Acknowledgments

The work of teaching writing - Joseph Harris 2020


Acknowledgments

I thank the Edwin Mellen Press for permission to reprint, in chapter 1, several paragraphs of my piece “Dead Poets and Wonder Boys: Writing Teachers in the Movies,” which first appeared in How “The Teacher” Is Presented in Literature, History, Religion, and the Arts, edited by Raymond McCluskey and Stephen J. McKinney (2013). I owe special thanks to Raymond and Stephen for hosting the lively and amiable International Conference on Representations of the Teacher at the University of Glasgow, Scotland, in July 2008, which was the moment when I first began thinking seriously about the issues in this book. I also thank Utah State University Press for permission to reprint, in chapter 3, my analysis of the exchanges between Wilfred Owen and Siegfried Sassoon, which first appeared in the second edition of my book A Teaching Subject (2012).

I had the chance while I was at Duke University to teach several undergraduate seminars on representations of teaching and learning. I particularly remember a moment in one of them when I had asked the class what we saw students and teachers actually doing in the texts we were reading and watching together, and they replied “well, we almost never see them doing any real work.” That comment stayed with me, and I hope it is clear how it has informed my writing.

It was my close friend and co-teacher at the University of Pittsburgh, Steve Carr, who first pointed out to me that Phaedrus asks Socrates to remind him (rather than help him remember) what they’ve been discussing. I asked another friend, the classicist Peter Burian of Duke University, to check if this shift in verbs was an accident of translation, and he assured me it was not. I don’t presume that either Steve or Peter will agree with my eccentric reading of the Phaedrus, but I could never have constructed it without them.

Julie Wilson found many of the critical texts I discuss in Background Readings during the summer she worked as my research assistant. She has helped me look more learned (or, at least, sort of). I am very thankful. Jeanne Marie Rose of Penn State Berks and Margaret DeBelius of Georgetown University offered very useful responses to the first draft of this manuscript, pushing me to make the line of thought that connects my readings of various texts more clear. And out of the blue, Paul Corrigan of Southeastern University generously offered to read the near-final version of this book and helped me formulate my title, a new introduction, and the line of thinking they gesture toward. I owe him special thanks. I am also grateful to have had the chance to informally share my work in progress with too many friends and colleagues to list here, most of whom asked: Did you ever read this? Or, did you ever watch that? I always hurried to do the newly assigned reading or viewing.

Dan Pratt has designed a handsome and bold cover for this book. My thanks to him. I also owe thanks to Cheryl Carnahan for her close and attentive copyediting of my manuscript, to Laura Furney for establishing the format of the book, and to Linda Gregonis for preparing its index. And it was a special pleasure to have the help of Rachael Levay, the new acquisitions editor at Utah State University Press, in turning my manuscript into a book. Rachael is stepping into the shoes of one of the great editors of books on teaching writing, Michael Spooner, and she is doing so with grace and authority.

I walked into and out of writing this book several times over the last decade. Art is long, and life is short. So I am grateful to my wife, Pat, for turning to me at breakfast one morning and asking “so, are you going to finish that book this summer?” I offer her all my thanks and love.

A book is a machine to think with . . .

—I. A. Richards