Where to then, dear Dr. Stewart?

I just finished reading Donald Stewart's speech, published by the NCTE under the title "Some History Lessons for Composition Teachers."  As I read the piece I began to feel some familiar tremors of frustration and discomfort.  Here is a speech delivered by a priest of the church to the converted.  Hence, despite its eloquence and the strength of its arguments, I was left with mostly the current list of damnable sins in composition teaching and nothing with which to redress them.  Apparently, learning the historical basis for my errors and the errors of my profession will thrust us all into a new age of understanding and light.  

In reality of course there is probably no way for Dr. Stewart to address as many different issues as he left me pondering within a single speech.  In fact, as his speech made me aware of the huge gap between my knowledge of compositional theory and what is really out there in the academic discussion more than it did anything else.  He proposed problems with every method of considering the teaching of writing to which I've ever been exposed (with the possible exception of Tom Romano's multi-genre approach) and more than that, if accepted whole cloth, seems to rip the foundations out of the current standards for teaching writing in the public schools in our dear state of Colorado.  Now perhaps, if he had given a speech that included all these cool alternatives apparently already available to his in the know audience at the CCC meeting at which he spoke, I would find that the changes he advocates are not as strong as they appear.  

Certainly I have fought and am fighting the five paragraph demon in my high school.  I have juniors who have arrived in my classroom convinced that essays as a genre are defined by the five paragraph format despite the evidence of their eyes in any essay that we read in any class at any level of high school language arts instruction.  The presence of CSAP testing with its "long response" definition including a five paragraph minimum encourages teachers to instruct their students in the development of the five paragraph, "three pronged thesis," tell them what you're going to say, say it, and then tell them what you said format all of which Dr. Stewart condemns as at least unfashionable if not downright wrong.  

I am extremely frustrated by the perseverance of the five paragraph model at an age when I feel the students should be moving beyond this crutch.  When the five paragraph minimum of standardized testing should not dictate form or content, but rather be simply what it technically is, a minimum length for discussing any idea at anything that can remotely be called length even on a timed writing test.  Getting my students to realize that five paragraphs was only an arbitrary ending point and that a dependence on the style that tried to fit everything to that length was damaging to their writing is an ongoing battle.   All of this makes me sympathize with the complaints Dr. Stewart raises against what he calls the current-traditional rhetoric.  

However, he goes beyond attacking this level of formulaic writing to attack the division into narrative, descriptive, expository and persuasive, as well as delivering blows to usage and style.  Unless my understanding is far weaker than I am aware, these elements make up the entirety of the writing curriculum as demanded by the state standards for public education.  Perhaps there is an implied distinction here and he is address is directed solely to the teaching of writing at the undergraduate level or above, but I don't think so.  As such, while I was heartened to be able to say, "Yes, I think those teacher's who are the supergrammarians (those first attacked as most clueless on his scale) are thoroughly wrong to give a paper a poor grade or to refuse to accept it solely on the basis of mechanical and grammatical correctness,"  and further heartened to find myself agreeing heartily with his argument against the deplorable five paragraph essay and (one must assume by connection) the even more deplorable five sentence paragraph, I found that his critique of these old devils of writing instruction extended to all the other pillars I'd been taught to base my writing instruction on.

My great frustration with Dr. Stewart's speech is that he provided no alternatives.  No answers.  Oh there were some quick tosses to those already in the know, referring to books and articles in support of these other unnamed theories he prefers and there was something tantalizingly close to the alternative I was hoping to find in the short passage on Grammar A and Grammar B, but nothing concrete on which to base writing instruction.  My frustration with this speech, and my new hope for this course is that it whet my appetite for something more, for new ideas and then failed to provide any.  Dr. Stewart kicked the props out from under me without providing me something else to stand on.  

My questions then for our class and for further articles and instruction:  1) What is an acceptable standard for correctness and from whence is it derived?  If a student cannot control spelling, mechanics and grammar with a minimum level of skill there can be no successful composition and no written or - at the extreme even verbal - communication.  While I deplore the focus on grammar and mechanics to the exclusion of all else, and feel it ought to be a capstone fitted to the community of discourse for which the author is writing, some standard must exist.  2) If we cannot break writing down into categories beyond creative and nonfiction (and even that isn't fair if any time has been spent with creative nonfiction) how are we to approach the teaching of writing?  Writing is already so broad a subject that one is forced to put false barriers and dividers in order to begin addressing it in some organized fashion, and to make chunks that the students can swallow without choking.  If these current traditional divisions (narrative, descriptive, expository and persuasive) are not acceptable what is?  3) If we throw out the teaching of so generic a thing as style, what then are we teaching our students?  

Perhaps I am so much a novice in the field of compositional theory that I am unable to comprehend the arguments that are being made.  It may be true.  I almost hope it is, because that would make some sense out of the situation in which I find myself.  However, it seems that if we throw out all the elements of writing instruction to which Dr. Stewart objects we are left with something so amorphous, so defiantly undefined and subjective, that we cannot teach it.