Abnormal discourse

"The first steps to learning to thing Better,and learning to converse Better and learning to establish and maintain the sorts of social context, the sorts of community life that foster the sorts of conversation members of the community value." -K. Bruffee
Academic discourse truly is an amazing beast. It is unbearably pompous and I can't help but cheer those students who try to engage in "abnormal discourse"---- when someone joins in the discourse who is ignorant of the conventions governing that discourse, or who sets them aside." (Rorty ref. by Bruffee--Conversation of Mankind, 429)
I know that there are students out there who tend to manipulate assignments. I've always been a huge proponent of socially accepted rebellion-- those intellectual revolutionaries. I've participated in the occasional revolution and I've paid for it by not getting an "A." I've paid for it by having to re-write, or conference.
I've become weary of it.
I re-read D. Bartholomae's "Tidy House" this weekend. In his essay he discusses a student he had in his first year of teaching. The student wrote an essay which discussed the fact that he.....thought the assignment was stupid. The student used different language, of course, but that was the gist of it. It made me question the idea of rebellion and resistance within the classroom. Paired with Bruffee's essay, "Tidy House" once again, made me re-evaluate the acculturation that goes on within academia.
So many teaching "techniques" seem to be stifling, seem to be hoop-jumping, and when a student decides to vocalize frustration and annoyance via essay, the student is proverbially put in the corner to think about what s/he has done.
Is it always "wrong" or "right," "correct" or "incorrect" within the classroom?
I disliked the idea of abnormal discourse simply because it set the scene. It was/is abnormal because it isn't normal. Instead of realizing that abnormality has its roots in normality--its causal ancestor-- we set the two up against one another, and we pick one over the other, when, in fact, they are simply variations on a theme.