Here's what I think about the readings for this week--McCarthy says that "as a student goes from one classroom to another they play a wide range of games" (pg. 126). Then he proceed to explain that David thinks that every classroom has a different set of rules to make the grade. I'm thinking shouldn't any classroom have the same credentials for writing? I know that writing for science and writing for literature is a totally different topic, but shouldn't the writing style at least be consistent as far as structure and grammar? After all a research paper is the same all across the disciplines, only the subject matter would be different. As she says writing in college is something you have to adapt to, I don't think I agree with that. It is something new from high school writing as far as the language and level of intellect, you should be able to tell the difference between college students paper and a high school students paper, do you agree? I think McCarthy had an accurate method of establishing David's writing process across the curriculum, the observing and interview, as well as analyzing the text (pgs. 128-132). I think the Table on page 131 was really great for his evidence as well. Is there anything you think McCarthy should have done that he didn't?
As far as Berlin, I had a hard time following his whole writer, reality, audience, and language idea. Then he breaks thinks down more in to the four groups: Neo-Aristotelian or Classicists, the Positivists or Current-Traditionalists, the Neo-Platonists or Expressionists, and the New Rhetoricians. I do agree with his idea about the New Rhetoricians and how it is the best for the students, I think anything the teacher does in the classroom should be at the students best interest. The whole idea about the Reality Aristotelian scheme and Aristotle being communicated with with language serving as the unproblematic medium of discourse (pg 767), I'm not sure I fully agree with that. Is it because Aristotle's rationalistic idea of language that Berlin talks about on page 768? I'm a little confused about this article, do you have some insight? I didn't really like the philosophy twist in it.
To tie in Bean, who I think has really great points, he thinks that the amount of errors in college work should be eliminated, and that begins in grades 1-12. If a college student is making these mistakes, who should get the blame? The teacher, or the careless students? Maybe we should take the McCarthy approach and analyze a student to see where the errors are originating from, is it the grammar, is it the structure, or is it everything, in which case how did the student get this far? Bean says improvement of a students' grammatical competence in writing is a difficult task to achieve (pg 54). Why is it so difficult, and what can teachers, and future teachers take from that? What can they do to increase the chance of improvement? What grades do you think this should start?
Reflection:
I actually really like this assignment because not only can you ask questions and respond to the readings, but you can also get inside for your peer, to see where they are at with the readings, if they agree/disagree, or maybe they understand something that you don't. I would most definitely use this assignment in a classroom for the reasons I listed above, but the most significant reason would be to see a peer response of the reading before class discussion, it give you and idea where others students are with the readings and compare.
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