Stony Brook University - SUNY Digital Repository

from over-reflection, obsessing upon all of those “What if … ?”-
s and upon what I could have done differently when, in the end,
there is a good portion of the phenomena of teaching that is,
simply, out of my control. Like it or not, that is simply how
it is. In reality, then, it was all of those possibilities I
had been discussing thus far at work in my writing classes: all
of them influencing the others, determining the others, in
unseen ways. Dialectically. In the end, if I am guilty of
anything, it is of underestimating and overestimating those
writing students at the very same time. Because I had
underestimated the intellectual and cultural “baggage” that they
brought with them to my classroom, I had overestimated their
natural capacity to think and to write as I wanted them to, from
the very start of the semester. Because of this, I did not
supply those writing students with the sort of “community”-
fostering support that they would seem to have needed and,
instead, left them too often to their own devices, nurturing
them separately as “individuals” rather than all of them as a
“community” of writers. Because of my passion and my faith in,
again, the “potential” and “promise” of that dialectic between
Certainty and Uncertainty – of that old commandmant to “write
with Uncertainty” – I also overestimated the sheer possibility
of them engendering that “reflective thinking” and “relativistic
pragmatism” in the relatively short duration of time that is a
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