The first challenge is: “How would you describe Edmundson’s ethos, or self-representation, in this essay?” In answer, he clearly established his ethos in his introduction as a college professor that cares about his students and how they learn. He then explains that, while he gets good feedback about his teaching from his students, he feels that he is being too easy on his students and he isn’t teaching them the way he would like. He also compares himself to a professor that asked the two part question: “What book did you most dislike in this course? What intellectual or characterological flaws in you does that dislike point to?” He makes this comparison to represent that he has lightened his teaching style to match today’s consumer attitude. The second challenge is: “... how would …show more content…
The final challenge is to find three passages that best illustrate the author’s self-representation and how they contribute to, or detract from, the argument he makes in the essay. The first example is in paragraph four, where he explains the way he dislikes his self image “of knowledgeable, humorous detachment and bland tolerance.” The way this contributes to his writing is that it shows he is aware of this major problem in his own classroom. It shows that he has an awareness of his faults and a longing to change them; not only in himself, but in the system as a whole. Then next example is found in paragraph twenty-one, where he talks about the fact that he cannot make this claim for every school in every state, but that he can only make accounts from visits and stories from other professors. This contributes to the essay in a way that shows he is not attempting to speak for everybody, and that he is aware this problem has not yet spread everywhere. This shows that he is unwilling to make a generalization, and wants to keep his writings