eng 319

11

Paper 1 Draft

Kayla Horner

Essay 1, draft

WC 1,000

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Class Picture

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I am munching on an everything bagel with vegetable cream cheese (highly necessary) as I contemplate multiple persuasive essays regarding Academic Discourse; I am attempting to decipher the arguments and decide which specified ideals as proposed by great writers, teachers, and scholars, are more realistic and, can I say, worthy of serious consideration for use in the classroom, or more specifically, my classroom.

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This contemplation leads me to memories of my primary and secondary education, of which took place in relatively low income schools where book variety was little and passionate teachers were few. School was hardly ever engaging and I can sadly, yet seriously say that I went all of my years and left high school with little knowledge, let alone a sufficient preparation to be initiated in higher level discourse. Honestly, I still have trouble placing a semi-colon and I often cannot think of the “right words” to say because my vocabulary bank is so small. I remember doing some grammar exercises and studying vocabulary, but it never “stuck.” I am certainly one of the students requiring remedial, conventional writing classes during my first years of college (and probably still today), that Bizzel points to in her article "College Composition."

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Scholars like Elbow, Bizzel, Bartholomae, and Corbett have offered some interesting ideas as to why that initiation process didn’t really work for me, or even work inside those schools, but I happen to believe that they are looking at this issue from the perspective of writers and readers at heart—who love to participate in at least one of them—and I, frankly, am not. True, I am an English Major looking to be a teacher, but unlike so many others I hate writing, and reading always makes me weary. I am listening to these arguments and thinking, “yeah, so what does that mean to me—or any of the classmates I grew up with?” I vividly remember not caring whatsoever about what was being taught, viewing virtually ALL work in my English classes as busy-work, un-useful, and completely irrelevant to life outside school walls—a sentiment shared by most of my social group.

If I had time and room for further exploration, I would argue that Academic Discourse—which for the purposes of the rest of this essay means Academic composition, or more specifically the traditional 5 paragraph essay pounded into students’ heads until college—while neither more or less important than any other social discourse, is necessary in certain situations for maintaining the productive academic community. Bizzel. Therefore if we, as [future] teachers, did not teach our students the conventional writing techniques, and merely to use their own voice and experience (while powerful in other situations), we would be doing them a large disservice in not allowing them the opportunity to connect and succeed in the academic community. (Though I do note my own contradiction in engaging in an argument throughout the academic community by relying more on my own personal experiences and (researched) opinion, without properly giving much credit to the brains of that research.)

So here I am (luckily), armed with a bagel, and trying to figure out how to reach the people like me. How these arguments and processes and idealistic ways of teaching texts can apply to the kids who just don’t care about reading and writing and have not been shown the reason to. And here is what I have come up with so far; this is the tentative image of my future classroom.

One of the bigger arguments between Elbow and Bartholomae is how to properly “initiate” students into this academic community, and the answer, to me, seems rather simple. Just do it. Engage them, invite—no, throw them in. Don’t treat this question as though the situation were a puzzle, the students were the pieces, and we as teachers have the power alone to create a coherent picture. My classroom will be (hopefully) adorned in pictures of strong rhetoricians who brought great change by their powerful voices in proper academic language such as Martin Luther King Jr., Fredrick Douglas, and so many others; it will be adorned with posters depicting events by organizations advocating for struggles such as the war in Northern Uganda, the AIDS epidemic across Africa, the lack of access to books and education across much of the world, and the need to preserve the natural wonders of this world such as the Polar Bear or Brazilian Redwood. Certainly these posters will distract from lessons sometimes, but they are also asking students to become aware of the surroundings outside of their small community/reality, to think and dream. My classroom will have a thick atmosphere of freedom: freedom to think, freedom to write, freedom to change, freedom to share.

Just as Bartholomae treasures, students will read traditional authors like Shakespeare, but they will be encouraged to understand that Shakespeare is not an incredibly important author himself in shaping the rest of their lives, being able to summarize and analyze MacBeth will not make or break success throughout the rest of school and into their careers, but in reading Shakespeare, we will be searching for the techniques that make him considered to be a “good” writer and how we can apply those to our own writing to be effective and powerful.

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Equally, just as Elbow treasures, students will be writing and creating, learning that the strong writing they pull from reading traditional writers as shown above will actually give them a powerful voice in society. Rather than just stating that one day being able to write will help them, I’m going to show them that it will, by leading them to apply it outside of the school walls. The biggest dream I have for my classroom is to have a “class project;” a chosen struggle, an organization to research and support. They will have to form arguments and persuasive essays that will be sent to people within and around their community to raise awareness of the chosen issue. This creates a whole new awareness of audience and purpose for writing a paper. Rather than writing to make a teacher happy and get a good grade, they are applying it to something bigger than themselves, bigger than the classroom, and bigger than their community. I think it goes without saying that no essay they would write and send would be effective unless it “fit” into proper academic discourse and communicated their ideas; and once they understand that, it will hopefully inspire and excite students to learn how to communicate. We will workshop as a class, analyzing sentences and word choice, moving things around, exploring ideas about how a certain paper can be effective. Corbett.

The image of my classroom (inside my head at least) is one that very literally invites students to learn the conventions of proper academic composition in order to actually use it and apply it for more than just a grade from an eccentric teacher. The image of my classroom may be rather idealistic, and could possibly lead me to an epic failure when I try it in my first year(s) of teaching, but I think this image may have something that all those famous scholars and teachers verbalized that they didn’t have during their first teaching years: a purpose and a plan—and that is to give the students their own purpose and plan for writing effectively and being engaged in the academic community as well as those outside academic walls.