Lesson Plan

So, this is the beginning of my lesson plan...very rough and not finished.

Title-Musical Computers
Subject- Computers and Internet, Language Arts
Grade Level- 4-5th

I would have a starter idea to make it easier (can really be anything, I would use something like - We just got out of school and in the parking lot was a Martian...) on each computer. Each student or pair of students continues writing on their computer until the music stops. Students then move to the next computer. Students read and then add to the started story on that computer. When the music stops, students move to the next computer and so on and so on. Eventually, everyone is back at their computer. Students edit for spelling and punctuation, not changing the content.
Students can add pictures to the finished stories if they like.
Students are evaluated on punctuation corrections and participation.
I would hope that students are amazed at how the same story turns out so differently each time.

Philosophy of Education

“A teacher’s personal philosophy of education is a critical element in his or her approach to guiding children along the path of enlightenment” (Barbara Witt). This statement shapes my philosophy of education. As a future teacher I am aware that I must possess the responsibility of providing my students with a variety of tools they will need to be successful in their live. There are four key points in my philosophy of education: teaching children, schools and the community, curriculum, and diversity.
I believe that I am a decisive element in the classroom. As a teacher, I will teach, motivate, encourage, listen, and be enthusiastic in my teaching. This will help students to become fully educated members of society, and allow them to make decisions on their own. In line with the progressive philosophy, the role of the teacher is to facilitate learning by posing questions for students that exercise their minds in a practical manner. I believe my personal philosophy of education is most closely related to progressivism.
I believe that both schools and the community need to work together to create a fun, safe-environment for the children. Educators need to understand that everything around students, inside or outside, affects the student’s behavior, feelings, and outlook towards their learning process. In my opinion, educators value both the character of each individual and the larger sense of the community in which the individual may grow and flourish.
I believe that a progressive curriculum has a strong emphasis on problem solving and analysis, for those skills is invaluable in today’s society. Progressive curriculum is founded for providing students instruction that ranges from basic real-world skills to higher levels of investigation and analysis. In my opinion, a teacher must guide students down a path of greatness and productivity by being current in theories and practice, while remaining open to new ideas for the classroom.
I believe that all students regardless of race, ethnicity, socio-economic status, or religious background are deserving of an education. An effective teacher should diversify the instruction to meet each child’s abilities and needs by using various strategies to meet the needs of tactile, kinesthetic, visual, and auditory learners. I believe that an education should allow students to fully discover themselves, their strengths and weaknesses, and benefit from necessary real world/real life instruction. Diversity would expose students to cultures and experiences that they otherwise would not have had the opportunity to encounter.
Again, “a teacher’s personal philosophy of education is a critical element in his or her approach to guiding children along the path of enlightenment” (Barbara Witt). My personal philosophy of education focuses on teaching children, schools and the community, curriculum, and diversity. When a student succeeds at learning something that they are proud of, that is the teacher’s reward. Celebrate and appreciate!

Class Discussion

"Zitkala Sa was an Indian teacher who challenged and countered educational norms that silenced Indian voices and erased Indian culture"(118).

The significance of this quote is her pedagogical resistance in a time where minority rights were iqnored. She was trying to establish the inherent right of native Amiericans to decide their own values, modes, styles, voice,etc. We can learn from her resistance to conform to what was expected, and know more about the history of the past.

As a writing teacher I care about this because everyone regardless of race, gender, etc., should have the inherent right to their own VOICE. Everyone deserves respect, and that voice is crucial in the classroom. We, "can both contribute to and learn from" the work of rhetorical sovereignty" (118).

Contact and Negotiation

This week I really took pleasure in reading Joseph Harris, Contact and Negotiation. I found to agree that there needs to be much more of a diversity awareness in our classrooms today. There needs to be more “balance.” There needs to be “two-sides” to all issues. I have seen dialogue and truth replaced with dangerous blind faith. From denial of global warming to the teaching of intelligent design, we have entered an era where the foundations of democracy are not being chiseled away but openly hacked down, degraded and destroyed. When people, adult and children, cannot back up their accusations, they rely on the frightening rationale of “just because.” Facts no longer matter where ideology is blindly and dangerously driven by a complete obedience that does not question the results of the order.
“Dissent is dealt with by not being noticed-much as, Pratt argues, the views, experiences, and writings of minority cultures have been studiously ignored in most American classrooms, even in schools where many students are black, Asian, Hispanic, or working class. This leads Pratt to call for classrooms where such voices do get heard, even if at the cost of some conflict or confusion-for pedagogical contact zones rather than communities” (118).
The teachers aren't telling students what to think — they're getting their thoughts on it. I truly believe that teachers should emphasize that students need to think for themselves in order to achieve success in life. It is important to educate children with a greater awareness of others around them, especially those who are different. Teaching content is the ultimate result we as teachers must achieve; framing the content within the curriculum so that it is culturally responsive to the students in the classroom will ultimately make it more relevant. Students who are taught to respect and be curious about culture will ultimately develop a better understanding of the cultural differences that exist around them. This will help them to be better citizens and more productive members of society as a whole. Educators do not believe that all learners are the same. Yet visits to schools throughout the world might convince us otherwise. Too often, educators continue to treat all learners alike while paying lip service to the principle of diversity. An individual learner's culture, family background, and socio-economic level affect his or her learning. The context in which someone grows and develops has an important impact on learning. Every learner benefits from an excellent teacher and an engaging learning experience. Every student and teacher deserves to be treated with respect. Every student should have an opportunity to reach his or her individual potential.

