Response to Fulkerson

Rough drafts are important.
Be ready for your peer reviews on Monday.
Where is your thesis?
What is the point of this paragraph?
Rough drafts are important.
Your peer review should be done before the final draft.
What is this word supposed to be?
Yes you need to have a main point.
Rough drafts are important.
These are the thoughts that were running through my mind as I read this article. This has been my experience with the instruction of composition. I would have to say that most of the composition instruction that takes place at the high school level would fall into the rhetorical category. We have the responsibility of preparing student to be capable of making the leap to a less formal, albeit more interesting, use of the language. Students cannot successfully use language to gain the power that has been denied them, if they are not first taught the rules and procedures that accompany their words. A student may find great release in expressing himself through composition, but he will have a hard time finding a job if he can’t spell his name. We lay the foundation so that future instructors can expand the horizons.

Fulkerson uses the analogy that teachers are like a “coach helping students master a variety of activities.” While I agree with the comparison in some ways, we do train and practice and reinforce skills with our students, I would suggest a different analogy. A coach has the chance to continue working with students. A coach may see the same player for several years. Teachers don’t have that same opportunity. Teachers are more like workers on an assembly line making chairs. This is not to say that we spend our days mindlessly creating little student clones, but rather, we have a limited time to work on our piece of the whole and then we send it along. We get students whose composition skills are rough or nonexistent and we spend a year trying to whittle away the bad habits and polish their strengths. When or time is through, we send them along to someone else on the line. In most cases, we don’t see our pieces again. We may hear about how they are progressing along the line, but we don’t see a finished product. We can only hope that the work that we did with them was enough to prepare them for the next step. It isn’t until they have graduated and left us completely that we will know if they are able to stand. Our spot on the line may not be as complex, or as thought provoking as the critical/cultural studies comp class, but it’s pretty hard to change the world with a wobbly chair.