Subject: Re: comfort ye, my peepul
From: Jim Rovira (jrovira@drew.edu)
Date: Tue Feb 12 2002 - 14:08:39 GMT
Well, will, you're a personal hero of mine for giving up teaching
literature courses (I assume that's what you were doing) to teach writing
-- sounds like composition courses. :) Everyone else (just about) is
running the other way.
Oh, yeah, I disagree with the idea that students bring nothing into the
classroom that's valuable. Bleah. I think they need to learn what it is
they're actually bringing and how to draw from that effectively.
Yeah, I'm pretty fortunate with the type of students I'm being asked to
teach -- I'm actually teaching ENGL 2 here -- the research writing class,
and most of the students in it were good enough to go straight to it
without taking ENGL 1. We're also a small, private university that gets a
lot of good students anyhow. I taught a Comp. 1 course at another
university down the street and saw a BIG difference in the students'
abilities...eesh. Three had learning disabilities. One, I could tell,
really, really struggled. Fortunately, these students were given pretty
good support out of class from the LD center there.
I'm probably not a good enough composition teacher yet to be really good
with students who are really bad. I think I helped most of them, but the
most dramatic improvements I saw were with the better students.
Jim
Will Hochman wrote:
>
> >
> >
> >At any rate, I think addressing grammatical rules and basic sentence
> >structure issues can give students the tools to really say what they want
> >to say. If they stay stuck in their language of birth -- their dialect
> >-- they often don't have the tools or vocabulary to express the more
> >sophisticated ideas found in academic discourse. It's a disservice to
> >leave them there.
> >
> >Jim
> >
> YES! I agree and I was trying to show that I work hard to do just
> that. In point of fact, I gave up a gig where I was "too important to
> the dept" to teach first-year writing and took a job where that's all
> I do. I want to help students gain access to academic discourse as
> readers and writers and knowing rules matters. However, I'm also
> talking about a two-way street. Students teach teachers, right? They
> bring rich insights in dialect from their experiences and cultures
> that need to be voiced. John Dewey's work in education means nothing
> if we haven't realized that the "empty vessel" approach doesn't work.
> Dewey believed education happens when students and teachers
> experience ideas. We know that lecturing students about rules and
> giving them handbooks doesn't work. When we challenge students to
> think critically (btw, here's a nice url that sets up a Critical
> Thinking rubric: http://www.ctl.wsu.edu/ctrubric.asp) we have to
> realize that writing is thinking. I am all for thinking about rules
> and proper use of language, I just know that concern is not typically
> the best thing I can teach students about writing. Writing, from my
> point of view is about encountering ideas and expressing the
> experience of that encounter. Getting my students to the point where
> they are able to "play" with reading ideas and write with critical
> and creative insight takes more of my teaching time and energy than
> rules. It's not one or the other, but the mix and how well it works
> for individual classes (I sense yours is more advanced than mine), as
> well as how well we can teach. Uh oh, I'm going to be late for class,
> will
> --
> Will Hochman
>
> Assistant Professor of English
> Southern Connecticut State University
> 501 Crescent St, New Haven, CT 06515
> 203 392 5024
>
> http://www.southernct.edu/~hochman/willz.html
>
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