A Normal Response

I don't know if life coincidentally matches up with schoolwork, or if I simply read life into my schoolwork. Perhaps part of both.

Shor, "Monday Morning Fever"

I find myself remembering our 791 discussion about Freire; Dr. Brown asked us what value he carries for the U.S. since he was theorizing for an entirely different situation. I won't explain my argument for the value I believe he carries, but at the end of the discussion my point was simply this: it doesn't matter that the problems we pose are different in our classrooms, it only matters that we are posing problems. Shor writes, "Most students possess more language skills than they will display in school. The turn towards student reality and student voices can release their hidden talents" (107). By posing a problem that is somehow applicable to them (or made applicable to them) we open the doorway for their rhetoric to flow through and give them voice. This seems what everyone is after. If this is done successfully then suddenly writing makes sense in a way it never did before. Shor tells us, "Most of my students have never looked this closely at their jobs, their writings, each other, or the teacher. The careful attention to detail is what their English teachers have lectured to them under the rubrics of "paragraph development" and "theme organization" (113). My favorite part, though, is what immediately follows: "Studied as a rhetorical lesson instead of as a lesson in critically reperceiving reality, 'paragraph development' has of course not developed inside my students" (114). By discussing the "tools" of writing and rhetoric as something to be harnessed instead of providing an inquiry for them to develop and sharpen what they already have reifies language and shuts down discourse. I think Shor has touched on this and that is a lesson that is applicable to all composition classrooms no matter the politics or the nationality.

Freire

Oh Freire. How is one not motivated by Freire? Even now, so worried I can't sleep and so tired I keep worrying, I find myself perking up a little bit when reading Freire. How is he not applicable to our school systems, our pedagogies? My classes are working on their research papers right now. I finished the drafts last night and was angry. Angry! I haven't been that angry in...I don't know how long. I was angry not just because they were bad--no focus, poorly framed sentences, etc--those mistakes I could have understood. Those mistakes show me a writer grappling with language. No, these drafts were full of typos, citations errors (which we had covered ad naseum in class) and sentences like "There may or may not be a solution." "This is a complicated problem with no simple answer." "When pregnant the woman will give birth after some time." These are sentences that don't say anything. My students, faced with a research paper, had reverted back to their old "academic sounding" selves and were filling page after page with "facts" and worthless meaningless commentary. All our discussions about making meaning, discussing their own thoughts had flown out the window when faced with an eight page research paper.

I wish I could have read the first line of this article to them: "Experience teaches us not to assume that the obvious is clearly understood" (616). Or perhaps, if I could find the great cause of our education's treatment of language I could say, "Only someone with a mechanistic mentality, which Marx would call 'grossly materialistic,' could reduce adult literacy learning to a purely technical action" (617). At the very least I could help them to understand that "To acquire literacy is more than to psychologically and mechanically dominate reading and writing techniques. It is to dominate these techniques in terms of consciousness; to understand what one reads and to write what one understands; it is to communicate graphically" (622). These are the ideas they are unaware of in relationship to themselves, their language making capabilities, and their general approach towards life.

We talked about it. I brought in passages of meaning made by Ayn Rand and Robert Heinlein, but I wish I would have remembered my Freire. I read this article a couple of years ago, but I now realize he is one of those that might be worth re-reading every year before the school year.