Allen Lee's essay

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• A single teacher can't create that level of alienation and disdain in any student.

• Or at least guilty of having a bad teacher...

• Seems to me Allen Lee is perhaps guilty of many things--a dim view of (formal) academics in general (though that's in great part a function of the kinds of instruction he's received, not necessarily his "failure to grasp" what value courses/assignments might have), displaying a violent persona (but then, so does Stephen King, and he was not arrested in his youth), perhaps even being insensitive to the consequences of what his own writing might tip off. He's guilty--maybe--of being stupid and mean.

  That's it, though. That's really it.

  Have we forgotten that writing is for some a cathartic process? That fantasy, and writing as a tool in the service of fantasy, are ways of decompressing or channeling aggressions in a relatively healthy outlet? Or are we just supposed to write for ourselves when no one else will look at it?

  If anything, this incident highlights for me two things:

  (1) We really don't know what we're asking for when we ask for utterly "free" freewriting; we are inviting ourselves into the psychologies of our students that we aren't necessarily prepared for

  (2) The collective sense of the committee, which met to decide what to do about Lee's writing, that its members are "very well-versed with [the] types of creativity put into writing," is depressingly impoverished on this very point of knowing the boundaries of creativity, the purposes of writing, or how patchwriting works.