Stony Brook University - SUNY Digital Repository

ut inwards, to themselves, and to pursue it tenaciously and
vehemently because, as I told them time and again, it was a
question that would set them free. Many of these “lessons”
became a mantra of sorts throughout the semester, in particular
the very last, because of how often I reiterated how utterly
crucial they were to those students’ writing and their
existences as writers. Whether they exited the course loving or
hating to write, these were lessons they would never forget.
Can this be said for all of those students that year? No. Most
of them? I cannot say. Some of them? I would say so.
Despite all of this, however, as I confessed before,
although I was not a “bad” writing teacher, when all was said
and done and those courses at the University of Delaware were
over, I was not the writing teacher whom I had tried to be, whom
I had wanted to be, because the very basic intentions of my
particular teaching philosophy, which I have hitherto now been
trying to explain and to explore, went unrealized. Despite how
much I had deliberated over and over again upon the selection
and sequence of the readings and films I put before those
students, the planning of the classroom discussions about the
questions which those readings and films were supposed to raise,
and the construction of the writing assignments I required those
students to undertake as well as the scrutiny of the various
drafts that came from them, I do not believe that this
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