In an earlier version of this essay, I opened as follows:

Rereading this introduction now, I realize it won't work; it doesn't do what I need it to do. First, it's misleading because it creates faulty expectations: I'm not going to talk much about narrative theory in this piece. Second, and perhaps more importantly, it raises questions about my academic ethos by suggesting that I'm uninformed about our field. Haven't I read enough composition journals to understand how much (perhaps too much?) we value stories?

Despite these weaknesses, I'm having trouble letting go of my old introduction. I like that word "luminary." And I like that I come across as nervy. But I suspect my biggest resistance to letting go is what happened when I read my introduction aloud at a recent conference: people laughed in all the right places.

This is an essay about revision and the hope that exists when change is possible. Specifically, I argue that disruptions—when foregrounded in a variety of situations, including texts, conferences, and classrooms—delay closure and thereby create spaces where theories and relationships can be rethought, renegotiated, revised. Given the transformative potential of disruption, I contend that we must analyze disruption as something other than evidence of poor taste or failed pedagogy. Instead, I suggest that we reread disruption so that we might rewrite it. To help us move in that direction, I discuss and apply Roland Barthes's metaphor of the punctum to demonstrate how disruptive stories generate new knowledge as they disrupt and revise the reader. I then argue that the metaphor of the punctum, with its ability to locate and problematize elusive disruptions like silences, holds special significance for writing teachers who enact feminist pedagogies in their classrooms. These implications I explore in the final section of this essay, where I read silence-as-disruption in my own life and discuss the revisions such a reading inspires.

Reading Disruption

In an essay about photography, Roland Barthes distinguishes between two elements in a given photograph, the studium and the punctum. Interpreting Barthes, Jane Gallop explains that the studium

For me, the studium is like theory that lacks a purpose beyond itself. In my pre-composition days, as a student of American Studies, I befriended the studium and found it interesting in an academic, cerebral kind of way. But I longed to move outside the borders of that field's theoretical picture. I longed to experience the pierce of the punctum, the second element "that leads us outside the frame" (Gallop 156). Gallop explains that "the punctum, by breaking open the studium, breaks open a sterile impermeable enclosure and allows what Barthes calls `life' to pass through, to permeate the frame" (153). For this disruption to occur, a photo needs a viewer, a person who sees in the photo some detail that moves it from a mere flat surface to a living event. This transformation takes place, Gallop explains, when the viewer imagines how the people or the scene captured on film exist now, in "real life."

Because I'm a writing teacher and not a photographer, I always link the notion of the punctum to Louise Rosenblatt's idea of an aesthetic reading. In both cases, a reader personalizes a text by getting inside its borders, by connecting with it in way that enables him to feel its influence. For me, Barthes's metaphor makes explicit that which Rosenblatt's implies: this type of reader-text connection occurs when a reader sees within a text's borders some humanness—an unexpected detail, an unplanned moment, a disruption of sorts—whose presence asks her to imagine the conditions and experiences of another's life. Through this imagining, through an outsider's experience of the insides of the frame, the text moves beyond it and the reader is changed.

As a writing teacher, I feel the prick of the punctum at least three times a week. My students have humanized and disrupted every syllabus and every lesson plan I've ever written. I spend hours designing courses that I bring to my students with the best theoretical intentions only to find that their presence makes those courses come to life in ways I could never have predicted. And when other teachers write about their unpredictable and disruptive classroom experiences, and I read what they've written, I see how their stories, like my own, break the theoretical frame. Their stories remind me of "the gaps and ruptures in practice—the confusions and contradictions that are always a part of the interplay of teaching" (Orner 84), and, I would add, a part of living.

