It’s interesting that they discuss the idea that college is knowledge. While, of course, it is, it isn’t the only form of knowledge. This is the issue Hollinger wrestles with in the beginning. Everyone sees it all the time in high school, including myself, and the statement “You’re going to need this for college,” can definitely leave a student feel powerless. It re enforces the hierarchical structure of the teacher-student relationship because it leaves the students feeling like they don’t know any better and the teacher does, since they seem to have experience on their side. It goes back to pulling students away from trusting their own instincts.

Later in the reading, we start hearing about the much-needed separation between literature and good writing. On page 345, Wright states, ” These classes teach students how to make writing choices appropriate for specific audiences and situations; in other words, they teach students how to consider who might read their texts and what this audience’s relationship might
be both to the writer and the writer’s purpose,” and I think it’s a great summarization of the great difference between literature and writing classes.

Literature classes limit students to focus and analyze the text in itself, which typically leads the writer to think of one reader, the professor. While writing classes, allows students to mold and build their words into a structure that is accessible to anyone who’d be interested in its content. I used to struggle with this difference a lot because I used to think good writing meant exactly what it isn’t.

Wright kind of brings back the idea that teachers are just as limited as students sometimes, which is another reason to bring down the idea that teachers know all and students do not. If we all acknowledged that we are all in the same playing field, we may discover new methods of approaching these issues.

This essay connected to Formulaic Writing in that Baker-Bell explains how the “right” way of doing things, or the socially acceptable way, steals a student’s identity. Baker-Bell approaches the same idea in relation to language.

With the focus on language, this idea becomes way more personal somehow. I think it’s because spoken language is so much easier to express. It’s our default way of expressing our thoughts, so when someone tells us we aren’t speaking right, it’s like they’re telling us to fix our thoughts. But, as Baker-Bell points out, the thought is there. It’s the delivery that bothers some people because it isn’t mainstream White English.

I have some connection to the stories Baker-Bell tells in her essay. I am the child of immigrant parents, so the amount of times I had to be the one on the phone because they couldn’t speak “proper” English is beyond me. The thing is, they were speaking proper English. The most they’d “mess up” are past tense words, or roll a few Rs. As I grew older, it broke my heart to see them so anxious to talk to people in “proper English”. If they could, they’d avoid those conversations as much as possible. It also frustrated me because I know how badly they’d want to express a thought and didn’t have the right words to sometimes. Of course, this is a bit different than Black Language since it involves an entirely new language. I know this isn’t exactly what Baker-Bell was getting at with Black language, but it definitely relates to how we are forced to narrow our identities to fit what is socially acceptable and how that might affect our confidence in expressing our thoughts. The same goes for formulaic writing, as I’ve said.

On page 8, Baker-Bell says, “Anti-Black linguistic racism is embedded in this approach as Black Language gets interpreted as a defect of the child rather than a defect of the educational system’s response to it,” which resonates with the frustrations I’ve stated above.

Formulas are easy. In a way, the social norms engraved in our minds are formulas. If we follow them, we are rewarded. If we don’t, we may not be. This is what Wiley seems to be generally getting at in his essay.

At first thought, it was interesting to me that “Schaffer’s Formula” used the same writing formula for essays about literature and personal experience. RIght away, this made me go “….wait,” because personal experience essays are personal, they should be individualistic and it’s crazy that students are deprived of the freedom of expression because they are told the formula will get you higher grades. Personal experience essays are the perfect opportunity to allow students to run wild with their thoughts and explore their writing identities. It frustrates me to no end that this is taken from them because it’s “easier”.

I also think that because students are wired to follow these formats, the content they read is never digested correctly. Their job is to write the paper and they’re on a time crunch. Meaning, they are trying to read as little as possible to gain time to correctly follow that formula. This defeats the entire purpose of teaching these subjects.

