ASSAY: A JOURNAL OF NONFICTION STUDIES
11.1

Katherine Fredlund
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Six Words Toward Knowing and Feeling

Fall 2024 Spotlight:
​Six Word Memoirs as Assessment
Ever since I read Catherine Denial’s “A Pedagogy of Kindness,” I have tried to center kindness as essential to teaching during my semester-long TA training course. As Denial explains, kindness pedagogy asks teachers to start from a place of trust, to extend generosity, and to understand the difference between being kind and nice. (Kindness is having an uncomfortable conversation when there is no way a student can pass the course; niceness is avoiding discomfort by telling the student they can try to pass the course when you know they cannot.) In Denial’s words, “To extend kindness means recognizing that our students possess innate humanity, which directly undermines the transactional educational model to which too many of our institutions lean, if not cleave.”

Rather quickly after making this shift, I realized that kind teaching requires emotional intelligence. Indeed, research has repeatedly demonstrated that “teacher emotional intelligence has a significant impact on the teaching and learning process, [influencing] student learning behaviors, engagement, and academic performance” (Su et al. 2). So while I use six-word memoirs to check the pulse of my overworked TAs and let me know how I can provide support, I have a second goal for these exercises: to help my graduate students further develop their emotional intelligence, something I believe is key to their capacity to teach well while navigating the stress of graduate school.  

Emotional intelligence is defined by education researchers Huili Su et al. as the “ability to detect feelings and emotions in oneself and others [including] self-control, persistence, zeal, and the ability to self-motivate” (2). Su et al. also explain that emotional intelligence has a positive impact on teaching: “Teachers can be seen as emotional workers; their self-efficacy, teaching performance, burnout, job satisfaction, and teaching effectiveness have been found to be influenced by their emotions” (2). Detecting feelings with specificity, however, is not a skill I can assume my TAs have already developed. In fact, Travis Bradberry and Jean Greaves, psychologists and authors of bestselling Emotional Intelligence 2.0, found that “Of those who took an online EQ test, only 36 percent were able to accurately identify their emotions as they happened” (13). While not immediate, the six-word memoirs encourage the TAs to identify their emotions after they happen. Limiting the TA’s assessment of their experiences and emotions to six words encourages word play and creativity while requiring specificity. When a person is asked to find a precise word to describe an emotion, they  practice accurately identifying what they’re feeling. The closer someone gets to knowing their feelings, the more they develop their emotional expertise, making it less likely that emotions will control their behavior. As psychologist Christy Wilson-Mendenhall and Distinguished Professor of Contemplative Humanities John D. Dunne explain, “Emotional expertise involves skills for understanding, experiencing, and regulating emotions. Emotional granularity is an aspect of emotional expertise. It refers to the ability to experience emotions in a precise and context-specific manner” (1). Through directed six-word prompts, TAs are encouraged to consider their emotions in precise and context-specific ways while doing the hard work of naming their feelings—of fine-tuning their emotional granularity. 

Perhaps unsurprisingly, I was met with resistance when I first began talking about emotion with my graduate students. One year during orientation, one of the TAs, visibly frustrated and uncomfortable during a discussion about imposter syndrome, blurted out, “why are we talking about feelings? This isn’t therapy!” I thought the reason we were talking about “feelings” was obvious. Teaching is the art and science of helping people learn, and if people are involved, emotions are too. This student’s frustration and discomfort told me that I needed to make the connection between effective teaching and emotional intelligence more explicit. Consequently, I now begin the process of connecting teaching with emotions through course readings and  class discussions. Then the six-word prompts support other learning activities by asking the new teachers to reflect on their experiences in the classroom through word play while also inviting them to talk about their feelings without the discomfort of more extended discussions.  

