[capital]S[lower case]tructure[space]thoughts

I was struck by something of a connection between today's readings from Durst and Daniell (that's how human brains work, after all; everything is patterns, like my parenthetical asides when I accidentally distract myself). Durst's fifth chapter focuses on students' struggles with writing two of the essays in the class, particularly because "there was no ready-made format for students to apply" (102). Case-study student Cris (which would be an excellent band name) particularly struggled with the ambiguity of moving from a personal narrative topic to an explicative paper and later a problem-solution paper, because "she was not sure how to bring her powers of narrative and humor to the assignment (103) and "she...had no idea what information to focus on or how to organize it" (105).

I connected these words to two passages toward the end of the Daniell article: First, that "Literacy isn't one thing, and we have learned that it is more accurate to speak of literacies than of literacy" (405). And second, "The little narratives underscore the fact that we are teaching actual not abstract students to write, not just for the next professor but for life in the culture" (406).

These two passages from Daniell seem to contradict each other somewhat. On the one hand, students will have multiple literacies coming from different backgrounds and experiences. On the other hand, we are teaching these "actual not abstract students" in our own particular way and according to our own particular (academic) literacy, and necessarily so since in a pedagogical sense we do not contain multitudes but are teaching a class of 25 or so students at the same time. Teaching them to write "for the next professor" hints at an overarching literacy that must be learned in order to move within the field.

Given this conflict, is it any wonder that students, especially first-year students, struggle when not given definite structure for their papers? Coming from multiple literacies but entering a single academic literacy, a situation in which they don't have a definite idea of how to build a paper is naturally rather terrifying.

Durst later quotes Mark Edmundson, who says of college students "There's little fire, little passion to be found...strong emotional play is forbidden" (112).

Again, is this surprising given the conflict of literacies and the stress of trying to meet the foreign demands of academia?

I would argue that this very conflict is what produces successful college students. The pull between their literacies and ours is not necessarily negative. In fact, it can and should be positive once it is negotiated, as the student develops an understanding of negotiating foreign literacies and the teacher gains at least pieces of dozens of new literacies with each semester. Five points for anybody who's still reading. I think I've finished with my point.