"Do we teach to life or college?"

Geoffrey Sirc quotes Johndan Johnson-Eilola's 2000 Watson conference address in which Johnson-Eiola states, "Most of what we teach and what we do is wrong, out of date" (114).  I think this encompasses one of my major fears/insecurities when it comes to teaching composition.  While Sirc deals with the major ways in which the goals may have changed -- teaching email as a genre, teaching HTML, and so forth -- I even seem to have trouble keeping up with minor stylistic trends.  When did it become incorrect to put two spaces after the end of a sentence?  Are block quotations supposed to be single spaced or double spaced?  Why are some authors using semi-colons in places I've been telling my students to use colons...or periods?  Why does MLA have to keep changing things on me?

Sirc questions the usefulness/necessity of teaching the essay form when people in the workforce today are more likely to be writing technological codes than thesis-driven papers; he states: "life is long, college short; do we teach to life or college?"  This seems like it is putting an awful lot of pressure on composition teachers...but I can see the struggle for teachers over all.  I keep telling my students not to take class time or assignments for granted, to use their professors as the resources they are while they are in school.  I tell them they are spending a lot of money to attend this school and get an education and that money's not worth it if they're only really here to check things off a checklist and get a degree which may or may not be the driving force behind whether or not they get a job after graduation.  I do try to do things like asking them to consider the different forms an email should take when one is contacting a professor/employer versus a friend, and we have one assignment where they bring in an assignment description from another class and look at reading those as a kind of genre.  I want my class to be useful and not just a requirement (even though I know it is), but I also want the lesson plans to be somewhat coherent with each other and not just this one thing one day, this other thing another.  I think this article deals with a lot of the things I worry about when attempting to plan out a semester.