To help develop emotional granularity, the TAs complete five six-word prompts at different points of the semester. During orientation, students compose a traditional six-word memoir to introduce themselves, but the next four six-word prompts ask TAs to consider their emotions with the goal of developing higher levels of granularity since “more granular experiences of negative emotions, especially, are consistently associated with better coping and mental health” (Wilson-Mendenhall and Dunne 1). The next four prompts are as follows:    
  • Week 3: You are writing a memoir, but you are out of words. Your editor gives you six words to describe how you feel about your first three weeks of teaching.  
  • Week 6: Using the emotion wheel (see fig. 1), investigate an emotional response or negative feeling that arose in the classroom. You might consider responding to the following prompts, but please don’t feel limited to them:   
    • Write a paragraph that summarizes what happened and how you felt at the time. Then use the emotion wheel to name the emotion with as much specificity as possible. Once you have named the emotion, write a six-word summary of your response to the event that names the emotion you chose from the wheel. 
    • Have you left class wishing you had said or done something differently?  
    • Are any students getting on your nerves? Making you feel annoyed or angry?  
    • Are you struggling to balance being an authority figure with your personality?  
    • Do you feel as though your authority is being challenged?  
  • Week 11: You ask another grad student how they are holding up. They reply: “a buried Victorian ringing the bell.” Use six words to respond, describing your own motivation and excitement levels. [1] 
  • Week 15: You’ve made it to the last day of classes! Write a six-word memoir about your first semester teaching.  
My hope is that these prompts will help the TAs understand that successful teaching requires self-awareness. Since how we deal with both our own and other people’s feelings impacts how well we can support people as they learn, teachers need to check in with themselves, gauge their emotions, and hardest of all, name those emotions.  The six-word prompts encourage new teachers to do this while (hopefully) also reducing negative emotions. According to neuroscience, simply saying “I’m mad,” can make us feel better. Indeed, “A neuroimaging study from Lieberman and a team of UCLA researchers found that the act of turning your negative emotions into language disrupts and reduces activity in the amygdala, the part of your brain that drives your responses to stress and fear” (“Naming Your Emotions”). Thus, if we name our stress, we become less stressed. And that’s not all. A team of network and systems researchers found that “for a majority of individuals, emotional intensity decreased rapidly after their explicit expression in an “I feel” statement. This was the case for positive and negative emotions, but the effect seemed to be strongest and most immediate for negative emotions” (Fan et al. 97). Consequently, giving new teachers the opportunity to put the negative emotions they’re experiencing into words can lessen the intensity of those emotions.  

​While naming their emotions, also known as affect labeling, is useful in and of itself, these six-word exercises are even more productive if they help TAs develop higher emotional granularity. In order to do that, both the TAs and I need to understand what highly-granular emotional responses look like. Wilson-Mendenhall and Dunne again explain,  
Whereas highly granular individuals make fine-grained distinctions in their emotional experiences, those lower in granularity are unable to do so. For example, those higher in granularity can distinguish feeling angry from other negative feelings, such as feeling fearful, exhausted, or lonely. In contrast, those lower in granularity experience feeling bad without further distinction. (1)  
The ability to understand the difference between emotions such as anger and fear makes highly granular individuals better equipped to respond to others when they are experiencing such emotions, and this ability ultimately makes for better teachers. Many new teachers are insecure about their role as professors, and this insecurity can influence how they respond to students. As anyone who trains new teachers knows, these understandable insecurities often lead new teachers to assume their authority or intelligence is being challenged when that is not the case (which isn’t to say it is never the case). A highly granular individual, however, will recognize that they are feeling insecure and then consider how their feelings of insecurity might be influencing their perception of the situation whereas a lower granular individual will not recognize their insecurity let alone consider how it might be influencing their perception and behavior. This recognition (or lack thereof) will then impact how they respond to the student, and our interactions with our students influence how the student interacts with the teacher and the course, not to mention how much the student will be able to learn.  

In the years since I began incorporating emotional intelligence into the TA training course, I’ve learned that emotions are far more involved in learning than I thought. Understanding our emotions is not only important because teaching requires interpersonal skills, but also because knowing and feeling cannot be separated into distinct experiences; they co-occur. As biologist James Zull explains in The Art of Changing the Brain there are three biological facts about how emotions impact learning that can help teachers rethink what we do and how we do it. The first is that “Knowing is a feeling. Not only is knowing a feeling, getting to knowing is full of feeling” (Zull 73). To illustrate what it means for knowing to be full of feeling, let me provide an example using my own experience writing this article.  

