10.21.09 Reflection

Chapter 1
Fu and Matoush make a decent case for students growing into the language on their terms, like we do when we're not in the classroom, like we do naturally. The English we learn in class (writing) is never the English we speak in conversation. Standard English is a second language for everyone, though being a native speaker helps.

How should teachers assess the kind of writing presented in Chapter 1? If you don't know Chinese (China again?) large chunks of the text are incomprehensible. I want students to switch between the transition phases as they need to, but I get a paycheck and they need me to put letters into the registrar. Someone else needs to figure this out.

Chapter 2
Villalva describes the high-school project, but nothing crystalized for me. Sentences like this didn't help: "In sum, macrosystemic influences, internal mesosystemic influences, external mesosystemic influences, and cohort-based microsystems all shaped writing instruction at Cerro Vista High School in a variety of ways" (47). What does that mean? Stuff influences writing. Argh.

Socioliterate Approaches
I feel like I have to defend the personal expressive writing that Johns criticizes. The personal essay is meant as a step to develop voice before the student gets into the rhetorical-awareness models of ecocomposition and context-focused writing. Understanding the effects of external media, locations and geographies is cognitively more complex than asking a student to write a simplified and interesting personal essay. Johns acknowledges this, "they may not have the metalanguage necessary to discuss texts" (289). Expressive writing is one part of a scaffolded composition cycle. I don't see a conflict between the two modes and I disagree that the individualism placed on personal essays is only available to middle-class native students.

One last contention - "On the other hand, if we become fixated on making our students discover their personal identities, or feel good, then other goals, much more important to their future lives, will be neglected" (294). Peter Elbow has a response to this: "[I]t is possible to make peace between opposites by alternating between them so that you are never trying to do contrary things at any one moment" (Embracing Contraries in the Teaching Process 71).