Postpostmodern Compositionist

This is not a new post. A few months ago I was thinking about switching the blog over to Substack and this is the only piece that I posted there. I  wanted to preserve this post as  I am going to be deleting my Substack account. This post was originally posted on June 22nd, 2026.  *** Why do I call myself a lapsed critical pedagogue? The word lapsed suggests that I once believed and no longer do. This may be somewhat deceptive, as I like to believe that critical pedagogy still informs my teaching philosophy in a meaningful way. It doesn’t have so much to do with my teaching as much as it does with my jaded pessimism towards the current state of critical pedagogy. I want to believe in it, but I can’t, and ultimately I have been conflicted about whether critical pedagogy is dead and if it has actually been dead for a long time. When I say “dead,” this doesn’t necessarily mean that critical pedagogy-informed approaches to teaching aren’t being implemented in American classro...

Okay, so this is the second post where I have reneged on my promise to talk more about Composition & Resistance , however, as one can tell by the title of this post, I have been sidetracked by a more timely event. Expect my musings on Composition & Resistance next time.  My mother's side of the family is from New York, and during my childhood we spent most of our summers in Southold, Long Island. In August of the year 2000, my parents took my sister and I into the city and we went to the observation deck located at the top of the South Tower. I was nine years old and thus my memory of the experience is fleeting, however I distinctly remember two things: 1) I was afraid of how high up we were, and for this reason I avoided standing too close to the windowpanes where you could look out at the rest of Manhattan. 2) I also remember being intrigued that there was a Sbarro pizza restaurant within the observation deck space. The past feels like a dream, and while it is hard for me...

In my last blog post, I mentioned that the next two blog posts would feature articles from  Composition & Resistance . Those posts are definitely still coming, but I had an interesting idea I have been thinking about over the past few months, and this week I couldn't help myself in deciding to move it to the top of the docket. At the end of the day this is my blog, so I change the rules whenever I want, right?  Trust me, I have no illusions. I am aware that my blog doesn't get much traffic, if any at all. However, I did notice that Blogger's country-tracking feature shows visitors from over 18 countries, including Kenya, Turkey, and Vietnam. I am not sure how these people are finding my blog or why they are interested in it (perhaps they are rhetoric & composition scholars?), but I also suspect that they might be bots who are scraping the internet for text they can use to train AI models.  Aside: This is a direct comment for people who might be reading this: If y...