Fred Kemp writes:

I've taught in the classroom for 27 years and although I do think that there are, rarely, "nuanced breaths and glimpses," I think that very very few students have ever benefitted from them. What I find much more often is unproductive instruction, students and teachers wrestling for control of the classroom, students bored out of their minds and teachers resentful of an increasing lack of respect from their students. I would willingly trade any possible "nuanced breaths and glimpses" I might encounter for a better track record in reaching the last two rows, who are in my mind valuable students often sacrificed on the altar of the first two rows. Peer-to-peer interactivity made possible through online interactions is the only way to salvage a formal instruction that is rapidly clogging up on its own inability to validate itself to students. They aren't voting with their feet but with their brains, as they increasingly zone out of whatever learning space we are trying to create for them. If the whispers of coming and going were creating a ringingly successful instruction, all the alternatives to formal learning that are cropping up wouldn't have a chance.  We wouldn't be feeling the desperation that so many of us feel. The subtleties that diPardo is talking of shouldn't be targeted in first-year comp. Something else should be going on there.

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