Response to Brookfield (English 8050): worst practices

Lauren: "If I hadn't distributed the written text, no one would have thought I made a 'slip'" (Richardson, p.158).

I think that I failed my own English 1020 course. Specifically, while my first section was fairly bucolic, my second or "evil" section (Section 22) made me want to harm my fellow creatures. This morning after distributing the departmental evals, I engaged in a CBT-style chart and graph making session designed to prove to myself that I am not a slobbering moron:
Why My Section Failed
1. Statistics: My previous sections have been consistent: 10 percent.
2. Social Dynamics: Psychologically intimidated by older, bigger student: 70 percent.
3. Eventual failure to adequately plan around disruptions above (see #2): 5 percent.
4. My actual inadequacy as a teacher: 15 percent.

Like most TAs, I envison a perfect world in which every section is both spontaneous and overplanned, the questions that arise are totally on-topic and all of my students are grammatically housebroken. However, while failure is often assumed to be universally bad, teaching-related failures actually serves a functional role in shaping the teaching of writing. In fact, the function of failure eerily corresponds to the funciton of theory--the all-time "hero" in graduate school. To illustrate this point, I've consistently replaced the word theory with the word failure in Brookfield's text below.

1. Failure "lets us name our practices" (p. 186).
Failure "can assist us in naming aspects of our experience that elude or puzzle us"; as a result of failure, "we feel that the world is...more open to our influence" (p. 186).

2. Failure "breaks the cycle of familiarity" (p. 186).
Failure can "free us from falling victim to the traps of relativism and isolationism"; failure helps us gain insight into "which functions of our work are context-specific and which are mere generalizations" (ibid).

3. Failure "can be a substitute for absent colleagues" (p. 187).
For academics who are not richly immerse in critical scholarship, failure "may be the only source of alternate viewpoints avaliable" (ibid). When a conventional approach to writing fails, new approaches to written texts open up. In fact, like theory, failure is relentlessly written: the primary consequence of failure consists of "comments scribbled in the margins, pages turned down and peppered with yellow slips" (ibid).

4. Failures "prevent groupthink and improve conversations with colleagues" (p. 187).
Failure supplies "provocative elements of dissonants" that can shake up "comfortably settled frameworks and assumptions" (p. 187). Academic communities need to critique views of "pedagogical correctness" and listen to "inconvient points of view" (ie, students' points of view) to remain intellectually "alive".

5. Failure "locates our practice in a social context" ().
Without the regular and serious study" of failure, we "agonize" about apparently private, isolated struggles with the teaching of writing: how can we "catch teachable moments" and "be spontantious", "while staying faithful to the syllabus".

Failure inspires us to "reframe what we consider to be the problems in our practice: the problematic focus shifts from the individual to:
the refusal of the curriculum committee or accreditating organization to let us
develop materials suited to particular ends, or the educational institution's intolerable burdens when we are expected to take on more and needier students without additional help (p. 188).