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eget that seminal “perplexity” and “disequilibrium” in those
writing students in my classes, but, if I were to follow the
explanations of Dinitz and Kiedaisch, there was simply only so
much I could actually do. I was, again, either too naïve or too
idealistic to think otherwise.
John Dewey himself had offered a similar conclusion, as I
discussed in my fourth chapter. In How We Think, Dewey had
written, again, that “Since learning is something that the pupil
has to do himself and for himself, the initiative lies with the
learner”(36) and that, because of this, “The teacher is a guide
and director; he steers the boat, but the energy that propels it
must come from those who are learning” (36). Despite those
confessions about my self-sabotage, as it were, at fostering a
“community” in the classroom and standing “inside” of that
“community,” had I not tried my very hardest to be a “guide and
director” for those students? To “steer” that “boat” that was
the course and its content? Those freshman students in my
writing classes that year were indeed, for the most part, the
very definition of the sorts of students Dinitz and Kiedaisch
had described. Many of them were eighteen years old or there
about. Many of them were away from home for the first time in
their lives. Many of them were from less metropolitan or
cosmopolitan parts of Delaware, Maryland, Pennsylvania, or New
Jersey and, consequently, had been exposed to little that could
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