Month: February 2016

Critical Thinking. It enables us to recognize a wide range of subjective analyses of otherwise objective data, and to evaluate how well each analysis might meet our needs. Facts may be facts, but how we interpret them may vary.

Over the weekend I conducted my interview for this week’s literacy assignment. The person I chose to interview was my aunt, who is the head principal at a local high school. Once we were done with the interview there were aspects she furthered on upon me asking some questions and the subject revolved around critical thinking and writing and how that is incorporated into the Collins Writing Program. Collins Writing is a 5 step program that builds us up to be critical thinkers and good writers. This was interesting to talk to her about. She was explained how it is brought into the school system and how it is integrated into each academic level. As she touched upon each level, I could remember certain points in my academic career when I either learned the steps to critical thinking and writing in school or when I had to learn them myself; this was especially signifiant in my freshman year of college. I had to learn how to think critically and analyze to understand the material. In order to pass some of my classes I had to be able to ask the right questions while studying to succeed.

I would like you to take a look at this website (link below) and read a little about the Collins Writing Program. Did your school integrate this into the learning system? What aspects of this system do you think could be changed? What are the best parts of the system? For those of you who want to teach, which area do you think is most important? If one cannot critically think while writing does that make them a bad writer?

http://www.collinsed.com/5types.htm

I really enjoyed this weeks readings, especially ‘Cultural Conflict in the Classroom’. My biology teacher in High School taught me literacy far beyond that of living organisms. For every ‘like’ or ‘umm’ used in a sentence, 25 cents were owed to him. This money eventually lead to huge pizza party, but the lesson taught was relentless in my future undertakings. To this day, I find myself listening to speakers and tallying in my head the number of ‘likes’ they use, just as I had in High School.

While I agreed with the majority of the reading, I find it hard to believe that ‘proper English’ doesn’t also have its benefits in our society. By speaking the way we write, we are able to improve our literacy skills everyday, rather than having to translate our personal dialects into a noun-verb structure.

Do you find that the way people speak influence other areas of their literacy? or are reading, writing and speaking completely separate practices? What experiences did you have as a child that conformed you to proper English, or allowed you to express your personal diversity?

 

I found last week’s reading by Akinnaso on how the context in which someone develops Literacy affects them and how sometimes it may even isolate one from their surroundings if is not already perceived as a cultural norm or ideal. Akinnasso mentions “becoming literate in a non-literate society”, and how this affected him. He also mentions how the questions he received from his father with regards to the Youruba people and how it could be the case that they would not be written in the Bible if they were active worshippers of the Christian Deity. Akinasso quips that he wished he could explain to his father at the time that every culture has its creation mythos and how this varies based on the times they were conceived.

That seemed very awkward to me. Not awkward in the way that it was written but awkward in the sense that it divides father and son in the way that it does. Between “literate” and non-literate individuals, value systems seem to change. It got me thinking about literacy as a cultural norm in our society versus others that do not value it in the sort of high-minded manner we do. I’m wondering if anyone here has had a similar experience to Akinasso in the sense that the more knowledgable they became via literacy, maybe it isolated them from family members?

I really enjoyed Delpit’s piece on language diversity and the notion that someone’s race can influence the way a person speaks. Race, as Delpit notes, is also highly correlative with a person’s socioeconomic class/background. African-Americans and Latinos, for example, are disproportionately located among lower-income neighborhoods and thus school-systems. As the little boy in the beginning of the passage notes, there is a communicative dissonance between members of these “inner-city” communities, as we refer to them and those who “talk white” (even perceivable by children!).  Now, this seems obvious to most people who are not completely sheltered (much like those from my hometown) but it raises an interesting question: Is there a “correct” way to speak?

What I mean by “correct” is not necessarily “best” or “optimal”, and certainly not “most intelligent” but simply right by objective standards and rules of a language i.e. certain pronouns correspond to certain groups in English like “he”, “she”, “they”, etc. Does it matter if someone who talks “white” and someone who does not are able to nonetheless have a conversation and communicate with the same ease as two people who engage in the same dialect, as Delpit defines it? Curious as to what everyone here thinks on this matter, given most of us share in a relatively diverse series of backgrounds and experiences, and as such may have different experiences with different “dialects’, as it were.

I also am aware I use a frustrating amount of “quotations” in my writing, thank you ahead of time for bearing with me on that.

I was particularly interested in the Lisa Delpit reading, “Other People’s Children” and the power of literacy, particularly the effect of the language and dialect used in teaching. I was not aware how much of an impact language diversity could have on an individuals learning experience. It is striking how a change in dialect can result an individual’s better comprehension of the same material.

I could make a particular connection with the teacher who was able to better teach his students through the use of real world examples. I too have had a similar learning experience. In some of my engineering classes, I struggled particularly with material that I could not relate to a real world example. For example I consider calculus 2 and 3 to be some of the hardest classes that I have taken.  The problems were purely theoretical and they did not click for me. However, when more complicated material was placed in front of me, in which I was able to associate real world meaning to the numbers, I was able to grasp it much easier.

I am curious as to whether anyone else has had learning experiences similar to mine or the ones we read about?

When I was reading the article about the Amish family for this week’s readings, I was very interested in the length the mother went to in order to find appropriate reading material for her children. She would only buy books from certain trusted stores and if she saw books anywhere else she would research them before bringing them into her house. And since reading is primarily a communal thing in their family, it is easy for the parents to control what their children read.

In my house, reading was primarily a private thing. Reading was what you did when you didn’t want to see or talk to other people. Reading was for alone time. I have an older brother so we had books in my house that were for kids a little older than me. If had run out of things to read I would go and look at our book shelf which had my books, my brother’s books and my dad’s books all mixed together. Only one time did my mother tell me that I wasn’t allowed to read a book, but it was too easy to sneak it so I read it anyway. I hadn’t been allowed to read it because it was about a high school freshman boy and his girlfriend and basically their budding sexuality. I was in about third or fourth grade and just thought the whole thing was weird. My mom found the book hidden under my bed but laughed instead of punishing me.

My experience with parental guidance from reading was the total opposite of this Amish family’s. There were all sorts of books in my house and once I started reading by myself pretty much anything was fair game whether my parents knew it or not. Because of this I was definitely exposed to things earlier than a lot of my friends who didn’t read as much as I did, some of which was good and some of which was bad. Do any of you guys have memories about being told not to read something or having your parents discouraging you from reading things that were meant for older kids? I’m thinking about at what point reading at the highest reading level is good and at what point parents really do need to be careful about what their kids read.