Learning from Rants

For years I have struggled with what to do about teaching grammar in the classroom. At the college level, while it seems like I should be helping students to develop more advanced writing strategies, I am often highlighting common errors and usually feeling like I am wasting all of our time. Yet if I don’t do something they don’t think I am doing my job. In the end, I just want to tell students to read and write more and they will pick up proper grammar, but like Kenneth Lindblom and Patricia A. Dunn claim in their article “Analyzing Grammar Rants: An Alternative to Traditional Grammar Instruction,” this is not true. Unless students read more of the “standard” forms of writing, they will keep making the same mistakes. If they are indeed stuck in a specific socioeconomic class that limits their exposure to other and possibly more standard forms of language, maybe a grammar rant will have them truly proof reading their own writing for the first time.

Some of our best learning moments in life are the ones some off-the-wall teacher had us do. Whatever it was; it sticks with us. For me, it was my sixth grade teacher having us draw pictures of words. He had us pick adjectives and write them in ways to convey the meaning visually. Some students picked easy words like fat and wrote these three letters in a balloon or block style with very short and wide letters. Others took on the challenge and tried to write slimy, scary, or strong. Just how would you write, I mean, draw the word “strong” to convey its meaning visually?

Honestly, I don’t recall what word I drew, but does it matter? I think what matters most is that I learned the difference between an adjective and a noun more clearly than before. I do recall telling someone they couldn’t draw “house” for the assignment because they would be drawing an object in the letters, a thing, a noun. Our teacher was trying to get us to understand that adjectives describe what things are like.

I am definitely going to add a grammar rant exercise to my next course. I am wondering how I can get them to examine their own language from a socioeconomic class or geographic region perspective as well as a language unlike their own. Maybe there is a compare and/or contract writing assignment in there somewhere.

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Developing Academic Literacy

I have had several courses with topic discussions regarding diversity in the classroom. We often talk about what biases and diversity the students bring into the classroom, and we have even talked about the literacy differences because of these and other factors. The one thing we are not always talking about is literacy outside of the classroom beyond the digital literacy discussions. In “Why Is Everyone Talking about Adolescent Literacy?” Catherine Snow and Elizabeth Moje discuss why and how these different literacies affect student performance and how writing across the curriculum approaches will help students be more successful.

Since students are reading and writing digitally, the texts are disjointed and nonlinear. “On paper” in schools, the texts are linear and abide by rules of progression. Aside from headings, there is no real opportunity to pick and choose how students read the text  They are essentially expected to read it from start to finish. And we know when they read online, they jump around from page to page, essentially hyperlinking their reading experience in their chosen sequence. So if students are mostly experiencing a digital literacy outside of the classroom, Snow and Moje claim that we need to make sure we teach students about academic literacy.

I couldn’t agree more.

I have actually been in graduate level courses as a student with classmates who could not decipher a peer-reviewed journal article. Admittedly, I was one of those students too my first time through grad school, but at the time I just thought I was the only one. I had no idea that there might be others like me in the classroom who were struggling with reading the material as an academically prepared student. Have you ever been in a particular literacy community where you lacked discipline literacy, for example? How did you resolve this issue?

A 1901 Perspective on English in Secondary Schools

In the article “English in Secondary Schools; A Review” Allan Abbott discusses the study of English in secondary schools. If you didn’t know the article was published in 1901, you might not realize it aside from the dated and sexist language. Over a hundred years later, professionals in the field are still trying to figure out how to prepare students for college and the real world in the English classroom.

I was struck by what seemed like a reference to a writing-across-the-curriculum stance in the following passage:

After the elementary steps, proficiency in composition and  taste  for literature  can  be  obtained only  by several years of  constant writing and reading,  which  can  be  done  with  but few  recitation periods.  A boy cannot write with ease and force until he has reasonable accuracy, nor can he criticize without a fairly wide knowledge of books.  The  intermediate  high-school  years are crowded with  other subjects that  need  time,  and  that  also,  if properly taught, afford English  training. In short, the middle high-school years demand for other subjects time that English can well spare .

Abbott is essentially claiming that it should be the English teacher’s job to teach the basic skills early on and then allow for less time spent in English and Literature classrooms during the middle years because the other subjects can incorporate writing into the lesson plans. I agree that it is important to encourage writing, and good writing, in other subjects, but does this really work?

It was also amazing to read, again in an article published in 1901, that “interest, the psychologists tell us, depends on ability to connect the new object with something interesting already in the mind, and to hold the interest of pupils, we must discover what resident or natural interests they have, and make our work branch out in a sort of network from them”(395). I wasn’t surprised to read that “very little work has been done in this direction”(395).

Questions Lead to Change

In “The Power of Questions and the Possibilities of Inquiry in English Education,” Jennifer Buehler challenges us to consider whether or not we ask enough questions. I think it’s safe to say that many of us don’t always ask as many questions as we should in order to keep our lessons fresh, effective, and interesting for our target audience.

I agree with her assertion that “the most important thing we can do in the field of English education is to support teachers in establishing a questioning stance that will evolve throughout their careers. The complexity of the work we do demands it. Because every teaching context is different and because every student presents a unique literacy story, there can be no single set of answers that captures what English should be in every location”(282). Even the same material taught within the same brick and mortar to two different groups of students will have completely different outcomes for both the students and the teacher.

I have gone into a term with two sections of the same level remedial writing course, wrote up one syllabus, changed the dates a bit, and turned that one syllabus into two syllabi. After  two weeks I decided I had to make some adjustments. The students in one class responded better with sentence worksheets and the other class responded better to paragraph assignments. Of course I incorporated a bit of the other type of writing practice in each class, but I realized early on that what I thought was good for them, wasn’t. Questioning my plan led me to change.

Have you ever had a syllabus you had to essentially scrap, or maybe a part of it, because you realized your plan just wasn’t going to work with your students?

Welcome to my blog, ENGL 530 Classmates

As some of you already know, I was forced into creating and writing a blog for one of my classes last winter. Honestly, I kicked and screamed on one hand but knew it was good for me. After all, it is a great way to have a better understanding of at least how some people are reading nowadays.

I will resume this blog for this class and provide links to the articles through the class wiki. Basically, I will continue to add to the page where you found the link to get here to this blog in a table of contents format. The links will go directly to the articles and not just to the blog, so you won’t have to hunt around, hopefully.

I have to drive home, install a storm door and get some dinner. I’ll be back in a couple hours with my first couple of posts…