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I know that today marks the fiftieth anniversary of the March on Washington for Jobs and Freedom, at which the Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr., delivered what is now one of the most famous pieces of oratory in human history.  I also know that other people much better qualified to discuss the event and its commemoration are doing so at great length; I need not add my voice to theirs, and I have my own matters to discuss:

One of the assignments that I am obliged to require of my students at Oklahoma State University is a literacy narrative, a piece in which students relate a moment of significance in their developments as reading persons and connect that moment to a broader socio-cultural context.  It is my usual practice to offer my students models of the kind of writing I want to see them do--my teaching blog is in large part taken up with such examples--and so I really ought to put together a literacy narrative for my students.  Certainly, those I have now deserve as much time and attention as those I once had, and I have discussed having more of it to give them (here, for instance).

Something stops me, though, namely that I have always had difficulty putting together literacy narratives.  I have made no secret of my training and my profession, of my calling, and being such a person as successfully pursues a doctorate in English makes of me the kind of person for whom the experience of literacy is not able to be disentangled from the workings of my life.  I know that there are many people--I would venture to say that it is true of most people--for whom reading is somehow separate from their "real" lives, for whom writing occurs seldom if at all, but I am not one of those people.  The opposite is more or less the truth of things for me.

To be able to identify a single moment of significance in my development as a reading person is not something that I can do well, therefore.  Or I thought so, but something occurred to me as I considered how I will proceed in the way I discharge my duties as a teacher.  An article from Profession, one I discuss at length in the first substantial post to this blog (more than three years ago, now), has continually cropped up in my academic writing, and even in much of my personal writing.  I have even referenced it in putting together proposals for research panels at conferences and in interviews for positions like that I now hold.  I think it safe to say that the article in question, Mark Edmundson's "Against Readings," has influenced my life as a reading person insofar as it has affected the way in which I do the work that I do--and my work is the work of a reading person almost entirely.

It is good to have come up with a topic, the way the article in question has affected me.  It is not, however, enough to move forward with the project of putting together an example essay for my students.  They are asked to generate some three to five full pages of material, some 950 to 1600 words in total, and simply announcing the way in which the text has affected me, lodging in my mind so as to serve as an initial point of reference for much of my academic discourse about reading, writing, and teaching, will not suffice to offer a developed model for their edification.  How that effect manifests, and what it means that it does so, needs to be explicated.

I have little right to ask my students to do a thing I cannot also do.  And if I have had difficulty in performing the task, then I can empathize with their challenges (at least in part), and in surmounting them, I can show them that they, too, can accomplish the goals laid out for them.

Now, to get them to set some goals of their own...