Archive for July, 2006
pedagogy of hope…
In his essay, “What’s Hope Got to Do With It?”, Dale Jacobs draws on the theories of Paulo Freire, bell hooks, and Gabriel Marcel to come to some conclusions about the need for a critical hope in education. Drawing on Marcel, Jacobs believes that “Hope…is social in nature” (785) and, drawing on Freire, that critical [...]
canon as violence
Robert Scholes offers an analysis of the origins of the word canon in his book The Rise and Fall of English which shows the etymology of canon and cannon as the same: rooted in Greek “kanna: reed; and kanôn: straight rod, bar, ruler, reed (of a wind organ), rule, standard, model, severe critic, metrical scheme, [...]
the whole teacher
Bob notes in his book, “Trying to make sense of questions about teaching without looking at them in the context of the teacher’s whole life suddenly seemed as futile to me as trying to cure a pain in my foot by treating it as if it were separate from my whole body and mind, the [...]
failure…
A few years ago, during my first year as an eighth grade teacher, I read Zen and the Practice of Teaching English by my college professor Bob Tremmel. I have returned to it, and while I read about ten other things, I’m reading it as well. Today, these words resonated with me (At this point, [...]
I like good questions
I am a fan of good questions (of course!). I just picked up Gerald Graff’s Clueless in Academe, and right away, some good questions: …schooling takes students who are perfectly street-smart and exposes them to the life of the mind in ways that make them feel dumb. Why is this? Why in many cases do [...]
On Yancey’s “Made Not Only in Words” (2004)
Lisa suggested I read Yancey, Kathleen Blake. “Made Not Only in Words: Composition in a New Key.” CCC 56.2 (Dec. 2004): 297-328. And I’m most struck by the good qestions Yancey asks: How is it that what we teach and what we test can be so different from what our students know as writing?” (298) [...]
who teaches?
When I was student teaching, my cooperating teach gave me a book, The Courage to Teach, by Palker J. Palmer. She inscribed, beautifully: Mike- This is a book that always reminds me of what is important in this job. I hope it will do the same for you. Best of Luck… With the way life [...]
Vitanza on Reading
I am struggling through Victor Vitanza’s Negation, Subjectivity, and the History of Rhetoric, and while I am very confused and taking it very slowly, I am loving it. Here is what he writes about reading: As readers — for to be a reader is to be disciplined, Oedipalized — we bring our identities and, thus, [...]
Passages from Althusser
Althusser, Louis. “Ideology and Ideological State Apparatuses (Notes towards an Investigation.” Lenin and Philosophy and Other Essays. Trans. Ben Brewster. New York: Monthly Review P, 1971. 127-186. What do children learn at school? What do children learn at school? They go varying distances in their studies, but at any rate they learn to read, to [...]
Must We Have a Cultural Revolution?
Kampf, Louis. “Must We Have a Cultural Revolution?“ CCC 21 (1970): 245-249. This article was cited by Sirc when I read Composition as a Happening, and I only knew that it was from the 1970s and that Kampf called Composition “oppressive“ and called for its end. So I had to check it out… Kampf writes [...]
