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PREFACE But we lean forward to the next crazy venture beneath the skies. —Jack Kerouac, On the Road Sometimes it seems that teaching first-year writing has the place in the academy that sex had in the Victorian era—the language surrounding it is one of duty and distaste, but the simple presence of a younger generation demonstrates that people are engaging in it, or did it at some point in their lives. The accepted explanation is that we participate in it because it is the means necessary to attain our true ends of security, prestige , and legitimacy. Our real interests are somewhere else, but we are willing to lie back and think of tenure. Once we have paid our dues, we move on to the higher and better things that we really enjoy, leaving others to such “service.” As with Victorians, there are some people who do enjoy the activity, and there are even books that tell one how to do it better, but we treat them as pornography, as texts serving impulses far baser than the intellectual pursuits that we really admire. Of course, there are some people who have no other pursuits, who have no responsibilities other than teaching first-year writing, but we see their existence as the result of vice and cupidity and pass them without acknowledgment. In a perfect world, we think, they would not exist. But me, I love teaching first-year composition. That is an odd admission for someone like me—who does not have to teach it—to make, and I have seen people physically recoil at the statement. For reasons obscure to me, this admission is always taken to mean that I do not love other kinds of teaching. Yet I see no reason to think that one must choose between graduate seminars, upper-division topics courses, and lowervii division writing courses, perhaps because, for me, the project is much the same: considering the place of rhetoric in democracy. As James Thurber says, even the best job in the world (which he identifies as hitting baseballs through the windows of the RCA building) would eventually get boring, and I don’t claim that I love every moment of teaching first-year composition (or any other course, for that matter). My long-term scholarly interests in deliberative forms of rhetoric, in fact, come out of certain recurrent frustrations—students committed to the notion of argument as aggression (whether they opt for participating in the aggression or staying out of it entirely). My intermittent responsibilities for supervising and training first-year composition instructors have also sometimes led to frustrating conversations about teaching writing, especially when trying to work with someone who seems committed to hating the course. There is a conversation I occasionally have with first-year composition instructors: They tell me how much they hate the course (often focussing on the teaching of argument) and what an intellectual wasteland it is. When I respond by seeing if we can come up with assignments, texts, or a course arrangement that might make the class more interesting for them and their students, they get visibly frustrated with me, as though I am completely missing the point. And, in a way, I am. My premise (validated by my experience) is that the course can be great fun, and student papers can be genuinely enlightening. For those instructors, such a premise demonstrates the smallness of my mind; I might as well have announced to a Victorian drawing room that I look forward to bedding my husband. Their premise (validated by their experience) is that student papers vacillate between incoherent and predictable and that neither they nor their students will learn anything intellectually challenging from the course. This disconnect, I have come to believe, happens because we are talking about pedagogy, but we really disagree about the place and nature of argument in democratic society. Hence this book. Most instructors, of course, are not so cynical about first-year composition , and I have been lucky in my career to have had teachers, colleagues , and students who were deeply committed to teaching. As a graduate student in the Berkeley rhetoric department, I had faculty mentors who enjoyed talking about teaching, especially William Brandt, Bridget Connelly, Fred Antzack, and Arthur Quinn. It was my fortune viii PREFACE to take a position at UNC-Greensboro, which has a faculty I will always admire for its dedication and sheer quality. The English department at the University of Missouri at Columbia...

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