The metaphor of the punctum is a powerful one because it suggests that stories of disruption have tremendous transformative potential. That is, these stories offer proof that revision in possible. And by presenting the sites and conditions of disruption, these stories provide us with a means to envision the terms of our revision. But the metaphor also obligates us to write these stories in a certain kind of way: we must highlight the disruption rather than gloss over it, or worse yet, explain it away. Drawing on the rhetorical theories of Kenneth Burke, Michael Hassett argues that the latter strategy actually closes down conversation between writer and reader because it assumes persuasive texts must be fixed and unified, with the writer having the final say. The former strategy, however, is premised on the postmodern notion that writers and readers work together to make meaning of textual experiences. Rather than create texts that have the illusion of unity and coherence, Hassett argues that writers should note the contradictions, the ruptures, the gaps, what Burke refers to as a process of discounting. By discounting their own language, and their own experiences in language, writers mortify both their texts and their lives: they sacrifice unity and coherence for the sake of conversation and expanded points of view. By making a textual space possible for readers, stories of disruption written as disruption promote a revising attitude, one that fosters patience as it delays closure; they break silences as they welcome in alternative perspectives. And, most importantly, when they are read honestly and hard, these texts challenge what it means to read and respond.

The reader encounters the punctum, an unexpected detail that disrupts a text's coherence. This disruption says to the reader: "I'm fluid, and I have room for you." With this gesture, the text creates a space for a reader to respond. Once engaged with the text in this way, the reader cannot leave its borders without being changed by it. As such, there's a kind of hidden agenda working behind the punctum. It's a bit like being invited over to a friend's house for what you think will be a relaxing dinner only to realize your friend is hosting a surprise party in your honor. As you walk into the house, you step back as unexpected shouts and smiling bodies launch themselves in your direction. It's an uncomfortable, somewhat scary moment, a moment in which your original intentions are shattered. Who are these people? And why are they yelling at me? Then there's a flicker of recognition. Oh, that's Maria. Quickly, strangers turn into friends. The dinner becomes a party. As you reorganize the terms of the evening, you create new expectations, and things begin to sort themselves out properly.

The punctum is the detail that sparks that initial moment of discomfort; the resolution is the reader's reconciliation of the text's new terms. And the effects of this revision stay with the reader long after the story is over.

Understandably, academic writers whose disciplines value unity and coherence might hesitate to take up Hassett's call. Indeed, the implications of his argument must be considered within political and material contexts. As Gesa Kirsch's work illuminates, feminist scholars whose subject matter and research methods challenge conventional notions of "good" scholarship raise questions about what counts as meaningful academic work (Women). These scholars ask: Why are some topics more research-worthy than others? Why are some audiences considered more academically suitable than others? How and to whom is research communicated, and why? Despite the importance of exploring these issues, Kirsch argues that scholars whose unconventional academic work raises questions about the politics of academic discourse have a harder time getting published and must struggle to be taken seriously as authorities in their field. The political and material consequences of unconventional scholarship thus suggest why composition scholars might refrain from writing in ways that foreground disruption. That is, when essays about classroom disruptions are written as disruption, they can potentially undermine the writer's authority as both a scholar and a teacher.

One example of a disruptive, revision-inspiring essay that challenges academic norms on several levels is "Why Doesn't this Feel Empowering," in which Elizabeth Ellsworth describes how an increased awareness of racism on the campus of the University of Wisconsin-Madison prompted her to design a new course, C&I 607:

When Ellsworth, a feminist theorist and associate professor in the Women's Studies program at the University of Wisconsin-Madison, first walked into that C&I classroom, she took her syllabus, her course rationale, and her theories with her. And although she and her students were dedicated to eradicating racism, they quickly discovered that naming that racism—indeed, speaking it—was harder than any of them had imagined. Ellsworth reports that she and her students

While Ellsworth and her group did affect change on their campus by speaking from their positions within smaller affinity groups, the stories from her classroom and her reflections about them challenge theoretical assumptions that undergird both feminist theory and critical pedagogy. Specifically, her experiences raise serious doubts that classrooms can be "safe places" where students are empowered through voicing their experiences and dialoguing with others about theirs. Ellsworth remarks that a kind of dialoguing that is achieved when students feel unified and safe "was both impossible and undesirable in C&I 607" (106).

