Stony Brook University - SUNY Digital Repository

the lure and inevitable quandary of worshipping either Certainty
or Uncertainty in the absence of the other. There are also
those related to fostering that dialectic between Certainty and
Uncertainty and the difficulties therein. Of them, these many
pages have already offered a thorough summary. With those
particular issues, as a whole, there is the crucial necessity of
remaining always conscious of whether your writing or your
teaching is doing what you had intended them to do and, if they
don’t, why. Furthermore, at the very same time is also the need
to remain as fluid and flexible as that dialectic to whatever
experiences writing and teaching brings you. If you become
static in your practice, your philosophy, or simply your
perception of your students or your very own standing as a
teacher, you will begin to take it all for granted. The whole
process, writing and teaching both, will lack life and you will
lose out on untold fruitful possibilities for learning and
growth.
A second conclusion overlaps somewhat upon the territory
of the issue of dealing with the obstructions that can hinder
establishing that dialectic in a real teaching situation.
Perhaps with possibilities for greater application, the
personality that you as a teacher, whether a teacher of writing
or otherwise, brings with you to an actual classroom with actual
students can profoundly affect the social dynamic of the
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