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Why didn’t I learn Chinese in High School instead of Spanish?

I just read the chapter on writing in a second language in A Guide to Composition Pedagogies and found that I conveniently read a chapter in my Educational Psychology textbook on teaching students whose first language is not English. (I love it when all my classes are on the same page.)

               One of the things Educational Psychology addresses that Composition Pedagogies does not, is that it is apparently possible to lose your first language when developing a new one if you do not practice both. And then those students who are semi-fluent in both languages get to high school where they are required to take another foreign language class and then they end up semi-fluent in three languages. In many places, there are special schools that offer classes for adults and children to help people learn and retain their home culture and their language.

                I think it would be a smart idea to have language learning work both ways. If a school has a lot of students coming in all speaking the same language that isn’t English, then maybe that school should offer classes in that language so the students who only speak English can learn another language. There are no downsides to being bilingual as long as you don’t lose your first language in the process. One of the reasons students might lose their first language is because they don’t have a chance to use it. One of the reasons kids in high schools with a majority of students who speak only English don’t pick up Spanish from taking the required two consecutive years of a foreign language is because there is no place for them to practice using that language. If everyone is learning each other’s languages, everyone has a chance to practice and use the language. The high school I went to is guilty of encouraging English only. We had a lot of Chinese students. The only foreign language classes they offered were Spanish, French, Latin, and German. The Chinese students took ESL classes, and then all sat together at lunch at their own table and spoke Chinese and rarely talked to the rest of the students. Maybe if the rest of us had all been learning Chinese that would have been different and everyone could have learned something.

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Should Teachers teach how to Research?

 A Guide to Composition Pedagogies had a delightful chapter on research papers, and did a good deal of criticizing a website intended to help students with school work, which inspired me to check out studenthacks.org to see what it’s all about. According to the chapter, all the advice on how to write research papers is exactly what not to do if you want to actually learn something from your research and write a good paper. The website appears to give advice on a whole range of subjects that might be taught in school, but for the purposes of this chapter, I looked at the pages they have on research papers. Some of the writing advice seems like good advice. Then I found the specific page the chapter mentions on how to write a research paper in one night. To be fair, the article says that it isn’t the ideal way to write a research paper. Sometimes you have to turn out a paper in a day, even if you didn’t spend your semester procrastinating. (The solution for high school teachers is to not overwork their honors students, so they don’t need to do the whole thing in one night). The total time it would take to write the paper, following the steps, is between 10 and 11 hours, which is probably more time than I’ve ever spent on any one school assignment ever, and it actually seems counterproductive. If you were too busy to start earlier, you’re probably too busy to spend 10 hours in one day on one project. I had a teacher in high school who had us write 3 to 4 papers per quarter, and he said the way to write papers in college would be to work on it for 30 minutes every day until it was done. He said it would get done in maybe four days total, you’d have a better paper, and you’d have spent maybe two hours total on it. I can’t imagine either extreme is very good. I always wrote my papers at the last minute regardless of his advice and he loved my papers. So what I have to wonder is, if cramming the essay in last minute produces a crappy paper, why are the students who do it still passing?

               Another problem discussed is students’ lack of ability to engage with their research, which is not something they really teach you in school. They just expect it. And then they wonder why students can’t do it. I can think back on times when I have been rewarded for just pulling out convenient quotes to throw in my paper, as this chapter warns against. In high school theology class, we were taught exactly how to write our pro-life essays. Of course we were only allowed to take the side that abortion was wrong, and we were only allowed to argue from a religious perspective, so that leads to everyone having the same thesis, in different words. The next step was to find a quote from Pope John Paul II on the Catechism of the Catholic Church website and use it in our papers. My theology teacher showed us exactly where to go, and what section of pope’s writings to pull quotes from. We all wrote the papers, and—bam!—Instant A. This is exactly what the chapter warns about, and it suggests other ways of teaching research, that actually walk students through the process, and teaches them how to properly use quotes and paraphrases to avoid inadvertent plagiarism. Such a class would have been so useful, and there’s no reason why schools can’t do it. Some schools offer classes on how best to prepare for SATs and on test-taking strategies to optimize your SAT scores. Many schools also offer a study skills class, but it’s more of an excuse to take away a real study hall, under he guise of being beneficial to students. You only go take the SATs once or twice. Study skills can be covered in fifteen minutes on a college campus event (I’ve seen it happen). You write research papers starting in 6th grade, going all through college. You can guess which type of class would be the most useful for students.

