Tardy Post for week of 9/5 - 9/8/06

First and foremost, I wanted to comment on the discussion about the readings before I talked about this week's readings, themselves. Class on Friday was, for me, one of the most beneficial classes I've had this year. Sometimes with the articles we are assigned, I get bogged down in the length and the big words, and I end up only understanding half (if that) of what is being explained in the article. But the group mini-presentations left me going "Oh!" a lot, in my head.

Now, as for the readings themselves, I "got" the most of the Royster article on cross-boundary discourse and the least from Bizzell's article on cognition. I feel that the monitoring and modeling how to blur the line of the "Other" is something very practical, and can be applied both to our classrooms and our everyday lives. I mean, being more consciously aware of what we say about people who are something we are not, be it race/gender/religion, seems common sense. And being that we are teachers, regardless of our political pedagogy, we have the need to model that way of thinking for our students. And it has to be modeled, because I don't believe that is something that can be taught.

The Kirsch/Ritchie article on politics of location seemed to be mostly about how to handle research subjects. I probably need to go back and read this one again; not because I didn't understand the concepts in it, but because the idea of human subjects as something that I might be working with is so new to me that my focus was on that. I guess part of my brain always thought that English majors only studied the literature and writings themselves, but I am seeing now that there is more to it than that.

This week's readings were clearer and more beneficial to me personally than some of the previous ones because I feel like I finished the week understanding (at least the main point) of each of them.