Out of Sirc's Box (and Back into the Regular Old Box)

Sirc's box, when taken as a proposition intended to imagine a different kind of writing assignment, is most successful whenever he emerges from the theoretical and talks directly about in-class practical application.  Reading this, I was clouded by the theory and the art-talk; like Melanie, it took too long for him to apply it to the classroom, and I wanted more.  The journal-keeping and spring break documenting seem like interesting ideas, so why not talk about how students actually respond to them in the classroom?  How engaged are they?  How much does this improve the processes of their thought and their ability to assemble the "found objects" Sirc so promotes?

The next time Sirc surfaces into the practical world is a good deal more troublesome than his laundry list of possible box-inspired assignments.  The email from Sirc's student, Greg White, was disquieting.  Are we to throw out concepts of good writing entirely in favor of good ideas?  Even if, as we've previously read, college has become the new remedial writing grounds, does that mean that we can pass the baton to the students themselves instead of back to the high schools or keeping it for ourselves?  "Here you go," we say, holding out the Chicago Manual of Style to Greg White.  "You want to be hireable--you want to be able to write a single coherent email to a coworker, or else a cover letter for a potential employer--and you take care of this yourself.  You want to be an artist, cut up the pages into something pretty."

Sirc early on poses the question of whether he wants to prepare students for college or for life; according to his framing, he inevitably settles on life.  However, I argue that Sirc is preparing students, not for real life, but for Sirc's idea of college as a safe haven, as a maternity ward of ideas.  If a student came into the Writing Center having taken every writing class Sirc had ever offered, then asked me to help her with a statement of purpose for a graduate school or a scholarship, I would be lost entirely.  Of course there is an importance in being able to draw connections between text and object, to be able to assemble the like and the unlike into something coherent and refined.  Writing in itself contains all of that process of assemblance of found objects; the artistic essayists have been composing that way since the time of Thoreau, patching in allusion and quote and poem and pun and mortaring them together in solid, meaningful prose.  Why sacrifice grammar entirely on the altar of creativity?  Why is understandability the first thing to go when we start trying to think nontraditionally?  (I was about to say "out of the box," but that hardly seems apropos.)  To what extent is Sirc actually empowering Greg White for "real life," if Greg White will one day have a college degree but be functionally unable to compose a sentence?