This extended argument against assigning the generic memoir in first-year composition, finally, begs the question of what type of writing should be assigned. Many activist teachers turn to Paulo Freire (1987), who believed students from all walks of life should be taught to read and write “in relation to the awakening of their consciousness” (p. 43). Such writing, according to Freire, is analytical, seeking to “clarify situations” of personal or group import, or seeking “action arising from that clarification” (p. 42). This focus on a situation or problem—an object, if you will—requires a student to develop her or his consciousness, not as a “knowledge container,” but as a “Subject,” an “I” who already knows, reads, and writes the world (Freire, 1987; 1991). His ideas about literacy learning assume students’ agency in and authority about their worlds and assume that the exigency for literacy development grows out of a need for clarification or action within that world. It appears to me, then, that teachers asking for memoir writing have confused “matter for writing” (the self) with “writing that matters” (Sommers & Saltz, 2004, p. 139) (an exigency for writing elicited by personal need). Therefore, writing in first-year composition should evolve from student needs that they identify, a task that Freire argues, acknowledging the time commitment required, involves dialogue between co-learners (including the teacher) in a “critical matrix … linked by love, hope, and mutual trust” (1987, p. 45). Although the impulse of this argument is deeply respectful, students with histories of trauma, in particular the trauma of domestic abuse and violence, have had the links of love, hope, and trust shattered by institutions far more fundamental than the university, and they have every reason to be wary of trusting the stranger-teacher sitting among them. Learning how to trust (or predict the responses of) the institutional representatives who can facilitate or block access to achieving their literacy goals may appear to first-year students a greater need than to clarify a more abstract situation; said another way, learning how to navigate opportunities for failure may be the situation they want to clarify first.