Should we expect a "one-size-fits-all" approach to composition? In an earlier discussion, I essentially said that very thing. It was born out of frustration with a lack of, in my opinion, coherency and consistency in instruction. Wouldn't some students be better writers than others because of the quality of their instructors? Wouldn't some students be unfamiliar with certain types of writing, persuasion, technical, etc because, in their course, they weren't exposed to it? Shouldn't there be a national standard for all instructors to follow to ensure every student receives the same compositional instruction? 

 The answer is no. 

 Just like a painter, or a musician, every writer is different. A person's uniqueness is what makes a writer a writer, regardless of his/her abilities, style of writing, topics they write, or field of writing they choose. So why should instruction be cookie-cutter perfect, if a student's inner identity will dictate what and how they write anyway? They shouldn't, and neither should instructors create Hemmingway or Morrison clones. Just as their students come to their classroom with unique perspectives, experiences, and philosophies, so do our instructors. 

 What these scholars have shown is that there is no one way, no perfect way in which to write or to teach to write. What they have done though is to find ways to connect with their students, to provide them with the clearance to fly and fall, to learn and reinvent, to innovate and collaborate. Most of these instructors taught their students that communication is more about discovery, rediscovery, and self-discovery; about flexibility and integration, about culture and community, and about themselves and others. They taught them to believe that anything is possible. 

Although I agree with essentially everything in this article, I guess my concern is that very little has happened in the eight years since this article was published. It was clear in this article (2013) that technology was and is the future and that the sooner we understand this, the sooner we can make real movement for the education system to fundamentally change how students write and learn and teachers educate in the current technological world we operate in. 

But, I would argue that we haven't grown much at all. In fact, I feel that, in spite of all of our technological advancements in communication software, social media platforms, multimodalities, and communication mediums, we have remained stagnant. Still, too many people, educators, and institutions, are dragging their feet when it comes to full adoption and implementation in the classroom and pedagogy, one can see it in the classroom today. Yes, "smart boards" and slick educational apps are being utilized; it's nice to see, but could we do more? I think we can. 

As Griffin and Minter mention in their essay, new pedagogies need to be introduced into the classroom. It's not enough to throw educators and students the "newest" education platforms (that will invariably be discarded within three years); the classroom and how we teach composition needs to be reinvented. There seems to be an unconscious disconnect between what teachers are doing in the classroom with their use of technology and the understanding that a completely new way of teaching (composition, specifically) needs to occur. That's why this article, although interesting and accurate, resonated with a thud; eight years later and very little has changed. We all realize that fundamental change needs to occur, yet were still talking about integrating technology in the classroom, utilizing it to create new communication, bridging gaps between multilingual students, and creating a more open structure of education that focuses on collaboration, eight years later.

 Rice mentioned in his piece Marcel Proust's Remembrance of Things Past,--a quick read if you have a spare evening-how his story really started upon the memory of a smell from food. Is it really that uncommon for the smell to be such a great invoker of memories? I remember picking a coffee mug out of my cabinets and the slightest whiff from the mug immediately sent me back to my grandmother's house (it was one of her old mugs; washed of course), and I was cloaked in sadness thinking about her (She had died five years earlier). 

 Food has always been a great intersection for family and friends; yet we hardly read about them in literature, and, as Rice mentioned in the essay, it has been all but invisible in scholarly work. Maybe this essay will serve as a clarion for others to explore the culinary world with a more critical lens on how it can be incorporated into other literary topics.