Cantrell, Mary. Teaching and Evaluation: Why Bother? Leahy, Anna, Ed. Power and Identity in the Creative Writing Classroom.

Cantrell says that "unlike professors in any other discipline, (creative writing professors) seem eager to relinquish our authority in the classroom" (65). We don't like the podium, we use our first names in class, we create circles of desks to share the authority ... yet few of us truly want a classroom in which we do not embrace, to some extent, roles of authority" (65). If we aren't needed in the classroom, indeed, "why bother?". We have the experience to talk about craft and revision, and to help lead the students in their understanding of the writing process. "If a professor completely relinquishes authority, if the class becomes primarily a writers' therapy group designed to encourage writing by providing a nodding audience, if students are not held accountable for having learned or produced anything, if no guidance is offered, then why offer college credit for creative writing courses?

"Moreover, our own sense of integrity dictates that we set some parameters and that students acknowledge our authority to some extent. We do, after all, hold degrees that reflect, if not expertise, at least experience" (66). We can offer methods to help students to become better with their criticism, while still having a supportive workshop.

Cantrell examines some of the creative writing teachers' history that might have led us to our existing pedagogy. She points out that many creative writing programs began "in the wake of the Beat Generation and various civil rights movements, (so) writers often disdained working too closely with traditional scholars and academicians" 1. and we can still feel rebellious against traditional academic measures, such as grading. "We must balance our responsibility to the institution, which prescribes a degree of authority in the classroom, with our commitment to questioning authority. We may feel hypocritical -- question authority, but not mine -- or simply reluctant to impose specific standards on students..." (67).

Cantrell also examines our discomfort with often being placed in "traditional" English departments, simply because of the old standard that others might hold English teachers to: being masters of conventions and diagramming sentences, rather than the process of writing. I believe this is something not only creative writing professors worry about, but even many composition professors, who have students resist writing simply because they had a former teacher who told them they couldn't write well because they hadn't yet mastered the comma.