Carl Gerriets’s idea of establishing dialogue with the students through cover letters makes sense in the KSU context for several reasons. Like the students described in the essay, the students we will teach will have too much on their plates as they strive to juggle work and course load with a busy lifestyle. Speaking from the experience of observing a few of the writing classes, more fruitful interaction between the writing teacher and the student can only be deemed beneficial. It might not be always possible to interact with all of the students on a particular problem. In such a scenario, the cover letter does seem to provide a fool-proof mode of communication if used correctly (assuming that is, that the student takes it seriously, and understands effectively the teacher’s purpose in instituting it as a form of extended dialogue). Since the course will be on writing, a customized written response to a student paper can get the important message across that his/her voice is being heard. It also seems to be an original way of relinquishing control by the teacher if used in Gerriets’s way. However, as Gerriets mentions himself, it may not be well-received for a number of reasons. I am particularly concerned with it being perceived as ‘extra work’ that makes each assignment a paper-within-a-paper, placing it in a frame. Won’t there be resentment in the wake of this perception? It will work best, in my opinion, if it is used sparingly on some assignments that call for it (the multimodal ones, for example, in which more dialogue is sure to provide a more sure footing both for the teacher and the student). What do you think?
The essay on remediation made interesting reading. I was especially struck by the writers’ attempt to historicize the concept of ‘school failure’. The repudiation of the notion that academic failure comes from “defects of character or disposition” (312) and the observation that “variability disappears as rich differences in background and style become reduced to a success-failure binary and the “problem”…shifts from the complex intersection of cognition and culture and continues to be interpreted as a deficiency located within families and students” (313) on the essayists’ part seem particularly penetrative. That one should focus on the aforementioned interesection to enhance literacy is a point that has been underprivileged in traditional classroom practices for long, and continues to be so, as seen in the case of June’s class with reference to Maria. Maria’s disruption of the IRE sytem (very helpful formulation by Shaughnessy, I found myself thinking about our class and trying to figure out how we follow or avoid this pattern!) obviously stems from a basic misreading of the class ground rules. I am not sure whether this is a result of her ‘cultural difference’ though. The four ways in which the writers suggest one should go about in making a better learning atmosphere in a remedial classroom should also serve equally well in all other writing classrooms, and that seems to be the primary merit of this essay—its suggested methodology sounds universal in application.