The first chapter is great, and dense.
There were so many things that I wanted to take from it, to mark and
remember. Here are some of the things
that I wanted to take away from it.
I like that they choose a topic that the students are already masters
of—either adolescence or work. In ENG
700 last week, Professor Ching mentioned that he likes to do something similar,
and he explained it as a way to balance out the inherently unbalanced power dynamic
between the student and the teacher. “You
teach me what you know,” he said (that he said to his students), “and I’ll
teach you how to write about it.” This
is important because in a basic writing class, I don’t think we want to get
into a situation where we have to teach something to students so they can write
about it. That is the purview of other
classes—history, sociology, even literature.
We are teaching how, not what—so that what needs to be something that the students know already. It’s interesting that even though the
students described in Facts are “experts”
in adolescence, they are not as experienced in thinking about the topic, at
least in an academic way. This made me
realize (again) that the how that we are teaching is not just how to write, but
also how to analyze, how to discuss, and how to use these skills and writing to
make one’s own thoughts clearer.
I like that they began the course with students writing about their own
experience with the topic, and then moved through other people’s accounts of
the topic, and then finished with academic papers. This is not a new idea now (the concept of a
course-long “arc” was introduced in our first class), but is still interesting.
I like how they frame the students’ problems with reading. They say that the problem is not that the
students don’t know how to read, but that the students don’t know how to compose
a reading of a text. Reading is not
memorizing facts (or even events) of a text, and the fact that students can’t
remember every detail of the text is seen by the students as a deficit. They refer to Frank Kermode and his idea that
the gap between a text and a reader’s version of the text is what makes the
reading his or her own. The authors say
that “it is this act of attention that initially defines his (the student’s)
authority as a reader.” (29)
I find myself going through this same process as I write these words
and think about this chapter. I am
looking through the parts of the book that I highlighted, pulling out ideas and
briefly discussing them—these ideas were the ones that struck me as important
or interesting (for some reason) when I was reading them for the first
time. The choices I made at that time
affect how I understand the reading the second and third time I read the text,
and this allows me to come up with an understanding of the text that is my own. I think it’s interesting that Bartholomae and
Petrosky say that this partial reading is what allows us all to have personal
readings of a text, but that this same partial reading is what makes basic readers
feel insecure about their reading skills.
I don’t really have any problems with the course. It’s interesting to see a full course laid
out and described in detail. The course
and materials are clearly dated. I think
it could be interesting to use some of the ideas in this course in my own
course, especially since it will be based on different ways we use language,
and this is something that everyone does, but might not thing about very
much. In some ways my topic is analogous
to adolescence, the topic of Bartholomae and Petrosky’s course.
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