My rough draft is by all means a "rough" draft. It is very un-organized and not finished. My thoughts and I have not been devoted to this paper as it should have been. My fiance and I found out this weekend that his mom has cancer and chemo-therapy is not an option. My rough draft needs a lot of work, and I cannot concentrate on it at all.

Technology in the Classroom
Over the past two years, many school districts, such as Fort Worth ISD have installed new technology and have upgraded their teacher eduaction programs to include the Promethian Board. The Promethian Board incorporates the benefits of a white board, an overhead projector, an audio/visual system, and incorporates the infinetely adaptable technologies of the computer. Promethian Boards are poised to change the future of education as we know it. The incorporation of this technology enables educators to create, customize and integrate text, images, quizzes, tests, web, video, and audio content, so they can more easily enthrall students and inspire them to both pay attention and participate more readily in their own educations. It also makes it easier to accommodate several different learning styles. Though, as I have experienced as a substitute teacher, there are positive features of the Promethian Board, and drawbacks. Nonetheless, the Promethian Board allows educators to meet their students’ technological capabilities, and the curriculum standards, while meeting students’ individual learning needs.
The Promethian Board differs from teaching in a traditional classroom by creating a computerized, technology-based classroom. “The change-a potentially more social, collaborative environment,” requires teachers to adapt to a more collaborative pedagogy in their classroom. “Much more frequenlty, scholar’s note ways in which collaboratve pedagogy levels the teacher-student hierarchy. When teachers are no longer dispensing knowledge in lectures but are guiding students in the collaborative process of discovering and constructing knowledge, students are empowered” (Howard 57). The Promethian Board enables more students’ engagement through the integration of technology in the classroom. Students are able to not only work on the board, but explain to their classmates what they did on the Promethian and why they did it. I have noticed that they enjoyed what they were doing and it was appropriately challenging for them. The students reflected on what they were doing and suddenly understood on their own and from their peer’s problematic issues they were faced with. The Promethean Board is a wonderful asset in a classroom where the teacher's goal is to produce students who are meaningfully engaged in their learning throughout the day. With its various accessories, the possibilities for collaboration, communication, and interaction among students is endless. The Activclassroom makes learning come alive, encourages students to embrace technology, provides immediate feedback on student comprehension (through the use of Activotes and Activexpressions), and gives a new dimension of interactivity to lessons. The Activclassroom assists in students by providing flexible ways to access and display lesson content, opportunities for active student participation in complex interactive activities, and engaging ways to obtain immediate feedback.
The Promethian Board’s interactive applications work well for involving all students in the learning process.The Promethian Board accomodates different learning styles. Tactile learners benefit from touching and using the Activpen to mark on the board. Audio learners take advantage of videos and podcasts, and visual learners see what is taking place as it develops on the board. The visual learner is able to watch as the teacher or student manipulates images, shapes, colors, and words. The sound system allows the most distant student in the classroom to use his audio learning capabilities to full effect. Though, even with all the benefits of this system, integration in classrooms is not taking advantage of the full capabilities of the board. This is primarily due to available resources for preparing teachers to use this educational technology system in their classroom. “Technology has the potential for educational harm as well as good, teachers and administrators must plan ahead as they implement computerization” (Sidler, Morris and Smith 234). Rebecca Howard Moore believes that, “collaboration offers the benefit of discover; students learn more by working together” (Howard 63). I have seen that students in a computer-based classroom are focused on what is being taught at hand, rather than social issues. “In only one category of interaction-student contact with teachers outside of class-did the traditional classrooms have higher levels of contact than the computer classrooms. Yet this may stem less from reluctance on the part of students in the computer classrooms to seek out their teachers outside of class than from a sense that they didn’t need to do so” (Sidler, morris and Smith 259).
“Most students have a good initial reaction to the computer and feel that it can help them in their work, though some users, especially older students, may be uncomfortable with the technology or may even be “computerphobic” (Sidler, Morris and Smith 405). I have personally experienced this “computerphobia” in many students. Several students find the board intimidating and want nothing to do with it. They view the board as challenging by the technology it offers and scared of change in the traditional classroom they have been accustomed to for so many years. The Promethiann Board promotes collaboration by the students working together, and some may be against this type of learning. Some students feel they are better prepared to accomplish their assignments independently and struggle with working with others.
My own experience with the Promethian Board has been amazing. I was astounded at the ease of the system. A simple point and click interface and I was creating pictures and graphs with the Activpen. The projection system allowed me to show images to my audience from the Internet as I surfed for valuable information, and the impressive sound system kept the class entertained as I played music during downtime. The Promethian Board is the future of education. The large collection of the premade and teacher made lesson plans and activities for the ActivStudio software make the ActivBoard very versatile and convenient to use in a wide variety of classroom and applications.

