Ken MaCrorie’s Uptaught
is funny as hell. We have about seventy pages of it excerpted for Tuesday’s
Curriculum and Pedagogy session.  It’s particularly interesting for how he
pits Percival the computer as essay-reader against the robotic, mechanistic
professorate.  MaCrorie (of I Search notoriety) comes around to a
method of spurring invigorated self-discovery toward students’ notice of voice,
intellect, conscience–blended.  But he’s ingenious for the way he parodies the
field, for the way he cracks on the serious posturing among those who "preach
Engfish."  

PUBLICIZE THEIR ERRORS

Engfish teachers pass around to each other what they call
"bloopers" made by students in their papers.  They post them on
bulletin boards.  They send them to teachers’ magazines , which publish
them as humorous material to fill empty spaces in their pages.  Three of
the commonest slips are:

1.  His parents were having martial trouble.
2.  He took it for granite.
3. The boys were studing in the lounge of the girls’ dormitory.

In the column heading of a recent issue of an English teachers’ state
association newsletter appeared the words CALENDER. In the graduate school I
attended the English Department distributed to faculty and students a notice
containing the word GRAMMER. These bloopers were not posted or printed in
magazines as filler. (72)

Okay, so MaCrorie’s a hoot.  WTF’s the point?  We’re reading this
as a lens on the compositional redirect–stuff in the early sixties that carved
out a space for composition as the modern behemoth spillway in higher ed–the
conditions (Dartmouth Conference and NCTE’s The National Interest and the
Teaching of English) as the incubus for what’s since taken root.  And in
another class, it’s Sharon Crowley’s Comp
in the University that takes up the stance (through polemicals and historicals…mostly
excessive historicals!) that we oughta cut the FY course loose. Perhaps. We.
Should.  To the sea.

I find the National Interest rationale especially interesting in light of the
resulting material strains felt by teachers who were by and large destroyed
(critically) in the NCTE’s report.  Stop it!  Material conditions suck
(onward).  That’s clear.  That hasn’t changed.  Teacher shortages,
class sizes, resources, technologies ("Composition, literature, and
language are taught more effectively in rooms which permit the storage of books
and papers, as well as the use of recordings, tape recorders, and other
audio-visual aids," goes the NTCE doc.) all were named in 1961 as musts for the bedding of
National Interest and the Teaching of English.  The whole "send it in
motion" pretense makes me think about the Russian space program,
particularly all of the animals that went, unknowing, into the beyond. 
Poor Laika.
Poor comp.

But material strains and abominable labor practices–it seems to me–are only
a few of the problems deserving attention (and leading us to seriously
consider Crowley’s plan–note, I’m only halfway through b/c the book hasn’t
arrived yet…only a six-chapter tease), and in the mini-paper (called Crowley:
A Response) I’m about to write, I plan to call out the top-down tenure and
promotion meritocracy as one more of the fundamental constraints defining the
field as we know it.  In a field so notably self-conscious about its legacy
of inferiorities in English Departments and plodding with the cement shoes of a
broadly perceived service ethic, burdened additionally by what Donna Strickland
dubs the managerial unconscious , composition–of all fields (and, why not?,
others too)–needs ways to re-imagine the safeguarded meritocracies , especially in an era
where over-stocked archives and gobs of peer-reviewed information (spilling far
and wide, disciplinarily vast) make entrance into the field drowningly ominous
for all who approach.