When I reflect on my experience as a learner in the English classroom, I realise how much I was handicapped by perhaps well intending teachers and I feel shortchanged. Quite often the focus of our attempts was how well we could reproduce, recall and regurgitate. It became quite difficult for me later on to rely on my own wealth of knowledge, common sense and insight when making responses. This was because I had been so well spoon-fed, that I became dependant on the thoughts of others to make my own response. I also crafted well the art of manipulating the information disseminated to me to make the response my own. Truly, this form of teaching became a crutch for me and I realised how much I would panic or get stumped whenever I did not have some outside source of information to qualify my responses. Even now, when doing assignments at this level I feel a high level of disequilibrium if I do not have some source of information to "check to see" if my answer is on the right track. This means that I am not yet fully an independent learner and learning to rely on myself for answer has been an unsettling experience.
I have never taught English before, but I refuse- now that I have been introduced to a better method of instruction- to handi-cap my students by not giving them the skills necessary to make their own responses and to put to paper their own thoughts. Whether it is in responding to comprehension questions, questions based on literary texts or in completing some form of writing (poetry, prose, argumentative). I strongly approve of the process approach to writing and I think that its incorporation in the classroom will help foster our students' writing and response skills. That way, in the future, when they are faced with lecturers who expect them to do more than give a "correct answer" they will not have to face the fury of self-doubt and agitation.
