Stony Brook University - SUNY Digital Repository

students had to do it from and for their own worlds and
definitions of “self” – not mine. For such an intention to have
any true reformative or progressive potential, I had to
acknowledge the fact that students will not perceive themselves,
their world, and their “truths” any differently than they did
before they entered my course unless they want to, or are simply
prepared to. To do otherwise, to tell students “how it is” and
to evaluate them according to their reception and rehashing of
“how it is,” akin to the sopping up of water by a sponge, would
be a betrayal of that potential.
But how did this translation of my teaching philosophy –
arising from that dialectic between Certainty and Uncertainty –
through that freshman writing course that year at University of
Delaware turn out? What became of its “operationalization”
through the class sequence and content I have described? What
happened to all the “potential” and “promise” I have heretofore
been proclaiming? I would leave it to the next chapter, my
last, to say.
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