Crystal Lessons

One element of the Crystal work that I definitely did not expect to run into when I picked up the book was the type of information that was included. As a typical text in a graduate course, I expected it to be full of theoretical remarks and not to be so saturated in actual "information." I found the text very enjoyable and easy reading but also very informative. A couple of lessons that I gleaned for the text are.

1) I really had no idea the extent of the disorders listed in the "How reading and Writing Can Go Wrong" section (pg 140-46) As a person highly interested in the concepts of language and writing I found it rather shocking that I knew very little about the types and varieties of disorders that can keep a person from enjoying these concepts as much as I do. I had known a few friends in high school that had dyslexia, but from what I remember being told it simply meant that they couldn't read the same way that I was able to. (Either words being backwards or scrambled, was the most common explanation) I knew very little about the ways in which dyslexia and dysgraphia differed and the ways in which the forms of those manifest themselves in different ways in different individuals. This could be very important to our understandings of students in our classes that face these disabilities.

Whether in the Spring or sometime in our future in the classroom we could very likely face the case of a student with one of these problems and rather than being uneducated in these areas and therefore less likely to understand the demands and limitations of a student.

2) Like a couple of the other people that have posted on the board before me, I was taken by the way in which Crystal does not classify computer based communication as either writing or as speaking. I had never really given this much thought and had always seemed to classify Net-speak as a form of writing, but Crystal clearly proves that this is incorrect. The temporal elements of writing don't fit the Internet and also doesn't fit the elements of speech. Even this blog does not fit the molds of either and it is odd to view the concept of computer-communications now while attempting to sense tone and intentions. Sarcasm can be very obvious in speech but try writing sarcasm and the tone and feel becomes lost in an IM or even in a message board post.

3) Many of the students in our class rooms have a much more extensive background in computer-based communication than I do. While this may be effective in creating a blog or online journal assignment for the classroom, where my students may very well be more tech-savvy than I am, it may also pose a difficulty in general writing assignments. Like Katie mentions in her post, it is very important for the students to understand that classroom writing assignments need to be more refined that an email to a friend or and IM conversation. In the age of text messaging and AIM, our students may have a different writing style or tone than we are accustomed.

Computer/ Phone-Texting speak seems to be center around speed, abbreviation and brevity. As we know these are not exactly the most effective tools in the composition of a quality academic paper. Our students (not saying that high school teachers don't attempt to teach students quality writing) may use these same characteristics in their papers because this is what they are accustomed to using in their type-based universe.

I had a similar experience in my College English I course, as it was called when I was a freshman here. There were at least two students in the class room that simply wrote in the same fashion that they spoke. It appeared that their high school English teachers had emphasized a "conversational" style of writing and had never really corrected their students as to how to effectively create a conversation within a paper. Both students used large amounts of slang, some abbreviations, and had extensive misspellings when our papers were all from word processors and should have been properly spell checked. Either this showed that the students didn't really care about their courses, or that the students where not properly taught how to right properly and use a spellchecker. I fully expect these problems in some shape or form to surface during my course, but Crystal gave me a little more to think about with the idea that computer-based communication isn't writing.