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Working on a seminar I'm leading Friday on the writer's practice and its use in teaching first-year writing and thinking my first slide needs to say "There is no pedagogical fix for systemic problems." Right now, it's implied in the work, but why not make it explicit?
I mean, every writing instructor knows the benefit of one-on-one conferencing, but what does that matter if you have 150 students in a semester?
The Writer's Practice reflects the end run I took to get around the systemic issues with teaching as an adjunct and what I see as the damaging "folklore" of writing instruction, but everything in the book works many times better if the teaching and learning conditions improve.
A deep irony embedded in the book is that building this approach kept me teaching much longer than I otherwise would've managed. At the same time, taking that as far as it could go revealed to me that I'd have to walk away from teaching full-time to survive spirit (mostly) intact
I know the book is helping people who use it, but I don't want to lose sight of the greater need to address the systemic problems. It can't be merely a way to manage around the problem.
This is me ending the thinking out loud on Twitter, and getting back to what I'm supposed to be doing.
