Time for a change?

Kathleen Welch's "Ideology and the Freshman Textbook Production" provides some interesting food for thought. I tried to think back to my own freshman days--tried to recall any textbook words of wisdom--but I can't even remember if I had a freshman comp text. I'm sure I had some sort of technical handbook, one that answered basic formatting questions, but a text like the Norton? I don't recall. Of course students feel disconnected from composition texts. Hell, even teachers hate them. That's why we ignore the text half the time and pad the syllabus with "interesting" supplemental material. So why have a text at all? The only logical answer is money. Publishers make money off selling texts to schools, colleges make money off of selling texts to students, but whether they receive any benefit from them at all is a mystery. It's practically impossible to create an affordable comp text that doesn't reproduce writing samples, thereby disconnecting text from context. I like Welch's idea--make student writing the focus. I say, get rid of texts all together. No, seriously. Think about our own writing as grad students. Grad classes help foster some kernel of an idea. We take that idea, research it, formulate a thesis, and because of time constraints, write a poorly executed seminar paper. But for us, the project doesn't end with a final grade. We hold on to that seminar paper, write abstracts in defense of that original brilliant idea, condense our best thoughts into a twenty minute conference paper, and if we are lucky, revise and expand those thoughts into something publishable. With every step, that original idea gets better, more complex maybe, but the writing itself, the execution of the idea gets better. Why not make freshman comp that simple. Make our students start with a kernel of an idea and revise, revise, revise, each time with a new audience or a new goal in mind. We base grades on improvement over time. Just one project--one grade--and hopefully, one brilliant idea.