What Love Is

I suppose like others, I have been affected by Beau Biden’s death—and really, by the love that surrounded him. In my usual fashion, I have linked the events to writing—and to me. We know that love is the link to life. It’s how flowers grow, the way the moon shines. And its absence is what causes crime.

If we can help our students know through writing what love is, we will have taught them what we need to learn ourselves.

Writing as Game

I should begin this entry with a double apology: first an apology to my old (meaning I’ve known her for a long time) friend Marcy, for having entered into her conversation and drifting it elsewhere; and secondly, to Bill, Asao, Galen, Fredrik, Will, Matt, and perhaps others who entered into the discussion linking writing instruction, affect, and assessment. The discussion was serious, having real consequences in our classrooms. I wasn’t able to continue the conversation because so many ideas were flowing that my head began to spin. So many issues are involved in how we teach writing and assess the efficacy of our programs.

I’ll begin by acknowledging that quite possibly none of us know the first thing about teaching writing. I think I do. I’ve been doing it for forty years, and you would think I would have learned something—but history and the history of writing instruction is full of people who thought the world was flat.

It is of course quite possible that everything I think I know is dead wrong. Likewise with my friends like Asao, Galen, Will, Mike Rose, James Moffett (ok—I met him, but he wasn’t my friend), Dewey (never met him), Paulo Freire (met him once), Ira Shor (good friend), Peter Elbow—so many others I could mention who in general think we should be four-square on the side of our students, four-square on the side of writing as a form of inquiry, self-discovery, expression, and communication and .0005 as a way of proving one’s knowledge or ability to write in the genres being tested. And maybe a little bit on the side of helping students negotiate the writing demands our students might meet in other classes and in their professional lives.

I could go on forever in what I thought would be a short-winded response. First, I’m going to say to Marcy what Asao has already said. Exit exams are a bad idea. Portfolios as exit exams are a bad idea. We need to interpret them in terms of power structures—and teachers and administrators retaining power. This is just pure wrong. One of Freire’s fundamental tenets was that an authentic pedagogy had to resolve the student/teacher contradiction. Any structure that maintains that contradiction is oppressive. As Asao noted (and I have obnoxiously argued) grades are one of the primary elements of that oppression. Ask most teachers what would they do if they didn’t have to give grades, if they didn’t have to grade “essays.” My bet is that they would enjoy themselves more. Freire argued that the tools of oppression cut both ways, oppressing both the oppressors and the oppressed. Grades cut both ways.

Dewey explains education as game. I love to play games. I have argued for writing as “fun,” but I haven’t elaborated: fun means being in a game, being challenged, learning, being inside what you are doing, being, as Csikszentmihalyi put it, in the flow. I don’t think creating this kind of fun/challenge ethos in a writing classroom is all that difficult, particularly if one throws out the controlling notion of grades. One has to go back to Dewey here—the way in which pick-up games work without an authority controlling the game.

Assessment should be about us, not about how well our students write in fake rhetorical situations. A valid assessment points toward the real life consequences of our instruction, pedagogy, and assessment. Perhaps we should ask this: five years after they graduate, how many of our students engage in self-sponsored writing? We should ask the same thing of reading. If I were a music teacher, I would want my students in five years to still be singing, even if no one was listening.

Works Cited

Cvsikszentmihalyi, M. (2008). Flow: The Psychology of Optimal Experience. New York, HarperCollins.

Dewey, J. (1970). Experience and Education. New York, Macmillan.

Freire, Paulo. 1995. Pedagogy of the oppressed, 20th-Anniversary Edition. New York: Continuum. (Orig. pub. 1970.)

A Serious Function of Writing

[This post is a continuation of an overly-long post I wrote on the WPA-l. I am arguing for using portfolios not to evaluate students but as a lens through which we (students and teachers) can collaboratively see how we're doing in the class, given what we had hoped we would achieve. Below is an example item from the current mid-quarter portfolio--the student describing herself as a writer.]

"Initially, I thought I was too introverted to write. I overthink and bottle up thoughts until they are too messy to write down in a coherent, logical paragraph, so I feared my writing would reflect how

scatter-brained I am. I even hinted that fear to the class in my very first post, saying "I realize this is scattered and that I am scatter brained, but hopefully this says what it needs to in order for you to get a sense of who I am." (autobiography, Slater, April 11, 2015). 

