[Teaching_Composition] Re: Teaching_Composition digest,Vol 1 #1110 - 2 msgs

[Kathy Fitch]

Geez, Doug, I had to read sections of Houston Smith, Madeleine L'Engle, Anne
Lamott, and Kathleen Norris just to set the world right again, and I may
still have to wander off into the mystical moist night air, for a bit.  I
could probably go on and on about this, but I'll be brief, for the night air
beckons:  professing writing need not entail usurping all absolutes,
disrupting all certainties, denying every fundamental.  As Smith points out,
"There can be, and are, dogmatic relativists and open-minded absolutists."
Yes, language, learning, and teaching are all inherently political
activities in the broadest sense.  It is simply and inescapably so.
However, teaching writing need not entail narrower, more specific political
aims.  Too often, the latter masquerade as the former.  I'm not a huge fan
of the particulars of the "bill of rights" that would have students make it
through school without ever encountering a challenging or disquieting
notion.  Nonetheless, my first instinct toward the document as a whole is to
wonder to what extent it proceeds not merely from simplistic concerns (oh,
no, my teacher is a leftie!), but also from deeper, more complex fears:
destruction of hierarchies, disappearance of the transcendent, dismissal of
the mystical, loss of faith, nihilism.  It's not hard for me to see how
someone inclined to be a signatory to this "bill of rights" would read what
you have to say about language and politics and hear in it a claim that
writing has only been successfully professed if writing students end up
replacing their fundamental beliefs (and not only about language, but about
truth, power, objectivity, subjectivity, the metaphysical) with yours--or
worse, with nothing at all.  

Then, too, the absurdist in me comes to the fore and pictures a writing
student wondering how all of this helps her get the researched essay
written, the cover letter and resume posted, the screen filled.  I like her,
and think she asks excellent questions.  If she comes to me--to any of
us--for help with these tasks, what then?  How shall we cope with her?  How
shall we serve her best?

Kathy