NYMA:
Mother Always Said
What we do, so often, is to complicate our lives and the lives of our students by asking everyone to compartmentalize. In many ways, we ask individuals to leave their emotional selves at the door to the classroom; while we want students to be passionate about learning, we don’t really seem to want them to be passionate about anything else. When we speak about passion, we have so few academic models to choose from: Jane Gallop on one end and bell hooks on another. But we say both of these women, these models, have earned their rights to speak passionately, to be passionate, in ways that many of us cannot or will not, at least until we see tenure on the horizon.
But passion is a strong component of both argument and invitational rhetoric. We need passion.
“When we fail to talk about the teaching of writing as a matter of people’s lives, we fail, I believe, to see our own compliance with the rules of social behavior that traditionally have defined the man’s world as being separate from the woman’s.” (Lil Brannon, 1993, p. 458)
Tuesday, March 9, 2010
A matter of people’s lives—our lives
