Lu & Rose Discussion...not to bad

hey everyone, these two readings were enjoyable so I might write a lot, sorry! There is nothing like reading a story that motivates a person to stay on the path of learning throughout their life. According to Roses' work, their are many underprivilged students, that may start out their lives ignorant towards the English language,however in the end, those students who practice at learning, continue on successfully in life. Lu explains a similar view point, however she discusses her own life, and how her daughter followed in her footsteps.
As a professor of education at UCLA, Rose visits students from the lower population of society and shows them how to develop into bright young individuals, through a clear meaning of a word, a "certain" word. For example, by looking at parts of a word such as the word "egocentric," one should realize that the beginning part of this word means self. However, many students were so confused by this, they never understood one word having multiple meanings. Rose tried to show them that many things in life have different meanings, if u look hard enough you can find the right answers, because it is your choice to do so.
At the University of Wisconsin, Lu is an English professor, a teacher just like Rose. Lu grew up knowing that education was a huge part of her life, however, the adolescents from Roses' story went to school, just to go to school in the beginning. Both stories expressed an internal struggle in Lu, and Rose's students to not give up or be tempted to give up their dreams for many reasons. Rose's students came from the bottom and elevated to the top, as did Lu, but Lu had everything, had an initial will to improve her education because of her strict familial background when many of Rose's students, stated above, did not at first.Furthermore, both authors insist to encourage young teens to "preserve their discourse in learning,". Hope this was helpful and easy to understand.
~Angel~

culture is ordinary

This was my first chance to post my opinions of Williams writing due to my stupidity with computers, it probably helped that we looked at some other opinions in class yesterday because after reading this again i got a better feel for it and found myself asking the same questions, at first i was puzzled as to why he was going on and on about the landscape he was looking at and then about his grandfather and father. But then it started coming together as he explained the modes or changes he has seen throughout his time, still i was not all that impressed with his writing, i was bored for the most part and that is sad because it was only a page long. He goes on about the word "culture" and how ordinary it is, i think he was getting at that your culture to you is ordinary but societies culture as a whole is most def. not

What counts as "good writing?"

I was re-reading your responses to Raymond Williams's "Culture is Ordinary" and came across several statements you all made about what you did not like about the essay (some of you liked it, I know). But I thought your statements might be useful for us to considerover the course of the semester. From your posts I compiled the following list of what you consider "bad writing":

• writing that is "very vague"
• points made in essay are "redundant"
• you "learned nothing new"
• "stating the obvious"
• being "long-winded"
• "contrast of writing styles"
• "constipated and boring narratives"
• "writing style???" (do we need to develop a definiton of "good" style?)
• "confusing" (how do we figure out what causes confusion?)
• "culturally naive" and "unsophisticated"
• "pretentious"
• "overuse of imagery"
• confused by "format" (prefer five paragraph essay)
• if your reader has to "go back and re-read" your essay
• if your reader has to "work to hard to grasp" what is being said
• "repetitive"
  
• "narrow-minded"
• "distract[ing] readers from the message"

Perhaps one of the things we can do is use this list as a way of discussing writing practices and what we consider "good writing." Given this list, I am curious about what would be considered "good writing?" And, for that matter, what about those of you who liked Williams's text? What did you "like" about his writing? Just some ideas to consider...Great postings so far everyone.

Culture Is Ordinary..

Hey everyone, I'm Angelique and I'm a second year Psychology student. I started to read this article, and I was very confused. I will say that whether his article on culture was supposed to be informative or persuasive, I found it to be very vague. "Every human society has its own shape, its own purposes, its own meanings..." is a very evident point when you think of any society. I felt that whatever point he was trying to get across was redundant and I learned nothing I hadn't already learned before.

i didn't get the book!

Hey everyone! My name is Kelly and I am a sophmore here at KU. I am undeclared and will be until I am forced into a major. I didn't get the book yet because the bookstore is a horrible place and they decided to close for the weekend! However, from the rest of the blogs I assume it was something about culture being ordinary. Which is completely true. Although many cultures may seem out of the ordinary or strange they are simply ordinary people brought up in a different way of life.

Culture Is Ordinary

Hey everyone I'm Sarah...When I read this article for the first time I was a little confused. I was to the point where I could understand where Raymond Williams was coming from but then he would state something else and I would be completely lost. So I ended up going back to the begining and reading it all over again. Raymond Williams said, "Culture is ordinary, in every society and in every mind." I feel as though he's right because everyone in most cases are able to think what they want for themselves. People are born with their own minds and its up to them to use it. He basically said that culture has two aspects: "The known meanings and directions, which its memebers are trained to and the new observations and meanings, which are offered and tested." I think he knows whats he's talking about. In the long run I believe that culture is ordinary because everyone is different and they have things to call their own, their own ordinary things.

