A State of Recovery

I'm still in a state of recovery from the cold of the year. It has been an awful experience. It started last Saturday and has remained with me, peaking on Wednesday when I was practically comatose in my living room recliner.

Anyway, I think I'm on the mend, but I'll defer my bigger blog entry on the Gilyard and Nunley readings until later this evening.

I do want to give a shout for Terri's blog where she posted her responses to the Deb Brandt questions. The 601 class interviewed each other about their reading and writing experiences and literacy sponsors on Tuesday (we reported out our "findings" to the class as a whole). Terri was out sick, so she posted her responses on the blog, and they echo many of the themes we discussed in class. We saw similar patterns across our literacy experiences as well as some interesting/unique stories and entry points into engaging literacy:
--parents sponsoring our literacies early on (most of us were read to by parents)
--an early interest in books and reading and even an "obsession"--some of us got into trouble for reading too much or going overboard
--interest in writing fairly early on and some early successes, in some cases

There were a lot of interesting factoids, too, about childhood writing and reading experiences:
--Tanya had early writing success--she won a writing contest at age six.
--Immy grew up in an intellectual family--her father was an English professor and her mother also was a writer/thinker.
--Laura was writing letters early on to public officials and reading history voraciously.
--Trish and her sister taught the children in their neighborhood how to read and learn.
--Laurie and her Dad were reading philosophy together and discussing it.
--I thought it would be a good idea at age six to copy down the words of library books I liked so I didn't have to keep checking them out of the library. My mother explained that this was plagiarism, and that it was "illegal." I was crestfallen and feared being arrested (I thought illegal meant you could be arrested immediately), so I stopped.


I'll let everyone post their notes/follow-ups, but it was a productive discussion, and we wished we had more time to take down our literacy histories. We also wished we could find ways to ask our students some of these questions. All of us left the discussion with a healthy respect for all the labor Brandt performed with 80 interviews and data to analyze/interpret. A huge amount of work.

We also discussed aspects of the Feminism and Composition readings, and I went on a historical tour/timeline of feminism that covered the blackboard in the seminar room. I refer to it as the "Central New York as hallowed feminist ground lecture." Trish and Tanya say they have notes about it, so if they would post the timeline at some point.....

More later....