To Dr. Kemp: So You Want Me to Fly?

[A response to the post-class dialogue]

Ask me about page design. Ask me about style sheets. Ask me about grammar. Ask me about print cost, pre-press, or copyright registration. Even ask me about the finer points of a volleyball jump serve. But if you want me to fly, just don't ask me about the rhetoric of personal agency. Not quite yet. I'm still learning to walk.

It's not about lack of enthusiasm or desire...I'm in this class without the guarantee that I even have a future in the MATC program. I'm here because I wanted to be; because I couldn't wait. I wanted to dive in as soon as I started reading the course offerings. The journey had to start somewhere, at some point, and this was as good a time and place as any, I supposed.

But I am laying the tracks down even as I'm racing over them. Personal agency, collective intelligence, rhetorical analysis, participatory culture, ethnography--I've encountered all of these ideas for the first time in this class. I don't have the research history to lean on that others do. I'm at the beginning; they're nearing the end. I'm learning a new language and trying to be fluent all in one ambitious leap.

So you're going to have to exercise some patience, oh rhetorical master. Push me. Challenge me. Make me think critically. But don't neglect to teach me too. I need to know what you know before I can question it, build on it and move it forward. I need to benefit from your experience and wisdom. Graduate school, or more specifically an educational model that relies on the very thing we are trying to explore, personal agency, is necessarily constructed to engage students in seeking out knowledge for themselves. Yet against that backdrop, your role is more critical than ever. I need direction, and some parameters. Your presence is not a limitation, but a standard and a guide, so that I don't wander off the course into irrelevance.

I want to fly. And I will. But I'm smart enough to understand the value of a few good lessons. And wise enough to know that there is no substitute, not even with all the internet has to offer, for the tangible, touchable erudition of someone who knows more than I do. Respecting and learning from a teacher or mentor isn't some dusty, outdated pedagogical theory; it's a foundational, timeless truth.

Off to finish Jenkins, and see how he explains the idea that social media can be oppressive...