Le brouillard de l'etude

The writing process.
We've spent this entire semester learning how to teach writing. As a graduate student, I have spent the last three semesters learning the "Writing Process," or was it product?
We're learning to inoculate, to break down, to build up, to ride around, to run around post/modernizing the writing process and the students that we teach. ( I'm using the royal "We" here, since I am not teaching this year, and so can only look at these processes through the dim and unfocused eyes of the outsider.)
But I can see quite clearly with the eyes of the student learning to write.
This week someone touched upon the idea of high school versus college writing. Or maybe the actual subject was "My English Teacher Taught Me During Half-Time." I felt rather lucky during that conversation. My high school English teacher was wonderful. Most of the students hated her because she wouldn't let anyone chew gum during class, and her druthers involved assigning twenty page papers. I dug on her. I was fully prepared for my first semester in college, and I think it was because we wrote constantly in her classes. We generally kept within a very formulaic outline of reader response and criticism, but it certainly didn't hurt me to write more.
So, I'm just wondering about that first semester at the university.
Does it really make or break a writing student? Or is that giving too much credit to 100 and 110 classes?
How does one start to teach writing? How does a teacher get through the fog of learning that is hovering around some of those first year college writers?
How do graduate assistants get rid of the idea that the writing really isn't as bad as all of that?
When I was in high school my math teacher was the woman whom I named as my arch nemesis. Our relationship and interactions were uncomfortable at best.
I guess what I'm saying here is that I still hate math. Walking into a math class makes me want to drop out of school just so that I don't have to deal with any math teacher/pro/fessor ever again.
I know that every teacher is not Mrs. Clark, but I always see her 50's hair and huge glasses when I encounter arithmetical theorem.

So how do teachers deal with the presuppositions of the student?
Any teacher can reference those icons until his/her breath is absolutely gone, but when all of those greats have death-rattled their way into the sunset, it really is up to the Teacher to tear away those prejudices.

Because, you know, I really loathed Mrs. Clark.