Now, I realize writing is not the product of a method of clear thinking; writing is the method. I have practiced this in the private journals. I write multiple drafts in that ten minutes. The first minute or two I spew every major event of the week onto the screen. Then, I reread it and more thoroughly word the bullet points, adding my opinion to them as I go. By this step, I have already done self-reflecting and have benefitted therapeutically from the activity. If there is time, I rephrase certain events, usually the negative ones, to look more pleasing. Something about having control over how an event sounds written down makes me feel like I have some sort of control over the event itself. 

Obviously, writing is not a tool for time-travel, and I have no control over the past. However, writing is a tool for attitude-adjustment, and if I can phrase things in a way that makes me more comfortable confronting the past and overcoming it, then I have changed the past- at least from my perspective (and my perspective is the closest thing to reality I "have," so this control over my mind is major.) 

Basically, writing has helped me practice and apply "mind over matter." I have already started catching myself thinking negatively about situations I find myself in- in the present, while they're happening- and saying "written down, this is going to sound so cliche and banal. I don't want to invest emotion on something so insignificant." Writing has started to filter into my daily life, making me a more peaceful individual, and it has not only benefitted me, but anyone around me who could have potentially been hurt or negatively impacted by my negativity

They say change starts with a conversation. Usually this is meant on a societal level. However, it's the same thing to say that having a conversation with myself- through journal writing- will bring change at the level of the individual and community. I thoroughly believe that this change, however small, has the power to ripple to a larger scale. Is it a coincidence that history recognizes societies that use language, art, or any other form of communication as the most advanced and civilized societies? The individual artists had to start with writing, painting, and singing before the "conversations" they were having with themselves grew outwards.  This class has given me the tools and time to start the conversation with myself."

Maybe we should look at where Annelise was five weeks ago--On the first day of class, I ask students to tell my about themselves as writers:

"Writing has been a long and varying process for me since it became a major part of my learning, in seventh grade. My seventh grade English teacher was very passionate about his class and created fun writing prompts, often requiring song lyrics, to answer. I think there was a strong tie between my overall t enjoyment of the class and how good my writing was. Eighth grade and onward into high school, I began to become less interested in my teachers' class styles and the essay topics they assigned. As a result, I put less effort into my writing, and the quality of my writing deteriorated. It might also be note-worthy to mention that in my senior year, the only essays my English teacher had the class write were in class essays, given as the last question of a test. Due to the stress I was under to write an entire essay in a short amount of time, I have developed the habit of spewing out everything I am thinking all at once onto the paper. While this has helped me develop honest outlines of essays and create a clear sense of why I am writing, it has not helped the actual phrasing of my sentences, so I feel like it has done little to strengthen the sound of the final drafts of my essays. 

As for writing outside of the classroom, I have never kept a diary or journal. The closest thing I have is an idea book from middle school, and I'm honestly not interested in re-opening it because I don't want to rediscover what it's like to be in a thriteen year olds head. However, I don't think I have to re-read anything I have written in order to do it justice, and I don't think my middle-school aged self would care that it has been left unread. I believe things that are written and unread still do enough for the writer to benefit from it, and because of that, I would be open to starting something similar in the future as a way to clear my head sometimes.

I am curious to see that the style of this class is. Judging by the music, it's already like my seventh grade class, so hopefully that means I'll get back to enjoying writing!"

[As part of the portfolio, I ask the students to look at the announced objectives of the course and to analyze how we did in meeting each one. We had five.  Here's a link to the portfolio instructions. And here is Annelise's response -- note she decided not to write about a couple of them because we have ignored them, at least explicitly.]

 

"1. Communication:

-Building a community since the very first class helped establish an environment I felt safe and eager to participate in.

This was accomplished in class through the naming exercises and by splitting into smaller groups when discussing more personal experiences. Even spending ten minutes to write at the start of class helped establish a community. While no one is interacting with one another during the activity, we are all going through a developmental process side-by-side, which does form a community of self-improving students. These are the types of people I want to have intellectual conversations with, so the communication between my peers and me is greater than it would be if I didn't view them as self-reflective individuals.

Outside of class, both writing our autobiographies and frequently commenting on one another's works improved communication.

2.Self-Directed Learning:

-Writing Can Heal:

 My major is in Health Science, particularly in the pre-physical therapy track. I like physical therapy because, unlike medicine where an outside force (drugs) are covering up the symptoms and the patients themselves are not creating their own path to recovery, the patients in physical therapy are teaching themselves to be stronger people as they go through the treatment process. The transformation happens from the inside-out, starting with the decision to get better, followed by the commitment to working past your physical limitations, and eventually ending with a physical change.Taking the initiative to write for yourself gives you power over your own mental health. Like P.T., the change happens starting from within, and you grow as your writing grows. The way physical exercise heals physical wounds in my future profession, mental reasoning and conversation heals mental wounds in writing.

