Shaughnessy

I'm not sure why, but I read the first part of Shaughnessy's article very sarcastically. I laughed out loud when she discussed the teacher's initial, inherent need to protect the academy and exclude certain people who are clearly outside of the realm of education, such as the students the teacher first encounters. The teacher conciders the consequences of failing an entire class, as opposed to deciding the best way to go about teaching students who are so far behind. The initial judgments tickled me, though I'm sure Shaughnessy's assessment is not far from the truth. "Converting the natives"...now that's just being racist and condescending. Still funny though.

I like how Shaughnessy's essay focuses on converting the teachers as opposed to the students, because I do think that education is a give and take relationship. Students can only sustain cognitive arguments as far as they are taught to think in such a manner. She says, "For [students] the injuction to 'be more specific' os difficult to carry out because the conditions that lead to specificity are often missing" (238). Students are always taught just to find the answer, but no one seems to teach them how to specify WHY they think an answer is correct, or how to QUESTION the answers they are given, or CHALLENGE what they are taught in classrooms. Isn't that the "point" of education? To inspire original, thoughtful ideas about the world?

This leads me to Bizzell's essay. I agree with Caitlin that by the time college rolls around, students should not be looking to teachers for all the answers, but rather should be actively participating in their own education by actively participating in what goes on in classrooms. I do think that in many ways, college has helped me become a much more critical and analytical thinker. I no longer just take what people say as fact, but I have the ability to challenge and BACK UP my claims. While I'm not sure if that's just me being overopinionated or more mature since I was in high school, but I think college has had a lot to do with why I now think this way.