I like teaching for a variety of selfish and unselfish reasons. It's the only work I've done that makes me feel I'm doing something really worthwhile. It the only work I've ever done in which the effects, for good or ill, are immediately apparent. Those are the unselfish reasons. It's also&mdash;and here's the selfish reason&mdash;the only work I've done that completely engages me intellectually. When I'm teaching, I spend a lot of time thinking&mdash;about the efficacy of what I'm doing in the classroom, about the nature of writing and reading, about how and if those things can be taught, about the nature of education itself. It's nice to be working at something that I can care and think about.

For the past few days I've been thinking a lot about the nature of college writing instruction. The freshman comp courses where I'm teaching now are structured much differently from the way they were at other schools where I've taught, emphasizing critical thinking and process-oriented writing more emphatically. This emphasis extends to the writing assignments themselves, as outlined in the course information and sample syllabus given to me when I was hired. I'm finding some tension, though, between the ways I've expressed these emphases to my students in class and the way these things are explicated in their textbook. This could be a problem. At the very least, it's something to think about, which is good.

At a meeting the other night, a fellow adjunct asked one of the professors what she thought about the student writing samples in the textbook, whether she thinks student writing provides a good model. Her reply was, I think, indicative of a philosophical difference between people who focus on literature and those who focus on rhetoric and composition: She thinks that the student writing samples are good models because the offer students something to aspire to that is more attainable than "a story by Maya Angelou." I disagree&mdash;but maybe that's because I don't conceive of learning to write as a process of copying models. I think that having students read "a story by Maya Angelou" or any good writing by any good, well-known writer provides much more than a model to copy. These pieces offer inspiration as well as example. Even more importantly, in this the age of TV babies, an English class may be the only environment in which these students are exposed to literary writing; by force may be the only way they'll ever read it. To give that up in favor of models does the students a disservice. Reading a textbook full of student writings and letters to the editor will not turn students into readers. Reading "a story by Maya Angelou" just might.