When I originally looked at the topic for this week, BASIC WRITING, I thought it would be about SKAs that are needed for writing and their surrounding theories. The idea of necessary SKAs (skills, knowledge and abilities) did come up, in all the articles, in all different ways. However, the first article by Mina Shaughnessy surprised me since was all about teacher remediation. I really liked her Four Teacher Stages of Basic Writing Teacher Development (312). As a culture I think we are quick to place blame anywhere but upon ourselves. I now know that when confronted with a class that doesn't seem to "be getting it" I will be most likely to put the onus on myself and look for changes in my curriculum, rather than blame the students for not trying. Being aware of this and having the ability to skip stages 1-3 will benefit myself, as well as my students tremendously.

My favorite quote from this article (and possibly anything else I have read) was from Leo Strauss (to a teacher), "Always assume that there is one silent student in your class who is by far superior to you in head and in heart" (VV 317). WOW! What a powerful statement.

I like Deborah Mutnick’s ideas about teaching basic writing students to be comfortable with language. She emphasizes this by her praise of Mary Soliday’s Enrichment Approach in which a specific BW course is designed to first “encourage students to use the unfamiliar language of the academy to describe and analyze familiar aspects of everyday language use and cultural experience” (GT 107). While this specifically addresses basic writing at the university level, it is easily transferable to other grade levels. The language of any discourse community is usually apparent to those who are in it. I think Mutnick would agree then, that the key is to make sure that students understand the different communities that they are in, and the languages that are utilized.

In my Linguistics class we were talking about how dynamic language is, and always has been. Specifically, though, how recent technologies have seemed to increased the speed at which language is changing. Our discussion circled around the idea of what "language" will be acceptable in our classrooms. Many of us agreed that texting terms would not be acceptable in formal papers, and this would be something to discuss with our classes. For Basic Writing classes a more in depth discussion about what is considered acceptable and "expected" language for papers would be invaluable, as well as examples.


Nancy Sommers's case study was also extremely interesting. I really liked her conclusion about teaching writing and the writing process as a means of discovery. This relates back to a lot of what we have read, especially critical thinking. I can completely understand the basic writer’s desire to correct for (syntactical) error as their method of revision; having “rules” to adhere to in a daunting situation can be comforting. As the experienced writers have figured out, it is leaving this comfort zone and going beyond that truly help shape a “good” paper. So how do we teach this? This seem to me to be the key to developing creative writers, who are not 5 paragraph junkies, who write and think as a means of learning. That is the long term goal, isn’t it?

Teaching is Power

When I decided to go back to school, my mother the guidance councilor questioned why English. She bemoaned (over and over and over) the grading of all the papers. My initial response was that you only have to grade what you assign, and I really love the freedom it enables you. The freedom to essential teach what you want- within the context of the classroom. I am ready to change the world... so I thought. This week's readings while strengthening this notion, has made me a bit afraid of a teacher's impact.

Last week Brufee through Trimbur wrote "How we teach is, is what we teach" (VV 464). This statement had a real impact on me, and it was only implying that education is not neutral. This weeks readings really drove home this notion on a much deeper level, indicating that what we teach can truly impact lives, more deeply than we may ever know. I love the idea of teaching students to think critically, (Berthoff and George) but how will topic choice affect them? Do I let them choose? Like Bizzell, in George, asks, "What is the legitimate authority of teachers, or any other orators?" (GT 108). I want to teach those shared values, that George discusses (GT 108), but how do we know if they are really all shared. I think they should be... but who am I?

Knowledge is Power

Just when I thought I was jaded enough to be realistic about how my first teaching experiences will be I read James Berlin's article Rhetoric and Ideology in the Writing Class. Now, again, I have the feeling that I will be able to hand my students the world- as long as I can teach them to write.

I think everyone has had a teacher who made them feel like that (above). Just this week I had a teacher (yes college level, no not a professor) define a term, using the same term in addition to saying it was more than a different term that she had not defined, and had not planned on. When I asked her for an example of the undefined term in the definition she said that it wasn't important and we didn't need to know it. She got very flustered when I persisted, explaining my inability to fully comprehend the new term with out knowing the meaning of the words in its defenition, telling me she would tell me (only me) after class. I know there were others who wanted this level of comprehension as well. Ahhh the "[l]oveless, arrogant, hopeless, mistrustful, acritical (Shor (95) in Berlin 734) classroom.

How does this relate to writing and the readings?

"...a way of teaching is never innocent. Every pedagogy is imbricated in ideology, in a set of tacit assumptions about what is real, what is good, what is possible, and how power ought to be distributed" (Berlin 735).