English 111 – Week 9

I think this is what need to do but please make sure

1.  it’s an essay (five paragraphed),

2. then a self-reflecting discussion,

3. then a response to 2 students 

This is the video you need to watch to understand the assignment 

https://screencast-o-matic.com/watch/cYiVXL5r56

Hear more from Rose in Chapter 15 or here:

http://mikerosebooks.blogspot.com/

Week9

~Reflecting on your reading

      ~Learning to work with difficulty

I have been reflecting on a line that is our inspiration for the writing for this week from Rose inChapter 13 “In Search of a Fresh Language for Schooling”: “There’s not much public discussion of achievement that includes curiosity, reflectiveness, uncertainty, or a willingness to take a chance, to blunder” (Rose 126).  If I, or the format of this course, squashes this curiosity etc.

This week you will read an article and work on strategies to work through difficulty. WARNING: you may need to read the article more than once! You will see why.

PREREADING : Reflect on what learning is. Reflect on what transformation is. 

VIEW:

What is Problematization?

READ and Annotate (and reread as needed!): 

“Transformative Learning: Theory to Practice” by Jack Mezirow, chapter 12 in the book 

And/or

“Disorienting Dilemmas: Their Effects on Learners, Impact on Performance, and Implications for Adult Educators”  

And/Or

“

The ‘Banking’ Concept of Education

by

Paulo Freire

. 

Please read this

chapter introduction

(this and the article were supposed to be in the book, but for some reason it did not make the publication

The ‘Banking’ Concept of Education is Chapter two of his book Pedagogy of the Oppressed. What is Pedagogy?  Be sure you get to page 6 (sometimes I have my students start here to make sure they get to his idea for the resolution of the banking concept!).

WRITE :                          

Problematizing Difficulty Reflection  (10 points)

The Difficulty Paper is a strategy borrowed from

Mariolina Salvatori

that asks you to reflect on your own experience of reading something—a book, poem, essay, or story. Unlike the usual essay assignment, the Difficulty Paper does not ask you to assume the role of an expert defending a thesis, but instead to document the challenges you faced while reading. These challenges can range from understanding difficult passages or problematic vocabulary to disagreements or conflicts you may have with the authors’ ideas. If you do not want to share your challenges/forum post publicly, feel free to email them to me. 

Not all articles that you read in classes will be discussed with others; this paper is meant to give you a strategy for when you are faced with challenging text and ideas on your own.

The purpose of this assignment is to help you pay greater attention to what your mind does as you read and to allow you to explore a text in greater depth. In particular, I want you to learn about difficulty in reading to recognize that in difficulty lies rich promise for interesting discoveries. All readers encounter frustration/uncertainty etc. and we are exploring how to recognize it and use it to understand a reading.

To create this reflection, read the articles above and then analyze/problematize your difficulty with one.

Read through the text and notice any places that make you stop and think or that puzzles you. Look for sections that particularly confuse or interest you (it might help you get started to look back at your annotations). 

Part 1 Writing:

After introducing, make at least three points, in separate paragraphs, about what was confusing, difficult and/or thought provoking etc. (don’t let these descriptors limit you) about the author’s message. This means you will have to write about ideas, not just the text in general. So, work on quoting and paraphrasing here….include examples from the author and analyze why they caused you difficulty. 

Writing about ideas might be harder to support (it was too long….that is hard to support with examples, other than how long it was! I know these articles might be longer than what you might like…). Or, how about this one: it was repetitive (I hear this a lot from students about many articles. The repetition was probably for the audience, so they get/follow the ideas (review how McCarter and Rose did this. I think they did it well, which I know I should support! But, I can see how you might not agree). Repetition is also another hard one to prove, but giving a few examples of where it was could work. 

Talk through your difficulty in each part to try to see what it was and what you think as you are trying to figure it out. 

What do you think it means? What new insights did you gain? Even if you still do not know what it means, that is ok (remember the chance to blunder is not meant to make you feel dumb it is a place to learn!). Do not just point out the difficulty, puzzle through it.

