Pomo Blues Response

First, a quick note in response to the previous reading ("Discourse and Diversity"). I did not recognize that the writer of this piece was a female until I reached the "what she wants" in the middle of page 430. I don't know what to make of this fact other than I noted it with surprise. The piece sounded very masculine until this point, and once this was recognized it felt much more like a femine-written piece to me.

I really found the underlying argument of non-authenticity within the student writing sphere quite compelling and somewhat disturbing. I think that it is true that a false environment for writing does exist for the student in the classroom and therefore creates a false notion of what is truth in writing. I think our job as teachers is to create an environment that does not permit the student to succeed through "cookie-cutter" papers. How does one do this when many of the colleagues around her will punish the students for fulfilling the guidelines imparted by her less-conventional assignments--the assignments necessary for avoiding cookie-cutter papers? Isn't it also the responsibility of the teacher to prepare a student for success. If a student adds "I" to an "academic" paper, he will undoubtedly injure his chances of success in the traditional classroom. If he fails to succeed in the classroom, he has failed to succeed in life, for at this time the student's life is being a student. Such unconventional assignements therefore appear to lead students to failure. Further disturbing with regard to this notion of non-authenticity is the idea that culture is what structures our stories. All stories therefore lack originality, for they have alll been written and read as this article supposes. If culture constructs the students "truths" doesn't it also construct our (the teacher's) "truths"? If this is true, than all writing is without originality in our postmodernist world, and such a notion reduces all of this to why. Why are we teaching students to do something that we the teacher are not even able to do?