What Do You Learn from What You See? Gloria Anzaldúa and Double-Vision in the Teaching of Writing

Abstract

When I began to teach the first-year writing course, I was startled whenever students would listen to me. Life had never given me a ready audience before, let alone one accustomed to following orders, and since it seemed clear that I did not know what I was doing, I’d find myself laughing whenever they took me seriously. “Take out your notebooks,” I’d say and they would, and their implicit faith in my authority used to make me pause, especially since I often issued the directive to fill a ten-minute void. Sometimes I’d stand there for a moment, feeling vaguely unethical, wondering whether to let them in on the joke. “It’s just me,” I wanted to confess. “I am not The Professor. I am not The Institution.” Often I did call attention to what I found humorous—our resemblance to the Keystone Kops trying mightily to construct some version of what a writing class was supposed to be, watching those efforts dismantle under our mutual confusion over what it meant to be sharing lives and words for fifteen weeks.