Stony Brook University - SUNY Digital Repository

from without, and, because of it, writing was seen as a means to
an end rather than an end unto itself. Taken as a whole then –
the possibilities for trying to implement that translation of my
teaching philosophy with writing students who were not
cognitively or intellectually “mature” enough for or simply
prejudiced against because of cultural or social depreciation of
the relativistic, uncertainty-stirring thinking and writing that
it called for them to do – is it any surprise, really, that
things went as they did that year?
But all of this said, no matter how valid these
explanations may be, no matter how present they were in and for
those writing students at the University of Delaware, I do not
concede to them because they don’t sit well with me. To me,
they feel like excuses. Copouts. While I do not doubt that
they were influences upon how those students responded to my
freshman writing course – the curriculum and how I taught it -
and, thus, how they thought and wrote throughout their
respective semesters, I could not claim that they were the
influences upon them.
After all these many pages since beginning this chapter,
however, I could also no longer claim that the “blame,” if that
is what you would call it, rests solely upon my shoulders.
Because of that tendency towards Certainty, from time to time
and in particular when that urge for Control fails me, I suffer
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