It is basically saying that women are just there to fill a void for men.”

“People lie, Amber.” We talk about the purpose of a hook. “The point is to get their attention. Being honest is about what you think is less important… at least in this case.”

Bean and Melzer articulate this idea by saying that “one way to think about purpose is through the writer’s aim—such as to inform, explain, analyze, persuade, reflect, entertain, and so forth. But another useful way to understand purpose is to articulate the kind of change the writer hopes to bring about in the readers’ view of the topic.” This concept requires the rhetor to have an awareness of their audience.

I revert back to my background as a music teacher to internalize this idea for myself. For performers, the concept of audience awareness can feel devious and even dishonest at times. My music students often talk about communicating in music in the same way that Amber talks about communicating in writing—as if honesty is the best path. While my cello students talk about needing to do a crescendo “because that is what is in the music,” my vocabulary is slightly different. I talk about creating the illusion of a crescendo, because whether or not you do it is of lesser importance than whether or not the audience hears it. “Musicality is an illusion,” I say. “Sometimes you have to trick them into hearing what you want them to.” For Amber, this is still a work in progress. Many of her essays retreat back to the comfort of duality: right or wrong, good or bad, for or against. While she is able to make an argument in her writing, she reverts to slipping in pronouns like us and we, unintentionally joining forces with the invisible army that she has created in her paper to feel more secure about making a claim. She is critically aware of her desire to seek confidence in these habits, but her writing doesn’t reflect that awareness yet.

When we stopped trying to fix her papers and started working on her writing process, we both expected that the papers would get better. They didn’t. But her awareness of what was going on did improve. While the writing didn’t show any progress (though I won’t deny that there is a temptation to say it did to help prove my point), she did become less reliant on my feedback to see where the problems were. I come back to the goal that I communicate to my cello students. “My hope is that you eventually won’t need me anymore.”

During our final session of the semester, I suggest we make a “process” checklist that Amber can reference as she tackles writing assignments in her future classes. I ask her to think about what first steps she might take after she gets a prompt for an assignment in class. She looks at me with an open-mouth grin and, maintaining eye contact, types “Cry.”

I roll my eyes. “Ok, I can play this game too. But that is not the first thing you should do.” I delete what she has written. We are meeting on a videoconference platform, where we are able to work on a document simultaneously. Her writing appears with a blue background, while mine shows up in red, making our conversation even more colorful.

“Panic.” I type. “And then cry.”

She bursts out in laughter. I look around the writing center, suddenly worried that I might get in trouble for having too much fun in a tutoring session. We continue making our list, in between bouts of seriousness and silliness. 

“Read the prompt.”

“Read the prompt again.”

“Freewrite without deleting anything.”

The list continues…

“Chocolate.”

“Chocolate.”