I can definitely recall old classics I first read in high school that struck a chord in me. I had so many thoughts about the book, its writing, the ending, the characters, etcetera but I was confined to the prompt. I had to answer the question asked, and only that question, because if I didn’t I would be “unorganized” or “unfocused”. The truth is I could have included all of my thoughts about the book in an organized fashion if I knew how to on my own, but it was never taught.

For this reason, I lost my love for reading, as almost every student does. Even if I tried to reignite that fire, I would read a book and the content would fly right over my head after a few months. I wish I had other means of approaching my absorption of literature early on, so I possibly would have never lost that fire.

(My posts have been drafted this whole time. My apologies!!!)

I’m feeling a lot less stressed now than I was this time last week. I got a lot accomplished over the weekend for both this class and my other grad class, so now it’s just a matter of final revisions, putting everything together, and writing final reflections.

For this class, my draft of my story is done, as well as my 3 sentence bio. I’ve created the website shell, and everyone has editing access. I started making some basic edits to Ariel’s page so that everyone could get an idea of what we can add, how we can format, etc. I input my remixed story in a text box, but will still make final edits. I also added a YouTube video of instrumental tracks from The Little Mermaid that people can play in the background while people read the story.

3-Sentence Bio: Theresa Chuntz is a high school English teacher by day and grad student by night, but she’s a bookworm 24/7. She loves creative writing and hopes to publish a novel one day. This is her first collaborative publication, and she has thoroughly enjoyed the process.

I’m looking forward to class tonight and getting the bulk of our project put together. (And snacks. I’m always looking forward to snacks!)

Now if only I could master Ariel’s iconic hair flip…

Hello everyone! My part of our class’s final project, a remix of Disney princesses, is coming along well. As you all know, I’m doing a remix of Rapunzel’s story. I’ve completed the whole story by now and am doing some editing work on it. Aside from that, I’ve also made up a draft of my author bio. All that I have left to do for my personal part of the project is finalizing the story, finishing the moldboard (which I’m going to work on in class tomorrow), and doing my self-assessment narrative. As far as the project as a whole goes, I’m going to help out tomorrow as we all do our author statement, I will help with anything else that needs to be done (such as proofreading), and Giselle and I will work on the front-page visual. I’m glad that everything is wrapping up for the semester and that I’m almost done! I hope everyone is in similar states and that they’re not getting too overwhelmed. Just know that the end is in sight

I am almost finished drafting my entire project. I am playing around with a couple different tools and working on material in pen and paper. I plan to import it all to digital format this weekend and decide on the main tool.

Looking forward to working on it further tonight.

This week I am focusing on polishing my pages, making sure that they are cohesive, and fleshing out my Lit Review.

I hope to have the pages polished and finished by this time next week so I can really focus on my Lit Review. I have one more source I want to finish reviewing that I think will be added so that is what I plan to do for the next week and half.

Thinking ahead, I will be working on college applications over the break and that will be my main focus. I do plan to plot and continue building out my thesis as well we compiling more sources for my research.

Jules’s selection of Bi, Butch, and Bark Dyke: Pedagogical Performances of Class, Gender, and Sexuality was a really interesting read. I’m excited to bring a discussion of gender and sexuality into our talks about teaching and pedagogy, and Michelle Gibson, Martha Marinara, and Deborah Meem do an excellent job of talking about the intersection between their identities and their careers as academics.

I really enjoyed Marinara’s piece and her discussion of shifting identity. She brings this thought to the forefront of the classroom, where she feels that the uncertain spaces found in the writing classroom between the “real me” voice and the “emerging public voice” shouldn’t be resolved by placing students into identity label boxes, but rather this tension should become a space to work from and with. Identity, Marinara says, “includes the writer’s shifting relationships with the peculiarities of our culture,” and therefore is not static. She believes that the space created by opening up identity, rather than making it essentialist and fixed, allows for a model of collective identity and helps to reveal how every single one of us is both enlarged and oppressed by constantly shifting social norms and cultural ideas.