For me, these moments in Ellsworth's essay, where she talks about the struggle to speak, feel very important in that they show how difficult dialoguing can be, even when (perhaps especially when?) those people in dialogue recognize the value and importance of contradiction and difference. As such, Ellsworth's essay is a perfect example of how disruptive stories function as the punctum of our theories. Through her story, we as readers experience the contradictions, the confusions, the disappointments, the pain.

And the fact that so many readers criticize Ellsworth's essay (and Ellsworth herself) simply underscores my point: we've been conditioned to read disruption in negative terms. For example, Patricia Bizzell argues that Ellsworth's essay shows how identity politics often leads to what she terms "group selfishness," where an oppressed group, fearing outside threats, tends to "insist ever more strongly on its own victim role and its unmet needs, and concomitantly to reduce the chances of working with other groups against common sources of oppression" (298). Because Ellsworth's students didn't work together as a whole group but instead fought campus racism through their smaller affinity groups, Bizzell declares the course a "failure" (290). (Actually, she says Ellsworth says it was a failure, but I can't find Ellsworth saying that anywhere in her piece). While Gesa Kirsch commends Ellsworth for critiquing traditional notions of dialogue, she, like Bizzell, finds Ellsworth's description of her course problematic:

Bizzell's reading that the course "failed" and Kirsch's observation that these classroom experiences are "problematic" and "troubling" are for me another way of saying that our stories of disruption can live on if we view them as the punctum of our theories. By proving that theory-in-practice is a personal and complicated affair, stories of disruption become something other than the troubling consequences of failed pedagogy. Instead, they can be used to generate new knowledge, new ways of looking at ourselves and our interactions with students. Ellsworth's inclusion of disruptive details, the details so many of her colleagues deem problematic and troubling, create a space for a reader. They are, in fact, the very details that resonate with Bizzell and prompt her to revise and articulate more clearly her own theory of teaching:

I've quoted Bizzell at length because I think her response to her own reading of Ellsworth's essay is unique: it's the first I've seen where a writing theorist writes her reaction to a story of practice in terms of the story itself. Although the students in Ellsworth's class go unnamed, we see them here, living on in Bizzell's retheorizing, in her own academic project, in her own story of coming to practice Bizzell's response thus demonstrates how stories of disruption promote revision by enhancing what Michael Hassett calls a reader's response-ability.

I want to be clear that I'm not suggesting that we accept all pedagogical practices as success stories and therefore uncritically accept whatever it is teachers do in their classrooms. To do so would be reductive and even dangerous. Instead, I'm arguing that writing our stories of disruption is worthwhile because they suggest new ways for writing and reading our field. Through our experience of what might be termed the Ellsworth event, we can begin to see the value of researching and writing the stories we're so hesitant to tell, those where theory breaks down within the specific contexts of people's lives.

The stories of teachers are not the only ways we disrupt and thus experience the humanity of theory. Reading and revising through the punctum provides us with a way to reconsider all our professional experiences. Such a revision asks us to remain committed to the theoretical potential of our classroom work as well as to explore that potential in other sites as well, sites like conference sessions, colloquia, and faculty meetings. In short, any place where we expect uniformity under a theory and instead we get disruption—that is, any place where life seeps through the frame—is a place worthy of exploration, research, and writing.

Feminist theorist Nancy K. Miller advocates this kind of work through the lens of what she calls narrative criticism, a way of locating an act of criticism within an autobiographical context. Miller's model is grounded in feminist epistemology; she refuses to view the personal and the theoretical as binary opposites. Instead, she contends that theoretical readings within the context of autobiographical events enable feminists to reconfigure the terms of the argument; as Miller puts it, "rather than handing `theory' over to `them,' what we can argue about is precisely the practice of theory, and therefore the question of whether theory can be personalized and the personal theorized" (21).

