Day 2: Brave New Ways of Reading/Writing

First, I begin with the end. The very last thing to happen in class was an interchange I had with a student who had hung around until everyone had left. Student: I'm really confused and nervous. Me: Why? Student: I'm one of those who has always been taught just to write what the teacher thinks and now you're saying it's what we think. Me: It's okay. It's a process of learning how to do this. The whole term is about developing this.

I am so excited about this reaction (I feel like what I was trying to get done today seems to have happened) but I am also grieved again to think about the limited, highly schooled ways some students have been taught to interact with texts. The anxiety around trying to approximate what the teacher thinks. The disjunction between your real life, really meaningful things and schooled literacy.

What I did today:
Starting with a 40 minute in-class essay about 2 things (1. write your autobiography as a reader and writer and 2. put these experiences in conversation with what B and P say about reading and writing in the intro). We then talked about what they wrote, broke out the different types of reading B and P describe, discussed the uses of writing from B and P, and talked about how to deal with difficult texts.