Author: lgend

When comparing the two opinion pieces “What Should Colleges Teach?” and “Why Johnny Can’t Write” I was frustrated to see that scholars have been working more fervently on challenging college courses, rather than those in elementary, middle and high school. While educating college students is obviously important, it is my personal belief that college students have had more time to practice reading as well as there writing skills, and change should be occurring at a young age where all are receiving education.

Stanley Fish proposes a series of steps to teach upper level students to write. These include, making sentences out of a random list of words, asking students to turn a three-word sentence into an 100-word sentence, and replacing nonsense words in famous text. Although with each step they were asked to analyze what they accomplished, I wonder if by asking younger students, those who are first learning how to create paragraphs to complete these same exercises one would see success? What methods could we implement to younger students in order to start the process of better writing at the beginning of formal education?

Ever since the third grade, I dreaded standardized tests. The words “No material on this page” still burn my memory. For this reason, the Addison article greatly interested me. When beginning to learn about education, specifically special education, my hatred of filling in bubbles became a cause that I cared to study and challenge. Many of the programs being advocated by our government place standardized testing at the forefront of judging a person’s intelligence. This article claims the same, but personally, offers an interesting counterargument hidden within the text.

“The SAT writing test is shown to be the second best single predictor of college success after HSGPA.”

What research has shown, is that the final cumulated score of a standardized test do not predict future academic success, but rather, independent thinking and writing to be second after one’s high school GPA. Personally, this proves that the standardization of questions in a multiple choice format lacks to provide evidence of intelligence beyond the ability to easily compare numbers. If writing and high school GPA are the best predictors of success, why do colleges look so closely at SAT or ACT scores? Are there better ways of judging someone’s intelligence? Finally, what are other methods could our government use to test on a large scale, that do not include scantrons or filling in bubbles?

In this weeks readings, two explanations were offered for our current state of technology usage in order to write and express ourselves. While it is typical for the adolescent to be writing more frequently, literacy skills and writing levels have been on the decline for some time now. Media and technology play a massive role in this: we are constantly reading news articles in under 500 words, and writing to one another as a form of communication rather than talking on the phone or face to face. What are other factors that are contributing to this shift in literacy, as well as actions we can take as college students to change this pattern?

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?

 

This question is posed in two parts. First, do you think it is possible to categorize literacy as learning stages? In development, there are so many facets of one’s life that are broken down into milestones which should be met in other to prove normal progression. Do you believe that learning to be literate has milestones such as these? Do children develop literacy skills or is each new skill separate from one another. Secondly, if you believe there are stages, what do you find the most crucial to be. Do stages allow for one to decide if someone is literate or not?

Thank you!

My fondest memory of literacy stems from my junior year combined history and English class, titled American History. The class was a double period, co-taught by a history and English teacher. Our texts each focused on historical events, while incorporating both fiction and non-fiction. As a student, English was never my strong suite, but I absolutely adored history. History class to me was a matured version story time, and I believed that taking a class that combined the two would allow me to improve my writing skills. My English teacher was not a completely sane woman. Among other traits, she was utterly obsessed with finding glimmers of symbolism throughout texts. She never strayed from hiding what she wanted us to find in every chapter, whether through music, colors, animals or simple sentence structure. Reading became less of a class chore, and more of a way to beautify pages finding the different themes throughout.

I found immediate joy in turning the loose-leaf in class to find multitudes of colored notations and symbols I had coded. The books I read for this class quickly became torn and shredded, a demonstration of the time and love I had dedicated. The methods I learned from my teacher have crucially stuck with me throughout a variety of education quests. Coding and note taking has become one of my favorite forms of literacy. Today, my computer rarely leaves my bedside desk as I venture to class with my planner, notebook and pencils, attempting to recreate beauty on the notes I take for class.