In what ways did your understanding change or shift after rereading the piece? Did your inquiry lead you to ask additional questions? Include cited examples in each section. One example is good, two can be better!

Try to be as specific as you can with your ideas and examples.  Please refer to and cite specific passages, and use quotes/paraphrases (properly cited) when appropriate. This will give you a chance to practice and help you locate ideas that you might use later in your academic synthesis paper.

Note: please include at least 3 quotes from the text to support your ideas. 

Part 2 Create a Works Cited entry. 

Freire’s article  is a chapter out of Pedagogy of the Oppressed, so to cite you could either explain in text, like this:

https://style.mla.org/chapter-in-authored-book/

You could also do it this way for the Works Cited:

https://style.mla.org/chapter-from-a-classroom-web-site/

Citing the book would be just fine for our class too:

https://owl.purdue.edu/owl/research_and_citation/mla_style/mla_formatting_and_style_guide/mla_works_cited_page_books.html

Part 3 Self-Reflection:

In closing: What do you see as the value or purpose of this assignment? 

Share a story about yourself as a reader and a writer doing this assignment. In other words, what are you feeling and thinking about yourself? About school? About learning? What happens when you encounter confusion and difficulty? 

Part 4

Have a discussion with/reply to at least two others. Do not just agree that something was difficult. Discuss it to come to a deeper understanding. (I will upload later)

Here are 2 students to response to them

Kody Blades

10/29/2020

Eve Elden

English

Difficulty’s in Articles

 

    We as students and teachers even will read articles and we will come across a word or a sentence or phrase that just doesn’t make sense to us. It may be hard to read or say or it could just be difficult to understand. When we read articles that seem difficult to us some will say that you should just quit reading right then and there but the right thing to do is keep reading and figure out what the word or phrase means because when we keep reading we are improving as readers that then can advance to even tougher texts and then we are better as readers and students/teachers.

     In the article I read, one difficulty I had was not being able to picture in my head what the author is trying to say because sometimes when I read an article I like to picture what is going on to try to understand the reading better. In paragraph 4 of the article the author ended paragraph 3 explaining how students learn more and thoughts are permamint when the teacher explains topics more carefully, and when I read that I could picture it then when the next paragraph started it started with “Education thus becomes an act of depositing, in which the students are the depositories and the teacher is the depositor” and when I read that I just stopped my thought process and had to back up and reread it and I found out that depositing meant pick up then I figured out that depositories are ones that pick up so what that quote is saying is the teacher lays down the facts and the students pick it up and turn it into something new.

            Another Difficultly I had in this article was the word choice meaning the author used some words that I have never heard of before. It wasn’t really difficult for me, but it was really confusing at sometimes. It was confusing because I read the phrase and I reread it again after looking up the word I wasn’t sure about then then replacing that word with a synanon so that I can read it better. For example, in paragraph 23 the author wrote, “Oppression—overwhelming control—is necrophilic; it is nourished by love of death, not life”, the word “necrophilic” is what confused me because of how it looked and how it sounded when I read it out loud. I looked up the word on google and the meaning of the word is sexual intercourse with or attraction towards corpses, when I first read that I was shocked but then I understood because the sentence did say “nourished by love of death, not life” so the sentence was saying overwhelming control is like loving by death and not life meaning they are attracted to death and not life. 

            In the article I realized that the author does a lot of skipping around and I find that hard to understand the text and what the overall message is. The author talks about teachers and students and how they interact then goes to another new topic then back to another one. I find it hard to understand when that happens because I find it easier to interpret text when everything flows smoothly and this article is like rapids it flows at one point then it is rough at another time. 

            In conclusion, this article was difficult at some points to read and understand. The idea of trying to take a picture in my head by reading the text was hard to do because of how the word choice was which was also a difficult task during this passage. Another difficulty I had was the ideas seemed to flip back and forth and not stay on one track. I will admit that this article was hard for me, but I felt after I finished the article that my reading has gotten better than I thought it was. It really helps me to write down a word I don’t know and the paragraph number and then look the word up and come back to it. 