Cheryl Glenn and Jessica Enoch

I want to start this blog with a quote from Drama in the Archives: Rereading Methods, Rewriting History by Cheryl Glenn, and Jessica Enoch. “For years now, historians of rhetoric and composition have studies the history of university-level writing practices by turning their attention toward archival and primary documents such as, “actual student writings, teacher records, unprinted notes, and pedagogical materials ephemera that writing courses have always generated but never kept” (323). Archival research practices are, “a Burkean framework of “scenes, acts, agents, agencies, purposes, and attitudes” can invigorate our understanding of historiographic methods and open up new possibilities for future histories of rhetoric composition” (322). This article is particularly important because it touches on issues that are central to feminist pedagogy. Namely the question of whether it is productive to essentialize women's writing. Looser, in demonstrating the dangers of blindly accepting essential definitions of women's writing, is able to make a case for examining closely when and how we invoke these descriptions. This fits into the debate surrounding teaching masculine and feminine (for lack of better terms) modes of writing in composition classes. Looser suggests that it might be dangerous to perpetuate these restrictive categories without a clear examination/explanation of the reasons behind doing so. Therefore, the question becomes: are our students sophisticated enough to understand that we are not advocating a split between masculine and feminine writing, but that we are merely attempting to articulate a need for a more accepting academy? In other words, should we bring this debate into our classrooms, where we may be reinforcing the dichotomy instead of working to eliminate essentialisms?
I enjoyed how Glenn and Enoch emphasized that, “not all research in rhetoric and composition begins-or ends-on a university campus or at a great research library” (326). I strongly believe that some of the best research comes from a number of different sources. For example, I had to write a history paper a few years ago and some of my research and sources were from my grandfather and his friends. I had gained so much insight on what really happened and the emotions that they experienced during that time in the war. They also kept records like newspaper clippings, diaries, letters and postcards that helped me tremendously. Their stories and records helped my archive research experience to be efficient, fun, and less daunting. Glenn and Enoch go on to state, “in their research, these scholars could not access catalogued materials that had been archived by professional librarians at the university library. Instead, they leveraged the collections of their “pack -rat” colleagues” (327). That is more often than most the best kind of research!

