Let's be honest, the initial thought of a Rhetorical Family Tree was my first impression of Dr. Souder, and after listening to her talk about her multiple job experiences I thought she was stuck in the fourth grade teacher mode.
But, being the sport that I am, I grumbled under my breath and started digging. What this project has ended up being is an opportunity to correspond with colleagues, influences, and scholars nation(and for some world)-wide. What an experience! Digging to find influences, making connections with scholars such as Faigley, Fish, and Elbow is more than I could have imagined.
The biggest impact this project has had is bringing these rhetors down to earth for me. Everyone is human (even Socrates), and humans interact. The e-mails that I have sent and received this semester reminded me that teachers like to talk about their job. I love working with other colleagues to see what they are doing, how they learned to do it, and modifying it to work for me. This has been the experience from our readings, from our discussion both before and during class, and from these projects/papers. The rhetors we discuss are no different, only some of them would rather talk about themselves and what they can do to help you than listen :-).
The Tree: I am a simple man. I think a real tree would be awesome with ourselves as the dirt, our professors as the roots, their teachers as the trunk, and expand further. If we trace it back to Aristotle, he can be the sun or something -- photosynthesis gets its energy from the sun...makes sense in my head :-)
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It is interesting to cover the history of our discipline and discover that real, live people also do this work! So often, we study only the dead or nearly dead, Important White Men (and occasionally Woman) and then our work is over. Exchanging emails with Faigley, for instance, reminds you that some folks who have changed the way our classrooms run (before we even knew they existed) are as close as our nearest Fb friends - just a quick click away. The next step in this cool realization, of course, is recognizing that we are part of this world and we must contribute in some meaningful way so that some day, not too far from now, some graduate (or undergrad) student working on her paper says, "Hey! Dave Armstrong (you know - the Diabetic Scholar) wrote me back!"
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