“Unless someone like you cares a whole awful lot, nothing is going to get better. It's not.” -Dr. Seuss

Some years ago, on a bus on my way to the University of Washington’s Seattle campus, I shamelessly eavesdropped on a pair of new English Department teaching assistants who were loudly bemoaning the demands and the misery of their current positions: how time-consuming and distracting teaching was, how little their students understood, how the papers were “so bad” they could barely stand to read them. I was an undergraduate at the time, a tutor in the writing center, and what I overheard made me see red, but I bit my tongue – then and a thousand times since. In those thousand times, I have replayed in my head what I might like to say. That the concern should always and ever be for the writer, not for the paper. That we are all learners, and no learner ought ever be derided, because curiosity and intellect are too valuable to be quashed. That teaching is a calling and a privilege – and that the classroom succeeds or fails largely on the strength of the teacher’s engagement and commitment to students. These truths shaped my teaching philosophy long before I ever stood in front of a classroom of my own.

On my first day of teaching, I arrived at the classroom early and took a seat near the door. Young, and even younger looking than I actually was, I was easily mistaken for just another student, which allowed me to eavesdrop on the freshmen as they entered. (Yes, terrible habit). “I just know this is going to be my hardest class” and “I’m so nervous about this class. I’m such a bad writer!” were only a few in a run of similar comments. No writing tutor could be unaware of this mentality – students’ perception of deficit is often what gets them through the writing center door – but the attitude was no less heartbreaking for its familiarity. Who tells them this? How and when and where do they become so convinced of their own communicative inadequacy in such demoralizing, even paralyzing, ways? Psychologists and behaviorists call the result of persistent demoralization ‘learned helplessness’, and that kind of apathy can be all too evident in the first few days of my writing classes. “I can’t” and “I’m bad at it” can function as low-level defenses when, as Rosina Lippi-Green argues, the student has been a fly in the education-spider’s food chain and so perceives rational discussion of the learning hierarchy to be impossible.

Given all of this, it should come as no surprise that I conceive of my role first and foremost as a ‘hope-monger’ (to borrow a phrase from our new President). My classroom can be and is a turning point, a space in which students (re)discover rhetorical ability and agency. “Language is power,” I tell them; paraphrasing Charles Bazerman, I assert over and over that discourse is not only the means by which we describe our realities, it is the means by which we shape them. Persuasion, I assure them, is an art that can be learned, one they already have access to and need only inquire into, practice, shape to their purposes. And those purposes are valued, as demonstrated by writing assignments that not only have clearly articulated rationales, but also have open-ended designs and real stakes. My students give high evaluative marks for this room to develop their own ideas and to produce writing that “makes a difference” for those who read it.

Hope for a different sort of learning experience and a renewed awareness of self as writer play out in my classroom in dozens of small ways. Everyone is on a first name basis from the first week; we take the time needed throughout the quarter to introduce ourselves, to explain our identities and backgrounds (our past experiences), to articulate our perceived strengths and difficulties as writers and learners. Students’ reflection on those strengths and difficulties – metacognition, in a word – is a fundamental part of the fabric of my curriculum: brainstorming what discursive resources they bring to a given writing task; open discussion of many possible approaches to that task; group pre-writing; working draft peer review; reflection on the peer review process itself (what they heard, what they want to change as a result); extensive, iterative, painstaking feedback from me; carefully conceived revision plans; self-assessment as a vital part of the grading process. All of these practices reflect my belief that, while I may not be able to offer them skills that will translate to every writing situation they will encounter throughout their varied academic and professional careers, I can offer them learning strategies and writing practices that will hold them in good stead.

And I can focus on them individually as writers – not merely during the few fleeting moments of one-to-one conferences but throughout the quarter – helping them adapt these strategies and practices to serve their own rhetorical goals. Maybe it says something that students continue to visit my office hours long after the quarter is over, seeking mentoring and feedback on their high-stakes, ‘real life’ writing (program and job applications, graduate and medical school statements of purpose). This tells me that for all the ways I ‘get it wrong’ every quarter, there are a few things I am getting right: I am somehow conveying my full commitment to students, and I am helping them to both be aware of and act on their understanding of the social power of their own attentive, well-crafted writing.

Ask me to trace the origin of nearly any of my beliefs or attitudes about teaching, and I will point to one place: Cate School. One last anecdote makes the point. Five years ago, at the end of my three-week, crash-course training in university-level English composition instruction, our harried workshop leader faced a room full of overwhelmed and mildly terrified teachers-to-be. “I know,” he said, “that most of this will just take time and experience, but you have to trust me when I say you know more than you think you do. You know what good teaching looks like because you have in your heads all the good teachers you have ever had.” It’s telling, I think, that after four years of undergraduate instruction and a year of graduate instruction at a top-notch, research-one university – full of talented, creative, inspiring professors – the “good teachers” my mind conjured in that moment were Cate teachers: Jim Durham, Katie O’Malley, Gaby Edwards, Ross Robins. These were just a few of my Cate teachers who cared “a whole awful lot.” They made the classroom a place of excitement and joy, where we were challenged and changed by ideas. They committed themselves to nurturing the curiosity and intellect of one more shy, skinny girl among many. Ten years later, as an increasingly mature teacher in my own right – largely because of their voices in my head – I can only offer my humble thanks.