Reflecting on your posts

I've been reading your posts from last week and began thinking about some of the issues of literacy we've been discussing. I continue to come back to the complexity of the issue of literacy when we start considering what is involved with the ways we learn language and the ways in which culture is intertwined with both language and identity. For example, Lu, Jordan, Delpit, Rose, Anzaldua, and Finders all point out issues of "shame" or discipline around language. Anzaldua tells us, "if you want to really hurt me, talk badly about my language. Ethnic identity is twin skin to linguistic identity--I am my language" (521). In telling the story of her struggle between her "home" language of English and her "school" language of Chinese in Revolutionary China, Lu writes: "Constantly having to switch back and forth between the discourse of home and that of school made me sensitive and self-conscious abotu the struggle I experienced every time I tried to read, write, or think in either discourse" (136). And Jordan argues that "Black English" is a "irreplaceable system of community intelligence" (145) and that the "syntax of a sentence equals the structure of your consciousness" (149).

I am also thinking about our discussion of Finders's article, "Note-Passing: Struggles for Status." As I said in class, it was very interesting to hear how discussing your everyday experience or thoughts about note-passing became intertwined with issues of gender identity and how gender is framed and disciplined. That discussion seemed to further complicate the issue of literacy. Now I am paying attention not only to language, but also to the practice of literacy. For example, in Sizer's article, he "tests" the official rhetoric about educational goals against the practice of everyday life in schools. He concludes by arguing, that the "rituals" of education tell us that school is a place in which "adolescents are supervised, safely and constructively most of the time, during the morning and afternoon hours, and they are off the labor market. That is what high school is" (113). Sizer also tells us that the classroom is devoid of dialogue and that "probing of students' thinking is not a high priority" (112). Likewise, Stuart and Elizabeth Ewen barrage us with a series of vignettes and then conclude that these seemingly disconnected moments from daily life form an "ensemble, an integrated panorama of social life, human activity, hope and despair, images and information...a pattern of life" (185). They argue that this pattern is tied to the rise of industrial consumer society and "spells new patterns of soical, productive, and political life" (185).

A whole lot to consider! Anyway, these are just some thoughts roaming through my head as I think about your writing!