The Pot Calls the Kettle Black...

As I finished the readings for this week, I couldn't help but notice the repetition of some of the same concerns in comp/rhet that occur in WC work. Of course, I know this is no coincidence, as WCs are the child/adopted child/bastard child/stray cat of composition--and obviously we both deal with student writing, so there are going to be connections. What differs, though, is what I'm trying to cling to--because they are really not the same, again, for obvious reasons. Our main text this week (for those reading who are not in our class) was Nancy Grimm's Good Intentions: Writing Center Work for Postmodern Times. I truly enjoyed this book and found it illuminating, frustrating, helpful, and unhelpful all at once. Page five gives a list of excellent questions that I think every WC should grapple with, questions I intend to bring up in my tutor training sessions. While I think Grimm answers many of these questions, she also created new ones for me.

My biggest question was about her anecdote about "Mary" starting on page 25. For one, I really felt the need to know what the assignment was. How can we understand the inappropriateness of Mary's response if we don't know what she was trying to accomplish? But my questions--or rather, my irritations--about the Mary anecdote didn't end, because Grimm referred back to this situation frequently. And this is what bugged me: whenever Grimm referred to Mary's situation, she made assumptions about her that I felt were biased and prejudiced--the exact opposite of the kind of WC she advocates throughout the entire book. Let me explain:

On page 32, Grimm says that Mary "appears to uncritically accept the wisdom of elders and ... holds some texts holy, appears to be wrong, naive, or at best unenlightened." Why? Because Mary was a devout Christian. Is Grimm saying that people of faith are uneducated? Are the Chinese, who revere the wisdom of their elders and their ancestors, "unenlightened"? Does holding a text as holy make half the population of the world (there are many holy texts) wrong? Doesn't the postmodern notion Grimm advocates reject the dichotomous ideas of right and wrong and encourage embracing difference? There was no evidence in Grimm's tale of Mary that indicated she was naive, wrong, or unenlightened at all. Grimm makes this assumption because (now I'm assuming) she has a bit of a problem with people of faith. Well, I tried to overlook this, because I know that many liberals have problems with fundamental Christianity and think they are all just brainwashed. But on page 49, Grimm says, "We need to learn to live with the paradox that Mary and many other students don't want to be like us..." Who is "us" in this scenario? All WC people? All in academia? All women? And all this because Mary wrote a paper about living under God with her soon-to-be husband? I couldn't get over this and it bothered me through the whole book.

The only reason I think it bothered me so much is that I highly doubt Grimm is aware of her own jaded language in this text, which makes it all the more important. And it illustrates just how difficult it is to adopt the kind of WC that she proposes. Because while Grimm's language concerning Mary was probably not so wisely chosen, the way she proposes working with students we see as being so different is admirable and makes excellent sense. If someone who has thought this through and researched it so much that she writes this excellent book about it can't even overcome her own prejudices, how can our undergrad tutors? I'd love to think that I can get my tutors to adopt this attitude of wonder, but prejudices run very deep.

One other thing I wanted to point out: there were two times that I had questions, explicit questions, that Grimm anticipated and answered. Although I'm still wrestling with her answers, i thought it said a lot about her text that she anticipated these questions. One was on page 97, where she said, "Skeptical readers may ask if writing centers, given that they are often staffed by undergraduates, are up to the transformative tasks I have outlined here." Yep. This (skeptical?) reader was asking just that. I know how difficult this can be for me--and I'm old, a teacher, a mother, have been working class, and (almost!) have a PhD. So my 20-year-old middle-class white tutor is going to be able to do this? Sounds nice. And I know we have to strive for the ideal, even if we don't reach it.

Back to my initial point: what is different between WC issues and comp/rhet? What I noticed most of all today is that WC administrators have to relinquish control, whereas what I learn and struggle with in comp/rhet I can take directly to my classroom and work through myself. In WC work, I have to train others to do this--a much more daunting task. I'm anxious to get working on my tutor training materials!