Welch Response: Textbooks, Schmextbooks

All of these readings seem to reinforce the things we learn in Practicum. I forget that when I misread one of them or get lost and sidetracked like I did with last week's. Welch was easier to follow for me, I think because it felt more readily practical. I like the idea of letting student writing be the primary text for a freshman comp class. I also like someone spelling out for me a definition. The five canons of classical rhetoric was refreshing: invention, arrangement, style, memory, and delivery.
My reading of this assignment was heavily colored with my own preoccupations with a lit class writing project that I have been stuck spinning my wheels on since, like Tuesday. I'm dealing with two critics, and am supposed to be wrestling with their ideas on the page, or letting them wrestle out their ideas on the page while I act like Marv Albert and tell the reader who is winning. Somehow I am supposed to fit a close reading in there as well. One of the critics seems to take an approach similar to what Welch calls the dominant composition ideology. This critic, Fairer, seems really into the tradition of the pastoral and only lets himself praise a poet when the poet does something technically advanced or stylistically inventive in a poem. The other critic, Feingold, seems to take a more Welch-friendly approach to lit crit, going after an understanding of the social and political context of a poem in order to evaluate the poet not only stylistically, but morally within that context. My problem with the assignment (besides getting started so late on it that I couldn't ask any questions until it was already late), is that I feel like I am supposed to leave my own opinion at the door and bow to these critics before I am allowed to talk about what I am interested in. I should be able to draw on this experience of mine to be a better teacher. Welch: "Teaching writing means enabling writers to compose out of lived experience."
Keeping writing active, not passive, and keeping an energy level going about and with language are very interesting to me. Tiffany N. told me last week about how she got her students to write down pick-up lines in class, and they examined them as pieces of rhetoric. Keeping something like that going in some way, some exciting approach to language, is a new goal of mine for every class day.
I loooove the idea of appetite, p 275. My trouble with my own assignments comes out of that area sometimes.
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