You Are Invited . . . to Leave

You Are Invited ... to Leave Lad Tobin When I was in eighth grade, I used to spend a lot oftime after school playing pick-up basketbaU inJeremy Rosenstein's driveway. It was a good place to play—walking distance from school, a basket that was a few inches less than regulation height, and several younger Rosenstein brothers to fiU in when we needed extra players. There was only one drawback: Mrs. Rosenstein was the grouchiest of any of my friends' parents and if you caught her on a bad day (actuaUy I don't think I ever saw her on a good day) she could be scary—Roald Dahl-level scary. Fortunately she usually ignored us but I stiU have memories ofher losing her temper and screaming at her sons or even at us as ifwe were her sons. What I remember best, though, was the time she came out to the driveway to interrupt a late afternoon two-on-two game by announcing, "Jeremy and Michael, go inside right now and wash up for dinner."Then she turned to Jim Cohn and me: "We are about to eat," and here she almost seemed to smile for a moment, "and you boys are invited ... to leave." At the time it struck me as a kind ofperverse and malicious act—inviting someone to stay and then turning and inviting someone else to leave— but as I grow older I've come to understand its usefulness and appeal. I've even come to recognize that as a writer I've been inviting certain people to leave for some time now. ActuaUy I'm not sure I would have noticed ifothers hadn't pointed it out to me. Over the past ten years or so I've pubUshed a number of autobiographical essays about teaching in academic journals. Most of these pieces are case studies ofmy own classroom in which, along the way, I confess to certain quirks, idiosyncrasies, and failures as a teacher ofwriting. The confessions usually focus on my inability to Uve up to what I take to be the profession's agreed-upon standards of honesty, consistency, fairness, and integrity. For instance, I might admit to giving students lower grades than they deserve because they argue with me about previous grades, support poUtical positions that I find personally offensive, or look, dress, and act like fraternity-types. 45 46Fourth Genre Now these confessions are not non sequiturs; at least they are not meant to be. I introduce them as part of a scholarly investigation of a teaching problem. For instance, I might be examining resistance in the classroom or the difficulty of objective grading or gender issues in teacher-student relationships and I wiU illustrate these issues by talking about my own neurotic, iU-tempered behavior. I've always felt these personal confessions serve as the kind of specific, concrete examples we always ask for in our students' own writing. I've hoped that these personal examples helped establish me as a credible and sympathetic narrator. And as I heard from feUow teachers, the personal material in my essays was what distinguished my writing from the majority of scholarly academic articles; the personal material, I believe, is what got me published. But as I found out lately, it is also what has made some academics dishke my work. Though most ofthe responses I've received have been positive and generous, a significant percentage are from people who are enormously put out and put off by the form and content of personal scholarship. Two years ago I submitted a piece to a scholarly journal on the difficulties I have often had when I teach writing to aggressive adolescent males; whüe one outside reader praised it for the clarity and honesty ofthe voice, the other rejected it saying, "I not only hate this article, I also hate this author."And so I've had reason to ask myself this: By including personal material in a scholarly piece of writing, who wiU I invite in and who wiU I invite out? I'd Uke to think I'm inviting in smart, secure, good-natured readers and excluding pompous, pedantic, humorless ones but...