Abstract
teach writing at a state university. Our spring semester ends in mid-May. By Memorial Day weekend I've turned in my grades, returned final papers, and begun planning for my fall courses. But I usually won't read the student evaluations until much later. I always dread reading them, even though I know most of them will be positive and some even flattering, and even though I will carefully consider what my students believed was useful about the course and what wasn't, what should be changed and what shouldn't. This, I assume, is part of what good teachers do in their efforts to improve their teaching; it's part of what many educators have come to call reflective practice. Nevertheless, I hate it. To explain why is to explore an ambivalence that attends reflective practice: a troubling space between doubt and committed action that writing teachers often inhabit, a space of both possibility and paralysis that we rarely acknowledge directly in our discussions about teaching writing. Turning an unflinching critical eye toward one's own teaching is often characterized as essential to constructing what bell hooks calls an engaged pedagogy (Teaching to Transgress), and indeed experienced teachers of all ideological stripes understand the usefulness of genuine self-critique. But self-critique-and reflective teaching in general-is more difficult than it may seem, often accompanied by an acute form of self-doubt that leads me to believe that many of us may be more ambivalent about our pedagogies than we let on. I think it's worth asking why, especially since