When I started writing, I felt unsure of what exactly I wanted to say, so I returned to the six-word prompts I asked my TAs to complete. After rereading the prompts and then their responses, I felt less hesitant, but I still didn’t feel like I knew how to say something that might matter—something that might help other teachers—, so I decided to return to research on emotions and the brain. As I read, I started to feel more confident in my ability to write something that mattered, and I selected some quotations that felt like they supported my claims about how the six-word memoirs can help students develop emotional granularity. Once I had about two pages of notes, I finally felt like I knew enough to start writing, but I still didn’t know where the paper would end up. Based on my prior experiences writing, however, I felt (or was it knew) that if I started writing I would eventually end up somewhere useful, and if I didn’t, then I knew (or was it felt) that I would find a way to work through the writing problem.  

As I hope the italicized words demonstrate, knowing involves a whole lot of feeling. So much, in fact, that the two words can sometimes be used interchangeably. Knowing doesn’t seem to exist without feeling. Yet when I first discussed the ideas in this paper at a conference, an attendee asked me “what does knowing feel like?” It wasn’t an easy question to answer. While knowing likely feels different to different brains, I’ll share how knowing feels to me to more fully examine Zull’s first point. I begin, however, with how not-knowing feels because not-knowing must precede knowing and, at least for me, knowing is best explained in relation to not-knowing. If we are unaware that we don’t know something then not-knowing doesn’t feel like anything at all, but once we know we don’t know something, feelings arise as we try to move from not-knowing to knowing, from confusion to understanding.  

As an example, I recently read a short article about the theory of retrocausality and decided I needed to learn more about quantum mechanics so I could better understand what, at the time, I couldn’t. Indeed, after I read the initial article, I called my father (whose brain is more sciencey than mine) and told him my brain hurt. Of course, I wasn’t in acute physical pain, but as I tried to understand the incomprehensible idea that time is not linear and that future events can influence past events, I could feel my brain stretching as if it had swollen and pushed against my skull. The only words I had to describe this were “my brain hurts.”   

After receiving a recommendation from a friend, I started reading Carlo Rovelli’s Helgoland. It had been a long time since I had thought about physics, and I had to work hard to understand Rovelli’s summary of the history of quantum mechanics. Each time I finished a chapter, I’d put the book down and find myself exhausted, exclaiming to whomever was near: “my brain hurts.” It was almost as if I could feel the neurons bouncing around my brain, looking for neural pathways that didn’t exist. The missing neural pathways needed to develop for me to understand what I had just read. Once formed, these new neural pathways would allow me to reimagine how I understood the world. They weren’t there yet, but I could feel my brain stretching, looking for ways to do what I wanted it to do: understand. Perhaps that is a better analogy for how not-knowing feels: stretching.  Not the pain of an injury normally associated with “hurt,” not knowing is more like the stretch of a muscle as it attempts to move into an unfamiliar position, to become more flexible, to gain strength. Not-knowing is a reach, a strain, and often, a failure, but with each reach, the brain moves a bit closer to knowing. 

In my quest to understand the upside-down world of quantum mechanics, I kept stretching my brain by reading and then bouncing the ideas I read about around in my head. I talked to a very patient friend with a PhD in Quantum Mechanics, asking questions and trying to make sense of what I read through conversation. After weeks (or maybe it was months) of confusion and frustration, it happened. Click! I knew. In contrast to not-knowing, knowing doesn’t hurt. Knowing is my shoulders relaxing as I let out a deep breath. Whereas not-knowing feels like trying to do a one-legged king pigeon pose with soccer thighs—impossible, painful, frustrating—, knowing feels like standing mountain pose—familiar, powerful, aligned.  

