Of Paragraphs and Paradiddles: Talking Failure in the Writing Classroom

I’ve been playing drums for more than twenty years but I only just started taking lessons. At my first lesson, my teacher, Sol, a broad-shouldered Frenchman in his late forties, asked me what I wanted to learn. Among a few other things, I said “rudiments.” Rudiments are short sticking phrases first practiced on a pad or single drum then moved in various ways around the drum set. They’re what scales are to the pianist: a simple foundation of mental and physical knowledge with endless applications on the instrument. One of the most basic and useful rudiments is the paradiddle, an eight-note phrase most commonly played like this: RLRR LRLL. I thought I “knew” the paradidle because I knew the strokes and could play it at a decent speed. But Sol has taught me that I don’t know the paradiddle, or a dozen other things that most drummers know. 

Here's drummer's drummer Steve Gadd showing how creatively-used paradiddles can nice up a beat:

This realization opened up a vista of new work that’s both exciting and intimidating. But it’s only exciting because I enjoy playing drums and can see the potential of the paradiddle concept beyond the work itself. I can imagine putting a variation of it into a new groove, fill, or solo that catches the attention of bandmates or an audience. I can imagine it getting me something.

I mention all this because it seems to me like a failure followed by a success, and I’ve been incorporating stories about failure – mostly mine – into my teaching. The failure comes from the fact that I played drums for two decades before really thinking about one of the instrument’s most basic concepts, an error that now feels like a lot of wasted time. But now that I am thinking about it I’m re-energized and practicing as much as I ever have. When I tell students about this kind of thing, it’s to make an emotional connection between the pain of not succeeding like you want to and the satisfaction of accomplishing something difficult. I usually deliver it as a short talk in class after they’ve gotten a few papers handed back with my comments on them.

Generally I write a lot of comments on my students’ papers because everything they write is a draft that they must or may revise. Big assignments are preceded by little assignments, and the big assignments will either be revised for the course’s final portfolio or can simply be re-done for a better grade. So everything, all semester, is in process, and my comments are designed to keep that process directed and productive. But I acknowledge that it hurts. Any time you put yourself into something and someone critiques it, it hurts. Even if the critique is careful and sensitive, it hurts. And the pain doesn’t end when you’re done reading the criticism because then you have to tear down and rebuild that thing you made, coming face to face with the realization that it’s not as good as you thought it was.

Here’s a short clip of Ta-Nehisi Coates talking about writing being about failure that I’ve shown in my class (though another teacher persuaded me that I should show it late in the semester rather than early, to keep from discouraging students):

I’ve been using the word “failure,” and Coates uses it too, but I could just as easily say “learning.” Only talking with students about my “learning” isn’t nearly as compelling as sharing the times that I’ve failed, or at least it doesn’t fit as well with the persona I want to create. In any case, there are times when my and my students’ failure, or learning, are tied up with each other. Like a grouping of recent classes where we talked about paragraphing. I was introducing the idea of synthesizing sources into their papers – taking several different things they’d read and using them to build an argument. What are some good ways to do that? What are some bad ways, and why does any of it matter? It matters, I tell them, because, yes, it’s a basic way of writing about a topic. You show that you’re familiar with what others have said about something and explain where your own views fit into the conversation. More importantly though, it’s a basic way of thinking about a topic.

I tell students that part of being smart about something is knowing where your and others’ ideas converge and depart. In terms of pulling this off in a paragraph – like the paradiddle, a basic building block in a larger, more complex skill – you should know how to organize your thoughts not just in terms of the things that you’ve read (first this author in this paragraph, then this author in this paragraph, etc.), but in terms of the key points of agreement and disagreement in an issue. So instead of starting a new paragraph every time you’re going to talk about a new author, I tell them, each paragraph is held together by an idea or concept and includes thoughts from multiple authors. This way, you’re driving the bus, not them.

Many students resist synthesis of this kind. They’ve been writing annotated bibliographies and know how to summarize first this reading, then that one, then the other one. But that’s a lower level skill, and it’s BO-RING to read (and to write) because it’s predictable and nothing is created. An example might be writing about the surprising rise of Donald Trump in this year’s primary elections. You could review what E.J. Dionne thinks, then what Rush Limbaugh thinks, then what your dad thinks, and put a bow on it. Or you could divide the Trump phenomenon into what you see as its most plausible causes – conservative talk radio, overpromising and ineffective elected officials, Democrats’ immigration policy, racism, Obama Derangement Syndrome – giving each one a paragraph or two and sprinkling in the thoughts of your different sources. In this paper, unlike in the first one, you control the direction by making decisions about what subtopics to cover and whose voices shape the contours of each one.

I explain all this to my students, and they write their early drafts and hand them in. And many of them – I’d say more than half – just write really long paragraphs. They write in a manner very similar to what I asked them not to do – this author, then that author, then the other author – but when they move from one author to another, they just continue on in the same paragraph rather than start a new one. What they heard me say in class was, “You should be talking about multiple authors in each paragraph.” So they did.

This is the kind of reminder we often get when we underestimate the complexity of the skills we’re trying to teach. In these instances, we equate words being spoken in a classroom with learned practices. “I explained how to do it. They must not have been listening.” I have probably said this, and have definitely heard it – quite possibly in the last week. Seen in this way, the batch of papers I received was unsatisfactory and someone had failed. If I am uncharitable, the students have failed. If I am honest, I, as a teacher, have failed. If I am honest and experienced, no one has necessarily failed, but we all have something to learn.

In this particular situation I learned that teaching synthesis requires patient work over many days that include examples and counterexamples. And like so many other things, it also requires the teacher to successfully argue that it is indeed worth learning. That vista of new work that opened up in front of me when I grasped the meaning of the paradiddle also opens up for students when they learn something new, but if the work isn’t meaningful then that view is a desolate one. Why should students simply take on faith that this skill is worth their time and sweat? To get a grade? Even if that did work, would we want that to be the reason they stuck with it?

Actually, maybe a little bit of grade-motivation is okay. After all, part of the reason I keep up my paradiddles is because my teacher asks me to, and I’ve got to show him my progress at the end of the week. And while it’s painful to push past my limitations at home by myself, it hurts a lot less than showing up to a lesson with nothing. But that has happened before and will happen again, and I’ll probably tell my students about it.