The presentation Sharon and I did with Peter Elbow as respondent came off extremely well, I think. Thanks to Peter’s generous presence (and I love Sharon’s observation that he was taking notes in a Gryffindor notebook), we got a big hall, and we filled it. I clocked my presentation at 17 minutes and some change, with slides (I got two slides behind at one point, but managed to recover), and almost abstrusely theoretical in its Marxian economic analysis of the valuation (in Bruce Horner’s mode) of student writing — and then Sharon turned things around and made our audience gasp (audibly: if you were there, you heard it) in her profoundly moving personal examination of her reaction, and her students’ reactions, to the Gulf Coast disaster that hit her school in Mississippi. And after we talked, Peter got up and offered his response, his account, and synthesized what we’d said better than either of us could have ourselves, in a performance that was — well, if you know Peter, or have seen him talk, he was at the top of his game, and in his mode. Sharon and I were grateful to have him and his audience there, and he really did manage an impressive integration of our two extraordinarily different presentations on personal writing — which was, in fact, very much our point, though we made it in very different ways.
If you know me here, you know I’ve been posting a lot of theoretical stuff about the economic, the affective, and the personal, which is why I’m going to hold off posting my talk for a bit. It condenses and re-works material from my blog posts over the past couple years, and adds some new stuff as well, but I was more than a little proud of my 49 PowerPoint slides, so I’m going to try to sync them to some audio and then put up the text and podcast together.
But definitely pester Sharon for notes on her talk, which was wonderful — and with as many folks as we had in the audience, perhaps somebody (was it you?) took notes on what Peter had to say, and could share them as well?
And, to Peter:
Thank you.
Nice to see you emerge on the public stage as a recognized “expert,” drawing on the years of blog writing. I wonder how your thinking will change when you become conscious of the Department Chair and other personages in the hierarchy reading your public writings. With enough terminology and theoretical scaffolding, you might render your work sufficiently opaque to be safe, but I hope you retain that edge of cultural critique that stems from your own diverse background, Sgt.
I’m glad that the presentation went more than well, Mike. And Tutor, while you make a good point about caution, I think that Mike is canny enough to maneuver safely around those minefields.
Thanks, Mike. Your slides were excellent. I regret that I was so focused on what I was going to say that I did not take notes during your presentation. I hope you will post it in the future.
I plan to post mine at some point. I made a number of hand-written changes at the last minute. I’m just waiting for a little bit of time between grading stacks when I can make sense of my own notes enough to transcribe them.