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89 7 — “Ain’t We Got Fun?” teaching writing in a violent world Elizabeth Vander Lei The violence of the world is but a mirror of the violence of our lives. We say we desire peace, but we have not the souls for it. We fear the boredom peace seems to imply. Even more we fear the lack of control a commitment to peace would entail. —Stanley Hauerwas, The Peaceable Kingdom If we are to make rhetoric relevant across not only disciplinary boundaries, but also across the boundary between the university and the “real world,” as teachers we have to help people cultivate language and relationships to work though often radical contingencies. —Thomas Darwin, “Pathos, Pedagogy, and the Familiar” It seemed a simple way to have some fun in the last ten minutes of the first class after spring break. After a short lesson on composing styles, I turned to my students, students in a first-year writing class that I considered one of my best ever, and asked them to create a metaphor for academic writing. I expected, and received, typical metaphors of writing as physical adventure. Most students invoked emotions of fear, anticipation, and exhilaration; most described a concluding moment of satisfaction for a difficult job, done well. Three students, however, told of a different kind of experience. John, an earnest, unfailingly nice student, described his writing in terms of disheartening defeat, like that he feels as a fan of his then-disappointing Detroit Tigers. Robin, in the middle of revising one of her essays for publication in the college newspaper, nevertheless compared writing to enduring the shooting pain associated with a rotting tooth. But nothing prepared me for what I received from Marty: “Writing is like being flogged in a dungeon. It is like this because we’re being held prisoner here 90 ■ elizabeth vander lei at school, and we are tortured with writing assignments. Writing is like being flogged, because it is a painful process that can go on for hours, and you just wish that you would die. It is also like being flogged because weeks later you get your grade, and it is like seeing scars on your body that remind you of a past painful experience.” I was surprised, embarrassed, disheartened: I thought we had been having fun. While Marty’s passive voice verbs de-emphasized my role in the torture, I couldn’t help wondering about the violence he ascribed to me— violence that was intellectual, not physical, but violence nonetheless. I held on to Marty’s description for a long time, wondering how I had contributed to his pain, wondering if scholar Elaine Scarry is right that “what is remembered in the body is remembered especially well,” and, consequently, wondering if this pain would be one of Marty’s principal memories of his first and only year of study at Calvin College.1 The shootings on college campuses like Virginia Tech, Northern Illinois University, and recently at a Houston community college remind me that violence is not some distant problem and that the students in our classes may be suffering more than we know. Following the 2012 shooting of elementary school children in Connecticut, I concur with the scholar Paul Lynch, writing about the apocalyptic turn, that “ultimately, kairos doesn’t matter: there are enough global threats to occasion any essay.”2 To make sense of Marty’s experience in my class, I turned to composition scholarship. In The Peaceable Classroom , author Mary Rose O’Reilley frames my wonderment into an ambitious research question: “Is it possible to teach English so that people stop killing each other?”3 O’Reilley’s question helps me focus my own question, one that bears some similarity to Lynch’s quest for “an apocalyptic turn toward responsibility ”: how can we teach students to engage (rather than enact violence on) people who offer words and ideas that we may find disagreeable?4 My experience with Marty helped me refine my focus even further because I suspect that my response to his religious assumptions—assumptions consistent with Christian fundamentalism—may have been one source of the pain he describes. Two different streams of research have helped me frame an answer to this question. The first is familiar to many of us: the work on violence and incivility by rhetoricians Lynn Worsham and Sharon Crowley. The second stream is likely less familiar, but it may serve us well as we theorize about our teaching of writing: Christian theology...

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