Yes, I must say it is so. The man has to be the worst ego-maniac I've read in awhile. He thinks that Tim and other male students who write about sports or near-death experiences in a car are cheap, predictable and utterly not worth reading. This paradigm seemed misleading from the get go--and although he tries to make up for lost ground in this essay--Tobin has extreme bias throughout the essay. I mean the guy [Tobin] is giving a confessional on a stand, preaching if you will, about problems with the way freshman comp teachers read these papers. I totally agree with a majority of his change in heart. It's an expressive assignment and yea, sometimes women aren't involved, but isn't it more about the person writing than it is about a teacher's preference? I kept thinking this as I glided across this essay. Tobin begins to change midway through as well. He started to realize that: "hey, maybe I've been reading this the wrong way!" Naw, really? I felt very offended by the fact that such a man with prejudices against these sorts of essays was the director of a writing program. You know I wouldn't mind it much as long as he didn't try to justify his answers! He dug himself with the dung and his experience with his daughter and fellow colleague were good examples were he fails to see his faults.
First, with the daughter. She's 13. Hormones running wild and even she is less blinded by prejudice than Tobin is. He wants to make an absolute. He wants to be the one right. It's not hard to hear the voice of the author in this essay although I'm not sure I like it!
Then there was Ralph. He probably made the most sense to me as I felt the same way. When Tim and Jerry write about an apple, guess what? They're probably still talking about an apple. We don't have to read student essays with the expectation that it should somehow be ingenious otherwise why would they be in a freshman comp. class? And just because the author doesn't agree with the argument that does not give him the right to lower the student's grade solely for that reason! Ugh...I just felt so offended by this work. I felt like Tobin, who longed to talk about his student's faults, admitted some of his own, seems to have somewhat of an inferiority complex as I saw. It was like: you were probably picked on in school and now your past has come to haunt Tobin where he expresses it through an article. I felt like I was getting more into the head of the author than I was the learning anything about helping students.
Did anyone else feel this way? Forget talking about a car wreck--this was a train wreck! I felt hit in so many places by someone's prejudice against the kind of students who are popular or have personal experiences that mean something to them. What more does the teacher want? A lie? A blatant lie? I think Tobin teaches us that we shouldn't be prejudiced and to be prepared for all kinds of essays. I just hope that Tobin dispels his own demons after this essay. Be at peace, R.I.P.
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