Bonjour, my faithful readers! I should warn you that as I write this, my friend Flu played a little trick on me. He first came to visit last Thursday, and I told him that I could not miss anymore school to hang with him come Monday. You want to know what that silly little fella did before I left the house this morning? He sneaked into the trunk of my car; how he ever fit into the trunk of that Tercel is beyond human knowledge, I do believe. Well, the trick! The little bugger must've put a little tickle in my ice water at lunch, and that little tickle must have been of the "hitchhiking" variety. For it is currently--and has been so for the last five hours--stuck to the inner recesses of my throat. As well as Fluey (only his close friends can call him that) and I get along, I never like it when he brings Fevah. Fevah is a really violent new video game on X-Box 360. That game is so hard! Anyway, Fluey must have tried to play with the hitchhiker and his game at the same time because the hitchhiker is acting really violent right now. I asked him to be quiet since I am on the "Absolutely Quiet" floor of the AOK library--talk about irony, A-O-K. So here I am trying to prepare a response for all of you, but stupid Fluey's little trick has scared everyone on this side of the floor away from me. I suppose they are researching inconspicuous ways of killing me if I should not leave very shortly. As you might imagine, such a situation has me relatively flustered since I can't stop Ficklah, students are amassing, and I am still only beginning my response. Because I am so flustered, I beg your pardon, for much of what follows may mimmick babble.
Ch. 8 (Berthoff)
First of all, I could not stand how Berthoff wrote. It began immediately with the poor grammar combined with the immensely high vocabulary. I am learning to give in to poor vocabulary, and I believe that if it were consistently poor throughout Berthoff's piece one might assume that she did it on purpose to make a point. But it is inconsistent and the big words just feel like a student paper in which the student used the thesaurus tool on a random basis. The other writing method of hers that perturbed me was her constant rhetorical strategy of helping us to follow in her rhetorical "footprints," just to suddenly sweep the floor clean and leave her reader lost. Together, these issues made it impossible for me to gain any meaning from her text. Would anyone be so kind as to just bullet really briefly the three main issues she she discusses? Thanks.
Ch.9 (Hairston)
Hairston considered, "teaching editing is teaching writing" to be inaccurate. I am not sure that I agree with her even though he says such on the side of writing process. Isn't editing continuous and recursive just as the process people claim? Then how can't the teaching of editing in reality, or at least theorhetically, be teaching writing? Despite this opposition, I have to say that this essay was my favorite of the group. It was the one that really made me, one who is immensely in favor of traditional practices, feel as though it is my responsibility to my students to press the paradigm shift forward. I don't remember why (I tried to take an hour and a half nap between readings and postings, but Ficklah woke me because he was acting out so dang much), I just had that as one of my comments that I thought was worth writing. Hairston, back in the early 80s, when he published this, made many strong predictions regarding the impending paradigm shift. Where is this shift 20+ years later?
Ch.11 (Reither)
Quote from the essay: "If we are going to teach our students to need to write..."
This quote really bugged me because it is one of the issues that this class is trying to put in my face. It asserts that we are teaching students the "need" to write. Such an assertion suggests that without us the teachers to impress the need, no need would ever be present in the students life. Writing simply becomes a hobby that we as writers force upon others so that there are more of us enjoying that which we enjoy. We become that annoying friend who says, "What?! How did you hate that movie; it was so GOOD! Was the audience annoying? Were people laughing at the wrong times? You have to go with me and see it again!" Have we as a species truly evolved beyond a need for writing? Has writing truly become the millenium's vestigial tail?
Talk about a redundant rhetorical device! Can you say overused question rhetorifaoCB
P.S. Im not the kid that was sittin there, I felt bad bout what thy did to him and I figered hed want his stuf publish.
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