Fishing in Dark Waters

In our week of new TA orientation this month, several of our core writing mentors and instructors made it a point to articulate that a genre-based writing curricula, unlike the teaching of the 5-paragraph essay format, focuses on the use value of student writing which guides students to use writing as a way to get things done with words and images, as opposed to the exchange value of student writing which conditions students to write the requisite number of words in correct form in exchange for a grade.

There are these two young fish swimming along, and they happen to meet an older fish swimming the other way, who nods at them and says, "Morning, boys, how's the water?" And the two young fish swim on for a bit, and then eventually one of them looks over at the other and goes, "What the hell is water?"

If at this moment, you're worried that I plan to present myself here as the wise old fish explaining what water is to you younger fish, please don't be. I am not the wise old fish. The immediate point of the fish story is that the most obvious, ubiquitous, important realities are often the ones that are the hardest to see and talk about. Stated as an English sentence, of course, this is just a banal platitude -- but the fact is that, in the day-to-day trenches of adult existence, banal platitudes can have life-or-death importance. That may sound like hyperbole, or abstract nonsense.

A huge percentage of the stuff that I tend to be automatically certain of is, it turns out, totally wrong and deluded.

From David Foster Wallace 2005 Commencement Speech at Kenyon College

When student writers are conditioned and limited to particular structural formats guided by a strict rulebook of prose and grammar, the circumstances imposed or forced on them exemplify the tragic, insofar as the reality and the possibility that exist in the world are nullified by adherence to a pervading sense of order which MUST be followed. Students swim along in the water they are tossed in, paying attention to format, following rules, and receiving grades. This forced necessity, or anagke, to use the Greek term, elicits the comic response (in individuals who are paying attention) as an antidote.

True comedy is an acknowledgement of our limitations, insofar as it pokes fun at or satirizes a reality that constrains us. Cornel West posits that seriousness that can be made light of is mediated by the element of hope, exemplified by his discussion of African American humanism. In facing up to a country that bills itself as the world’s greatest democracy, a bastion of freedom that built itself up on the foundations of slavery, genocide, and racism, it is the very idea of equal treatment under the law that gives U.S. citizens hope (balancing reality against possibility). Developing curricula that encourages students to explore these murky waters of hate, hypocrisy and imperialism in order to understand the world we live in is vital to composition pedagogy.

As teachers of composition, we should feel compelled to encourage our students to fish in dark waters. The essence of learning for teachers and their students, as it was for Socrates, is realizing how little we know, and be willing to share and exchange in that dialogue with our community. Pragmatism is valuable in this endeavor. Keith Gilyard asserts, “Pragmatism can defend itself fairly well, and its ultimate value, particularly for teachers, lies in disturbing, complicating, and challenging otherwise totalizing views of truth, power, and society” (13). Our words matter, and writing should be a social and community practice.