Because overall health is physical and mental, I think it is only logical for me to apply my beliefs in PT to writing, and to carry it with me my whole life.

Specific Goal 5. Encouragement 

This entire term, I have been emailing, and emailed by, Dr. Peckman in a series he titled "Insight."  These emails are basically personal notes of motivation and appreciation. They have really pushed me to write to my best ability, knowing that if the work is of quality, someone will see that. In past classes, I felt like no matter how I phrased my thoughts on paper, the teacher would just skim through it with a rubric in hand just to make sure I covered the criteria of the assignment. In fact, sometimes I feel like the way I word thoughts as they naturally construct themselves in my head comes across as unorganized to many professors, so I have started writing with a rubric in one hand. Now I have evolved to not only disregard rubrics (although there are none in this class anyway, for the most part), but I have also stopped worrying about whether my writing will be good enough to receive an email of recognition. I have ascended to a state where everything I write, I genuinely do with my best effort. Thanks to the emails and to Dr. Peckman for believing in me, I see a writer in myself, and I want to write posts to be proud of. This ties into the idea of self-directed learning as well."

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Caveats:  Annelise is a great student, but I have many other insightful, wonderful students in this class. I picked on Annelise because of some very interesting things she wrote--like how she had to get outside rubrics, how this focus on teacher expectations were working to her disadvantage as a writer. Annelise is learning to write for herself--and I think she's doing beautifully. She's on a voyage of self-discovery through her writing. Yes, I gave her some encouragement in the beginning, but now, after five weeks, she's taking off on her own--that's what she said when she talked about "ascended to the state . . . ."  

Here's an  quote from Kevin, a mechanical engineer in the last paragraph of his introduction:
 
"Being that this is an English 103 portfolio, I should probably mention some of my thoughts about writing! I feel like I have always enjoyed writing to some extent. However, until this year, I’m not sure I knew exactly what real writing was. English 102 and 103 have opened my eyes to what writing can be. It’s self-expression, it’s digging deep into one’s thoughts, it’s fun! The following is a collection of my work for the past 5 or so weeks and it showcases how I’ve grown and progressed as a writer in 103. "

I have two dominant objectives in this course (others as well): improve students attitudes toward writing and themselves as writer; promote self-directed learning. I can look at Annelise here and say we're doing ok. I feel very good about Annelise, and I feel very good about what we're doing in the class and about myself as a writing teacher. We missed on a couple of objectives, and maybe we'll hit them later to some extent, but they weren't the most important ones to me--I more or less inherited them when I came to Drexel. Frankly, the ones like "Critical Reading," I could do without.

I am also going to say that I'm not into any false modesty here. I've been teaching writing for forty years. I love what I'm doing, and I'm good at it--if I weren't after forty years, I would have some questions about myself. I keep my objectives few and simple, and I know the students come out of the class learning something about themselves, about writing, and about themselves as writers that they didn't know when they came in. That's good enough for me.

 

Writing and Song

I have several themes I would like to write about tonight, but I think I might be able to focus on the relationship between writing and song--and something about the function of expressive writing.

I haven't really been able to explain my experience--to myself or anyone else, although I have tried. I wrote a book about dealing with my wife's death and my first bumbling experiences with late-life dating. I read it a few times and put it away.

One month ago, my dog died. He was a beautiful dog. He was our dog. I wrote a song about him and put together slides linked to the song. I haven't really been able to get the song just right, but I can't work with it anymore.  Not now. Here's a link to the song/slide show: I Know It Isn't Easy   (It might take some time to download)

I have listened to that production many times. Every time I cry. But there's something cathartic here--It's kind of like I need an object out there to just "be" out there, in some way allowing me to move outside of myself into the song and pictures of the dog I loved so much.

Some of my friends have responded to this production of abject pathos. I think by putting some of my emotional pain "out there" others can link their pains to mine. In an odd way, sine waves harmonize.

Living isn't always easy. It has been easy for most of my life, but I have lately experienced two very serious bumps in my road. I feel silly saying this, knowing what others have to endure. But somehow when we hit the bumps, the bumps become our world.

