Catching Up

As some of you may know, I've had a rough start this semester and so--as some of you may have noticed--I wasn't able to get my earlier posts online. For my inaugural post, I'd like to say something about the discussion that was occuring earlier regarding politics in the classroom (race, gender, sexuality, class). I know I'm hopelessly behind the curve on this, but it's something that I feel very passionate about. One of the main reasons I decided to quit the program I was in and take up English studies is that I found that English departments usually housed the people I wanted to work with and the research and discussions in which I wanted to engage--not just poetry and prose, but all media (film, television, music, art--both high and low) as cultural artefacts; and the politics involved played a big part for me. I was reading Richard Ohmann's _English in America: A Radical View of the Profession_ and I was moved, almost as moved as I was when I first heard Dr. King speak or, alternately, when I first heard the Sex Pistols cover of The Stooges' "No Fun." I highly recommend Ohmann (and Gerald Graff's _Professing Literature: An Institutional History_, which I used for that timeline in 8005 last semester) to anyone interested in the matter of politics in the classroom. I felt a calling as I read it--this is what I wanted to do. I wanted to engage these debates--"teach the conflicts" as Gerald Graff puts it--and the English department certainly looked like the place to do it. Graff wrote the Foreword to _English In America_ and towards the beginning, he says the following:

"Ever since George Orwell… it has been commonplace of social criticism that whoever controls language controls the way we think and act. With the massive expansion of American democratic education in this century, school and college English teachers have considerable opportunity to shape the way young Americans talk, write, and think about the world. That is no doubt why the teaching of English and the humanities has become a major battleground in the recent war over culture.

In fact, the student movement of the sixties owed much of its inspiration to the widespread teaching of texts like 'Politics and the English Language' in the expanding freshman composition programs of postwar American college and universities. It was in freshman comp that a generation learned from Orwell, Thoreau, Baldwin, and other essayists to contemplate the gap between hypothetical American ideals of justice and equality and the observable realities of racism, exploitation and militarism."

This is what motivates me to *want* to teach composition--the control over language is already one of the main fronts of the culture wars and so, in my opinion, as teachers of English we're already enlisted. I want to engage these ideas, enter into a dialogue with my students and try to motivate them to think, read and write critically.