Textbook Review

Textbook Review: The St. Martin’s Guide to Writing
After reviewing, The St. Martin’s Guide to the Writing by Rise Axelrod and Charles Cooper: Ninth Edition, I would strongly recommend this textbook to new instructors teaching first year writing at Texas Wesleyan University. In this review, I will summarize what the textbook is about, identify pedagogical influences I have seen in the textbook’s content, and weigh the various features of the text that makes this textbook stand out.
The St. Martin’s Guide to Writing is designed to be a flexible composition textbook for instructors and a helpful guide for students. Axelrod and Cooper provide a step-by-step guide to writing specific kinds of essays in this textbook. The text helps build on the actual writing processes of students and does even more to prepare them for writing they will do in other college courses. As a rhetoric and reader, The St. Martin’s Guide can serve as a comprehensive introduction to discursive practice. It comprises several parts:
• Part I, Writing Activities, presents nine different essay assignments, all reflecting actual writing situations that students may encounter in and out of college, kinds of discourse that they should learn to read critically and to write intelligently. Among the types of essays included are autobiography, explanation, position paper, proposal and literary interpretation.
• Part II, Critical Thinking Strategies, collects in two separate chapters, practical guides for invention and reading. The catalog of the invention stratagies includes annotating, summarizing, exploring the significance of figurative language, and evaluating the logic of an argument.
• Part III, Writing Strategies, looks at a wide range of essential writers’ strategies: paragraphing and coherence, logic and reasoning, and the familiar modes of presenting information, such as, marration, defining and classifying.
• Part IV, Research Strategies, discusses field as well as library and Internet research and includes thorough guidelines for using and documenting sources, with detailed examples of MLA and APA documentation styles.
• Part V, Writing for Assignment, covers essay examinations, showing students how to analyze different kinds of exam questions and offering strategies for writing solutions.
• The Handbook, is a complete reference guide covering grammar, word choice, punctuation, mechanics, ESL problems, sentence structure and usage. Provides student examples throughout so that students will see errors similar to the ones in their own essays.
Axelrod and Cooper took on a classical tradition of teaching writing not only as a method of composing rhetorically effective composition but also as a powerful guide for thinking creatively and critically. The textbook adds elements of critical and collaborative pedagogy that can make possible social and personal empowerment and transformation. Each chapter promotes critical thinking. In Part I, it concludes with three metacognitive activities to help students to become aware of what they have learned about the process of writing, about the influence of reading and writing, and about the social and political dimensions of the genres they have learned to write. According to Ann George, in Critical Pedagogy: Dreaming of Democracy, she states that “critical pedagogy reinvents the roles of teachers and students in the classroom and the kind of activities they engage in” (George 93). Axelrod and Cooper emphasize this idealogy in their textbook by believing that writing is both a social act and a way of knowing. The textbook also has activites to stimulate collaboration. At the start of each of the writing chapters, there is a collaborative activity that invites students to try out some of the thinking and planning they will be doing for the kind of writing covered in that chapter. Then, following each reading comes connecting to Culture and Experience, designed to provoke thoughtful responses about the social and political dimensions of the reading. According to Rebecca Moore Howard, “when teachers are no longer dispensing knowledge in lectures but are guiding students in the collaborative process of discovering and constructing knowledge, students are empowered” (Howard 57). This textbook empowers the students.
There are many features that make this textbook stand out. The text’s cover is a cheerful, soothing, cool green that invites the student to use it. The textbook is well organized and easy to use by both the instructor and student. There is a lot of visual rhetoric throughout the text with designs that highlight collaborative activities, lists of basic features, guidelines for peer review, etc. I believe this is an effective textbook for first year writing due to the content having practical guides to writing, the systematic integration of reading and writing, activities to promote group discussion and inquiry, and activites that encourage students to reflect on what they have learned.
The St. Martin’s Guide to Writing would be a superb textbook for a new instructor teaching first year writing at Texas Wesleyan University. The textbook will help students learn to write critically and effectively. Also, the text is very easy to follow, combining reading instruction with writing instruction. Overall, the textbook would be beneficial to the student as well as the instructor.

Michelle Payne

I really enjoyed reading Michelle Payne’s,Rendering Women’s Authority in the Writing Classroom.I found it to be very fascinating, mainly because at one point in every educator’s career, they will have a “Kyle” in one of their classrooms. So, my big question is, what do we do as teachers to effectively handle a disruptive, disrespectful student? In trying to find the answer, I re-read Payne’s essay, and asked a dear friend who teaches at Meacham Middle School in FWISD. So, here are a few suggestions by a teacher who has more than a handful of “problem students” in her classes. Her advice was: Remember that these problems can be more common for instructors with status inconsistency (women, minorities, international, young, TAs…). Also, remember if you can figure out why the student(s) is being disruptive, it can help you decide what to do. This takes good observation skills and conversations with colleagues and students. Just as Payne, she has found that being a woman educator offers more challenges when dealing with mainly male students that challenge her authority. She also gave these tips: Note who the disruptive students are and speak to them after class or ask them to come to your office hours. Explain why/how you find them disruptive, find out why they are acting that way, ask them what they would be comfortable doing. Tell them what you want to do.Discuss the disruptive behavior in private outside of class with some of the concerned and nondisruptive students. Ask for their assistance in maintaining a positive classroom environment.On a given day when this behavior occurs change what you are doing. Break students in to groups for some work. Call on these and other students to come forward and lead discussion.Consider changing the structure of the whole class. Is it all lecture and/or do students need to be more active and involved? Rethink if/how what you do fits the students and the course. Use more diverse techniques to reach the disruptive students. She also believes that a teacher needs to document any and everything, so she will be “covered” when the time comes to bring in higher authority.
Like Payne, she, “created this course to be designed by students so that everyone could find a space to get what they wanted out of it,” (398). Having a student that is difficult would take away time and energy from the class as a whole. I really believe as Payne does, that “the whole premise of this course is that students need to participate in their own learning” (398). Though, just as Payne feels, “the perpesctive of a woman who was socilaized to have what post-strucuralists call a “split subjectivity,” who already commands from most students less authority and power than a man, yet who has embraced pedagogies and post structuralist theories that decenter authority and who also sees the value of “apprenticing” students into the academy, asking students to question my authority was overwhelming at best, debilitating at worst” (402). I believe that this issue will never be resolved, and it can be discussed until the cows come home! I do think that as a woman eduactor gaining respect from mainly male students will always be a challenge, at best a headache!!

