Freshman English is not something I understand. I never took it myself, and now that I’m teaching it, I continue to fumble around in my conceptions of it. In class today, we were talking about the research proposal, looking ahead to the end of the quarter, and one student said, “I thought this was a writing class.” To which I replied, “so did I.”

We had a laugh and moved on to talk about topics, methods, objects, questions. But I was still left wondering: what am I teaching?

As I think on it, I try to develop my own goals for the course: something to do with curiosity and group dynamics; some small gains in the ability to communicate oneself to an other through a range of mediums. But what about the institution level?

In some ways, our English 101 is playing the role of gatekeeper that Crowley suggests may be its main function across the nation. Under Andrew’s leadership, however, we may be somewhat subverting that role, or even blasting the doors off the gates. But I also have to assume he has institutional approval. Can we still be subversive if we’re sanctioned?

Perhaps out there in the world of academia, fulfilling the requirement for the course is enough. Here look, we say, they’ve done it; everyone has passed through English 101. Just don’t ask us what they did there.

I like to imagine that this course prepares students to think and approach all their studies, but that’s vague and hard to sell politically or on any kind of grand scale. So it’s a sort of placeholder. A thing to do because it’s a thing that’s done. It also serves as a unifier for the student body. A point of commonality. And it’s allowing more of us MFA/MA’s to come here and get funding. Which seems like a good thing from some vantage points and a not so good thing from others. I think I’ll leave that one there.

What I keep returning to are thoughts of subversion. I remember reading Deborah Brandt, how those two women at the end took home their literacies and used them for a different personal gain. It seemed like subversion and was sort of presented as such, but it was actually just dissemination. More people learning the conventions and regulations of capitalism. More institutional control.

Or reading Foucault talking about sex. We think that we’re subversive, perverted, outrageous by talking about, but we’re playing right into this insidious institutional control, submitting voluntarily to its surveillance of our most private thoughts and moments.

And then I stand in class and I ask my students who wins when they gain literacy? Who always benefits by their education, by their taking on the dominant vocabulary (not to mention mountains of debt)? Maybe the main role of 101 is a sugar-sweet coating over the culturally prescribed indoctrination pill.

Do I imagine myself subversive because I sort of sometimes point to it? As I stand there, this vivid representation of institutional success (little do they know). Here let me be your white, male, educated, role-model. And our radically fair 101 curriculum? Are we really subverting the model? Is there even such a thing?