Miller's enactment of narrative criticism in her own writing provides examples of ways we might write about—indeed, linger onour practices outside the classroom. For me, Miller's work humanizes theory in a way I have never before experienced. In the following passage, for example, Miller reflects on her experiences at a feminist theory conference and shows how the practice of theory is a messy business because it is a human affair. Specifically, Miller remembers

In this passage we see how Miller's experience with her colleagues pierces, humanizes, and complicates feminist theory. Her account demonstrates that, even when we agree to the theoretical terms of an argument, we as individual practitioners—as people with different histories and identities—still struggle to enact them. On this occasion, we learn that, where voice and identity meet contradiction and multiplicity, there is disruption, and there is pain.

But why have I, as the writer and creator of this text, chosen to include this one passage when another might have done just as well? Before I explore this question, I need you to remember that the punctum demands a reader whose personal engagement makes a text come to life. And in the margins next to Miller's remembered occasion, where I've written, "Wow . . . Silence . . . The heat!" I begin to do just that. For me, Miller's story comes to life because I too have experienced the silence she relates. I can remember attending the National Graduate Women's Studies Conference a few years ago and feeling that same awkward and deep tension during a panel discussion on violence against women.

Someone in the audience stood up and accused the panelists of being ethnocentric because they failed to consider how members of different cultures might see certain behaviors as "normal" and not necessarily violent and oppressive. The panelists were understandably shaken (it's scary when someone implies that you're a racist) and quickly agreed that feminism must take into account cultural differences. Of course, I agree, but I nevertheless sat there, furious—and silent, wondering why in the hell a consciousness of cultural differences always gets more attention than the universal wrongness of clitoridectomy, rape, and abuse. As I read Miller's passage and remember my own, I understand more fully how difficult it is to speak when speaking both identifies me and silences the very people with whom I seek to identify. And not wanting to silence these others, I silence myself.

Reading Silence-as-Disruption

The above discussion suggests that the metaphor of the punctum holds special significance for writing teachers who try to enact feminist theories in their classrooms. That is, the punctum of feminist theory, the disruption, the thing that isn't supposed to be there, is, in fact, not there. In situations like Miller's conference experience or my own, the humanizing disruption isn't the eye-rolling of a disgruntled student; instead, it's an act of self-silencing, one born from the feeling that what we have to say can't, or shouldn't, be spoken here. But because we're so unused to calling silences "disruptions," I think we're missing out on some important stories, those which both locate sites and name the conditions for future revisions. As such, I argue that we must find ways to speak the silences in our practice of theory, for without them, our theories, which so dutifully strive to foreground contradiction and difference (the terms of life), will instead appear monolithic, uniform, and dead.

A few weeks ago my sister Lori sent me pictures of my four-year-old niece, and enclosed with the photos was a short note she scribbled during her few busy hours home alone with the kids. "I went to Julie's open house at pre-school," she wrote, "and the teacher says Julie never talks in class, that we need to build up her self-esteem at home so she'll want to participate more. I was bummed because that was exactly the way I was in school, too."

I put the note down on top of the pictures of this bright, articulate, amazingly energetic child, and marveled at how someone so "verbal" could be so quiet and timid in school. Was this the same little girl I took care of last summer, the one who talked so much at lunch that I'd be forced to reheat her food before she would eat it? I picked up the note and reread it, searching for some clue, some way I could solve the problem of my niece's silence and alleviate my sister's concern. But instead my eyes lingered on her final words: I was bummed because that was exactly the way I was in school, too.

My sister is five years older than me and was, for many years, my role model. She was the first of my siblings to graduate from college, to get a "real" job with benefits. When she bought her red Mazda RX-7, the very car she had been dreaming of owning since she was ten, she took me for a ride around the block. I can remember how proud I was and how much I wanted to be like her. Since that day, our lives have diverged dramatically. She makes a lot of money, owns a home, and goes to work everyday in tailored suits she promises one day to give to me. Despite our differences in lifestyle, we remain very close, and I think our connection in part is due to the love I feel for her daughter, my niece, who was named after me.