What does this have to do with six-word memoirs? While  emotions can be as unfamiliar and disorienting as physics, guided practice in the naming of emotions can support the TAs move into knowing themselves. As my TAs consider their emotions, I remind myself how hard the seemingly simple task of writing six words about feelings can be. Further, I try to help my TAs understand that knowing is a feeling because thinking about it this way can help them teach their students. To further understand how knowing is a feeling, let’s consider the threshold concept that “writing enacts and creates identities and ideologies.” This concept tells us that learning writing cannot be separated from a writer’s identity and, as a result, learning writing is steeped in complex feelings about self-worth, identity, and history. The feelings students bring to writing courses, then, have nothing to do with individual teachers (an always helpful reminder for new teachers), but if teachers want students to learn in writing courses, student feelings will be engaged as they learn new writing processes and genres.  

The next point Zull makes is that our emotions influence our thinking more than our thinking influences our emotions. The support for this claim is simple: more connections run from the amygdala (the emotional processing center of the brain) to the cortex (the part of the brain that carries out functions such as learning and reasoning) than those that run from the cortex to the amygdala (Zull 74). As a result of this biology of the brain, neuroscientists believe that feelings impact our thinking more than our thinking impacts our emotions. Consequently, if we ask students to grasp new knowledge, we must recognize learning as an emotional, not purely intellectual or rational, process. 

Let’s return to our threshold concept. We know that identity is tied to writing, and we also know that feelings about both identity and writing are going to impact how our students interact with and receive knowledge about writing. With this in mind, teachers can better develop empathetic lesson plans that recognize (rather than ignore) the emotional labor involved in learning to writing. When it comes to teacher education, the six-word memoirs similarly encourage new teachers to consider how their emotions (as well as their identities, histories, and sense of self) are impacting their teaching. Teachers’ feelings about writing, about education, and even about themselves will undoubtedly influence their ability to learn and implement best teaching practices. Their emotions will influence their thinking, and isn’t good teaching, when you boil it down, good thinking? What I want new teachers to recognize, however, is that good thinking isn’t the rational, highly objective process they have been told it is. Good thinking doesn’t avoid emotions: it engages them.

Once we accept that learning is an emotional process, then we can recognize that where students are, both emotionally and intellectually, will impact their ability to learn. Later in The Art of Changing the Brain,  Zull explains that, “for the most part, things have meaning when they remind us of something else. When they don’t, we are just puzzled. But there is another requirement. Even if we experience something that has happened to us before, it is hard to make meaning of it unless it engages our emotions” (166). This means that if we want students to learn, then we should not avoid emotions in the classroom. In fact, we should intentionally provoke emotional reactions to support and prompt learning. Further, we must start with what our students already know, rather than with abstract theories and concepts. If we want our students to understand the aforementioned threshold concept about identity, then we shouldn’t begin with a lecture or even a reading about the concept. Instead, teachers need to figure out what their students might already know and start from there. They can do this with an activity or writing prompt that asks students to consider their own identities and how those identities have interacted with writing and learning. Once they have an emotional connection to the idea via memory and/or example, then they will be better prepared to learn from readings or lectures about what the concept means outside of themselves. 

