The Importance of Critique: Dissing "The best thing I did on my summer vacation"

Writing teachers often give their student topics or prompts or story starters, things like "The best thing I did on my summer vacation," topics that are supposed to unlock the imagination and jump start the creative juices.  And so when Common Core arrives teachers do things like try to find argumentative or informational prompts, things like "For or against capital punishment" or "for or against 5th graders being allowed on the 3 grade swings,"  It is as if the topics are what generate the story or the position one takes rather than ways we think about our lives and our experiences.  Argument is not a "thing," a textual format--like we see in textbooks (Toulmin's claims and warrants, for example) but is a way of reading, thinking, writing--a habit of mind that foregrounds critique while backgrounding the stories of our lives on which that critique is founded.

In our SI this week, we really were getting into the stories of our lives, composing memories and poems that reflected on our histories.  Yet when we moved toward something as important as argument, we seemed to fall back on textbook prescriptions, things like for/against, good/bad, come to consensus.  We were wobbling with our lives, yet putting on the brakes when it came to what we think is required for school.  So I set as my goal to bring forward critique--to wobble with our teaching lives, the lives we take for granted, and write within and against the constraints we were given.  

We were asked to respond to this prompt "The best thing I did this summer," a prompt that invites a story of going to the beach with family or friends, of having a particular kind of summer, of being a particular kind of person, teacher, writer.  I wobbled there, trying to work against the promise of narrative, the way this "starting off" seemed to require me to compose my life.  So using this prompt as my starting point I decided to write a critique--not to argue for or against, but to show the constraints, and limitations of this kind of prompt and write an argument.  

Here is the draft:

The Problem of Argument or The Best Thing I Did This Summer

     The prompt I'm supposed to write in response to ("The Best Thing I Did This Summer") really bugs me.  It bugs me because it asks me to place value on things that I refuse to place hierarchical value on. And it assumes that I have had "a summer"--"a summer" typically means a vacation, a middle class life where there is leisure time--free time to fill-up--that that is better than "other" times like work time, or winter time, or time being a Mom or time caring or an elderly Mom.  So hierarchizing --and evaluating "this summer" creates a real problem for me.