My connection to both of them is deepened with the realization that, like them, I too never spoke in school. I never shared my thoughts and ideas in classroom conversations. I was, in fact, so afraid of speaking out that, rather than interrupt my teacher and ask if I could go to the restroom, I wet my pants while the whole class sat in a circle listening to her read The Little Engine that Could. I still remember that feeling I had, sitting there on the floor in my red pleated skirt, struggling—physically—to make the adjustment from half-day kindergarten to day-long first grade. And then I just let go. It was a relief, really, until the boy behind me (whose name I can still remember) said, "Oh, look, water." To which the prissiest girl in class responded, "Someone wet her pants," her voice sing-songy and accusatory. I looked up into the face of my sweet teacher, the one I could not bring myself to interrupt, and said, "I know."

The reality of classroom silences is one writing teachers, particularly feminist teachers, are familiar. As teachers, we seek to create classroom atmospheres where students feel safe to express their diverse points of view, even when doing so means we'll hear arguments in support of the very things we oppose. We're quick to realize that institutional realities render notions like classroom collaboration, dialogue, and student-centered authority problematic. Nevertheless, we hold dear the idea that when students are talking, learning is happening. In fact, we believe so much in the value of student talk that we worry most about those students who don't talk, who for whatever reason opt out of classroom conversations, typically from their positions at the back of the room. Because I'm a feminist and a teacher, I'm especially attuned to those students who don't talk. I worry that maybe the culture of the university—or worse yet, my class—might be threatening them, silencing them. And so I continually search for ways to bring these students in, to make them responsible thinkers by fostering what begins with their ability to respond.

My own struggles to break the silences in my life and in the classroom parallel the decades of work done by feminist advocates both within and without the academy who view the silencing of the other—women, people of color, gays or lesbians, members of the working class, the elderly, for example—as a primary way of perpetuating oppression. Canonical revisions have, to some extent, recognized those erasures, and now we have the voices of writers who were once silenced speaking to us through the multitude of multicultural anthologies designed specifically for the composition classroom, texts like Rereading America and Common Ground, which are popular among the teachers at my school. Sometimes, I feel like the mere inclusion of these voices is enough, that the students who were once silent will begin to speak when they see their truths mirrored in an officially assigned classroom text. I'm thinking now of a course I taught last semester, in which I assigned an essay by Brent Staples titled "Just Walk on By."² In that piece, Staples talks about how he, an African American male, walks the city streets at night and feels a pressure to adopt a certain persona, to whistle classical music, for example, so that the white people who pass him don't think him a criminal. After I assigned that essay, several of my male students of color spoke for the first time, talking about how they are often labeled as "gang bangers" and harassed by the police. Then a young woman in the class talked about how, when she walks alone, she feels frightened by all men, whether "they're whistling or not!"

After classroom conversations like this one, I feel like I as teacher am doing what Adrienne Rich inspires me to do, for myself and my students:

But, to be honest, conversations like the one described above don't often happen in my classroom. Maybe because, for the most part, I teach Anglo kids from middle to upper class homes who are more threatened by the once-silent voices then they are empowered by them. Other times I think the problem is me. I often sense that I don't facilitate discussions as well as I might: I cut them off too soon, or I let them go on too long. I worry so much about taking over that I don't say anything, or I panic that a student's racist comment will go unchallenged, so I jump in and pontificate. I admit that I used to avoid these problems altogether by deliberately structuring courses and assigning texts that steered away from controversy and debate. Fearing that heated debate on controversial issues might silence some students, I've silenced the issues—and as such, the texts—and thus perpetuated the very problem their inclusion was meant to solve. In Plain and Ordinary Things: Reading Women in the Writing Classroom, Deborah Anne Dooley opens a section on re-membering Adrienne Rich with this line: "Inevitably, the first problem is silence" (167). And inevitably, for me, it is.³

