All out of Whack

I’m not sure if things felt off today because I was sitting in the opposite corner of the room and the new vantage point threw off my mojo OR if it was off because my attention kept being distracted (remind me not to sit beside  Nick next time!), but something seemed off for me today.  Even though I felt a little discombobulated, what we did today was so interesting to me. I think that Sally’s modeling of the Socratic Seminar was exemplary and  Lil’s work with Envy (especially the Body Biography) is something that I cannot wait to implement. Check out our group’s Body Biography below:

What really spoke to me today was Lacy’s work with Not Your Mama’s Grammar and complicating the notion of conventions. What I took away (and I think that it is a derivative of something Sarah Davis said) is that grammar should be used as a set of tools rather than a set of rules. I have always been REALLY curious about grammar instruction and what is the best method for our students. I’m actually writing my graduate project on the “Great Grammar Debate” and whether or not we (college composition) should explicitly teach it in our classrooms. I created a site for my directed reading last semester on it and here is the link (http://kandre17.wix.com/thegrammardebate) if you want to check it out. The site itself may be a little boring, but there is a tab called “Review of Research” and that has an annotated list of the most well-known articles on this topic. If you’re interested in reading more on whether or not we should be teaching grammar, you should check it out!  At least you can save yourself some research time :)

And if you want to check out an interesting video, please watch the one below. It's based on Newsweek's 1975  article, "Why Johnny Can't Write" that created the illiteracy scare/writing crisis of the 1970s. It's really interesting to see what role popular media can play in the way America thinks about writing and ultimately about our teaching practices. 

Another thing I was thinking about was the connection among grammar, speech, and writing. I recognize that we don’t use grammar in our speech by internally flipping through the grammar files in our brain each time we create a sentence or suspect a problem—it just happens naturally. What I think we need to remember too is that the language we use in speech is often very different from the language we use in writing because speech and writing are two very different modes of communication. Speech is usually more spontaneous, interactive, and context-bound whereas writing is usually more concretized, structured, and context-independent. In other words, you use speech on the fly and what you say depends on who you are talking to and in what context. Now context and audience most certainly play a MAJOR role in writing, but what is unique to writing (over spontaneous speech) is that it can transcend the original audience and context (anyone can read it in any context) and yet it maintains exactly what has been written (concretized). I just wonder if the nuanced differences between speech and writing should be considered more when we often use them interchangeably. 

And I'll leave you with this video since we were talking about Grammar Nazis in our group: