Response 6 3/20/08

The four metaphors Shaughnessy uses to distinguish the levels of consciousness that a writing teacher has about their students and their own practices in the teaching of writing are well titled. They definitely express the different levels of thought that all of us as writing teachers go through. As I read, I thought about where I was on the scale now as opposed to where I started when I began teaching. I began at level two, Converting the Natives, I wanted to give my students all sorts of knowledge that I knew or even assumed that they did not have however, I quickly realized that I would have to tap into what they knew about life, speaking, reading, and writing. We would have to learn together how to differentiate. This moved me somewhere between level three, Sounding the Depths and level four, Diving In. I spent much of my free time examining student writing, trying to understand why many of them wrote as they spoke. In the case of my students, there were two main reasons, one was that they were ESL students and they had not developed a differentiation between speaking and putting words on paper. Two, I quickly observed through talking and listening to my students that many of them had never been told that writing should not sound exactly like speaking. As Shaughnessy says "Our teacher begins to see that teaching at the remedial level is not a matter of being simpler but of being more profound, of not only starting from  "scratch" but also determining where "scratch is" (317). This is what moved me permanently into stage four. In addition, I knew I had to find that "scratch" point for each student and that not all of them would be at the same point. Different students wold need different things and I would have to provide them with those tools. I could not make the presumption that they would change, without changing myself first. This is the manner in which I continue to teach and though it is challenging at times, it is also very rewarding. When the students know that I am paying very focused attention to their writing and their needs they really turn it on and start to work towards improvement.

The element I found lacking in Mina Shaughnessy's "Diving In: An Introduction to Basic Writing" was the little to no focus on finding student voice in writing. I know the article's point was on basic writing which is defined as simple sentences and paragraphs. However, if a teacher does indeed want to "Dive In" they cannot simply examine speaking and writing techniques, that alone will not motivate most students to write. In addition, a teacher has to have them thinking, speaking, and writing on topics of interest. That should be embedded in the idea of challenging them and bringing them up. 

All too often we forget what it was like to be a student handling multiple subjects and within each of those having to write with a particular discourse required for each subject. As Bartholomae writes "I think of "knowledge" I think of it as situated in the discourse that constitutes "knowledge" in a particular discourse community, rather than as situated in mental "knowledge sites" (633). Our goal should be to get students to think and respond in the particular discourses and furthermore to see the interrelatedness among all of them. As Bartholomae states, anyone can memorize facts, rules, dates, etc (633) but to process and create a product beyond regurgitation has to be the aim of educators in order to produce well-rounded thinkers. Increasing student awareness of what is common or remedial within discourse is one of the main arguments. We have to teach students to self-actualize, not just "do"  to complete their work but to analyze what they are doing, how they are doing it, and how to go beyond it.  This can be done through encouragement and patience on both sides of the desk. 

"Until we seriously rethink it, we will misrepresent the nature of writing, misjudge our students' problems, and miss any chance to effect a true curricular change that will situate writing firmly in the undergraduate curriculum" (Rose, 548). Can I get an amen to that? I'll go one step further by saying we don't need change, we need a revolution! I recently heard a speaker at a conference who said "We've been using the same model for public education for 100 years, we've squeezed everything out of it possible, it's time to rethink education." These words have resonated through my thoughts for the last few weeks. It is time for a change, but how? As Mike Rose deconstructs his five identified "notions" on the teaching of writing, I observe not only the holes in writing curriculum but in education in general. The nagging issue is that education has and is in large part about measurement, grades, test scores, and student achievement  that all weigh down the process of writing. In response to a need to measure something that truly is immeasurable as all abstractions are, writing  has become a measurement of errors because when we get down to it, that really is one of the only things that can be measured in writing. The consequence is the literal execution of writing as an exploration. 

In " The Language of Exclusion: Writing Instruction at the University" Rose takes his time to accurately define how writing at the college level evolved as a "tool" or "skill" for basic communication. This further devalues the richness of expression that writing can teach. Rose poses a very poignant question "Would history or philosophy or economics exist as we know them? It is not simply that the work of such disciplines is recorded in writing, but that writing is intimately involved in the nature of their inquiry. Writing is not just a skill with which one can present or analyze knowledge. it is essential to the very existence of certain kinds of knowledge" (555). This is again inspirational, it states what writing should be but is not. I know why the majority of students hate to write, they are limited. Writing should be an act of the subconscious and instead has become an act of the conscious, students are only aware of the mistakes they make and not what they say. Writing should be a process in which a student becomes lost in thought and when they finally stop to read their words they have that "Aha, I can't believe I wrote that but that reflects me or that's what I really think!" I think of writing as a beautiful wild animal, it should roam free and be unpredictable and yet we have managed to cage it, in fact I believe for the most part we have killed it.  This coincides with Rose's analysis of the remedial course which is diagnostic and implies that there is  something inherently wrong with students when they arrive at the university. Instead we need to embrace their ideas and help them to express themselves through writing.

Oversimplification of curriculum and in categorizing students occurs daily in any school and at any level. She's smart, he's not, that group can work creatively and that group cannot. They can read this novel, the others need to read a short story and so and so forth, the cycle continues. I was appalled when I began teaching at how many of my students said "Why can't we just do worksheets, like every other class?" Worksheets! I thought, I'm working like crazy to teach thematically, do project based learning, connect the texts to my students' lives and they want to do worksheets! I had smoke coming out of my ears for days! Then I took a step back and realized that they have been conditioned to do the worksheets, they have been taught to complete simple tasks but very few of them had ever been asked to think. And even if they were in the past, the slightest bit of resistance they gave, the teacher gave up. I knew they were testing me, and I continue to get tested every year no matter the academic level of the student. In Rose's "Narrowing the Mind and Page:Remedial Writers and Cognitive Reductionism" he points out consistently how difficult it really is to categorize students into neat areas. What's worse is that in most cases there are only two polar opposite places for students to be placed which just doesn't work. By explaining and critiquing the four theories in the article, Rose shows that each has its faults and that it is difficult to apply a theory to the teaching of individuals who don't fall into the formal-operational category, oh that's right we can't apply adolescent psychology to adults! In the end, Rose asks many questions and pokes holes in the theories showing that we can't generalize students, which is something I already knew however I did come to better understand the theories of Field Dependence-Independence and Hemisphericity. To be honest, after reading Rose's first article I was a bit disappointed in this one. I understand that this was an analytical review of the theories it just didn't have the same resonance I was expecting.