 
 
 

Self-reflection- When I think about myself as a reader I think I am a great reader meaning I am good at understanding texts and getting information out of them that it doesn’t clearly state. I also think my reading and writing improved since I started digging deeper into the text and trying to make more out of it. My writing I think I do a great job but it could use some work because sometimes I have a hard time starting meaning I have a idea in my head but it is just hard to get it on paper or in a document to make sense and once it does then the ideas flow great. 

 

                                                                        

Works Cited

“The ‘Banking’ Concept of Education”

Paulo Freire

 

Difficulties in Literature

by 

Via Prussner

 – Friday, October 30, 2020, 8:55 PM

 

There are many times when a student is tasked with a reading assignment and will have no idea what the article says. This is not a literacy problem. It is simply a lack of understanding. Problematizing may help in teaching said student to figure out what the author is trying to say. Not through the researching of the words and phrases that remain nonsensical to them, but instead by picking apart the things that don’t make sense and attempting to make sense of them, if that makes any level of sense. . . . 

In one article I read, Transformative Learning: Theory to Practice by Jack Mezirow, one of the things I struggled with was the wording. Not just the vocabulary, but the way the author wrote things, the patterns in the words. For example, Mezirow continually mentions a concept he calls frames of reference. I know, of course, what a frame of reference is. But it is very rarely mentioned in literature, and this automatically told me that this article would be a different read than most works I have previously read. In the third paragraph, Mezirow states, “A frame of reference encompasses cognitive, conative, and emotional components, and is composed of two dimensions: habits of mind and a point of view” (Mezirow, para 4). I did not understand this sentence at first. So, let’s dissect this and try to figure out how it works. Cognitive . . . in relation to the acquiring of knowledge. What is conative, though? I’m assuming that since Mezirow mentions emotion, it has nothing to do with that. Cognitive relates the rationality of an action, whereas emotion computes as more impulsive, not purposeful or well thought out. So I thought, maybe conative is in between. Kind of an irrational action, but premeditated. And sure enough, when I looked it up, I found that conative means it is related to purposeful, but not ultimately rational, action. So maybe it is action based on emotion rather than based on a completely impulsive or, on the other end of the spectrum, rational impetus. The second half of the sentence is explained by Mezirow. Habits of mind are patterns of learning or feeling that are “influenced by assumptions” which constitute a set of social, political, etc. codes. These habits of mind become our perspectives, our worldview. That second part made sense right away, how habits turn into semi-permanent fixtures in our mentality, meaning we can change it with some practice and willpower.

Another thing that caused some difficulty with my understanding, I have already mentioned. It is the repetition of the phrase frame of reference. I didn’t really understand why this is such an important topic, or what it had to do with transformative learning. Sure, you say this thing like ten times in the first two paragraphs, but it’s not until later that you really explain what is so important about the concept. Frames of reference . . . more frames of reference . . . but what’s the point? I ask.Then I really get to reading it and it kind of makes sense, for a second. Then it slips away, like in Madeleine L’Engle’s A Wrinkle in Time, when Mrs. Whatsit is trying to explain what it means to wrinkle . . . It’s a hard concept for me to grasp. Let’s take a look at the first sentence in the fifth paragraph. . . “Frames of reference [look, there is is again!] are primarily the result of cultural assimilation and the idiosyncratic influences of primary caregivers” (Mezirow, para 5). What is the point of this sentence? Obviously, as it is the start of a paragraph, it is supposed to explain where these things come from. But what is “cultural assimilation”? Well, we know what culture is. We know what assimilation means. But is it minority or majority culture? For this instance let’s go with the minority. It’s easier that way, for me at least. Cultural assimilation, a term in my sociology course last year, is when one culture comes to resemble a more prominent culture in society, taking on similar beliefs, values, and behaviors. Okay, so what about idiosyncratic influences? Having read many books about nerds, I know an idiosyncracy is a unique habit. So maybe younger children form frames of reference – points of view, habits of thought, whatever – based on the habits and perspectives of their parents/guardians? I mean, it would make sense. And what does this have to do with transformative learning? Well, if we can just change the way people think, we should be able to alter the way that they learn, too, shouldn’t we? At least that’s what it seems like to me. The pattern in our brains make us think, learn, and behave in a certain way, so if we change the thoughts, then we change the output as well.

