Empoword

General Introduction xliv I refer to the perspective in the Strauss and Maguire text as the complaint tradition , 6 and it’s probably something you’ve encountered plenty of times. With every generation, some older folks can’t wrap their minds around how terrible the following generation is. Those kids can’t write, they spend too much time on their phones, back in my day we used to play outside and movies only cost a nickel . It’s easy to write Maguire off right away here, but let’s unpack a couple of key quotes to better understand what we’re working against. “[Colleges] should offer new writing courses that assume students know nothing about sentences and train new sentence behaviors from the ground up. Be repetitive and tricky — fool the kids into doing the right thing.” 7 Beyond the fact that such an assumption is simply rude, it also overlooks the fact that students actually already know a lot about using rhetoric—they do so on a daily basis, just not necessarily in the same register, style, or medium that Maguire wants. Designing a course and basing a teaching style on the assumption that “students know nothing” would be a toxic and oppressive practice. As a student, you have dedicated yourself to learning, meaning you acknowledge that you don’t know everything. But this is a far cry from “knowing nothing,” and what you do know is not inherently less valuable than what Maguire knows. Furthermore, I do not believe in “repetitive and tricky” teaching that pretends to know what’s best for students. Don’t get me wrong, I love The Karate Kid , but teaching grounded in deceit reinforces the toxic power dynamic mentioned above. It assumes that teachers know best, and that their students deserve no power in their learning environment. Teachers are not “better than” or “above” students: we have had certain experiences that position us to offer help, but that doesn’t give us license to lie to you. Most importantly, though, I believe that pedagogy should aim to be transparent. In order for you to claim the knowledge and skills you gain in a learning community, you need to see how you’re building it, be invested in why you’re doing certain work, and respond to feedback on your thinking and writing processes. So Maguire and I have our differences on teaching philosophy; we disagree on the nature of the teacher-student relationship. If it ended there, we might ‘agree to disagree.’ But Maguire also drastically misunderstands the characteristics of good writing .