Number 9: for the week of March 18, 2010

My dear readers,

The main theme I see running through this week’s readings is the question of what is literacy? What does it involve? Who has it? How do we measure who has it? Most importantly, who gets to make that determination?

By its very title "sponsors of literacy" gives a name to the persons and/or entities who exert the most power over what literacy has meant or will mean. I deeply enjoyed Brandt’s historical overview of the printing and publishing process. She is right when she says that by the arrival of mechanized steam powered printing you had an entire class of society which had previously had pretty much unfettered access to the composition and dissemination of knowledge who were now cut off. It seems to me, that it was not just the printer’s apprentices she refers to that suffered in the evolution of the process. The eventual consolidation of ever larger newspapers not to mention conglomerates, like Random House and Turner Broadcasting, means that an ever smaller percentage of the population is deciding what the rest of us see and think about. Though it doesn't have to do with big media I do like Brandt's example of parents demanding reading and math instruction be taught in some Sunday schools along with religious and moral training. That is the point, when you are an entity, however large, that is providing resources by which others can become literate you are able to set the terms of what must be done in order to acquire said literacy.

"The public intellectual servant" picks up on this idea. The article believes that intellectuals must turn their eyes outside of the safety of academia and try to focus their research on the problems of the real world. When the article talks about intellectuals serving underprivileged neighborhoods, I wonder if the late Hal Rothman would qualify? I don't know much about the man but he was certainly an intellectual whom I saw on television and giving lectures many times before he died. The article is correct that someone underprivileged in any way normally is not thought about very much in academia. If they are thought of it all, they are usually thought of as deficient. When Mike Rose talks about the language of exclusion he makes the same kind of point, namely, if you don't fit in a nice little window that intellectuals can easily wrap their minds around then you don't count.

"Inventing the University" brings up the same type of idea in its assertions that students must learn to fit in. In other words to be middle-class intellectuals throughout the writing they do at the university level in order to succeed. "A stranger in strange lands" talks about the same idea. This is particularly true when the student who is the subject of the case study talks about having to figure out what the teacher wants and likes and the difficulty that is often inherent in trying to do so. Unfortunately, students feel like they have to figure out what the teacher likes or believes about a subject and then spoon feed it back to them.

That's mostly true I have to admit. One of the things my mother first told me when I was in perhaps the second or third grade has stuck with me ever since. It was on a day when the teacher and I disagreed about a particular subject (I don't recall what it was) and I ended up receiving a lower grade presumably because the teacher favored her own opinion. When I brought home that bad test paper my mother told me (as she has periodically throughout my life ever since whenever a similar situation has come up) “James, if the teachers say ‘the sky is red’, and make clear to you that the only answer they will accept to the question ‘what color is the sky?’ is ‘red’, and you want a good grade, you had damn well better say ‘the sky is red’ even if you have piles of evidence to the contrary.” I have never forgotten that and it has helped me survive more courses than I care to remember. All the same in my own teaching I have tried to make clear to my students that they do not need to please me in order to get a good grade. This is because I know how stomach churning it was in many cases for me to have to write to please teachers and professors with whom I profoundly disagreed. But, I did what I had to do to fit in.

Of course, not every means of fitting into the university actually involves writing something down. As Heath points out in her article many times people assent orally to information they haven't actually read themselves but which instead has been read to them. When one of my students volunteers to read a short poem or passage from a novel to the rest of the class as part of our daily writing activities can I guarantee that every student either is reading along or has previously read what they are hearing? No I cannot I have to judge by their ascension, in this case, their participation, or lack thereof, in the discussion directly following the oral presentation. Many times in life we can gain information that is written down somewhere in some form by hearing someone else who has read it talk about it. Status reports or summaries presented to a group or an important part of many professions. (I'm including conference type presentations as well).

Hull’s article kind of takes us back to discussions we've had in previous weeks about the idea that students can't write or that they lack literacy. Well, as we discussed there are different kinds and levels of literacy and writing ability. A person who flourishes in one arena or type of class, say mathematics, may struggle in English. Is that person inherently stupid? Some apparently would say yes but I say no. I'm a firm believer in the idea of multiple intelligences. Mind you, mine is mostly verbal. That's why I chose the line of work I did, but not everyone is that way. Mind you, when teachers or employers say there is a lack of literacy what they are really saying is that many of the people they are encountering had not been trained to write or think in the fashion that they particularly privilege. That may give you an example. My late grandfather was to my knowledge entirely illiterate. I mean the man could not read. But he could feed an army with the knowledge about farming and fishing and hunting he had in only his little finger. He raised four healthy children, one of whom is my mother, yet by the standards of our educational system he was a complete failure. I can't put my finger on it but there's something about that that bothers me.

Moreover, I also enjoyed the little interview that begins Hull's article where the two girls discuss whether literacy is needed in order to be a bank teller. They're very disagreement comes from the fact they don't really know how to define literacy to begin with. My second semester teaching English 101 I had a group of about three or four students who from the very first day of class told me flat out that they did not believe writing skill was necessary for any major except English. When I challenged them to show me one career which did not require the ability to write and communicate effectively, every one of them swore to me that they would eventually show me just how wrong I was. Not one of the aforementioned students made it through my class with a passing grade. This is not because of any disdain for them on my part. Rather it comes from the fact they did not turn in any of the required papers because they chose instead to use their energy in trying to research various careers in order to try to find even one where effective writing skills were not important. I wish I were making that up but I'm not.

Thank you so much for your time,

James Altman