Culture is Ordinary

Hi, i'm Marion and i'm a first year Art Education major. I feel that Raymond Williams is kind of stating the obvious in a long winded narritive with a subtext to his school years. I think it's a high school premise that he's basing his opinion on (not that I don't agree); we've all learned that we were born blank babies and our opinion is completely unique (with some generalized similarities to other's personalities) to us and based on our growing situation and what our surroundings carve on our tabula rasa. In my position, I see Raymond Williams as just clarifyinga fairly known topic.

Introduction and "Culture is Ordinary"

I'm Theo, a second year student in Kutztown, and I am a Studio Art major. When I first started to read "Culture is Ordinary" I felt confused as to how the first half of the paper would lead into anything having to do with such a large topic, which is defining the word culture. However, the rest of it was very specific about his definition and it tied in very nicely with the beginning, despite the contrast of writing styles. To include tradition and modernity into the meaning of culture is an intelligent insight, and I do agree with it.

"Culture is Ordinary"

"Culture is Ordinary" introduced different meaning of culture. Raymond Williams writes using facts and showing examples. Everyone has their own meaning when it comes to culture. I like how Williams started the article describing the simple things in life as a bus trip in Cambridge. Williams journey began in a university and went to the the Black Mountains in Wales. The mountain shows the example of how many different cultures he could turn to. The article then leads us to show the journey of culture in everyday life. He writes this article to make the reader think throughout the entire piece. It is almost as though he wants the reader to think of their own meaning and direction. Williams is trying to explain all the different views of "culture" and by the end I believe everyone thought of their own. This article was difficult to understand at first but after a few reading I began to understand!

Culture is ordinary

Hey everyone it's Lisa! I know it is kinda last minute but I am under steph's name because I am computer challenged and I had no clue on how to figure this whole blog thing out. Anyway, as I read this article, not just once but twice, I came to see that Williams wrote this article with clear ideas that he states throughout his writings; however, he allows the opportunity for one to come up with their own views on what he is referring to. I came to view cultureas being like human life. It goes through stages of changes such as a human goes through stages of life such as newborns, to children, to teens, to adults. Culture can not always be known throughout situations in every day life such as the next stage after childhood is teenage years. This puts me to believe that culture is not ordinary because it is unknown what the future has in store for the development of culture. Culture is affected by society, generations of family lifestyles, and by how culture is anything but ordinary.

Cultures Ordinary

When I was reading this excerpt from " Culture is Ordinary" I like others in my class found myself reading sentences or paragraphs twice, So I decided to read out loud. Assuming it would help, it didn't I found myself even more confused. I was discouraged with Williams writing style, but continued to read on. Through the reading I tried to look for things he was writing that I agreed with,to better help me understand. I guess I understand what he is trying to communicate in this story, that no culture is the same because every person makes up his or her own society/culture and that whatever a person thinks is ordinary will be ordinary for them but can be challenged and seem notordinary for another person.

Culture is Ordinary

Raymond Williams conveys a very important message in his writing, “Culture is Ordinary”. He explains that culture has shape and change; it moves and grows in art and society. Williams says that "Every human society has its own shape, its own purposes, its own meaning." What I believe he is trying to express to his reader is that every different aspect of life has a culture of it's own. Every town, family, relationship, and even friendship all have their own different Culture. In the way people interact in these aspects of life creates a different culture and because every part of life is different, that in turn makes difference ordinary. In my opinion Williams conveys this message in a very confusing manner. In the beginning of his vignette he uses his family as a model, showing how culture changes over time, ultimately expressing that change and culture are ordinary.

About That Reading ...(Culture is Ordinary)

Well, from the start i didn't appreciate this guys writing style. I found myself rereading sentences more than twice just to get the idea of what he was talking about, then only to be disappointed by what I found.
The thesis of this article, as I understood it was: every society has culture and it tends to change as time progresses... well duh, except for maybe the amish, but even they have to put their little orange triangles on their buggies in order to use our society's roads.
Besides the writers constipated and boring narratives the, only other thing this paper had to offer was a definition of culture: a society's way of life and also its progression through discovery and creativity.
As a disclaimer, I don't claim to be any better at writing than Mr. Williams... and you'll probably agree that I'm not after reading my little rant, but i enjoyed writing it.

Culture Is Ordinary...huh?

Hey everyone, I'm Elise but as you might notice, my "blogger" name just reads 'E' because most people call me that on account of them not remembering my name or not being able to spell it, so feel free to call me E. I was once in the Computer Science field as well as Business but now I'm in the Industrial/Organizational psychology major.

As with a few of my classmates, I also found Raymond Williams’ article confusing until he got to his point. Upon reading just the title, I disagreed with Mr. Williams and thought him to be culturally naive and slightly unsophisticated. I mean, how can one say that culture, which is the epitome of existence, is ordinary? The desks that we uncomfortably sit in for fifty minutes or an hour and twenty minutes are ordinary. The classrooms with pale white walls and temperatures that are either too hot or too cold are ordinary, but culture, how can it be?!

