Reading Response# 6

 

“Normalism”

          I am very impressed by the “normalism” approach that describes William Mayo’s way of instruction—his mainstream. The students of his are common students who might be poor, rural, but absolutely who are thirsty of knowledge. Mayo understood this and followed this approach to meet the needs of those longing students. He did not confide his teaching to a specific well-known method because they might not match with his students’ needs and interests. Instead, he brought down the curriculum to be congenial for the levels of the students, which therefore enabled them to feel it and touch it, and consequently enabled them to think about it instead of waiting for the professor to tell them what it was.

         Mayo’s philosophy in teaching encourages students to think about what they learn. By thinking, they can live what they study. Hence, they could practice what they learned every day and everywhere—because it became part of their lives. Also, “each Friday or Saturday evening, students met to discuss literary and political topics, present orations, speeches, essays, poetry, and drama, and hold debates and parliamentary activities” (Rhetoric p. 134). This would not take place unless the instructor encouraged the students to mingle with the live topics whether they are religious, social or political. And this is exactly what Mayo did when he paid a little (or no) attention to the textbooks because mainly they are repetitive and do not speak to the students as they are commonly good only in giving instructions, the thing that Mayo’s philosophy tried to evade.

           Finally, I believe that this “normalism” approach sparks my interest because, as a teacher, I always sympathize with students who complain that they are unable to think because of the high level of the subject matter. So, I encourage teachers, especially in rhetoric and composition classes to find subjects that intrigue the students’ interests, and then to ask them to tell what they think about it; in other words, to produce something new, instead of repeating what the authors of their textbooks already said. By doing that, I believe we will have a generation who can add new insightful methods and techniques in a variable number of fields.

Note: The photo of William Mayo was taken from www.tamu-commerce.edu/library

The photo of Mayo among his class in 1909 was taken from http://fiveprime.org/hivemind/User/TAMU-C Digital Collections

Reading Response# 5

 

February 21, 2010

A Successful Method of Teaching Rhetoric

           In the first chapter of Rhetoric at the Margins, the author exquisitely portraits the pedagogical technique of a famous professor at Wiley collage—Melvin B. Tolson, who taught at Wiley from 1923 to 1947. Despite his rigorousness as a professor, Tolson was a spiritual model for his students. He did not want his students to understand that learning is only confided to the classroom; however, he sat with them during late-night sessions and took them on long trips, he even used to stop his students on campus to ask them very specific and detailed questions about grammar, novels, history and philosophy. Again, despite his weird treatment of his students, he praised them when they worked hard. It seems that Tolson wanted his students to excel in different fields, not in only one which we call “major.” In other words, he wanted his students to become encyclopedic in all majors. Therefore, he wanted them to live the knowledge instead of knowing it or tasting it which will enable them in the end to mingle with the outside dominant discourse while keeping and appreciating their own identity.

          To be more specific, Tolson taught traditional rhetoric, and enforced his students to fully digest it. At the same time, he invoked in them the necessity of being knowledgeable in order to challenge and confront the classical rhetoric ideas. Therefore, his students should not only learn the classical and the dominant rhetoric, but, by using their knowledge, they had to add to it and shape it. In the end, whatever his or her identity, sex, background, the student would become a part of the worldwide rhetorical discourse. They became a part of it because they had Socrates’s style, asking questions; Marx‘s goal, changing the history instead of knowing it; Nietzsche’s method, questioning everything, Derrida’s approach, looking always for the hidden meaning, etc.  Beyond the Archives suggested that researchers sometimes lack archival information; however, there are always things that serve to substitute the archives. Tolson’s biography helped David Gold to examine the African American rhetorical tradition (p. 18).

- Photos of Tolson and Wiley College are taken from: www.marshallnewsmessenger.com, and www.answers.com 

Reading Response# 4

February 14, 2010

How Is A Problem Being Solved?

     The author of Twelve Million Black Voices wrote, “We hear men talk vaguely of a government in far-away Washington, a government that stands above the people and desire the welfare of all. We do not know this government; but the men it hires execute its laws are the Lords of the Land whom we have known all our lives. We hear that the government wants to helps us, but we are too far down at the bottom of the ditch for the fingers of the government to reach us, and there are too many men—the Lords of the Land and the poor whites- with their shoulders pressing tightly together in racial solidarity, forming a wall between us and the government” (p.48).  It seems to me that the author here wants to say that the government is nice and willing to help, but there is a vast gap preventing that from happening. This is a very exquisite sign from the author that commonly if one feels unjust, no one gives a hand for help, but it is that person’s responsibility to speak up, to shout, to cry for help, to let their voice be heard in order to get the injustice removed. Two weeks ago, we mentioned that oral history is an important research tool where we listen to people from the past in order to understand more about them, here it appears that the need of “speaking up” is not only associated with the past but you might speak up to let people who live during your time to hear you because apparently there are always some people trying to build barriers between you and the person you want to get help from.

