Growing up my mom always yelled at my brother and I for two things: chewing with our mouths open, and using words like “ain’t”. I would always get annoyed when she corrected me. I did not understand why these things were a problem. If I wanted to chew loudly or with my mouth open, why couldn’t I? If I wanted to speak improperly like the kids I hung out with on the street, why couldn’t I? I never thought that I would one day adopt these qualities I hated so much.

This is what Min-Zhan Lu’s piece reminded me of. How no matter how much we resist our parents qualities or the qualities of our peers we somehow end up adopting them because we are constantly immersed in them.

She tried her hardest to compartmentalize her two languages. Then she tried to follow her school language, but she found that she couldn’t because it was a part of her conscious and her subconscious. She could not really control the switches that turned each section of thinking on and so she would use both her home and school language at once, because they were what shaped her identity.

I am not fluent in a language other than English. I was not really exposed to any foreign languages until high school, and so I cannot fully connect with Min-Zhan Lu’s struggle as a child. I can, however, say that I am in favor of teaching children a second language young. Min-Zhan Lu mentions at the end that her daughter learned English, her second language, easily. Lu also took to English, and the two forms of Chinese that she was taught easily. Children learn languages easier than adults.

I am currently in Intro to Linguistics, and my professor proposed the question of how to approach teaching a second language to children. Which one do you speak at home? Do you speak both at home? What do you speak at school? It was hard to think of answers for these questions. I’d always assumed that learning a second language would be strictly taught in school, but what about children who come to the US and are learning English as a second language? Should parents only speak their native language at home or should they try to speak English or both?

Lu’s parents spoke strictly English and in their bourgeois terms. They did not mix languages except in possible helping with homework. This made things more difficult for her to decide which “side” she agreed with. We have read several pieces in this class that suggest that schools do not support students speaking their native languages in school, so how would a student deal with this? How would a teacher support this?  I think this goes long with questions I have asked before; where the answer lies somewhere in the responsibility for fostering success lies with both teachers and parents.

I have often thought of religion as a thing that limits literacy, based on certain religions/sects not believing in the education of women, religious censorship (Delpit’s Amish article), privatized education plans (banned books), the use of the Latin bible as a tool of oppression by the Catholic Church (of the poor, in the past), etc. While I understand most of these things and generalization or no longer relevant, I still have some personal prejudices.

In Janet Duitsman Corneilus’ article “When I Can Read My Title Clear”, I was really struck by how liberating reading the Bible was for African Americans during slavery and immediately after, and yet it seemed to be a double-edged sword. Yes, literacy was able to exalt African Americans into positions of power and respect (seen in the first example of Thomas Johnson), but it also made them a target for racial violence, because educated Blacks were the most dangerous. Slaves who learned to read had a greater chance of escaping and helping others, yet they were most at risk for death, or being sent deeper south (there are many horrific examples of punishments of pages 65-66). While I think the article clearly has a strong and positive relationship between religion and literacy, I wonder if you would agree? I think that slavery is a specific and awful situation in which any source of comfort and literacy is a positive thing, but in general, do you think that religion (modern or past) encourages literacy or hinders it?

The struggle that slaves and free colored people faced in the south to obtain literacy was awesome. They faced the constant threat of persecution, mutilation, and even death in their quest to learn reading and writing. By achieving reading, they were able to obtain their own knowledge by their own means without relying on their masters; the black community was able to transmit ideas amongst themselves without potential lies that have the potential of being leeched in. By achieving writing, they were able to gain liberties that were barred for most slaves, and in extreme cases, some were able to attain freedom. Schooling and teaching slaves to read and write was prevented as much as possible by the majority of slave owners from fear that having too literate slaves would lead to rebellion and an upheaval in the status quo. To repress even freed slaves, schooling and learning was not encouraged.

The importance that literacy was given during the 1800s has permeated society today. Today those that are literate have greater job opportunities and are considered a valuable part of society, while those that are not as literate are thought of as lazy or unintelligent. To this day, students of different races have lower literacy rates than white children. This leads me to believe that we have somehow failed to include all children hailing from various backgrounds in promoting literacy. Perhaps we are not catering to all the problems that children sometimes face with literacy, such as poor home situations. While I realize it is impossible to try to help all students with every single problem they encounter, maybe different teaching techniques would help some students unable to learn from the most common methods used.

