Questioning Tradition

because that's how it's always been?

freewrite: what do you see?


reconsidering the world as we know it...


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what does the world really look like?

an inherent bias?

Should we look more closely?

working the text

In groups of three, write a really thoughtful discussion question for "When We Dead Awaken" and exchange questions with another group.

Then as a group work to write...

working the text

In groups of three, write a really thoughtful discussion question for "When We Dead Awaken" and exchange questions with another group.

Then as a group work to write...

  1. one thing you found most striking about Rich's essay and why
  2. one thing you found most troubling (or perhaps confusing) about the essay and why
  3. an answer to the discussion question you received from the other group
  4. a definition of revision according to Rich
  5. insights to share on Rich's struggle with tradition

let's party!

How is reading and writing like partying?

Writing is like arriving fashionably late to a party where people have already begun mingling and talking in conversation circles.

In a situation like this, how do you find your way into the conversation? Do you immediately jump right in and make it all about you? Or do you do something else first?

don't want to be like these guys...


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SNL sketch "Night at the Roxbury"

a larger conversation

Writing usually means taking part in a conversation that has been going on long before you arrived on the scene. Enter the conversation, but be smooth about how you enter (not like the Roxbury guys).

It's time to play Koosh Conversation

That's right—Koosh Conversation—the chatty game of reading, summary, expanding ideas, and answering questions.

  1. Read the quote on the screen.
  2. Summarize it. That means in your own words, folks.
  3. Extend the summary with other ideas, thoughts, experiences of your own.
  4. Answer the question under the quote!

And watch out for the KOOSH!


read, summarize, expand, answer

“It's exhilerating to be alive in a time of awakening consciousness; it can also be confusing, disorienting, and painful. The awakening of dead or sleeping consciousness has already affected lives of millions of women, even those who don't know it yet. It is also affecting the lives of men, even those who deny its claim upon them. The argument will go on whether an oppressive ecomomic class system is responsible for the oppressive nature of male/female relations, or whether, in fact, patriarchy--the domination of males—is the original model of oppression on which all others are based. But in the last few years the women's movement has drawn inescable and illuminating connections between our sexual lives and our political institutions. The sleepwalkers are coming awake, and for the first time this awakening has a collective reality; it is no longer such a lonely thing to open one's eyes.” (522)

One might say that, like Rich, Herbert Kohl argues for a collective awakening of sorts in his “I Won't Learn from You” as an alternative to the dysfunctional strategy of not learning. Can you explain this? Who has to wake up and to what?

read, summarize, expand, answer

“Re-vision—the act of looking back, or seeing with fresh eyes, of entering an old text from a new critical direction—is for women more than a chapter in cultural history: it is an act of survival. Until we can understand the assumptions in which we are drenched we cannot know ourselves. And this drive to self-knowledge, for women, is more than a search for identity: it is part of our refusal of the self-destructiveness of male-dominated society.” (522)

As a student, in what assumptions are you drenched?

read, summarize, expand, answer

“No male writer has written primarily or even largely for women, or with the sense of women's criticism as a consideration when he chooses his materials, his theme, his language. But to a lesser or greater extent, every woman writer has written for men even when, like Virginia Woolf, she was supposed to be addressing women. If we have come to the point when this balance might begin to change, when women can stop being haunted, not only by ‘convention and propriety’ but by internalized fears of being and saying themselves, then it is an extraordinary moment for the woman writer—and reader.” (524)

To what extent might the tradition of public schooling in this country with its “conventsion and propriety” internalize fears in students of being and saying themselves? Might engfish be explained by such a fear? What do you think? Explain.

read, summarize, expand, answer

“An important insight of the radical women's movement has been how divisive and how ultimately destructive is this myth of the special woman, who is also the token woman. Everyone of us here in this room has had great luck—we are teachers, writers, academicians; our gifts could not have been enough, for we all know women whose gifts are being buried and aborted. Our struggles can have meaning and our privileges—however precarious under patriarchy—can be justified only if they can help to change the lives of women whose gifts—and whose very being—continue to be thwarted and silenced.” (524)

Rich seems to be saying that it is not enough to become critically aware of injustices, but imperative that those empowered do something on behalf of others who cannot do for themselves. To what extent do you plan to take your good luck of an education and turn it into action for others? Is this a fundamental responsibility?

read, summarize, expand, answer

“And a certain freedom of the mind is needed—freedom to press on, to enter the currents of your thought like a glider pilot, knowing that your motion can be sustained, that the buoyancy of your attention will not be suddenly snatched away. Moreover, if the imagination is to transcend and transform experience it has to question, to challenge, to conceive of alternatives, perhaps to the very life you are living at that moment. You have to be free to play around with the notion that day might be night, love might be hate; nothing can be too sacred for the imagination to turn into its opposite or to call experimentally by another name. For writing is renaming.” (528)

How does redrawing, renaming, remapping break us free from the arbitrary weight of tradition? Think about McArthur's map?

read, summarize, expand, answer

“But to be a female human being trying to fulfill traditional female functions in a traditional way is in direct conflict with the subversive function of the imagination. The word traditional is imporant here. There must be ways, and we will be finding out more and more about them, in which the energy of creation and the energy of relation can be united. But in those years I always felt the conflict as a failure of love in myself. I had thought I was choosing a full life; the life available to most men, in which sexuality, work, and parenthood could coexist. But I felt, at twenty-nine, guilt toward the people closest to me, and guilty toward my own being.” (528)

Where is the conflict between traditional female functions and the self present in the film Binta and the Great Idea?

read, summarize, expand, answer

“The choice still seemed to be between ‘love’—womenly, maternal love, alturistic love—a love defined and ruled by the weight of an entire culture; and egotism—a force directed by men into creation, achievement, ambition, often at the expense of others, but justifiably so. For weren't they men, and wasn't that their destiny as womenly, selfless love was ours? We know now that the alternatives are false ones—that the word ‘love’ is itself in need of re-vision.” (530 – 531)

How would you define student? Teacher? Are either words in need of revision?

working with quotes

It's not enough to pepper your writing with someone elses words. This results in a text that is choppy, incongruent in voice, and piece-meal in construction. You can do better.

Here's how...

This is called framing your quotes. It's way smoother and more professional.

what's not great about this?

I have grown as a writer. I used to be superficial in my observations about the subject I was writing about. “My neighborhood is mostly Irish-Catholic in its makeup, and many city workers live there.”

what's better about this?

I have grown as a writer. I used to be superficial in my observations about the subject I was writing about. This is demonstrated in my first paper where I wrote, “My neighborhood is mostly Irish-Catholic in its makeup, and many city workers live there.”

what's better still about this?

I have grown as a writer. I used to be superficial in my observations about the subject I was writing about. This is demonstrated in my first paper where I wrote about my neighborhood being composed of “mostly Irish-Catholic” people and “city workers.”

what's quite good about this?

I have grown as a writer. I used to be superficial in my observations about the subject I was writing about. This is demonstrated in my first paper where I wrote about my neighborhood being composed of “mostly Irish-Catholic” people and “city workers.” The assessment I provide here is over simplified as it reduces the complexity of a dynamic neighborhood filled with an array of unique individuals to a hasty snapshot and gross generalization based on fleeting glances and my own mistaken assumptions, bias, and stereotypes.

integrating sources, synthesizing ideas

Now, you try it...

homework