While provocative in ways I suspect he never intended, Joseph R. Teller’s Are We Teaching Composition All Wrong? proves to be an essay that should, ironically, be significantly revised after conferencing with someone well versed in teaching composition.

Broadly, Teller’s essay makes a common first-year composition mistake by significantly misrepresenting “teaching composition” and then proceeding to attack the misrepresentations. However, late in the piece, Teller wanders into some important conclusions that actually are warranted composition practices—despite his suggesting these are somehow alternatives to endorsed practice.

Teller opens by claiming that “compositionists have been enamored of a pedagogical orthodoxy” he briefly details in three bullet points.

In my first-year seminar, here would be the first area for conferencing and revision: how does the writer justify the condescending “enamored” (it appears Teller has a literaturist’s low opinion of the compositionist lurking underneath the real reason for this essay; maybe a bit of professional distress…

Richard Avedon – Location Portrait work known as ‘Into the American West’.

Richard Avedon began his major photographic career as a fashion photographer for fashion magazine harpers bazaar, after being inspired by his parents influential careers in fashion. He has originally begun shooting identification images for the merchant marines during his two year service.

After Avedon’s marine service he was hired as a staff photographer for Harpers Bazaar, forming a close bond with the art director during his understudy from him at the ‘New School for Social Research in New York City’ after he left the Marines and he began to focus his fashion images on showing the latest fashions in real life situations and settings such as Paris’s cafes and streetcars. Avedon bought a new style to  fashion photography by demanding that in his images the models show emotions and movement whereas before the norm had been for the…

We have started organizing our classroom library by favorite authors and favorite topics.

Yesterday, during Readers Workshop, I suggested a book to one of my kindergarteners. He looked at it and then asked me, “what level is it?” I was stunned. Where had he heard about levels? It certainly wasn’t in our classroom. None of my books are leveled and I’ve never mentioned anything about levels in our talks about how readers choose books to read.

I asked him what he meant. He told me, “the level tells you whether you can read the book or not.” Wow. We went on to have a great conversation about how readers (not levels) decide if they can read a book. Readers can choose a book that interests them, an old favorite, a favorite author or character, and they can read the pictures, read the words or remember read.

But I couldn’t get…