Every individual is comprised of many different cultures as a result of race, creed, gender, region, dialect(s), status, and the list goes on. So, to devalue my background to something mundane, I find offensive. However, I am an open-minded person who believes that there are multiple meanings in pieces of work. At first, I approached this article with simplicity, taking everything word for word and not taking into consideration other connotations for the word ‘ordinary,’—other than the ones that first came to mind, ‘average’ and ‘uninteresting.’ Yet, after reading his article a second time (with dictionary and thesaurus on either side) I found myself in complete agreement. I looked up the word ‘ordinary’ and found these synonyms, common, everyday, customary, and this definition, “of common occurrence.”

With this new information, I had to rethink Williams’ stance about culture using the new definitions of ordinary. To say, “culture is ordinary” is to say that culture is a forever-changing universal consequence of nature. Culture is “the shaping of minds, the shifting of relationships, the emergence of different language and ideas” and none can escape it (Reading Culture 5).

After reading "Culture is Ordinary" by Raymond Williams, I found out that he was trying to explain different views of how culture changed over the years. From his own perspective, Raymond shows that growing up, he looked from a mountain top and could see that each way he looked there was different cultures that were either more developed or less developed than others. Parts of this culture he added included such things asmeaning of life and purpose, art, religion, and how society acts as a whole. By using his own perspective on things it was easier to see the point that he was trying to get across. That is that culture in every sense is not just defined as one thing but combines smaller things to make a well developed process.

Introduction and Culture is Ordinary Response

Well, hello there class and curious people of the internet. My name is Sam Coren and I loathe self-introductions. I am a seventeen year old graduate of Council Rock High School North in Newtown, PA. Currently, I am an undeclared freshman and Bonner Hall resident at KU. No, I do not have school spirit - I just thought it would be nice place to start. In my free time I enjoy playing guitar and keyboards. Occasionally I will compose actual songs and record them using my PC for my own amusement. In addition to making music, I also like to occupy myself with a good book from time to time. My favorite author is, without a doubt, Thomas Harris of Silence of the Lambs fame. Now that I’ve gotten the personal bit out of the way I believe it is time to present my thoughts on the assigned reading.

Stylistically speaking, Raymond Williams comes off as highly pretentious early on with his overuse of imagery in the first section of his writing. I understand it is his intention to “show” the audience rather than “tell”, but I find he does this in such great excess that he almost loses his focus. He then proceeds to explain his family’s plight of being stuck in Britain’s working class and how his father worked to form a trade-union. Creatively, Williams states, “I speak a different idiom, but I think of these same things” as a tie in to his “culture is ordinary” thesis. Personally, I can agree to an extent with some of his ideas on culture such as culture constantly evolving in the background while still being tied to the past. However, I think that there are so many ideas Williams is trying to convey at once that his writing becomes too difficult for the reader to fully comprehend.

Culture is Ordinary

The first time I tried to read this essay, I was a tad confused with its format. Call me old fashioned, I might just be used to the antiquated five paragraph format used in high school. The second time I read it though I began to understand the author more fully because of his writing style. His use of descriptive, right to the point detail kept me interested for the most part.

Essentially, Raymond Williams is making a narrative/descriptive observation on how cultures within communities change with time and society by using his own family as an example. Over several generations, the culture that surrounded him, molded him per se, had been changed numerous times based on social change and the motions of time itself. I believe that not only did this make his job easier, but it also allows the reader to see his point much more clearly than if he just wrote from a generalized perspective. In many ways this allowed me to relate to and percieve his objective point much better. Moreover, I'm very grateful to him for not simply stating, ''society changes culture, time changes culture, etc...'' because quite frankly it would've lost me entirely from the beginning.

Change is Ordinary

I was kind of lost with a lot of this, but here goes nothing...

Raymond Williams wrote "Culture is Ordinary" to show his point of view of what culture means and how it changes. He writes it in a way that isn't long, drawn out and boring but instead, he makes it to the point and fairly easy to read. In the article he explains that, with growing up in the country, he got to see culture in it's stages of change because he could stand on the mountain, look one way and see a more peaceful, small area and then look the other way and see a more developed area with factories and polution. He also talks about growing up in a family of a few generations and seeing how each one changed.He then gets into how every human society is very different from one another in art, religion and in its purposes and meanings. These societies change with every person who is born into them. He says we use the word "culture" to mean either "a whole way of life" or "the special process of discovery and creative effort," but he doesn't believe in just one of these defintitions as the definition of culture, but instead he believes culture means both of these defintions intertwining and correlating to eachother to equal the true meaning of culture.

HEY

My name is Ryan Kulp and I'm a Communication Design major, I enjoy a 40 min commute from my home town of Boyertown everyday, and thats all I have to say about that.

Hello Class

Hi everyone,

My name is Jackie. I'm currently majoring in Psychology. I've lived in Allentown, Pennsylvania for most of my life where I attended Parkland School district from first grade up until graduation.

In my freetime I'm usually hanging out with my friends, listening to music, playing video games or watching movies.... you know... typical teenager stuff.

It's nice to meet you all.

-Jackie