What challenges have you faced with obtaining literacy, either reading or writing? Did anyone or anything stand in your way? Has this achievement of literacy changed you in any way for the better or even for the worse?

As I read through the Cornelius article I really began to realize how much I’ve come to take literacy for granted. I’ve come to recognize traditional literacy as something that most everybody does; that it was just another required part of education that we all had to go through. The biggest hardship I’ve seen some people go through in their literacy journey is a mild case of dyslexia. Seeing all the stories of people who not only struggled to read and wright, but risked being  mutilated and whipped for it really helped to put things in perspective for me.

I’ve always known that literacy wasn’t a staple for many people in history, but to see how hard some people fought to prevent some people from reading was really strange to see. While things in America are (seemingly) better, It makes me wonder if there’s anywhere that tries to subdue literacy like that.

It’s weird how articles I read trigger thoughts I have never considered. For my past posts, I have written about an issue that the article highlights and I have feelings towards; however, this article connected with me in a different way. In the article From Silence to Words: Writing as Struggle, Min-zhan Lu writes about her experience of having a family language different from her school language, and how this difference affected her studies. Lu mentions how she moved from home to school, or from English to Standard Chinese, and had to accommodate for each dialect. However, when her languages overlapped, such as with her incident with her second grade homeroom teacher, the reactions from her classmates made her realize that her home/ family language was indeed special.

Possibly irrelevant to the concept of literacy, however, relevant to the idea of this article, is the way I can relate. I am not bilingual, but my family dynamic was definitely different from the majority of my classmates. Therefore, I suppose you could conclude that my family language was a little bit different from my classmate’s family languages. The issue that always made me feel different was my parents being divorced. My classmates would refer to their parents as mom and dad, as normal children do; for me, it was mom and dad…and Stephanie. At such a young age, how was I supposed to explain to my friends why my parents didn’t live in the same house, why I had two houses or why my dad was married to a woman who wasn’t my mom. At school, I never referred to my step-mom, it seemed that keeping her out of the picture was easier than including her, and I’m pretty sure that was my preference at the time regardless. Either way, the explanation that was required to follow the mention of her name wasn’t worth the mention in the first place. My classmates made the situation seem completely alien, which in turn made me feel the same way.

I understand that Lu’s classmates didn’t make her feel out of place, however just like Lu, at home, English was spoken and Standard Chinese was not, and the opposite was for school, there wasn’t a universal language for both. It was as if such a language, or family dynamic, was foreign to the other, almost unheard of. The reason Lu spoke Standard Chinese in school is because it was the required Working-class language, the reason I didn’t speak of Stephanie at school is because a family is “supposed” to be mom and dad. Things are considered the norm for a reason and when the norm is interrupted people seem to become disorientated and confused, wondering why things are different for one person but not everyone else.

So my concern this week is about what made you different? Or what kind of family language did you have that set you apart from your school language? How did you deal with the difference?

Parts I and III are forthcoming because this is long enough. Part I is to be, in part, a personal narrative about time spent in university buildings and, in part, a eulogy to hard cider. Part III is to be an analysis of Parts I and II.

II

I’m not literate enough to drink hard cider all week—or too much literacy is required of me as student. The point is that I’m not a boozing author, nor am I a student at UVA, or UW-Madison, or UVM (maybe I chose wrong)—or apparently, UPenn. Am I bitter? […] Is Harpoon Cider bitter? (A little bit.)

Since I do attend Pitt, I have some other diversions for the academic week (Tuesday through Thursday), currently: lots of reading, running, and Mineo’s, but I’m also reading reviews on ratemyprofessor.com for non-Pitt faculty. (That’s correct.)

Continue reading Part II (Parts I and III forthcoming) →

I typically choose not to write my posts on the text we read for class because we do so much discussion about it in class that I feel I am rehashing similar ideas during that time. It also gives a break to the typical classroom style conversation, however, I could not pass up writing about this. To be perfectly honest this article was riding on a fine line of offensive and honesty. Let me explain.

