Week 1: Three articles on Compromises in Composition

Posted by Glenn Jackson at Sunday, August 28, 2011 10:27:29 PM EDT
In “The Politics of Literate Discourse,” Lisa Delpit summarizes James Paul Gee to say that writing always occurs “within some larger set of values and beliefs” (492). She shows her concern that what has so often been studied in a composition course dwells too much on superficial errors, but she claims at the outset that groups of students from variant backgrounds both need and want to produce the most standard English possible—that they need it because it is standard, but they want it because they have grown up knowing they would need alternate discourses than their home language, dialect, jargon, and manner of writing. Personally, I was trained from day one of graduate work and classes to ignore mechanical errors as much as possible, burning time only on recognizing patterns of error, not isolated instances of single errors. While Delpit’s article is edifying, particularly as it sides with Henry Louis Gates’ statement that we should ‘change the joke and slip the yoke’ (498), she does not follow through with the introduction’s promise to show why we shouldn’t give primacy to the voices students heard in their upbringing. (I loved the Keith Gilyard quote on 497.)

John C. Brereton’s introduction and history of composition shows an unbiased spread of what college and university students have been learning the last 250 years; it gives me little comfort in explaining that since the middle of the twentieth century, though, freshman English courses have been taught by lackeys. (That’s me.) He vies for a more up-to-date version of a humanities class, one which will prepare students for the future as best we can guess it. I notice that his description of 1970 textbooks for freshman comp matches one of the texts from which I teach exactly. My students like to read more serious literature, but I wonder if they have the same feeling I did in a pair of “high” courses introducing me to Western humanities, which was my college’s substitute for basic writing: I felt that I had been denied the basics of writing, just because I appeared to already know them. In my own classes, I try to give my students both the “serious non-fiction,” as Brereton calls it, and the introduction to modern rhetoric which might be today’s version of Harvard’s foundational rhetoric course. I was interested to see how rhetoric had faded from their four-year curriculum and eventually nearly dropped from the first-year as well.

At present, I wonder whether that “larger set of values and beliefs” that Delpit mentions plays too neatly into the tension that Spellmeyer outlines on 472: that we will pretend to teach, and the students will pretend to learn, so long as none of us is made to work too much. I honestly do not believe that is the set of values we are teaching, but I do recognize in my students a false learning, because they know I am pleased when they appear to learn. If all they are faking is the pleasure at learning, I would be content to know they learned.

Works Cited:
Brereton, John C. from Origins of Composition Studies in the American College, 1875-1925 (PDF)
Delpit, “The Politics of Teaching Literate Discourse” (TC)
Spellmeyer, Kurt. “Can Teaching, Of all Things, Prove to Be Our Salvation?” (TC)