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New Media in the Classroom

The next section in A Guide to Composition Pedagogies is all about technology in the classroom, and not only making use of, but also teaching new media to students. There was also a section on working collaboratively, specifically with the intention of teaching students collaborative working skills, rather than just as a means of producing a finished project on a topic. I think it is important that these two discussions go hand in hand because you can’t have group work without media. No one would ever be able to coordinate anything. I don’t know how it was done before technology that allows for instant communication, but I can only imagine that all group projects had to involve a lot of class time dedicated to allowing groups to coordinate, discuss what kind of project they want to do, what topic they want, how to divide up the work and when and where to meet to work on it when bringing it all together is required. With emails and texts, a teacher need only allow students two minutes to swap phone numbers or email addresses without taking too much time out of class for students to do nothing but coordinate. With Facebook messenger, a student need only know the names of the people in their group and they can find them, friend them, and send them a text, even if they had no time in class to coordinate and divide up the workload. Students can coordinate and work on their projects without ever having to meet.

               I agree to some extent that properly using technology and new media should be taught in schools. When I was in sixth grade, the computer teacher pretended to teach us to use Google Docs. She handed us a paper describing all the wonderful things it could do and how often we’d be using it. I did not figure out how to set up a Google Doc until my senior year of high school because the teacher never explained. She just expected us to use it, and got angry when we didn’t.  

               In a computer class in high school they handed us the user manual for Microsoft Word 2007 (as if we all hadn’t been writing essays on Word all throughout middle school) and told us to do the activities in it to learn to use word. It was an insult to our intelligence.  

These two examples are of course complete opposites of how not to teach technology, but it does raise the question of how much should be taught, and what doesn’t need to be taught because it can be safely assumed that students already know how to use it.

               It’s probably more important to teach about the importance of privacy settings on social media, and to teach students to conduct themselves respectfully online, even when it is very easy to troll comment sections under a ridiculous sounding fake name and a SpongeBob profile picture. Not that we can really control how students will conduct themselves online once they leave school, but we can at least teach them the consequences their actions can have online.  As for the rest of how to use social media, some students will be more familiar with it than others due to their upbringing. Some kids have been on Twitter since age 6, while others weren’t allowed to view YouTube, let alone have an account, until they were 13.  

               Another concern with social media that has come into play far too recently for this book to have addressed is the growing problem of internet censorship on popular social media websites. It could mean a teacher would be unable to take any political discussion to an internet platform at all. In late December, amidst all the debate about Net Neutrality, Twitter decided to ban a number of users for having the wrong opinions. Earlier, Twitter had de-verified  many of the users so people would not think Twitter was endorsing those opinions. Essentially, Twitter picked a side. The chapter in the textbooks describes classrooms in which students Tweet for class discussion. I’ve even had to do that for a class. What happens if a teacher wants to have discussions on Twitter, but a number of students can’t get a Twitter because they’ve been wrongfully banned? What happens if other social media sites decide to follow Twitter’s example? The best answer I can come up with is to teaching students about other less popular platforms, even if it means abandoning Google.

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Is Student Resistance Really a Problem?

In my continued reading of A Guide to Composition Pedagogies, I discovered an entire section devoted to how to solve the problem of conservative students in the classroom.  The first sentence alone sounded very brainwashy to me, and to be sure I’m not just seeing things that aren’t there, I ran it by my roommate, whose politics are quite different from mine, and she agreed. In case you’re wondering what it said, it posed the question of “how to understand and deal with student resistance to leftist politics.”

                Apparently, a conservative student in a classroom is a problem that needs to be fixed. The author considers the argument that having disagreement in a classroom, when it’s easier for a student to just agree with the teacher, is a good thing, because it gets the students to speak up and be less passive. She dismisses this idea as a joke and as the old-fashioned thinking of “early scholarship.”

               Instead, she suggests that student resistance in the classroom just confirms when the media portrays higher education as institutions for political indoctrination. Considering that half the chapter is spent discussing how to get conservative students to leftist ways of thinking, I’d say there’s a reason for such a media portrayal. She also dismisses conservative students as having an “everybody-has-a-right-to-an-opinion” attitude, as if their opinions are not based in fact, and as if they’ve never had their opinions challenged before. It is impossible for a conservative student to get to college without ever having his or her political views challenged. Liberal professors vastly outnumber conservative professors. Even I had a professor put one of my response papers on display as the most provocative one he’d read, pose a question about it, and allow the left-wing students to answer first. Meanwhile he smiled and nodded agreement with them, as they put words in my mouth and/or blatantly ignored things I had addressed in the paper. Then he proceeded to give me very limited time to defend my position, which was not even particularly controversial in the first place.

               The solution the author proposes is meant to encourage students to talk about politics. She suggests proposing the left-wing politics as theory, rather than as the teachers’ politics, so students will be more inclined to listen and respond. If a professor is pretending to be neutral on the topic, he will not face backlash and the students will assume they will not be graded poorly for disagreeing with the professor. This is where the goal of the chapter gets a bit confusing, given that the previous paragraphs were aimed more at conservative students, and this solution solves a different problem. The only way this solution makes sense is if the author assumes that conservative students are the only ones who do not participate in discussion, in which case it still wouldn’t work as a solution because conservative students have as much research and knowledge learned outside the classroom to defend their position. Conservative students have no problem being introduced to left-wing political ideology and seeing the arguments from the other side, and still maintaining their own position.  

