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8 t h e P r o f e s s o r s The reader who complained about my dismissal of the importance of argument in the working-class ethos also thought I had stacked the deck in my critique of politicized writing instruction by focusing on graduate students and community college teachers instead of rhetoric and composition professors, claiming that members of the professoriate are better versed in the literature and consequently less likely to blunder than teachers like Cale, Stanforth, and Hendrix. Although I partially ascribe to my reader’s logic, I don’t entirely accept the positioned implication that more theory leads to better practice. Nevertheless, in this chapter, I will focus on professorial critical teachers. Among them, Bill Thelin’s (2005) account, “Understanding Problems in Critical Classrooms,” is notable because he violates the naturalized narrative of failure, enlightenment, and triumph, a format for a genre that usually includes accounts of how others have gone wrong. Thelin leaves his analysis of his classroom failure mostly bare, grounding his article in the theory of failure on which he and John Paul Tassoni (2000) based their collection of “blunders.” Thelin (2005) narrates in explicit detail the degree to which his reading of liberatory pedagogy, as popularized by Ira Shor (1992, 1996), led to a classroom disaster. Thelin has taken seriously the methods Freire and Shor described, most of which fall under the rubric of democratizing education: co-developing generative themes, curriculum, contracts, and teacher-student responsibilities. Committed to a strategy of redistributing authority, Thelin holds up his own classroom practice to a critical examination in order to investigate with readers the missteps in his process. Thelin argues that we need to examine these missteps, interpreting them as a failure in strategy, not purpose. The smart mechanic doesn’t junk the car simply because rebuilding the carburetor didn’t solve the problem of acceleration hesitation. 144 Go In G n orT h T h I n kI nG W eST With some differences, the breakdown in Thelin’s (2005) class follows a model for failed critical teaching: too much time spent on codevelopment , student perception of teacher incompetence, missed classes (fewer than two-thirds of the class turned up on the second day), missed assignments, missed conference appointments, incomplete drafts, dysfunctional peer response sessions, student factionalism, student protest to upper administration, mid-course attempts at correction, and a hastily constructed assignment at the end of the semester directing students (the ones who were still there) to explain in five hundred words or more what had gone wrong with the class. Thelin’s desperate essay assignment reads like a cultural trope—an attempt at reconciliation on the brink of a failed marriage. Seitz (2004) describes a similar attempt to rescue a failed ESL class in which he “intended for students to mine their cultural experiences and anthropological reflections to develop academic habits of defamiliarizing the familiar” (19). After reading his students’ essays, Seitz realized the students were, as he puts it, “dead tired of writing about their cultural selves” (19). After a what’s-wrong-with-this-class? discussion, Seitz tried to revive the class by throwing his plans out the window and co-developing a new curriculum and themes to investigate. As a response to their failed class, Hendrix and Jacobson (2000) tried the same trick of having students co-develop a writing task and coming up short with a movie critique and the threadbare “24 hours to live,” writing assignments that are about as lame as they come, indicating the students were only going through the motions, holding their breaths until the semester was over. Once a teacher begins to flounder, students sense the teacher’s lack of control, at which point there is little one can do to recapture their confidence in a teacher who doesn’t seem to know what he or she is doing. Shor (1996) managed to pull his democratizing move from the brink with an on-the-spot invention of the now-famous “after-class” sessions when one of his students proposed that attendance should be voluntary (92-116), but few of us weather that moment when we have to get advice from students on how to fix our class. I remember my own antidemocratizing moment as a beginning high school teacher when three cowboys in twenty gallon hats got up and walked out after I announced this was their class, not mine. Conscious of the academic injunction against unmitigated confession , Thelin (2005...

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