career discourse
The red pen is a metonym for all that we have villainized about certain ways of teaching writing. As a metaphor, it reminds us not to do violence unto our students. As an object it reminds us of days when ink took precedence over pixels. As a symbol, it is that we define ourselves in opposition to.
term extension
Rhetoric is poised to enjoy a significance and name–recognition it hasn't in centuries. Its co–option of green buzzwords like ecology, sustainability, and e–anything guarantees that. Just as citizens are turning their attention to effects built spaces have on the environment, rhetoric offers to help with that analysis, and its terminology suggests that it's capable.
antidefinition
No consensus exists on what education is or what its purpose should be. If we could only agree on the latter, we would likely be a step closer to the former. It seems, though, that education has become a political and social incommensurability. Intellectuals feel under attack from anti–intellectualism, and the very idea of anti–intellectualism has taken on a positive sheen. Finding middle ground will be a matter of working to a definition of education in concert with each other. I fear it is impossible.
obtuse meanings
In a photograph, I pay attention to what brings me back to family and being dependent on them. Photos belong in neatly labeled envelopes, stacked in shoeboxes in my parents' home. Even when I see a digital photograph, I don't think of the thousands of digital photographs filling my computer. I think of the books and crafts and gardens of my childhood.
illumination
Early on, I learned to fear embarrassment and guilt, and to forever see them as intertwined. They both are a product of interacting wrong, performing badly. The wideness of my/your presence on the web compounds the possibilities for embarrassment and guilt logarithmically.