Option 2: CCC Vignette

OPTION 2: The second response I welcome is a completed vignette or “small scope narrative” of the lived experience of teaching writing and/or being a member of the profession (limited to 1000 words). This must be complete at the time of submission, and should be appropriately labeled.

Idea: Teaching English majors. Scenes from... Bringing composition/rhetoric to...

There was a single graduate level course, but that would only come around every so often, if at all (enrollment in this course, I learned, was notoriously low). I remember in graduate school, a young female professor, new to our school, announcing that she felt no need to argue about the legitimacy of composition/rhetoric within English Departments. Despite the fact that she was one of just three comp/rhet faculty at the time, her argument was that we should get on with the work of doing what we do and not worry so much about the status of composition/rhetoric. It was, in her mind, a done-deal. We were here. We were a field. Our work was legitimate. We were legitimate. I liked this posture. I liked the finality of it, the sheer no-bullshit stridency of it. I decided I would adopt it, too. The debates about composition/rhetoric's legitimacy and relevance were over, I decided. A thing of the past. We were all grown up now.

Imagine my surprise, then, when I arrived at my current institutional home (not my first TT job) to find that, um...my professional identity was all but absent from the work of my Departmental home. In terms of teaching, what, I wondered, as I skimmed the English Department homepage, were my options? As it turned out, there was just one course beyond the 200-level that I was qualified to teach: ENGL 350: Special Topics (and this course was assigned in a rotation among all 25 or so faculty members). Was I to go on teaching first-year composition and Business Writing (a required course of all school of management students) forever?

To be invisible in the eyes of one's colleagues is a terrible thing. As I got to know them at parties and in the halls, I felt welcome in many ways--but not in the one way that matters most. What would I teach? Would there be opportunities to work with our English majors on honors or thesis projects? How would I share with them what I do? How would I share with them who I am?

There is a way of settling: it is possible to teach students how to write without teaching them about writing. This appeared to be my plight. I would teach lower level courses, service courses, to mostly if not entirely non-majors. Basic Writing, first-year composition, Business Writing, the occasional section of Expository Writing (if it filled).

Once I got beyond the realization that I would never be able to work with English majors, would never be able to create relationships with students of the kind I had experienced with my professors as an undergraduate student. THere is something special about working with students who have chosen to work with you--who are there for reasons beyond the fact that they must be or that your course is offered at a time of day that is convenient for them or that you have good ratings on Rate My Professor.com. This was a blow to realize. I had gone to graduate school to earn a Ph.D. in composition and rhetoric, but I would spend my career teaching students who were not interested in my work, who were in my classes because they had to be, and who, were they to transfer out of my course and into a different section, would likely be taught by someone who had no advanced training in composition/rhetoric--who had not spend half a decade learning, reading, preparing, studying writing. This, too, was a difficulty realization. The apparent irrelevance of my degree. I began to feel over-qualified. Whereas once, having been an adjunct instructor prior to returning to college, I felt sympathy for my colleagues who were not on the tenure-track, I now began to feel, on the tenure-track, a sense of resentment for them. We were both teaching the same classes, but here I had all this preparation and training. In the end, I was little more than a highly paid adjunct instructor. I had not come as far as I had hoped.

The realization of the department vote... I have proposed these courses. Students needed certain kinds of courses at the 300-level to count towards the English major. Well, we scrapped that. We made it so that they can take any course at the 300-level. But there was still the vote about whether or not 378 and 379 would count towards the English major. And I remember sitting there thinking--wait, they are going to vote to decide whether the courses I am proposing will count? Seriously? If they don't count towards the major, no one will take them, so why am I doing all this work? And then they voted and it was unanimous. THe classes would count.

And then we worked on the minor. And that came to fruition... But there is still the issue of my work existing outside the boundaries of the major--the realization of the 200-level problem. That I don't teach any of the required 200 level courses, which are all about literature. So, how do I meet English majors? Get exposed to them? When I don't see them until later in the major? The disappointment of not being allowed to participate in their enculturation process because what I do is still invisible within our major, although, it now counts for something.

The sadness of the interchangeability of the terms English and literature. "Our literature majors..." The assumption that English = Literary Study.

The difficulty of watching new colleagues come in behind me or after me and walk right into the major, teaching 300/400 and graduate level courses walking in the door. They are immediately welcomed into the fold, curriculum-wise. And I am in the wilderness, trying to make myself and my work known. Hoping for a slice of the pie, a crumb, the leftovers.

Full-circle, this brings us to this semester: standing in front of a room of Juniors and Seniors and doing my thing. Teaching my stuff. Trying to establish a sense of comradeship with them. Trying to introduce them to another way of doing English. Their confusion about this, sort of. Their openness, too. The sad realization that many of them don't like to write literary analysis papers, don't like to read "old" literature. Feel alienated from their major coursework. The sad realization that their knowledge of writing, of themselves as writers, is somewhat limited. Books and papers, books and papers. And the challenge of asking them to read, for example, social-science type research articles and having them sort of role their eyes, at times. Or not. Just the frustration of having to start them at zero and realizing that they know nothing about this entire field, this entire scholarly tradition. That for them, English is about reading books and writing papers about them.