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2 P OT e N T I A l I T y A N d T H e T e Ac H I N G O f e N G l I s H A life is full of isolated events, but these events, if they are to form a coherent narrative, require odd pieces of language to cement them together, little chips of grammar (mostly adverbs or prepositions) that are hard to define, since they are abstractions of location or relative position, words like therefore, else, other, also, thereof, theretofore, instead, otherwise, despite, already, and not yet. Carol Shields, Unless Fiction writer Carol Shields notes that the adverb not yet is one of the “odd pieces of language” that lends coherence to people’s understanding of their own lives, or, as we will say in Chapter 10, to the kind of authoring known as lifestory. Our noun for not yet is potentiality. And our question concerning not yet and potentiality is why the notion plays such a conflicted part in the teaching of English courses. T He cURI O U s cAse O f POT eNT I AlI T y We start with a riddle. In the filing cabinet of every English teacher lies a manuscript on authoring. Each of ours, single-spaced, measures more than an inch thick. They are stored in manila folders bearing the label “letters of recommendation.” The riddle is why teachers’ letters of recommendation assign value to a criterion that makes scant appearance in their scholarly articles about teaching. It’s not that scholarship and letters of recommendation don’t compare . Scholarly articles are published, but in a sense so are letters of recommendation. The pieces in the filing cabinet were once printed, distributed, and read by hiring-committee members who believed they were looking at a product of a scholar’s careful attention. So there is an equivalency. Yet in professional letters of recommendation English teachers appraise students and their writing differently than they do in professional articles on the teaching of writing. The main difference lies in potentiality. Potentiality and the Teaching of English 33 As an estimate of the candidate’s promise, potentiality appears explicitly as a topic in letters of recommendation about a fourth of the time.1 Ideally, it should underpin all of them, at least tacitly. A letter that merely recites a student’s past performance without hazarding a prediction about the student’s future performance hardly merits the name “recommendation.” But is potentiality equally a central value in articles about the English classroom? Does potentiality compete with other pedagogical concepts that have shaped English pedagogy— concepts such as culture, audience, canon, critique, quality, invention? Hardly. Or, as this book surmises, not yet. The disjunct between recommendation practice and teaching/scholarship practice suggests that unspoken boundary interdicts are in place. One of the boundaries lies inside English departments, dividing literature and composition. Author potentiality has much more explanatory force on the literature side. We have noted that the adoption of a pen name may have helped maintain Alice Sheldon’s energies as a writer. In Chapter 6 we will see how some automatic writing of W. B. Yeats’ wife opened up new avenues in his poems and plays. It seems that the interdict has to do with treating novice famous-author writing and novice student-writing in the same way. As we observe in Chapter 1 and will see over and over in this book (especially in Chapter 14), student writers are not allowed the full rights of authorship, which include respect for the work they have not yet produced. This departmental boundary between literature and composition, however, is cut across by another divide. This is the line most English teachers draw between admissible and inadmissible evidence for learning within a course. Potentiality is not allowed, for instance, as a factor in grading. There are two main reasons. First, potentiality is internal, lacking the external or “objective” proof teachers feel is needed for summative evaluation. In this it is similar to the criterion of motivation . No teacher wants to be swayed by students who beg credit for “the hours I put into this assignment.” Much less would a teacher be persuaded by a student who pleads, “I’ll have this figured out after the course is over, so give me credit now.” 1. Susan Bell, Suzanne Cole, and Liliane Floge (1992) provide a sophisticated analysis of letters of recommendation and a good review of the literature. Among other...

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