Stony Brook University - SUNY Digital Repository

V.
The question before me then is simple and straightforward.
And it is a question that I know I have to ask myself, like that
proverbial long, hard look in the mirror to see what you find
looking back at you. To see what you’re really worth. Again,
that question is: what happened? What happened with those
attempts to translate my philosophy of writing and the teaching
of writing, a philosophy arising out of the work of John Dewey
and William Perry and Peter Elbow and founded upon a pursuance
of the dialectic between Certainty and Uncertainty, into actual
practice with those writing courses at the University of
Delaware? Like I said before, what happened to the “potential”
and the “promise” I have been proclaiming for page after page
now?
When I look back to that year at University of Delaware or
at any of the other freshman writing courses I have taught
before, whether Montclair State or Stony Brook or Widener, I see
very little transformation and very little triumph. When I look
back at those writing courses and the students in them and, in
doing so, do indeed take that long, hard look in the mirror,
what I see leaves me dispirited because I do not see the teacher
I have wanted to be since I decided to become a teacher of
writing all those years ago now. It is not that I see a “bad”
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