One final thing that made reading this article difficult was the broad vocabulary used. I swear, this guy should be a sociology professor . . . Not that I have anything against Dr. Milik. He was fun, honestly. But seriously: Proselytize? Autonomous? Aaaagh! (That is my thoughts. My brain hurts just reading it, but only because I must figure out what it means in order to fully comprehend everything . . . It’s very confusing, although I am sure we are reading this for a reason beyond My teacher told me to do it.) Thank the gods (sorry, God, whatever ya’ll believe in . . . I am not particularly religious. Nothing really makes sense, though I still enjoy going to church) for google and the dictionary, otherwise I’d be very lost. Proselytize . . . I’ve never heard that word before, but let’s take a crack at it. . . . Actually, no, I can’t make any sense of from the context. So I must look it up. Okay, here it is: to convert or attempt to convert someone from one religion, belief, or opinion to another. When looking at this definition, it makes perfect sense . . . in context of the title, even: transformative learning. This word makes sense. Because we are talking about transforming the way of thinking, and attempting to convert someone from one way of thinking to another. I saw that, made that connection, and was like: OMG! . . . !!!!! I did it! I’m a child, so sue me . . . Actually, don’t sue me, I can’t afford it. But I was so proud of myself for making that word and the title . . . interconnect. It made sense for the first time. Taking things apart and trying to fit them back together after you’ve figured out how it works . . . Dissecting the works of others . . . It really helps. Thanks, Eve, I think I will be able to use this later on. I mean it!

Works Cited

“Transformative Learning: Theory to Practice.” Jack Mezirow Published in New Directions for Adult and Continuing Education, 1997. 

Self-reflection: As a big reader and occasional poet, I have always loved reading and writing was third nature (I’m better with singing that songwriting, but hey, whatever). In this assignment, I have tried something I never would have thought of attempting: changing the way I read and think about what I read to try and figure things out without relying on other sources . . . just my brainpower. And then looking things up when I’m sure I have it. Okay, now onto the reflecting part. As a reader, I pride myself on being able to understand most things, and when I don’t ‘get it’ I have no problems researching a topic until I do ‘get it.’ I have always been proud of my hunger for understanding, for knowledge. But today, as I was reading, I realized that maybe that hunger, that longing, isn’t enough. And that I shouldn’t rely on other people to make sense of things for me; instead I should do what I can to make sense of it for myself. Now, as a writer, I’m very accomplished at making everything I write read as very original. I’m a part-time poet . . . it’s more of a pastime than a profession, but I do write poetry on occasion. I find it very easy to write down how I am feeling and still entwine it with “sophisticated verbiage,” as many people I’ve heard call it (or some variation). Forsooth (nobody says that but who cares), it is possible to sound smart and contain humor in writing simultaneously. I do it evey week. Twice! History and English . . . two subjects I was iffy in in high school (wait, I still am in high school . . . !!!). But I seem to be doing well in here. I’ve always done pretty well at relating my thoughts and wording things so that it makes sense. Maybe not at fulfilling all of the requirements . . . haha . . . but I always have something to say (or, you could say, never shuts up. I’ve heard it all) and am not afraid to share it . . . so long as I’m not the first one to say something. So writing this based on something I had difficulty reading . . . I had a lot to say (Oops, I almost said I had a sloth to say . . . just goes to show that you’re funniest when you aren’t trying to be). Anyway, I so need a nap . . . or lunch. That would be nice, as I haven’t eaten since around 8:30. But really, Eve, as I know you will read this eventually . . . I am actually a bit grateful for the assignment this week . . . I feel I may become a bit more independent from now on, when it comes to reading. 감사합니다 (kam-sa-hap-ni-da, thank you in Korean)!