Sometimes I wish I could be an engineering professor.

Let me unpack that statement, beginning with a massive disclaimer: NOBODY wants me to teach engineering. If I taught any form of engineering, even to a small group of students, you would begin to see news stories of bridges collapsing, neighborhoods losing electricity, chemical factories blowing up, and solenoids failing (if you don’t know what a solenoid is, don’t worry; neither did I before I married a magnetic design engineer). That’s not because I’m a bad teacher but because I don’t have the content knowledge necessary to teach engineering. This might sound obvious, but it’s an important statement that forms the crux of this post.

The other day, my magnetic engineer husband (yes, he has a magnetic personality, and he also works with magnets) and I were talking about the difference between his college experience and mine. The conversation was sparked by an anecdote we had heard about an engineering professor who bragged about how few students passed his final exam. I expressed my exasperation with this kind of thinking, and while Jordan agreed that this is nothing to brag about, he said he did understand and mostly support the concept of engineering professors designing their exams to be difficult (especially in early courses designed to separate the truly capable and serious future engineers from those who thought they’d take an intro course for fun). He pointed out the impracticality, even the danger, of students graduating from an engineering program without really knowing the content and concepts of the field, and explained how tests are one of the best ways of ensuring graduates have the requisite knowledge (second only to hands-on design projects).

I begrudgingly agreed. I knew he was right in the context of engineering, but that gatekeeping mindset is so antithetical to the way I teach writing that I’m used to cringing whenever I see it. The difference, of course, is that writing isn’t a content-driven discipline. Some would argue with me here–there is a whole field of composition that has essential readings and concepts. I recognize and respect composition as a discipline, and I think that disciplinary knowledge is crucial for people who want to dedicate their lives to the teaching and research of writing. But I don’t think it’s necessary for people who simply want to learn how to write. Writing is a skill, and the best way to learn it is to do it (while receiving quality feedback to make sure it’s being done well). That explains why my students earn their grades not by taking tests to prove they know concepts about good writing, but by doing lots of writing, which allows them to practice the skill over and over and eventually reach significant improvement, if not mastery. Mastery is difficult to demonstrate because the definition of “excellent writing” is notoriously subjective, which is why English teachers are all going to prioritize different things in our grading, no matter how hard we try to standardize the process through rubrics, norming sessions, and other efforts.

This explains why I don’t worry too much about whether we’re compromising our standards as a university by allowing students to graduate from our writing programs who probably aren’t going to win any Pulitzer Prizes or who maybe will never even get published. Every student’s goals and reasons for getting a degree in writing are different, and I don’t think it’s my place to judge students by a standard that has nothing to do with their goals. Of course, there are graduation standards students have to meet–e.g., if they’re writing a master’s thesis, it needs to meet a minimum length requirement. And yes, I absolutely do my best to teach students good argumentation, research, and sentence construction skills. But especially when we’re talking about creative writing, there’s a fine line–easily stumbled across–between teaching these skills and trying to reproduce students who write exactly the way we do.

I opened the post by saying I sometimes wish I could teach engineering because I sometimes wish I could have a more objective standard by which to grade–that I could simply mark my students’ work right or wrong. (And by the way, I’m sure there is room for creative approaches in engineering; I realize I’m stereotyping a bit to make my point.) But most of the time, I’m thankful I get to teach a skill that allows me to come alongside students in something resembling a mentoring relationship, even if that means I sometimes obsess way too long over which rubric category to click.