You can listen to a recorded version of Patchen reading the poem here (he's got a great voice):
What has me thinking about this particular poem is not the Sisyphean task of teaching writing, but rather the tasks that we often set out for our students when we ask them to be thoughtful, critical, sometimes wary, but always diligent writers. Our task-lists are many. Our writing prompts, exercises, project sheets, and learning outcomes--when taken out of context--might sound like the demands of a therapist with a particularly clever and/or twisted sense of humor. But always the task seems to be designed for the express purpose of breaking through the barriers of business-as-usual thought processes, razing the complacent attitudes that stand between passive observation and meaningful exegesis, and instilling in the student the need to "put it all back together again" in some meaningful form. At the end of a section of composition, or a literature seminar, or a creative writing workshop...I always want the student to "want the job that bad," even after the barrage of experiments and maneuvers that I concoct to challenge what they understand coming into the classroom might reduce them to a quivering pile of vacillating protoplasm. I have to admit, this makes the idea of being one of my students sound like a terrifying prospect, which I don't think is the case, but I'd be lying if I said I wasn't disappointed each time a student doesn't seem to want the job that bad. I do take it personally on some level, and though this does not bode well for the amount of ego invested in my role as an instructor, it does bring up some interesting questions when it comes to tying practice in the classroom to personality.
I got to thinking about this again during our reading for last week, particularly with regard to the Kill and Heilker articles regarding genre, personality, and the formation of writerly selves. Two quotes in particular stood out to me:
"In the context of first-year composition, the metaphors of role rehearsal and fluid selves are appealing in that they frame the subjectivities that writing instruction prescribes as provisional. Nevertheless, although postmodern notions of performativity may seem to downplay the effort involved in shifting between roles, it is important not to overlook the potential severity of challenges posed to one's sense of self even when one chooses not to fully commit to a given subject position" (Kill, 231).
"I am beginning to think that all genres we attempt, especially all new genres, may be sublime or at least potentially sublime, that they may all have the potential to invite us and require us and compel us to come up and out of our previous ways of being in the world, to become something new, something more" (Heilker, 29).
In Heilker's notion of genre practice as a potentially sublime activity, and Kill's plea to not underestimate the challenges to self and identity posed by the presented-as-provisional context of class-room assignments, I see an impetus to acknowledge that there is something more going on in the classroom beside the acquisition of intellectual skills like so many tools in a future-professional toolbox.
I'm wondering, how would some of you characterize this "something more" that Kill and Heilker seem to be groping towards? Do you think about this in your classrooms?
Also, though Kill speaks to the ways we may position ourselves as instructors in the classroom, I was wondering what impact the "provisional" nature of our assignments and exercises might have on our attitude toward them when it comes to assessment and evaluation. In other words, does evaluating these provisional incidents of genre practice have any impact on our identity and personality? If so, what does that impact look like?
Kind of a weird question, but it totally freaks me out sometimes and I was wondering if any of you think about this.
Well...sorry for the late post and hope some people get a chance to respond.
Best,
J
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