"Teaching to Transgress"

In schools, children discover that they must use their brains mostly for memorizing rather than exploring their interests, expressing their ideas, or solving problems. Even worse, much of what they are asked to memorize is irrelevant to their world. Often, their reaction to this is either social withdrawal or destructive anger. When teachers force students to memorize certain facts, and they replicate those facts on a test, teachers are satisfied that they have successfully controlled them. Just as Bell Hooks notes in "Teaching to Transgress", “The vast majority of our professors lacked basic communication skills, they were not self-actualized, and they often used the classroom to enact rituals of control that were about domination and the unjust exercise of power” (5). Most children are not capable of understanding what is happening to them in our present educational system. They are berated by a constant dialogue of blame and fault. They accept the system as the way things must be; realizing that one either must play the game, or accept the consequences of defying the norm. Many advocate the creation of more options and a greater freedom of choice, though, mainly fail with this idea from school districts. Students require action, movement, and the freedom to explore their own interests. Good education involves far more than test scores. It is at the very heart of character formation. Those who design our educational programs today lack an understanding of the elements that contribute to healthy mindfulness. Educators should not be attempting to change a person’s predisposition. This would be like trying to change someone from being left-handed to right-handed. People remember only what they find interesting and useful. Children want to learn things that will help them make sense out of this often-confusing world. They want to make a valuable contribution to society. We do not need coercive force in order for them to accomplish this. Rather than stress memorization and blind obedience, we must stress self-discovery and exploration.
Hooks explains, “Excitement in higher education was viewed as potentially disruptive of the atmosphere of seriousness assumed to be essential to the learning process. To enter classroom settings in colleges and universities with the will to share the desire to encourage excitement was to trangress” (7). Excitement is vital in the classroom. Without excitement, students will not engage in the learning process, let alone think independently without the teacher telling them what to do and think. Personally, I know that I have retained knowledge/curriculum by pedagogical techniques rather than from the professor lecturing. I completley agree with Hooks opinion that, “It is rare that any professor, no matter how eloquent a lecturer, can generate through his or her actions enough excitement to create an axciting classroom. Excitement is generated through collective effort” (8). I strongly feel that educators need to rethink their traditional teaching practices, and facilitate each and every student’s individualism.

Mina P. Shaughnessy

I am going to be doing a lot, I mean a lot of rambling on in this blog...so be prepared.
The presence of remedial courses at most colleges today is evidence of the failure of elementary and secondary schools to consistently turn out students with adequate language skills. In an Introduction to Errors and Expectations: A Guide for the Teacher of Basic Writing, by Mina P. Shaughnessy, “There is the reality of academia, the fact that most college teachers have little tolerance for the kinds of errors BW students make, that they perceive certain types of errors as indicators of ineducability, and that they have the power of the F” (392). There can be a huge difference between English written by native speakers and the English written by people who use it as a second language. I have nothing but admiration for people who master a second language. It takes years of dedication. But no matter how much effort one puts into learning English, it is the rare person indeed who can write it like someone born to the task.Text that is difficult to understand, or that contains distracting mistakes, will fail to connect an audience. They’ll notice the flaws, such as misspellings and improperly used idioms, and their attention will be shifted away from the message.Language, skillfully used, has the power to make a connection between writer and reader. As Mina P. Shaughnessy puts it, “So absloute is the importance of error in the minds of many writers that ‘good writing’ to them means ‘correct writing,’ nothing more” (392).
High standards of grammar, spelling, and punctuation should be expected in schools; but these mean nothing if the content itself doesn’t express the writer’s ideas accurately. I’ve had people say to me that perfection in writing is not important enough to spend time on. As long as the reader gets the drift, that’s good enough for them. That kind of thinking is dead wrong, and here’s why: errors in writing are not benign things that readers gloss over and ignore. Errors do damage! Errors will result in failure to effectively convey thoughts or information, and worse, can create serious misunderstandings. Even small mistakes draw the reader’s attention away from the subject matter and focus it on the errors themselves. Even if they are not severe enough to cause a misunderstanding about what is being said (and all too often, they are), errors still obscure the message and detract from the writer’s image. Early schooling doesn’t necessarily demand adherence to high standards, and concentrates instead on ideals like “self expression” (without any regard to the content) or “self-esteem” (without any regard to achievement). “Error is more than a mishap; it is a barrier that keeps someone not only from writing something in formal English but from having something to write” (394). I have my own issues with that kind of educational focus, which I believe leaves many bright students without the necessary tools and discipline to succeed. I think there are two separate parts to learning to be a good English writer. First you need to master the foundations of the language (grammar and vocabulary) and then you need to develop style. So what’s the problem? The problem is reflected in the growing numbers of students’ who can no longer write in the formal, professional style that academia demands.
I know that I rattled on, but this issue is very near and dear to my heart. My grandmother can write and read probably at an 8th grade level...creating many obstacles in her life that could have been avoided had she had one teacher take the time and instill basic writing and reading concepts to her. It’s a vicious cycle in the education system when there are many who graduate highschool to start their collegiate years not even having an understanding of Basic English. BOO to those educators! You should be ashamed of yourselves!