Writing has always been my way of coping. And so has singing. I will willingly listen to anyone who can connect the two.  I think it's important to get the "in here" "out there" and have it play back again.  I would like to know why.

Walking Through the Door

Below is an essay assignment I am posting for my class next week. It's a prelude to the next writing task, which will be to write an essay to teachers, telling them what does and doesn't seem to work with teaching/learning writing.
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Walking through the Door

This essay will be in part a preparation for our last essay, which will be directed to teachers at Drexel (and really, a wider audience, because with your permission, I may link teachers around the country to what you tell them—I have a blog about teaching writing, and I’ll put your essays up there).

Here’s my thesis--and I don’t think it’s a half-bad one: education works when students enjoy learning about something. It doesn’t work when students don’t enjoy learning. Actually, these claims seem obvious—but I’ll bet there are many professors who would argue with me on this. But one of the things we want to do as educators is encourage students to be self-directed learners such that learning is a life-long project.  Self-Directed learning is in fact one of the twelve Drexel Student Learning Priorities  (aside—one wonders why 12?).  It’s one of the two we have adopted for our writing program.  In general, one might suspect that each of you has decided on a major because you have learned how to enjoy the activities associated with that major. (I know there might be other reasons as well.)

Since I am very interested in writing and would like writing to be a part of your lives, I’m going to make another claim—which I know I have already made in class: if any writing task assigned to you in any course (including mine) makes you have an uncomfortable experience with writing, then you will be inclined to have a bad association with writing; consequently, you will have learned the wrong thing about writing. This is just me. As I said, a lot of people disagree with me. But they’re wrong (joke--maybe).

Ok, let’s get to a topic we can write about. I would be very interested in your experience so far at Drexel. But I’m interested in a bit more than your experiences in courses. I’m interested in how this part of your life is different (I’m thinking of Annelise’s essay here, the essence of which that the childhood part of her is over and now there is that “adult” (and her use of scare quotes was appropriate, given how many of us act as “adults”) life stretching in front of her—and this year might be thought of as walking through the door.

So maybe you can spend a couple of hours telling us (in writing) what it’s been like, walking through the door. It will be fun for the rest of us to read if you can give us some specific issues and maybe scenes, things that happened and made you think about things, about life, about who you are, about what you’re doing (again, Annelise’s essay is a great start in this kind of thinking because she has described for us her changing beliefs—I know I really didn’t do it justice in class today).

As you describe your journey in this first year, it would be great if you would include something about your experiences in your various classes.  I (and a lot of other people) would really like to know about the kind of learning experiences you are enjoying and the ones you’re not. I’m good friends with an associate vice provost here who is very interested in retention issues. I know that I would like to share your essays about walking through the door with her—I’ll bet she’ll learn something by what you write.

Why School? Why Write?

I recently had a conversation with a good friend, also a writing teacher more traditional than I am--but her mind is open. She was somewhat gracefully challenging just about everything I was saying about teaching writing effectively.

I have made most of these claims on this blog: grading essays is counter productive (and socially reproductive); student writing should be authentic, real communication of writer to reader and reader back to writer; writing as performance, particularly in a testing situation, is testing something far other than the writer’s ability to write; argument as a genre is class-based (and probably gender and race); rigor is a male fantasy—I had better stop here.

In our conversation, it seemed as if I were an idiot, just positioning myself in opposition to any generally accepted verity.

I have in the latter stage of my career acknowledged that I seem to think differently—a disposition probably influenced by my defining years in the sixties when thinking differently was thinking the same, or perhaps by my full-court resistance to authority, personalized in my battles with my father, a psychologically damaged World War II veteran who wore his uniform in death.

But I rescued myself from the entirely outlier position by thinking about the “other” tradition I have followed, educators who have challenged traditions: Bishop Whately, John Dewey, Fred Newton Scott, James Britton, James Moffett, Paulo Freire, Ira Shor, Ken Macrorie, Lucy Calkins, Peter Elbow, Don Murray—and Mike Rose, the subject of this post.

There are of course a host of contrarians I have left out in this list—but I am locating an alternative pedagogy within a tradition of writing as joy, as a way of discovery, of becoming, of communicating—not writing as a way of showing teachers that you know something and how to reproduce your knowledge formulaically.

I just finished reading Mike Rose’s second edition of Why School?  As always, Mike writes with voice. He is there, inside his words—a person who has found his life in a personalized theory of education. As all of us who have read Lives on the Boundary know, Mike’s theory of education is intensely grounded in his experience of moving through literacy from an underclass to an overclass.