(As a side note, I was floored when I read the passage about a student who stated they “didn’t believe in lesbians” or, even worse, that an entire classroom of female students couldn’t/wouldn’t work with the writing of a lesbian essayist. I know this article is older, but it’s only from 2000 and the class mentioned above was stated as being taught “last quarter”, placing it in, most likely, 1999 or so. That’s not that long ago, but this really shows how far we’ve come in twenty-odd years regarding LGBTQ+ rights. Of course, we’re far from finished, but wow!)

Deborah Meem’s piece was eye-opening, in that it made me think about things in a way I’d never thought about before. Meem states that “as a butch woman, however, I had a certain power over him; he clearly perceived me as being immune to male feather-ruffling and intimidation,” in regards to an interaction where a male colleague where her butchness helped her. Furthermore, in an identity/privilege chart, Meem puts butch as privileged, femme as oppressed. I think society usually views butches as oppressed, because of their very visible lesbian identity (which can make them targets for hate), while viewing femmes as privileged because of their ability to be “invisible” in regard to their sexuality. Meem sees it otherwise, though: “today, however, butch visibility in the academy can provide access to a certain kind of power; the relative invisibility of femmes makes it difficult for them to connect with sources of lesbian community…” Meem feels that, while butch was an oppressed identity in the 1950s because the butch identity was a target for harassment, discrimination, and violence, today that axis is shifting and it may be that butch lesbians are able to use their identity “as a commodity” (mentioning work by Diana Fuss in which identities, in academia, are commodities) and that experiences of privilege vs. oppression do not remain consistent over time. Echoing Marinara, Meem states that identities, and the experience of privilege/oppression that goes along with them, are not fixed, and that complicating one’s own identities is a revolutionary act. I’d never really considered this concept of identity used as commodity/for power (which I don’t believe Meem posits as a bad thing, nor do I!) nor the idea that the experience of privilege/oppression attached to identity could change so much over time or from one situation to another.

Gibson’s piece talks about identity, political resistance, and diversity in academia. I think her piece was particularly telling about the state of the academy, at least in the 2000s, though I’m sure her statement still echoes today: “though many academics talk about diversity, the academy itself persists in seeing the university as tweed: white, middle class, and heterosexual.” Gibson tries to subvert this view by talking about her own memories and performing her identity actively in her academic career. She talks about how, in a dossier of her work that she was required to submit at her university (as a professor), she used her life experiences and identity as “currency” (following in line with the idea of identity as a commodity) to try to bring some understanding of her students’ circumstances to the administrators she knew would be reading her dossier. She was being sure to actively blur the line between a person that the administrators would see as “not college material” and a person who was a successful professional, by using herself and her life experiences as an example of these things. At the end of her piece, however, Gibson warns that over time, acts intended to work as political resistance can become so familiar and institutionalized they can lose their power, so these acts should not continue to be used thoughtlessly/without constant interrogation to see if they are still functioning as the user intends.

The overall piece ends with the conclusion that teachers committed to creating classrooms that critique traditional power structures must commit to interrogating their own identities and positions in the classroom. They must be aware of and responsive to the interplay of identities of their own and their students; it is not enough to simply assign readings about race, class, gender, sexuality, and so forth.

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And now, an update on my final project. I’m doing a remix of Rapunzel (my favorite Disney princess!) and for a bit I actually really struggled, unsure of what direction I wanted to take this in. However, after a brainstorming session with my girlfriend, I know what I’m doing:

My remix is going to be set in the modern world. Mother Gothel is not evil, but rather an overly-anxious mother who went through a tough past and has some agoraphobia because of it. Her daughter, Rapunzel, is the light of her life and she wants nothing more than to protect her from the world. Rapunzel is homeschooled and learned a lot of her mother’s fears; she doesn’t go out much and doesn’t have any friends besides her pet iguana. People, and the outside world, make her nervous. However, despite this, Rapunzel is determined to go to college in person next year. After an encounter with her neighbor, Flynn, she builds the courage to try new things and experience the world around her.

I’m really excited to keep working on this story! Above is a mood board image that I think fits some of the vibes and ideas I have in my mind. Can’t wait to share more