Just when I thought I was jaded enough to be realistic about how my first teaching experiences will be I read James Berlin's article Rhetoric and Ideology in the Writing Class. Now, again, I have the feeling that I will be able to hand my students the world- as long as I can teach them to write.
I think everyone has had a teacher who made them feel like that (above). Just this week I had a teacher (yes college level, no not a professor) define a term, using the same term in addition to saying it was more than a different term that she had not defined, and had not planned on. When I asked her for an example of the undefined term in the definition she said that it wasn't important and we didn't need to know it. She got very flustered when I persisted, explaining my inability to fully comprehend the new term with out knowing the meaning of the words in its defenition, telling me she would tell me (only me) after class. I know there were others who wanted this level of comprehension as well. Ahhh the "[l]oveless, arrogant, hopeless, mistrustful, acritical (Shor (95) in Berlin 734) classroom.
How does this relate to writing and the readings?
"...a way of teaching is never innocent. Every pedagogy is imbricated in ideology, in a set of tacit assumptions about what is real, what is good, what is possible, and how power ought to be distributed" (Berlin 735).