I realize that my nouns might raise hackles, but neither Mike nor I will back off from our experience: we both came from solid working class and have moved into the academic upper-middle class; we both know the particular advantage of finding a vocation that is our avocation, our work and pleasure being one. I don’t think either of us shirk from recognizing that that privilege is a consequence of our having worked our way into the educated overclass.

This overly-reflexive analysis is a poor introduction to Mike’s second edition of Why School?, a book I recommend along with all of Mike’s other books and standards like Moffett’s Teaching the Universe of Discourse,  Bowles and Gintis’ Schooling in Capitalist America, and Shirley Brice Heath’s Ways with Words.

The threads in these books challenge testing, education as preparing students for their professions, and education as an assembly line production of the “educated” worker ready to hit Wall Street. Rather, they follow Dewey, who argued that education should lead toward self-sponsored education, the love of learning discovered though educational experiences sponsoring that love.

Mike’s latest book is squarely in this tradition. We need to listen to his voice when he analyzes the intellectual instability of the current testing obsession, which he tracks from the No Child Left Behind, the idiotically named Race to the Top, and now the Core Curriculum (he might have tracked back to the Minimum Competency Movement—he’s old enough). Rather than teach students how to score well on tests, he says, “A good education helps us make sense of the world and find our way into it.” Throughout Why Schooling , Mike celebrates the joy of learning, of searching, getting information from others and layering that information into one’s own conceptions.

I don’t agree with all that Mike argues in this book. I at least wonder about the degree to which we should spend class time teaching students how to accommodate bad teaching/rhetorical situations at the expense of promoting a love and joy of writing. I would like to see Mike write more about this love rather than situating writing instruction within academic expectations, many of which seem downright silly to me, but this is a small critique, one raised before in this discussion (see John Trimbur’s critique of Lives on the Boundary and Ways with Words).

I hope many of you will read Why School?  As with all of Mike’s books, the words slide right by the reader—and I think this is the best kind of writing, rather than writing that calls attention to itself . The reader doesn’t have to fight against the text. If we could teach all of our students to write like Mike rather than (fill in your favorite over-the-top theorist), we would have something.

About Not Reading in a Writing Class

My friend and colleague Scott Warnock mentioned something about my anti-reading philosophy in his blog about online instruction. I started to write a comment that was clearly going to be too long, so I'm going to finish it here:

Well, actually, I lost it, so I'll try to rewrite it:
I minimize if not eradicate outside reading in my writing classes. In about 1968, James Moffett made the sensible claim that the only books students need in a writing class is each other's writing. I have long taken that to heart. I want students to be circulating their writing, reading and responding to each other in real communicative fashion (which also rules out the kind of criteria-centered, fix-it kind of peer response for which in my most of my career I have been an advocate). I start from the premise that I'm a writing teacher, not a reading teacher. Writing is what I have studied; it's what I know about. And it's what I love to teach. I have not specialized in reading.

I of course understand that when one is writing, one is reading and that when one reading, one is writing--but this dialectic points toward a different notion of reading than Bartholomae and Petrosky in their misguided way champion. Truthfully, when I have my students working on a project (right now, they are working on writing advice for writing teachers), I do encourage them to do some internet research to see what others may have said about teaching and misteaching writing. We also read some articles on the subject, like Gary Tate's wonderful essay, Halfway Back Home, but not many. As I said, I really like to minimize reading anything outside what we write. That's what I and my students enjoy doing.

I can't resist throwing in my anti-critical thinking spiel following the same line of argument as I did with my anti-reading theme. But I've written about this before on this blog, so I'll stop. Maybe I'll post a link to a chapter I wrote about critical thinking in Going North, Thinking West (see Important Resources to the right).

An Act of Grace

I'm working through grief about Ali. I've been here before--or at least in a place too much like this one, but that doesn't make the journey any easier. I'm one thought away from crying.

When people ask me, innocently, how are you?, they really just want an easy answer, a sign that everything's okay and we can continue on with our day unburdened by other people's griefs. My problem at this stage is that if someone asks me, I tell them probably in some attempt to unburden myself. I know from hard experience that keeping grief inside doesn't work. It festers there. On the other hand, you can't shout it from the rooftops. Some people really don't want to hear.

