Process of Interpretation

While preparing my lesson plan for this week, I came across a quote in Shout! The Beatles in Their Generation describing John Lennon's first week at the art college in Liverpool. His tutor, Alfred Bollard, was an unconventional teacher who actually had no interest in formal lectures and held most of his lectures in Ye Cracke, a pub on Rice Street. Despite his unconventional methods, Bollard saw Lennon as a slacker; he never contributed to the discussion, didn't share his work and had the attitude of an "ill-at-ease Teddy Boy."

However, Bollard's opinion of young John Lennon changed greatly after finding the future Beatle's notebook in the pub. "Then one day in the lecture room I found this notebook full of caricatures - of myself, the other tutor's, the students - all done with descriptions and verse, and it was the wittiest thing I'd ever seen in my life. There was no name on it. It took me quite a while to find out that Lennon had done it.

"The next time student work was being put up and discussed, I brought out this notebook and held it up and we discussed the work in it. John had never expected anyone to look at it, let alone find it funny and brilliant. Afterward I told him, 'When I talk about interpretation, boy, this is the kind of thing I mean as well. This is the kind of thing I want you to be doing.'" (Norman, 41)

Teachers of first-year college students have a responsibility to educate their students in the principles of collegiate writing. But one thing that is often overlooked is the importance of allowing interpretation in the classroom.

In Wardle and Downs' followup to Writing About Writing, revised in 2012, the authors reiterate their reasoning which prompted their 2007 article Writing About Writing (WAW):

First-year writing should seek to "improve students' understanding of writing, rhetoric, language, and literacy in a course that is topically oriented to reading and writing as scholarly inquiry and encouraging more realistic understandings of writing" (553). Although we clarified, not very vigorously, that "there are a number of ways to institute" such a course (559), we described a particular way that we had been teaching to this purpose at the time with sufficient emphasis to drown out that ecumenical encouragement."

The first-year experience, or freshman seminar, is one of these different ways to introduce college students to the levels of writing, rhetoric, etc. expected by their university. It is also a form of interpretation, much like what Bollard expressed to Lennon when he told him, "This is the kind of thing I want you to be doing."

Interpretation isn't merely drawing caricatures in a sketchbook during lecture (and in fact, Lennon was very lucky that Bollard read his work as a form of interpretation), but rather teaching a subject through a new lens such as popular culture or re imagining a course in real life experiences. Which is in fact what Wardle and Downs have promoted through WAW.

"What we advocate for, and what remains stable in our own classrooms, is simply the underlying set of principles: engage students with the research and ideas of the field, using any means necessary and productive, in order to shift students' conceptions of writing, building declarative and procedural knowledge of writing with an eye toward transfer. That seems to be the heart of writing-about-writing: a basic belief that, as a field, we know some things and should teach them. This belief comes to be shared more broadly and stated more explicitly these days, including by scholars much more experienced than we." (Wardle and Downs)

The idea of interpretation applies more to the thought process than an actual skill, but these ideas can certainly be expanded into writing at the college level. An example of this works with argumentation: for the student's second written assignment, they wrote a review on one of the Beatles' media: a movie, book, cartoon or interview. In the review they had to argue as to whether or not this was a good example of the Beatles' work or it if reflected the Beatles in a truthful manner. This assignment allowed students to work with a nontraditional source of media and form a argument either for its success or its lack thereof.

The importance of the freshman seminar weighs not only on introducing first-year students to the expectations of college, but also allowing students to experiment outside the box of traditional education. After all, as educators we hope that students will apply what they learn in college to their post-education lives. Interpretation allows students to bring the gap between education and the professional world, through writing and other forms of expression.