Teaching Disruption

In the Fall semester of 1994, I think I underwent a kind of paradigm shift, only I didn't know it. I was teaching English 100 ("basic" writing) for the first time, studying the rhetorical theories of Kenneth Burke, and getting divorced. Although I never discussed Burkean theories explicitly with my students (I did talk about my divorce), they were there, influencing my unit syllabi and assignment sheets, my choice of metaphors, my use of puns. It wasn't until later, after my students had long since moved on to English 101, that I felt like I could articulate Burke's main thesis: we as human beings can become more perfectly human—that is, that we can behave more humanely—if we exploit that quality that distinguishes us from all other life forms: our conscious use of language, our desire to act on our motives through language, our ability to be revised by our language. For Burke, this distinctly human awareness, this metalanguage, is important because it helps us develop pliancy in our thinking; it equips us with different lenses through which we can view the world and, thus, come to understand diverse points of view. Simply put, metalanguage is a way out of violence: if we can see the world through another person's terms, we can talk with that person, and talking, by its nature, delays killing.

That same semester I read Mary Louse Pratt's Arts of the Contact Zone for the second time, and, as probably happens more than we realize, my theoretical interests—the stuff I was learning—carried over into my teaching in conscious and unconscious ways. Although the first unit was fairly typical (students were asked to a personal experience essay), I diverged from the standard "community profile" essay in the second unit and instead asked my students to write about what happens when they, as members of two overlapping communities, experience a clash in the overlap. The conscious ways I imported Burke and Pratt into my classroom are apparent in the language of my title for that second unit, "Analyzing a Contact Zone," and my assignment sheet for the second essay, which began with the following Burke quotation from the introduction to Attitudes Toward History: "[This book] operates on the miso-philanthropic assumption that getting along with people is one devil of a difficult task, but that, in the last analysis, we should all want to get along with people (and do want to)." The language I used to explain the purpose of the assignment, which appears later, echoes both Burke's quotation and my later understanding of Burke's thesis:

I then get more specific in terms of what I want my students to actually do, and here I can see how Burke meets Pratt:

My intentions in designing this assignment were for my students to identify and analyze a conflict so that they could later, in their third essay, write a persuasive letter to someone with whom they disagreed. Rather than silence the contexts of their conflict, I asked them to speak them. My hope was that, through speaking conflict in more detailed and layered terms, my students would acquire a kind of patience that delays violence and creates a space for change.

When I assigned the essay, I began by talking about the idea of a community: students drew clusters of communities with which they identified, and I drew mine on the board. I labeled two of my communities "feminist" and "football fan," and, after my students had finished writing, I explained what I meant by clash. "I'm a feminist," I said (eyes rolled, of course). "That means I'm committed to ending women's oppression, but I'm also a huge football fan. I go to all the games, I cheer wildly when the defense sacks the quarterback, I scream `get him' when the opposing team makes a good run." While I oppose violence, particularly those societal conditions that make violence against women an epidemic, I celebrate male violence in the form of football. "How do I live with this contradiction?" I asked. My students looked at me, I looked at them. It was one of those teaching situations where my question demanded more of me than I was prepared to give. "I don't have an answer, really. I guess I'd have to think about it." Then a big grin. "Actually, I'd have to write about it." Then I asked them: what clashes do you experience when the principles and values of two of your communities, groups with whom you identify, overlap and disagree? Although I didn't realize it at the time, my Burke/Pratt intersection was really asking my students to find ways to talk to the various parts of themselves, to see the world from two different and conflicting positions, both of which reside within them.

