First Week Part 2

I absolutely loved Nystrand et. al's article. It was everything I hoped and dreamed it could be, and I'm really happy I read it last. Had I read it first I'm not sure I would have made it through Bereton's introduction. The question is, of course, what was it about Nystrand that was so darn wonderful? I give this quote as proof from page 301: "A sensitive intellectual history, therefore, must examine how the thinking of important scholars has changed, not seek merely to pigeonhole their thinking." Nystrand does what Bereton fails to do so spectacularly--he offers a dialogical survey of history that illuminates not only the theories of Composition scholarship over the years, but why they arose when they did, what they meant to the field and academia, and what use it is to the reader to understand all of this. That's what I'm looking for in an analysis of history.

There are so many things to talk about in this article and I'm afraid if I try to do it here I'll take up way to much of everyone's time so I shall attempt to paraphrase. It is freakishly scary that we still use five-paragraph essays to teach writing. I believe whole-heartedly (coming from the land of Berthoff, Bakhtin, and Bartholomae) that language, and knowledge, is dialogic and teaching pedagogies should understand this, and that the distinction between literary and composition studies is false, imagined, and the highest form of academic masturbation.

Literature is language. To say that our approach to reading and writing is vastly different seems to me created by people who couldn't write, don't like to read, or just plain hate each other. I took issue with some of the programs related in Bereton's introduction because they excluded reading from the writing classroom. Everyone agrees that reading makes you a better creative writer, so why don't we agree that reading makes you a better all around writer? I could go on about this for pages. It's something I will revisit at a later date.

I myself would rather talk about movies in an intelligent, theoretical context than most anything else. However, I love discussing literature and language. But as evidenced by my Master's final project I like talking about Shakespeare and V for Vendetta. Canonical texts and comic books. Why is there a division between the two? My point is that we create academic distance between "high" art and "low" art and pass that distance on to our students. In an effort to do whatever it is scholars are supposed to do, we forget that scholars are supposed to discover knowledge--knowledge isn't stuck up. It exists everywhere, even in comic books. This academic snobbery, however, is used to judge student's writing, to devalue their discourse and place them, exactly as Freire says, in the banking model of education. The moment you acknowledge a student's immaturity of thought you devalue their discourse. I feel that is the gravest of mistakes from the most non-dialogic of teachers.

I get worked up over this stuff. I would love to rant about the false delineation between essays, narrative, analytical, evaluative, persuasive, and why breaking them up that way is non-dialogic as well, but I'm running out of room and you all have things to do. I would like to say, though, that when we as teachers are challenged with difficult theory our response (at least mine and most everyone I've discussed this with) is to say "that's not practical." However, without the theory, the why behind why something works, we are left to offer instruction like Warriner in 1950--saying that a good writer writes well is about as helpful as saying a good musician doesn't make mistakes. It neither demystifies the act of writing, nor offers any real solution as to how we should improve it. This is also, I believe, the problem with most composition text books. Chapters on audience and description don't do students any good. They don't have access to the discourse; they don't understand how language works or their own power in manipulating it. We're asking them to swim before they even know what water is.

Alright, I'm done. Really. Sorry about the wordiness