I do agree with a lot of what Sheils is saying. Today our writing/speech is no where near developed as it was back in the 1800s. If you look at literature from that time frame it is extremely well written even beyond some of the people I look up to in the world of writing. I do agree that through the years that we have gotten lazy, myself included. I believe the reason this article made me so frustrated is because it felt like a personal stab at teachers. Children are learning through their teachers and to say they aren’t learning what is needed to write/read/speak at any decent level of English is virtually saying teachers aren’t doing their jobs. Ouch, that stings.

I work incredibly hard with all of my children from young three’s to late twelve’s on their reading, writing, and speech. I am constantly working on changing bad habits such as saying, “what?” to “what did you say?” or “pardon me”. This isn’t just about manners, it is also about having them intelligently express thoughts. I spend hours sounding out letters with three year olds and have them practicing writing their name quickly after their second birthday. I have reading sessions in the morning before school with my older students. I have them read books such as Sherlock Holmes and Harry Potter so they have exposure to more challenging vocabulary. This article is basically saying all that I do is not really helping at all because kids now a days still can’t read and write. After reading this article I was half tempted to just say, “Well you can’t write either Marril Sheils!” She can. This wasn’t a personal attack there are exceptions and I understand that which is why I am able to agree on some topics, but for some of it my anger blinded me.

I was upset by a lot of this article from the teacher perspective. As a student though, I agree, I do think my writing is sometimes shitty as ever and sometimes when I read peers writing I think terrible things inside my head. But as a teacher I have to put my foot down. Every fiber in my being wants to prove that what I am doing is preparing our future generations and preparing them well.

I am curious though in a class full of future educators if it bothered anyone even in the slightest. I may stand alone and that is fine (I still 100% stand by that I am teaching to my best abilities), but do you really feel as though our teachers are doing that poorly of a job when you are able to see all the hard work that goes into running a classroom? Does anyone else feel that people not in the educational field may not understand the difficulties in getting a child to an appropriate reading/writing/speech level? Do you think that Shiels even considered the large population of kids who are lazy and simply don’t want to learn no matter how hard you try to get to them? Or the kids that physically/mentally can’t get to that point due to restrictions such as learning disorders or even handicaps? Let’s talk about it.

In “Why Johnny Can’t Write,” Merrill Sheils paints a very bleak picture for the development of writing and literacy as a whole.  Although I would argue that we aren’t quite as screwed as this article implies, I would be lying if I said I wasn’t afraid about how accurate some parts of this article were.  At the end of spring semester last year, one of my roommates asked me to read over one of his papers for a discussion class that he was taking.  I remember being shocked by some of the things that I saw in it.  Nothing was cited, and half of the essay read like something an 8th grader would have written.  When I asked him how he did on his other essays for the class, he told me that his teacher gave him A’s and thought his writing was the best in the class.  Granted, my friend is an Engineering Major, but that doesn’t mean he shouldn’t know how to format an essay properly.

As of recently, there has been a drastic transition in middle and high schools away from English and Writing and into Science and Math.  Out of all of my friends from high school and college, I am one of (if not the only) person taking a non-science or math major.  These are people who can tell you everything in the entire world about Organic Chemistry, but are terrified if they ever have to put that information into an essay.

On top of all of this, technology isn’t doing us any favors.  Due to spell check and text language, teaching spelling and grammar has seemingly become unimportant.  It doesn’t matter if you know how to spell a word; it just matters that you can see the little red squiggly mark under the word.  (As a matter of fact, that same red squiggly line just popped up when I completely botched the spelling of the word squiggly.)  Likewise, texting has relegated “proper English”  to second class status.  My mom was telling me the other day how her 60 year old boss sent her emails with OMG and LOL in them.  If executive partners in law firms feel like it’s okay to say LOL in their correspondence with employees, what’s to stop high school and college students?

I know that this has been less of a question and more of a tirade, and for that I apologize.  But I think that actual English is starting to become a thing of the past, which makes me sad.  Now for some questions:  1.  From your time in middle and high school (or even college for that matter), do you feel like the teaching focus has shifted off of learning how to write onto learning other topics, such as science and math?  2.  Do you think the creation of things like spell check has impacted the development of spelling and grammar abilities?  If so, is there anything we can do about it?  If not, are there any other technologies that have impacted your writing?  3.  Do you think that things are as dire as Sheils put them in “Why Johnny Can’t Read?”  Does the fact that that essay is from the 70s impact its validity in any way?