september 4, 2002- 11:13am

passions, pedagogies, and 21st century technologies [hawisher, selfe]: while, for me, the cover of this book (I have to have cool style) looked daunting and rather academic, the intro. eludes to much more that I am excited to read.

I am a freak for more information on technology.. placing it into the classroom, etc. Plus, one idea raised immediately: "Sloane argues that a writer's choice of composing tools and setting, as well as his or her choice of topic and form, are always informed by memory..." connects to what I am doing in my specialized 110 course. that essay will be of great use.

as each chapter is explained, I grow to get into this book more and what it's reach will be throughout the three main words in the title. "... the germ of an idea which is subsequently repeated and expanded upon throughout the chapters of the book." I like that sentence.

Ooooh, and Geoffrey Sirc is in here too. Yippee.

"Revisiting Notions of Teaching and Access in an Electronic World." One major comment about how no one, really, can teach children everything or even most things they will need to know about the world. this is true. teaching is a overwhelming task once you take that fact into play. We can only show them, make them think about it all, and allow them to question.

personal effects- the social charactere of scholarly writing [holdstein, bleich]: as you mentioned in class Betsy, these people are attempting to show that the perspective of authors is important to better understanding their texts at times. we can't always be objective. our perspective on the subject will be bias in some ways. me writing about blogging, for example, would be positive because I enjoy it. someone reading my academic paper on it should/would want to maybe know that.

also, "The connection of literature and composition studies."-- another grad. student and I were talking just yesterday about choosing the comp. track with the Master's degree program thingie.. she said she chose it to enable herself the ability to other careers besides teaching. I agreed and then thought: wait, I love to teach, and 2) why should they be so separated. people of literature background know 'great writing' and probably can write well... why would they be pigeon-holed into only teaching? also, why do the literature people in our department look down, in my view, upon the studies of composition? we read just as much as they do? and write as much?

"She reminds us that if we think of ourselves as teachers, the process of sharing the private in public is never purely public or private. It is only that our ways of thinking about one another changes as we change our genres of writing.." =blogging.

"Just how personal a story is this?" Good question. In academic discourse or in alternative sorts, what would be TOO personal? is just using 'I' personal enough?

+++ {3/5}

authoring a life- a woman's survival in and through literary studies [daly]: WOW. .."in order to reconstruct meaningful lives, they must put their traumatic experiences into narrative form." that is the best way to deal with a lot of issues. write. get it out of you.

words of encouragement: power. authority. recovery. courage. challenge. therapy. confidence.

just as she mentions being denied knowledge of literary figures like Virginia Woolf.. rarely are we informed, as well, of young authors hitting it 'big' or even doing something amazing. it seems like you have to be dead to be famous. or, nowadays, lesbian or black. it's not like I am ashamed to have these women represent the female population, but where do middle class girls come in? we are 'too normal'? we haven't struggled? do I even have a right to complain at all? probably not.

reading this reminds me of a quote I always tell myself when I feel defeated or hurt or lost:

"Pain is the Root of All Knowledge."

+++++ {5/5}

alt dis- alternative discourses and the academy [schroeder, fox, bizzell]: what is 'standard' discourse? seems like they want to pin point what 'normal' is when rarely can anyone define what 'normality' pertains to. usually, to me, it means boring.. what the majority would like. yuck.

after reading in my sociolinguistics class that all dialects are equal, etc., i do not like how they speak of 'status' right away. no one way of communicating is better than another. if no one can understand you, go home.

"Because academic discourse is the language of a human community, it can never be absolutely fixed in form." ok, she redeemed herself.

this seems too much like a very academically-written essay to be trying to define what alternative discourse is. since i read bishop's intro first, i must say that that intro really opens the mind more to what alternative discourse could/can be. also, this introduction lost me in all the examples of people and in it's discussion of hybridity/mixing.. what determines if a languages has strong enough roots to 'breed' with another language and become 'appropriate'? the upper white male. that's why Ebonics gets a bad rap. supposedly that language isn't rooted enough. but if we looked at the changes our 'american English' goes through, we'd see the same shaky-ness.

i didn't quite understand the Williamson essay brought in at the end. she doesn't bring the whole essay together and the only reason, i saw, for speaking of his essay was to show some white guy doing alternative things with his writing and getting chewed up by many others for it. boo hoo.

man, i got to go to bed. ++ {2/5}

September 4, 2002- 10:37am

(first person)(first person)- a study of co-authoring in the academy [day,eodice]: co-authoring.. collaborative efforts.. "We were interested in why teams succeed, not why they fail."

reading through this, I am reminded of hearing through someone that when you are tenured at a university, you need to publish so much a year.. or maybe that is in order to get hired in the first place.. BUT that those publications can not be co-authored. which, according to what these women have to say and what I feel already about collaboration, is silly.

They ARE right in stating that collaboration is MORE work. Roen: "..collaboration has led to better work, not less work. If anything, collaboration requires more work because two minds are seeing all sorts of revisions to do." Exactly. Two people have to be satisfied. It moves away from the tactic that I pull which is to hand in something I am simply sick of looking at by myself.

I am thoroughly interested in reading what they found by interviewing these teams (and why they chose to interview them together is fantantastic as well- great back up reasons)...

Another thing to mention: I liked that they wrote this very narrative-like. And also that they automatically, in some places, allowed us, the readers, to know that they were bias in some areas. Compared to the previous intro. I read, this one reads friendlier.

++++ {4/5}

September 3, 2002- 10:00pm

elements of alternate style [bishop]: teaching un-composition. types of form: all cousins-- ..report, personal essay, article, paper..."heaven knows we need some fun and entertainment in the classroom once in a while" amen to that. Winston Weathers comments on the essays before I get to read them, which, at the same time, confuses me and gets me excited to see what they say. "Appropriateness, not 'correctness,' will determine our selection."

I need to stop being a copy editor with my students' papers.

The beauty of the SENTENCE. Ah, yes.. that's why I grew to love Emerson. As Steve Ward said, he wrote fabulous sentences connected with b.s. The power of a sentence. Or phrase or fragment in an essay. Mm mm good.

"And as we all know, it is only with enthusiasm that we keep our work as teachers and writers alive."

"...writing IS about taking risks, trying (sometimes failing), and learning from exploration, from play..." so is blogging.

this book i will like. +++++ {5/5}