Stony Brook University - SUNY Digital Repository

that “perplexity” and “disequilibrium.” But through it all, the
flow of those perspectives of “truth” and reality was, with
little exception, between those students and me. When they
wrote, they wrote to me and for me, regardless of whether they
knew their peers would be reading their drafts or not. When
they talked in class, they were talking to me, even if they were
responding to something their classmates had said. They didn’t
ask each other questions and they definitely did not ask me
questions, unless it was to clarify an assignment or a due date.
As I said before, there was no “community” in my writing
class. If there was a “community,” it was a minimal thing. And
if there was a “community,” I wasn’t “inside” it. “Deep within”
it. Because there was no “community,” there were no
“cooperative processes” or “joint activities” and, thus, no
“discursive riptides” or “contentious counterstatements.”
Because of that, there was no “explor[ing] and utiliz[ing] [of]
their idiosyncrasies” or “express[ing] and justify[ing] [of]
differences of opinion” and, thus, no “question[ing] [of] their
assumptions about the nature and location of knowledge and
values.” And because of that, then, there was no “collaborative
reconstruction” or “reshaping” or “imaginative recombinations”
or “rethinking.” No “reflective thinking and no “relativistic
pragmatism.” And as for me as a teacher of writing, I know I
did not “alternate roles” with my students so that we could
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