I don't have the papers my students wrote that semester, but looking back, I remember two of them vividly. One was written by Sylvia, a "non-traditional" student in her late 20s, who was married and worked full-time in the university's administration office. Sylvia participated a lot in class, asking questions, leading discussion, always bringing her unique perspective to the class. In her paper, she talked about being a feminist and a Mexican American, and those times, primarily with her husband's family, when she chose to remain silent, even when her husband's uncle made blatantly sexist remarks. She reflected on her family's pressures for her to have a baby, and how she preferred the freedom of taking classes and going out at night. Although she said there were times she spoke in situations where a person's behavior clashed with her feminist principles, usually while at work, she said that, for the most part, she kept quiet, opting to avoid conflict and instead keep the family peace.

Josh was unlike Sylvia in many ways. Eighteen, with baggy pants and the omnipresent baseball cap, he sat in the back row and didn't say much during the first unit. So, when I read a draft of his essay, I was surprised by its intensity. A musician in a punk rock band, Josh told the story of playing a gig one night, where he met a group of people and went with them to a party afterwards. In simple language that made my heart ache, he described walking into his new-found friend's home, only to find an enormous Nazi flag hanging on the wall. Josh, who is also Jewish, said his heart quickened, and, although he knew there were many neo-Nazis in the punk rock scene, he never actually met one before. And there he was, scared and angry, a "guest" in this man's home.

What did he do? Like Sylvia, Josh opted to keep quiet. Playing that music meant so much to him, he said, that he didn't want to ruin his chances. He said he felt bad for not speaking up, almost like he was letting his family and his culture down. But he also said, in pragmatic fashion, that his getting angry with the Nazi wouldn't have made him change his ways. "I probably would've gotten beaten up, and what good would that have done?" I remember that line from Josh's paper. I remember underlining it, feeling its importance. Libby Rankin asks, why do we, as teachers, "remember certain faces?" (3). As I reflect on that semester, I realize that I connected with Sylvia and Josh because they both handle conflict and contradiction very much like me: we all opt for silence.

Or, at least we used to.

Writing Disruption

What I just wrote is one of those "happily-ever-after" endings that glosses over disruption for the sake of unity and coherence. It's the kind of ending I didn't want to write, and I wrote it anyway. This experience makes me realize even more how hard it is to write about classroom practices in the way I'm arguing they be written.

In her third paper, Sylvia wrote a letter to her husband's uncle, asking him to stop bugging her about when she was going to have a baby. It was convincing, rhetorically appropriate, and I think I gave in an A-. She told me later that she actually gave it to her uncle, and at first I was delighted. Here was my assignment, my theory, being put to some good use outside the classroom. But then Sylvia told me that she and her husband were arguing because the uncle, who found her letter offensive, was no longer speaking to them. My heart sank. I felt responsible, and guilty. After class, I consoled myself by rationalizing that I didn't require Sylvia to give the letter to her uncle, that the ensuing argument wasn't my fault.

But this logic doesn't sit well with me anymore. It's premised on the notion that I "failed" because my assignment, which I designed as a way to avoid argument, actually created two new ones. If I'm going to practice the theory I preach, then I need to reread this event with an eye toward locating its revisionary potential. And when I do, I see that, in a way, I am responsible. I taught my students how to foreground contradiction and difference; I told them that doing so was a good thing, and I believed it. I still do. But what I didn't teach them was a method for writing those contradictions in ways that gave their readers a chance to respond—both vocally and peacefully. Through my experiences with Sylvia, I see that agonistic argument, the kind that prompts me to go silent, to retreat to my separate and safe corner, doesn't take place simply because someone expresses a differing point of view; instead it occurs when that view is expressed in tones that offer me no peaceful choice but to retreat. And although my retreat is non-violent, its silent defensiveness does little to promote or restore conversation. Thus, I argue that a feminist writing pedagogy designed to break silences and foster alternative points of view must also be accompanied by a postmodern pedagogy of expression, one that strives to answer the question: how do we keep talking to each other after we've made our differences known?