In this same vein, I often ask the TAs to post their six-word responses in a google doc, and then, as a class, we try to make connections to the research we’ve read about teaching. How are their experiences conflicting with the research? How are those experiences reinforcing the research? Since teaching involves emotions (both the teacher’s and their students) and since there is so much misinformation about how learning works and what good teaching looks like, it is especially important to connect the emotional responses to the research about teaching and learning. If the research we read in class conflicts with what they thought they knew before my course (which it often does), then the best way to get them to reconsider what they think they know is to draw connections between an emotional experience and the concept I want them to learn. For example, each year, I try to convince the new TAs that direct grammar instruction does not work. In my first few years as WPA, I’d simply tell them this or have them read studies that proved it, but the knowledge didn’t stick. Years later they’d tell me they had started doing direct grammar instruction and their students love it (seemingly having completely forgotten the many discussions we had about the plethora of research that says this is a waste of time). Now that I know that learning something new requires an emotional response, I ask new writing teachers how they learned about grammar (or if I want to be specific, how they learned what a comma splice is), and they often respond by telling me a story. These stories are about how a teacher or parent sat down with them and showed them the comma splices in their own writing and then helped them fix them. In other cases, students have no story to tell, and they might even say they learned through direct grammar instruction, but in those cases, they often don’t actually know what a comma splice is. They do, however,  generally know where to put a comma, and then I can follow up and ask how much they read or if they learned comma usage once they already cared a great deal about writing. In this case, the new teachers have the opportunity to have an emotional response to not knowing the rule despite being able to follow it. This allows for the realization that if they don’t know the rules but can follow them, it likely wasn’t direct instruction that taught them how to use commas. Within these stories (and lack of stories), lie emotional responses. If new TAs can make the connection between their prior experiences and the research on direct grammar instruction, then they are more likely to learn what I want them to and less likely to forget about the research on  grammar instruction years down the line.  

Now that I know the important role emotion plays in both teaching and learning, I lean even further into feelings, recognizing that emotions start as bodily sensations and last about ninety seconds whereas feelings are our brain’s interpretations of these emotions and are long-lasting. When I ask students to summarize their motivation levels in week eleven, the responses almost always indicate that the TAs are overwhelmed and exhausted. Of course, I am neither surprised or all that concerned by this, though I do have empathy for them and try to show as much kindness as I can during these last stressful weeks of their first semester of teaching. I do get concerned when students are unable to complete the task at all (which has happened). This tells me the teacher cannot put their emotions into words, and thus, the teacher has no way to know how these feelings are impacting their behavior, making it unlikely they will be able to move beyond these feelings. When this happens, I know I need to follow up with the TA outside of class and offer additional support. Yet even for the struggling new teachers, when we reach the last week of class four weeks later and  the TAs are asked to summarize their first semester of teaching in six words, they once again can name their feelings. The difference from week eleven to week fifteen is remarkable: their responses shift from statements of survival and exhaustion to exclamations of excitement and pride. Teacher feelings, then, are temporary, though in week eleven they likely feel immutable. With emotional granularity, however, those week eleven negative feelings can resist a feeling of permanence before the relief of the semester’s end. 

​When I started leading TA training in 2016, I worried when classroom conversations leaned negative. I didn’t want my pedagogy course to turn into the one I remembered taking which felt more like a lengthy venting session than a learning experience. Yet if we believe the science, then encouraging new teachers to adopt a “positive vibes only” mentality about teaching is not only emotionally stifling and problematic, but it also ignores the benefits of naming our negative feelings. New teachers need ways to process their emotions about teaching. Doing so as a class can  lead to new knowledge about both their emotions and the course content. If we avoid talking about our negative feelings, then we allow those feelings to fester and grow, whereas if we talk about our negative feelings, if we do our best to name them, then we can lessen their impact on our behavior, our teaching, and our lives. There is always that danger of letting the negative take over a classroom, and this is another reason why six-word activities are so useful. They’re quick. They’re precise. They let TAs release their negative feelings without allowing negativity to hijack my classroom. They can also help  new teachers understand that knowing doesn’t exist without feeling—that teachers can’t avoid emotions if we want our students to learn. This knowledge can revolutionize our classrooms by centering both our own and our students’ innate humanity through the recognition that engaging emotions prompts quicker, more meaningful, and long-lasting learning.

End Notes

[1] This clever description of motivation was one of my former graduate student’s six-word memoirs.
Click here to download a printable PDF with Works Cited.
Katherine Fredlund is an Associate Professor of English at the University of Memphis where she's served as the Director of First-Year Writing since 2016. Her research has appeared in CCC, College English, Rhetoric Review, WPA Journal, and elsewhere. She co-edited Feminist Connections: Rhetoric and Activism Across Time Space and Place and edited Writing Memphis. She is currently working on a novel of nineteenth-century historical fiction and on a grant from the Institute of Education Sciences developing Scenario-Based Writing Assessments with AI. ​