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My Reaction to A Guide to Composition Pedagogies

According to the first chapter in A Guide to Composition Pedagogies, the goal of Basic Writing classes is to make higher education accessible to everyone. In schools without basic writing courses, students are either not admitted for lacking the proper writing skills, or they are admitted and do not receive the support they need to succeed in higher writing classes. Since accessibility is the concern at hand, I believe the question boils down to when equal opportunity begins. The United States is supposed to be a country of equal opportunity, and the goal of education should be to attempt to put all students on a level playing field so that they have equal opportunity in the job market. The chapter fails to outline exactly who would be benefitting from basic writing courses. We only know that anyone who has not learned the academic style of writing for some reason or other would be put in such a class, but we don’t know why they didn’t learn it. If a group of students grew up in another country and does not speak more than conversational English, then we’d teach them writing rather differently from the way we’d teach someone who grew up using the academic style of writing their whole lives, in plain standard English, and still can’t write well.

           The book suggests an approach in which the course takes the emphasis off learning the finer points of writing academically, and focuses instead on the content, like any other academic course that assumes the students know the writing style already. Learning the academic language would come as a result of practicing real writing assignments based on reading and prompts and research like any other college course. This approach is tailored for students who haven’t had much experience with the academic culture and language, but who know how to do research and string thoughts together coherently to write a well-organized paper. Generally, students who can do that are in college because they want to be there, and they want to put in the work and achieve. Students who can speak two or more languages have an advantage in college admissions, so I fail to see how this helps with the accessibility of higher education. In my high school, most of the foreign exchange students came from China, and even though they were only just learning English, most of them picked it up before the end of the year. I had a friend from China whose whole family moved to the United States, so she was still hearing only Chinese spoken at home, and she still achieved highly in writing and all other content areas.

           I’d be more concerned about students like the one’s whose papers I peer-edited in my theology class in high school who tried very hard to sound academic and it was impossible to tell what they were even trying to say. It would be doing them an injustice not to get them caught up in writing when academic-style language is still used in many classes. Although, fortunately, many professors do see value in other styles of writing, as evidenced by this here blog post that is my homework assignment.

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Popcorn Expedition (part 2)

My dad and I may have had the popcorn, but our journey was far from over. The rain did not slow down until we were in line for the monorail to the Transportation and Ticket Center (TTC). By the time we realized it would have been much faster to take a resort monorail to the Polynesian Resort and then walk to the TTC, of was much too late. When at long last we arrived at the TTC, we got in line right away for a tram to take us to Jafar 75, the lot we had parked in. Unfortunately, from the looks of the line, there was no possible way we could get on the next tram… Or the tram after that… Or the tram after that. So we made up our minds to walk. We must have made a wrong turn somewhere along the way, for we ended up lost and wandering through the heroes half of the parking lot. As we plodded along through puddles, the rain could not make up it’s mind and continued to speed up and slow down. We walked a long way before we finally discovered another passing tram and asked for directions. At long last, we made it to the end of the great Popcorn Expedition, our destination: the car. We were ready to dig into the buckets of popcorn, our prize, the pot of gold at the end of the rainbow, but just then my Mom and sisters arrived and we had to share. After a long day in the Magic Kingdom, we made it back to our hotel room in Disney’s Art of Animation Resort and enjoyed the popcorn (and I ate most of it). The End

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Popcorn Expedition (part 1)

I never had a doubt in my mind that 2 souvenir buckets of popcorn were worth the effort it would take to get them. There was no telling how much time was left, but my Dad and I knew the last popcorn stands still open on Maine Street USA would be closing any second. My Mom and sisters had wandered into a shop and we were going to meet them at the car. We rushed to beat the crowds who were leaving the Magic Kingdom and got in line for popcorn. We watched the lightning in the Florida sky while we waited. The storm was close, and the sky would light up bright as day with every bolt of lightening, followed by thunder loud enough to make people scream. My dad and I were not even half way to the front of the line when the sky opened up and unleashed pouring rain. People ran around screaming, looking for cover, some with their shoes in their hands. Random pieces of garbage on the ground formed rapids in the quickly flooding street. The awning over the popcorn stand had become a vacuum, sucking in panicked people who couldn't find shelter elsewhere. Personal space doesn't matter anymore when trying to stay dry. We were fortunate to each have an umbrella, because the line had come to a dead stop. The people at the front of the line were too frightened to venture out into the rain. Eventually my dad asked someone to order the popcorn for him and had to pass the money up through the crowd, and we finally got our two buckets of popcorn and could leave. And so on we went, singing as we strolled, "I'm walking right down the middle of Main Street USA," but the adventure wasn't quite over yet...

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Disney art by Rodel Gonzalez