These thoughts and one of my friends led me to a new thought about personal writing. I have for decades used writing as a way of getting things more or less "out there," not keeping them "in here." Of course they stay inside, but by having them out there as well, they're just not as bad. Sometimes, I  even figure things out. I think that being able to use writing like this is an emotional resource and that we should at least in our writing classes give this gift of writing to our students.  A few years ago, my students wrote a book of advice for writing teachers. If you look at the chapter on "Journals," you'll see how students use writing to cope with some of the difficult problems we face in our lives.

Writing Ourselves into Each Other's Lives

A close friend of mine has been listening to me whining. I called her on the day Ali died. She had had a particularly hard day herself, coping with something very sad in her life. She listened to me for about an hour on the phone, I suppose you could call it bearing witness to my grief. I talked to her the next day and she said something striking.

She said something about how it made her feel better by making me feel better by her listening. I can't remember her exact words--but I had never thought of personal writing from this point of view. It goes something like this: the writer gets some sort of release by opening up those emotions, fears, hurts that our culture teaches us to cover--the places where we are most human, and as Bene Brown has said, most vulnerable. I had never thought about how opening up is a gift of sorts to whoever was gracious enough to hear you. I haven't quite said it yet: the reader gains by opening up to hear the writer. It's really an act of grace.

Interspecies Love

This entry is about as personal as an entry can get. My dog, Ali, died today. He had cancer. I loved him more than anything. I have marveled at inter-species love. Actually, I marvel at love. I would have climbed up on the cross for Ali. I can't sleep tonight, because all I can do is think of kissing him good-bye and telling him I loved him.

DeCentering Writing Studies

I have finished taking notes on Laura Micciche’s Doing Emotion. Her book was well worth my reading. I appreciated most of what she wrote. And in those places where I had to acknowledge different universes, she brought up points for discussion.

Her important point to me involves the materiality of emotion: that we see emotion and we read emotion in texts—again, understanding texts as only superficially static. When we read emotions in texts, we are obviously reading ourselves, our histories, out cultures, our relationships with others, our friends we have loved, those who have died, those who have faded from our lives but left in our minds their traces.

Micciche makes a convincing argument to the necessity of paying attention to the materiality of emotion through language. Her larger point contests the debilitating dichotomy between emotion and reason—as if they could ever be separated by a theoretical centrifuge.

I believe with Micciche that when students are emotionally invested in whatever they write, they will write better than when defending some kind of canned topic. Not only will they write better, they will learn more about writing by having been engaged in the writing act.

Although Micciche links Marx’s theory of alienated labor to her overly-labored argument positioning composition and writing program administration as subjugated and feminized, I might turn it against what I have previously called performative, fake, or school writing—when we ask students to write essays demonstrating their competence or knowledge in order to achieve an external reward—a grade (see Daniel Pink’s TED talk on extrinsic vs intrinsic rewards). Reframed, we can see this kind of writing as alienated labor, labor that is “external to the worker, i.e., it does not belong to his essential being; that in his work, therefore, he does not affirm himself but denies himself . . . mortifies his body and ruins his mind.” This frame of school-writing might help to explain the marked difference between the kind of writing we get when we ask for honest or bogus information.

I appreciate the general thrust of Micciche’s argument, but I have to wonder about the space between what she and I see or whether one or both of us are blind. I wrote in a previous post that I have never “felt” the subjugation of writing studies or writing program administration—and I have often wondered about the disenfranchised claims—which Micciche extensively documents. I don’t have space to disentangle our differences here. I have always felt respected within the academic environment—and I think many of my WPA friends  have felt the same. I think some of this difference might be located in social class relationships—I don’t know. I do know that as a Writing Program Administrator, as a Professor, I have occupied an incredibly privileged social position. And I know that as a WPA, one of my dominant projects is to abdicate disenfranchised academic labor.  There is absolutely no logic that supports requiring writing courses taught by part-time teachers (other than the logic of profit).

Micciche argues extensively that Writing Studies suffers from its link to materialism, caring, affect. I think as a field we may have overly disenfranchised ourselves. I have seen a long history of rhetoric and composition scholars (note the way in which we have linked composition to “rhetoric”) attempting to argue for the centrality of our field. To me, these arguments have seemed silly. I think it’s equally important for citizens to be able to name in distant order the planets in our solar system as to be able to define ethos, logos, and pathos. I think as scholars we need to pay some attention to how our arguments make ourselves the center of the intellectual universe.  I love to write. If I can pass that on, that seems good enough. I’m not certain that this love should be required.