November 2024 Director’s Letter

Dear all,

I had a dream last night that I got a tiny tattoo of a turtle on my left wrist. The dream came rushing back to my consciousness as I was arranging stickers on my kitchen counter (photo below). “Slow and Steady,” one reads. “Slow Growth is Good Growth,” says another.  

I like to look at the stickers on my students’ laptops. I get the opportunity to scan their collections when they are doing in-class writing or working in small groups. Stickers surely do not tell the whole story of a person, but they do give glimpses of insight into their curator.

Yesterday in ENGL 5000, “Teaching Multimodal Composition,” we were talking with our cohort of first-year TAs about how to teach rhetorical analysis, the first major assignment in ENGL 2500. Cornell Brellenthin, one of the co-instructors of 5000, shared that she often invites students to read their own laptop stickers rhetorically to introduce them to the idea that, as the title of our ENGL 2500 textbook contends, everything is an argument.

I have taught everything’s an argument since 2004, edition after edition, so perhaps that is why I haven’t put any stickers on my laptop. I collect them, I like to look at them, I apparently share them in newsletters. But I don’t commit. Perhaps another reason is my awareness that I need and relate to different quippy messages at different times: sometimes “Protect Your Energy” (look for the sparkles in the photo below) is the message that is most resonant, other times I prefer messages of the hustle and “let’s go” variety. (Incidentally, I also don’t have any bumper stickers on my car. The only one I can imagine committing to says, “Honk if you’re letting the soft animal of your body love what it loves,” which many of you will recognize as a reference to Mary Oliver’s famous poem, “Wild Geese.”)

Some of the sticker messages could serve as mantras. As Thanksgiving break approaches, my turtle tattoo dream suggests that “slow and steady” may be a good mantra for me. Another resonant-for-me message/mantra I came across recently, “use the difficulty,” is from a 2002 interview with the actor Michael Caine. Some days, I would resent the suggestion that any of us should find a way to use difficulties—particularly when some difficulties are so enormous, so devastating—but I found the idea comforting this week because it pointed me away from helplessness and toward agency.

What messages or mantras are most resonant for you today, this week, this month, this semester, this year? Can someone else’s words serve you at this moment, or do you need to write your own? Can you think of ways to invite your students to read or write their way into the messages that are most resonant for them?

All best,

Lesley