Short Story

Theory to Practice
Donald Murray clearly understands that times have changed, and teaching compoistion does too. In his essay, Finding Your Own Voice: Teaching Composition in an Age of Dissent, he clealry states his feelings by declaring, “The times indeed are revolutionary, cleansingly so. And they uniquely offer the composition teacher the opportunity to play a pioneer role in constructing an educational system which removes students’ responsibilities from the teacher and places them firmly on the student” (Murray 118).Writing is an essential skill that all students must learn to do while in school. Though, how the teacher chooses to enstill such knowledge plays a key factor in the student’s success. While observing Mrs. Simms, a secondary ESL/composition teacher, I examined how she implemented Murray’s belief of freedom in the classroom in the following ways: writing assignments, grading, and the diversity of the students’ contradictory voices to be heard.
Mrs. Simms recognizes that writing is a mighty instrument of thought. In, A Framework for Teaching, by Geoffrey Squires, he sees eye to eye with Murray’s theory of expressivism. Squires states, “The teacher may be ‘there for’ his or her students in ways that escape the formulaic confines of method” (Squires 348). Mrs. Simms uses journals in her classroom to foster thinking and learning in different ways. Students’ have the choice to write about things of personal interest for 15 minutes everyday at the beginning of class. Having students’ journal is one way to help them participate, and self-direct their own learning. As Murray wrote, “The student may be shown how to percieve, but he has to do his own percieving” (Murray 119). Also, Mrs. Simms permits her students to write creatively, giving them choices on assignments. For example, the students’ were given a broad assignment to write a paper on one of their most fond memories. They could present it in the form of a paper or poem. Her classroom is based on freedom and flexibility, major components in Murray and Squires opinion.
Murray’s theory suggests that, “Grades, of course, are ridiculous during the writing course. An “A” deludes a student into thinking an early draft is final copy, while an “F” convinces another student that there is no hope” (Murray121). Mrs. Simms finds a happy medium with grading. Instead of grading the journal entries, she comments, or offers positive remarks, upbeat questions, and encouragement. This helps students’ focus on what they think, and an opportunity to help them observe their writing errors on their own. Squires remarks about grading needing to have constructive criticism; “The role of the teacher giving encouraging reflection on the learning process and the students’ own self-image as a learner” (Squires 345). Similar to Murray and Squires, Mrs. Simms believes that if she does not allow her students’ to make mistakes, she will be taking away from the natural learning process required to achieve competency and confidence.
Voice is crucial in the classroom. Writing allows one to learn about themselves and their world and communicate their insights to others. Just as Murray and Squires feel, Mrs. Simms, “will break the class up so that individual students’ exchange papers, and have the class read each other’s papers in small groups” (Murray 120). In most cases, the students’ will better understand the problems of their peer’s and be able to voice the solution better than the teacher. Expressivism as Murray and Squires maintain, is that voice is the major role in good writing. In Mrs. Simms classroom, it is very apparent that voice is key. She tends to fall back and let the class take charge. She challenges them to be participants and spectators, giving her students’ a sense of empowerment and responsibility.
Mrs. Simms has embraced Murray’s concluding thoughts, “The teacher of composition should welcome the age of dissent. He should glory diversity, and he should discover that by giving his students’ freedom they will accept responsibility” (Murray 123). I truly think that expressivist teaching allows so much more growth from the student. Expressivist theory allows the student to think and write in a reflective manner, thus, creating a wonderful way to learn and think and speak more clearly, to be more precise, and more actively aware of what ones own thoughts and ideas consist of. Mrs. Simms is a superb teacher, and I applaud her methods of teaching!

