Amy Devitt writes, "Genre entails purposes, participants, and themes, so understanding genre entails understanding a rhetorical and semiotic situation and a social context" (576). Let me preface this blog by saying that I agree whole-heartedly. In fact, I've based my thesis on a similar claim. In the comments I make below, I am not disagreeing with Devitt as much as I am simply writing into some questions I have about my own teaching methods...

A few months ago, I had a conversation with a veteran comp. "How do you feel about the five paragraph essay?" she asked. Reflexively, I answered, "It's restricting. I teach my students to break away from the it--to become more sophisticated writers."
"I teach it," she answered. We then had a lengthy conversation on the merits (and detriments) of teaching the five paragraph essay, and I must say, I found her arguments compelling. "How can we expect them to become more sophisticated writers," she asked, "if they still haven't learned how to master the basics?" And isn't this how the rest of us learned to write? We learned poetry by writing sonnets and copy the rhyme schemes of the great poets. We wrote horrible juvenilias based on the books of our favorite authors. And we mastered the five paragraph essay in our English classes.
I did well in my comp classes. So it's hard for me to argue against teaching a genre that I benefited from learning and writing into. I know that it's restricting. I know some students will never be able to break away from it, (but I wonder if nursing students or biology students will ever need to). Sometimes I feel that by allowing them to select and "write within a genre" of their choosing, I am actually doing more harm than good (578). For one, the organization of their papers suffers. For two, most teachers are used to (and fond of) seeing this form, and when they don't get it, they punish the student. Devitt doesn't want comp students "writing for the teacher," but isn't this a skill--one student's must master if they are ever going to get through college?