Still Transitioning
Deborah Kehoe, English Instructor & Writing Center Director, Northeast Community College
Still Transitioning
I am looking forward once again to attending this fine event where Mississippi writing teachers gather to commune and confer about the responsibilities and challenges we all face, challenges that change, and those that never seem to go away. I am especially happy to be on the program as a facilitator with Wendy Goldberg and Mike Schwartz of the Conversation Corner on academic writing. I have been teaching writing since I was a wet-behind-the-ears graduate student over 30 years ago. I know what can happen to a person who does something so all-consuming (if done full-heartedly, the only way I know how to do anything I care about) for that long: acedia, close-mindedness, the enemies of a fruitful late career.
I also know the narrow-mindedness of youth and the unfortunate conviction that only the new has value. I wish I had not been that sort of person years ago and that I had had a more discerning, more gracious, attitude in my work. I wish it had taken less time for me to become a teacher who listens genuinely to others and reflects honestly upon herself. I cannot re-paint what then I was all those years ago, but now, I resolve almost daily to acknowledge both the spirit of the times and the wisdom of the ages.
While I trust and treasure the experience that sustain me in the classroom and which I bring to this symposium, I am more pleased with my enduring curiosity about what I will learn this time around, perhaps from those who represent the next 30 years of writing instruction in Mississippi.