"Rhetorical Pdagogy"

Iam finding that rhetoric is all over the place…literally. But it's not just the definition of rhetoric that is all over the place - it's the actual disciplinary practice of it that is sprawled everywhere. After I finished reading, Rhetorical Pedagogy, by William Covino, I felt exasperated by all of the definitions and theories. Though, there were two “modern masters” during the twentieth-century that impacted my thoughts on rhetoric; Kenneth Burke and Kennedy.
Burke defiines rhetoric as, “the use of language as a symbolic means of inducing cooperation in beings that by nature respond to symbols, thus revealing his essential and ongoing interest in the associational uses of language, for bringing together disparate or incongruous ideas, and for promoting the identification of different individuals and groups with one another” (45). Burke’s theory, dramatism, is simplistic and realistic for anyone. Dramatism is broken down into two parts: action and motion. Action is something that people do on purpose in way of their voluntary behavior. Motions are behaviors that are non-purposeful and non-meaningful. Actions deal with the basic forms of thought. While, motives are the way people understand events and the suggestions for response inherent to the dialogue that it presents for its audience. In order for motives to be understood further, Burke presents what is knows as the Pentad. Basically, the Pentad is: who, when, where, why and how. This can be applied to just about anything that happens in the world. I found that the Pentad was very easy to understand and I really believe that one could apply it to a very simple scenario or to a more complex one. I believe that Burke’s dramatism works well because it is organized and easily understood.
I connected with Kennedy’s theory mainly from a quote by him in Rhetorical Pedagogy. “Rhetoric is the most general sense may perhaps be identified with the energy inherent in communication: the emotional energy that impels the speaker to speak, the physical energy expended in the utterance, the energy level coded in the message, and the energy experienced by the recipient in decoding the message” (48). I strongly feel that emotion plays a huge part in both the speaker and the recipient. Emotion and energy is what makes writing great. It is what seperates the good from the bad. Kennedy is acknowledging that there has to be a connection between the writer and the reader. Again, the simplicity of Kennedy’s theory fascinated me. It is very easily understood which helps the not so devoted reader understand the meaning of rhetoric. ; )

Donald Murray

Donald Murray


“Finding Your Own Voice: Teaching Composition in the Age of Dissent,” by Donald Murray really held my interest the majority of all of the assigned readings for this week. I feel like everything that we discussed during our last class, Murray reinstated in his article. Murray writes, “I do get discouraged, mostly because the students have had no freedom, and when they find their voice, it has not been tempered by experience” (118). I believe that each and every student is an individual, thus, making each person’s writing styles different. The students’ voice is what makes each of his/her writing distinct from any others’. By not allowing academic freedom in compoistion, the students’ creativity has been smoldered…the fire has gone out. In my opinion, the only way you can develop your own voice is to live your life as fully as possible and spend a great deal of time listening to what is going on inside your own head. Everything you have seen and done and smelled and touched and listened to and experienced has gone into making you the person you are. And if your writing is to be original and authentic it is this person's voice that should come out on paper. Helping the reader see things through your eyes, your thoughts, your attitudes, is part of writing with your own voice. Though, the teacher more than often tells the student what to write about, what is expected, and how he/she should feel. “Too often the composition teacher not only denies his students freedom, he even goes further and performs the key writing tasks for his students. He gives an assignment; he lists sources; he dictates the form; and by irresponsibly conscientious correcting, he actually revises his students’ papers” (118). In the end, the student leaves the class not knowing how to write, or even wanting to express himslef through writing. The student has been cheated of an education, of attaining some kind of knowledge on creativity and expression. I believe in Murray’s four responsibilites of a teacher: to create a psychological and physical environment in which the student can fulfill his responsibiltes; enforce the deadline of when writing assignments are to be turned in; the teacher needs to stop trying to create a world in which success for the majority day by day is what is expected and normal; and lastly, the teacher is not the diagnostician…a good composition teacher does not see every little error on the paper, but merely listens to the students’ own diagnosis and how he/she would solve any problems. An experienced teacher would suggest alternatives and give positive feedback, waiting for the student to understand his own errors. I do believe guidance is very crucial in composition. As a last comment on writing with your own voice, I'd like to share with you the words of a woman named Margaret Fuller Ossoli, who wrote in the New York Tribune in 1846, “Truth is the nursing mother of genius. No man can be absolutely true to himself, eschewing cant, compromise, servile imitation and complaisance, without becoming original, for there is in every creature a fountain of life, which, if not choked back by stones and other dead rubbish, will create a fresh atmosphere and bring to life fresh beauty.” I thank my freshman comp.professor for sharing this quote with her class on the first day. She set the most mesmerizing mood that captivated each and every student’s creativity and has made my writing flourish with freedom!

