Teaching English in the Two-Year College - Volume 34, Issue 4, 2007

Responding with strategic empathy to the traumatic stories students share with us provides an opportunity to break down an elitist binary between teacher and student. Joyce Carol Oates’s novel them can serve as a cautionary tale for understanding the dangers of disregarding student trauma.

The preceding two essays focused on the challenges presented by students’ selfdisclosures in their writing. The authors, Janet Lucas and William DeGenaro, have read each other’s essays and provided the following brief responses. This cross talk between the writers continues, in a more deliberate way, the cross talk generated by their essays.

Of interest to instructors of first-year writing, this paper delineates the challenges faced by professors of first-year writing who lack formal graduate training in composition and rhetoric, and it explores the strategy that enables them to become excellent teachers despite such challenges.

Introducing Web-based literary hypertexts in an introductory writing course motivates students to ponder both the changing techniques of writing and reading and their own attitudes toward these two interrelated activities in a wholly new way. Evaluating a novice literature launches novice readers and writers on a journey to becoming “experts” at facing with confidence the many challenges that college and life will bring, including a fundamentally new approach to reading and writing.

While it is often ridiculed, the subject of the paranormal offers an effective means to encourage student involvement and support critical-thinking skills in first-year writing courses.

Composition teachers can reconcile the conflict between effective writing instruction and educational reform mandates by making timed writing assignments part of the writing process.