And then there is Josh, who reminds me that there are times when, in fact, conversation is impossible. Unlike Sylvia, Josh decided not to pursue the conflict he introduced in his second essay. Instead, in his third paper, he shifted gears and wrote a persuasive letter to members of the popular alternative rock band Green Day, in which he accused them of selling out their earliest, most loyal fans for signing with a major label and going commercial. Back then, I was disappointed that he didn't write a letter to the Nazi he met at the club, and I told him so several times in conference. I thought somehow the assignment would fail him if he didn't confront the person who silenced him. But now I realize that there are situations in which a speaker's tone simply doesn't matter. In these instances, where the only response is sure to be a violent response, my call for a postmodern pedagogy of expression seems embarrassingly naive.

And isn't it odd that I haven't mentioned Lisa yet? As I was rereading this essay, I was surprised that I omitted her story, the one that makes the terms of my revision most clear. Lisa was a student in that same class, and she impressed me early in the semester with her hard work and her willingness to talk over her writing. So, I was really disappointed when Lisa came to class without a draft of her second essay on the day first drafts were due. Her explanation? She couldn't write one. It was impossible, she said, because she didn't belong to two communities whose principles and values clashed. We talked a lot during that class, and during office hours, too. I was originally convinced that she simply wasn't thinking about it hard enough. "What do you argue about?" I asked. She told me she didn't argue; she didn't like arguments; she stayed away from them. "What do you care about?" I asked. "Softball, and my boyfriend." I tried to pursue the "woman/athlete" angle, but she didn't go for it. After talking for a long while, I finally realized that she didn't see a clash of values in her life, and I wasn't going to make her.

I could see the strain my assignment and her inability to write it was putting on her. She was a good student, someone who prided herself on fulfilling teacher expectations. The fact that she couldn't even though she wanted to made her frustrated, and yes, angry. I finally told her that she could write a paper about how she couldn't write the paper, which she did, and which I thought was well done. But in her self-reflection, Lisa said she didn't like her paper because it wasn't the "real" assignment. In her third piece, the persuasive letter, Lisa wrote to a "hypothetical" teacher of composition, arguing that students who can't write assigned papers experience unnecessary frustration, a frustration that could be alleviated, she said, if only the teacher were less controlling, more flexible, and had enough trust in her students to let them choose their own paper topics.

Disruption Revising

I could end here by talking about how Lisa's letter hurt when I read it. Or about how her letter prompted yet another silent retreat on my part—I decided not to teach that assignment again the following semester. And I'd be telling the truth, for what it's worth. But as I reconsider my experiences with Lisa, I see that I initially read her silence—her inability to write the "real" paper—as evidence that there was something wrong with her. In fact, in a previous version of this essay, I included this endnote, a kind of diagnosis of Lisa's dysfunction:

Apparently, somewhere along the line, I decided Lisa couldn't write the second paper because she led a blissfully pain-free life. "Wait, just wait," I can hear some part of myself saying. "Just wait until your life starts to fall apart, and then, believe me, you'll have plenty to say about contradiction and difference." In short, Lisa's silence became nothing more to me than a sign of her youth and naiveté.

However, with this rereading, I wonder why I couldn't see earlier what seems so obvious to me now: Lisa did, in fact, belong to two communities whose values clashed: She was a good student, someone who prided herself on fulfilling teacher expectations. The fact that she couldn't even though she wanted to made her frustrated, and yes, angry. As I reread her silence, I don't see an absence of pain. Instead, I see a young woman struggling to ask: How do I be a good student when what I want most to say is that the teacher's assignment sucks? The fact that I as the teacher couldn't guide Lisa to this place, that I was unable to invite her to question her assumptions about what it means to be both "good and angry," that she felt compelled to write her persuasive letter to a fictional teacher rather than me, makes me nervous. I sense a punctum of a sharper magnitude.

In my next version of this essay, I think I'll write about all the lousy assignments I had to endure in school and how I fulfilled them with a click in my step and a big grin on my good-girl face. Maybe then Lisa's silence, or rather, the silent Lisa in me, will get heard.