"The Feminization of Rhetoric and Composition Studies"

I would like to start this blog out with a quote from Lauers’, The Feminization of Rhetorical and Composition Studies, “In composition, the term feminization appears to mean the dominance or predominance of women” (pg.546). The feminization of teaching and the status of women are vital in understanding the role and perception of teaching in America. During the Colonial period, prior to women's entry into the teaching profession, the public began to view women's basic education as worthwhile, mostly so that they could pass religion and moral values on to their children. As a result, women's literacy rate increased. Though, in the 1800’s, an ultra-domestic feminine ideal reigned, known as domesticity and true womanhood. Women were supposed to be protectors of virtue and to build domestic, pure homes while isolating themselves from the world. Society recognized the values of female nurturance as well as discipline in education. Teaching was one way in which women could work outside their own households while still being examples of purity and nurturance. As seen in the third paragraph in Lauer’s, The Feminization of Rhetorical and Composition Studies, Robert Connors argues… “These women were excluded from taking oral rhetoric and assigned to a more “appropriate” course called composition. He goes on to illustrate that this course gradually introduced important changes: moving from challenging and judgemantal student-teacher relationships to those that were nurturing and personalized” (pg.543). None the less, women had broken the barriers and joined a male dominated work-force. Lauer writes in the fifth paragraph, “The smart tactic for breaking into publication was to ridicule or demolish the interpretations of others, a practice true also in linguistics, where the structuralists were in mortal combat with the transformationalists. This was the academic context in which Rhetoric and Composition began as a scholarly field,” (pg.543). Beth Flynn states that the field feminized due to the changed view of how writers write and how it should be taught. I found it interseting that most of the theoritical work which composition theory had been created was developed by men. Lauer goes on to explain traits that both women and men have that are characterized as feminine. For example, one is cooperative, relational, interdependent, collaborative, caring for another’s development, and suffused with desire and joy. Lauer also spoke, “of actions that bear three of Holbrook’s features of women’s work: service-oriented, less well paid than men’s work, and often devalued” (pg.546). It is my opinion, that when society needed more women to enter teaching, the aspects of teaching that seemed appropriate to women were emphasized: nurturance and morality. When teaching emphasized discipline and national duty, more men became teachers. The feminization of rhetorics and composition studies was, therefore, created by both men and women. “Some theoligians and feminists are offering a new understanding of spirit, not as transcendent, not as the binary opposite of body, but as an insistence upon bodily dimension of knowledge and the consequent “attainment of a new capacity for ethical action-whether this is described in terms of love, compassion, altruism or care” (pg.549).

'An Answer to the Cry for More English"

While I thoroughly enjoyed all the assigned readings this week, there was one that really held my attention and thoughts. Adams Sherman Hills’, “An Answer to the Cry for More English,” captivated my attention from the very first paragraph. Hill writes, “Boys and girls who were well on in their teens could talk glibly about “parts of Speech, “analyze’ sentences, and “parse” difficult lines in Young’s “Night Thoughts” or Pope’s “Essay on man,” but could not explain the sentences they took to pieces, or write grammatical sentences of their own.” From my own personal experiences in the classroom , this travesty is still happening in every school across America today. As I have had many English classrooms where I have been a substitute, there are so many students that do not have the life experience to understand the conventions and rhetoric appropriate to all kinds of writing situations. They lack the responsibility to realize that one must proofread in order to have successful writing skills. I truly believe there needs to be more motivation, habit, and above all respect to all students and their needs.
In the second paragraph there is another quote from Hill that I find worthy of note. “The overburdened and underpaid teacher had every inducement to cling to the prescribed routine; the superintendent of schools was too busy to listen, too busy with machinery of “the working system,” with his pet theory of education, with the problem how to crowd a new study into “the curriculum,” or how to secure his own re-election; the professor, absorbed in a specialty, contented himself with requiring at recitations and examinations knowledge of the subject- matter, however ill-digested and ill-expressed; journals of the better affirmed that, though such a book was not written well, it was written well enough for its purpose, and sneered at those who took pains to correct gross errors in others, or to avoid them themselves; and even some acknowledged masters of English held, with Dogberry, that “to write and read comes by nature.” This perspective is all true…from the underpaid teachers to the superintendent that was too busy to listen. I see teachers that have grown comfortable with their “curriculum” and are frightened to change or step out of their comfort level. Writing is not separate from content, nor a skill that can be mastered. I want to think that a teacher should show students how to think and express their thinking in and through writing.
Also, “so long as people think literary skill easy acquisition, they will be unwilling to have their children spend time acquiring “an accurate and refined use of the mother tongue.” To this day, I still often write fragments, or misspell words. I feel that no one is perfect, and everyone will make mistakes, this only helps people grow and learn. The help of teachers and parents working with one another in the effort to better understand the “use of the mother tongue” intelligently will only empower their students/children advancement in life. Again, motivation and engagement in the writing material plays a key role in the learning process. I believe that if students are not engaged in their writing, they did not put much effort in to it, and as a result may have seemed as if they lacked good writing skills.