Stony Brook University - SUNY Digital Repository

naturally to the other” and that, for teaching, the
“[alternating approach] naturally leads a teacher to higher
standards yet greater supportiveness.” However, what I hear
Elbow saying, louder and more clearly, is that such a movement –
that “cooking,” that dialectic – must be explicit and, then,
once it is so, it must be exploited. In short, the “alternating
approach,” his “embracing contraries,” must be deliberate.
Furthermore, it must be made deliberate.
This is the hard way, the difficult road to walk down as a
writer or a teacher or both, but, as I have been trying to
explain, what can come from it – seeing the never before known,
thinking the never before known, writing the never before known
– is worth it. I have not read any suggestions, or experience
it in such a way that it would have suggested to me, that this
dialectic is an unconscious process: something that simply …
happens. Returning to Weil’s explanation of dynamic
equilibrium, there must be a catalyst for it to occur. The
writer or the teacher of writing must be that catalyst, or try
to be it. And the student in a writing class, that burgeoning
writer and their writing both, must learn to become their own
catalyst, for themselves: for their world and their place in it
and their perspective of the reality or “truth” of both.
I suppose I have, by now, made very obvious that my
philosophy of composition as well as my teaching philosophy have
148