Hopkins vs. Bishop: A Response to Popken's "Edwin Hopkins and the Costly Labor of Composition Teaching"

I understand where Edwin Hopkins was coming from: As an undergraduate student, I had a professor who amazed me with her ability to read our packed-room-full Intro to Lit papers and get them back to us in a timely manner, chock full of helpful suggestions and encouragement. She was easily one of the most popular professors on campus, everyone wanted her for an advisor. She smiled and laughed and helped every student who came to her. For nearly three years, I had her for at least one class a semester, and I watched her struggle against her weariness in order to stay positive for her students; finally, the year after I graduated, she took a well-deserved, probably overdue sabbatical, the the next semester, she was at it again.

I say again, as I did in my previous blog on Wendy Bishop's "Against the Odds in Composition and Rhetoric," I had no idea when I became an English Major that there was such a disconnect between Literary Scholars and Scholars of Teaching and Composition. I did not know, as Popken points out, that "the current discourse of professionalism valorizes scholarship and demeans teaching" (618) in the way it apparently does. I find it sad that a professor who inspires so many students in the way that my professor did, is, in Bishop's words, so "underappreciated" (324).

But, where Bishop revels in the work ("It is our work and we do well to praise it" (Bishop 324)) - the way I felt my professor did - I sometimes felt that Popken was portraying Hopkins as something of a wimp and a complainer. I'm sure that's not what he meant. I'm guessing (again as a newbie), that Hopkins is more of a hero ("intense, self-driven, almost compulsively detail-oriented" (Popken 622), but the article left me feeling that Hopkins, after a while, spent more of his time thinking about shifting the workload of composition teachers than actually being a teacher. I'm sure the, or what Popken intended, but, via this particular article, I was not able to view Hopkins as Bishop's "[teacher] in love with teaching" (329); rather, when Popken explained that after all of Hopkins' struggles on behalf of compositions teachers that "the impact...was not immediate"(634), though "the teaching load did improve" (634), it did not feel like a great success. When I finished Bishop's essay, I felt proud to be a part of a profession that was all about accomplishing something meaningful (empowering others to find their own voice through composition). When I finished Popken's piece, I felt disheartened.

Then I remembered my own professor, the ways she stirred my love of both literature and composition, the open-hearted way she gave of her time as I and my fellow students struggled to gain our feet in difficult readings and theories. I remembered the changes I felt in myself , the authority and confidence I gained; the direction my life suddenly took was something I had never imagined. I'm sure this was what Hopkins must have envisioned when he received his "calling" from God to teach composition (Popken 622), and the idea of teaching compostion as a calling would be the legacy he would want and not that which Popken appears to have left him with: the idea that "composition is still very costly labor" (636).