             Black Schools Restored as Landmarks provides a similar way of solving problems. Ms. Schumpert, the former teacher from Pine Grove says, “Local white on their own would not have built the school for us,” and, “At least if you got educated, you could fight for yourself and start applying for jobs that were reserved for whites.” This is exactly what should take place. It is always difficult to solve the problem from one side; you always need the other part to help you. (It is common for teachers to say to their students: “Help me to help you!”) Let us suppose that there is a conflict between two groups; it is extremely hard to resolve the conflict unless both groups assist you. To sum up, in the first paragraph, we agreed that the first step of solving a problem is making the voice heard, and here we say, the action should complete the mission.

Reading Response# 3

February 7, 2010

The Spiritual Literacy

            Stanely James- one of the African-Americans that Deborah Brandt had interviewed- says, “My grandfather was in slavery. And my grandmother was a full-blooded Cherokee Indian. She had a little education. But they could both read the Bible. It is one of the most peculiar things in my life. My grandfather could not read a newspaper but he could read a Bible and understand it. He was religious. All of our family was” (Brandt 114). This is quite interesting, yet it is true. Personally, I know a number of uneducated people who cannot read a sentence in anywhere except in the Holy Quran. They can read it “just like that”. One of my interpretations to this puzzle is that a person can achieve and master what he or she loves. (A simple advice to teachers: if you want your students to read, find what they love, i.e. what field the student prefers, e.g. sports, music, religion, travel, etc.) The first word appeared in the Holy Quran was “iqra” which means read (the imperative verb). Therefore, when a religious person states that he or she could read only the religious books, we cannot undermine his or her astonishing spiritual ability.

            Aside from this understanding, the authors of Literacy state,” ..members of a church share assumptions about how the prayer book should be read during Sunday services” (p. 54). This statement is quite impressive for two reasons. First, it could be linked to the paragraph above assuming that spirituality can promote literacy in religious uneducated people (and of course in religious educated people, too), and therefore, they can lead the prayer although they lack the basic elements of literacy. The second reason is that statement supports the common understanding of how reading should be practiced. We accept the fact that the ability to read signifies literacy; however, the question is what happens after literacy is learned or acquired; in other words, what are those different outputs that people produce?

Reading Response# 2

Hmoud Alotaibi
ENG 677
Reading Response# 2
February 1, 2010

Space—another rhetoric component

The seventy-two-year-old John Falcone says, “everybody here was poor. We didn’t have money so we believed everybody was the same way. Because we never got out of the neighborhood, we were close..” (Mutnick 636).This poor man believed everybody was poor not because he knew about the outside areas but because his place consoled and sheltered him. That could be applied to everyone lives anywhere. When someone suffers from the difficulty of life—say, poverty --and he or she sees everybody has the same troublesome experiences, that person would accept his or her situation and lives happily. So thanks to place! Thanks to place because it sheltered that poor man and helped us to examine the relationship between that man and his place.

The project of “Our Legacies” points out many significant ideas regarding the space/ place, and its relation to the accommodators. It works as an imaginary bridge between the past and the present. Each place is full of happy and sad memories, significant and insignificant stories to tell, and crucial truths that may change the whole world, or at least to change our look towards who lived there.

Oral History, then, comes to hit the heart of the reality. Oral history is not racist because there is no writer that we may need to question his or her ethical values. However, the speakers are neutral people who just tell the truth (or at least at their best). By oral history, many myths may disappear as they may never exist. We live now in the present and we do not see many myths happen nowadays, so why they only have been associated with the past? I wonder, if we listened to those people who lived in the past where the myths have been told, would we still have myths to listen to? In sum, when somebody speaks up, we know his or her language, ethnicity, identity, etc, and therefore, we can use that knowledge as a strong rhetoric component to learn about literacy, pedagogy, etc.

Literacy in American Lives gives us a beautiful journey into the past. It highlights the development of literacy and the factors that affected literacy, especially the change of economy. It is quite obvious that the change of economy brings a severe change to the whole society; however, as this book tries to say, not only economy does that, but literacy also narrows and widens the gaps among the society members. Moreover, it is interesting to see how people were literate and educated in the past when there were no internet, TV, and Kindle. In the first chapter, the author focuses on the changes witnessed by people, Day and Hunt. Again, for me this sort of search gives more credibility because it was based on “real” people’s experiences and narrations. The same could be applied to the work of Woven the Words. “Let us tell our own story,” stated by the director of the museum, goes a long with the main theme of history research. It “evokes” people to produce what they know about the past; therefore it helps us to reach a very advanced, yet authentic, level of understanding people and their literacy, life, etc.