When I started planning out this blog post, I ran into a serious stumbling block. In my previous blog post, I disobeyed the rules a little bit. Rather than pose one question, I chose to pose multiple questions, across multiple genres and levels of meta-communication. This left me with the problem of “Which question should I focus on for my blog post?” After careful deliberation, one question stood out as the obvious choice.
I now present…
“Can anybody explain the ghosts?”
Yes, somebody can explain the ghosts. I can even do so, now. They were poetic license on the part of Friere.
More seriously, I decided I should look at an actual legitimate question, and proceeded to the next one, a question regarding James Gee’s piece on what literacy is.
“So, my question regarding this piece would be- where should we draw these boundary lines [of formalized schooling]? Is our learning system useful enough to warrant the multi-trillion dollar infrastructure we’ve devoted to it? If not, what needs to be adjusted in regards to acquisition skills and finances?”
This was definitely something of a loaded question. I mean, I threw in the word “trillion”, I was definitely trying to provoke some kind of response with this question. Unfortunately, none of the past six or so readings have addressed the issue directly. Part of this can probably be attributed to the fact that most of these essays were written before the massively bloated ecosystem that defines our university network was fully cemented. The closest thing I can find to an answer comes from Louise Rosenblatt’s 1988 National Center for the Study of Writing report, “Writing and Reading: The Transactional Theory”. Although Rosenbaltt doesn’t directly address my question, she proposes a vision of school that heavily promotes adaptability of student knowledge, rather than prescribing precise answers.
Lastly, I had the somewhat off-topic question regarding…
“If so, did that mean I was implying different gender-normative standards of writing on the authors? Were the others doing so? How would I be able to read such characterizations one way or the other without a broader context and base of knowledge? Thoughts?”
As was revealed in class, people had varying reactions to this question. Some people actually found them reconsidering how they reacted to the text, while others said it had no effect on them. Realistically, this was always going to be the most likely answer. People vary in the mindsets that they bring to the work, so of course their reactions aren’t going to be identical. It would be a pretty boring class if we all had the same reactions, anyway. Personally, I think I brought up the question because it did influence my reaction somewhat. When I saw the author as a woman, I was more reticent to criticize the ideas. However, I felt more comfortable being more aggressive, once I recognized his full situation. In a way, I feel some disappointment at this. However, I also wonder if part of this is cultural expectation- if men are conditioned to be more pacifistic towards women, it might be that an equal level of aggression would culturally be viewed as over-aggressive. I’m not sure. I could probably speculate on the problem forever. Maybe I should just try to be less aggressive in general.
Finally, I didn’t feel completely satisfied with the way my questions engaged with the readings, so I felt the desire to produce some thoughts and responses to those readings.
Thoughts about the Readings
This has been an interesting couple of weeks of readings. While I’m not fully sure I understand everything that was said, I feel like I have a grasp on where the course will move, going forward. Regardless of the differences between the texts, almost all of them seem to agree that reading and writing and simultaneously interlocked, and can’t really be separated from each other as processes. Therefore, any reading teacher will always be something of a writing teacher, too.
Paul, I think your second question, about the rationale for the multi-trillion-dollar infrastructure, is a more apt than some might have conceded. Of course, it's not entirely new question: it's the old division between practical skills instruction vs. the Greek Academy and the humanities that theoretically broaden our minds, if not our wallets. But Gee and Krashen bring up issues that point to a new perspective on conspicuous waste -- a waste of time and energy as much as dollars and cents. If the Gee/Krashen view is "right," then we'd do well to institute a top-down overhaul of methodology, though this goes beyond SLOs and invades a teacher's right to plan classes as she sees fit, smacking of a kind of pedagogical fascism, I believe. For my money, I would love to see colleges boost the hiring of teachers who favor student-centered teaching. Clearly, this has been a trend over the last 3 or decades, but still has a long way to go. The problem, I suppose, is how to "enforce" good teaching. Yet, with all the supposed competition for teaching positions, you'd think this would be the top criterion. Mediocre isn't new, however. We bitch about it from grade school into college, taking great pains to avoid teachers with reputations for causing great pains. In college, so the story goes, teachers tend to hired more for their writing than their teaching, for all the sense that makes. It's almost like electing a man president because he wrote a best-selling book of memoirs.
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