To satisfy the second Composition requirement, I took...
Composition (EN)-- English 2010: Intermediate Writing
On Communicating and Collaborating
This semester, I choose to write for ENGL 2010 on this issue, the efficacy gap in reading instruction, because of my children and the research that they’ve inspired. Before she entered the first grade, my daughter had read over 5 million words which is over 8x what the average fifth grader reads in a year, as I’ve pointed out in my persuasion effect project, Neurodiversity. This floored me. Before my daughter learned how to read, for her benefit I did a lot of research on the best ways to teach children to read. She loves stories, and from a very young age she wanted me to read to her constantly. I selfishly wanted to help her learn how to read in order to extricate myself from the task. Nonetheless, I still followed the advice outlined in my information effect project, Play. My daughter and I played together, experimenting with ways to help her learn. I was very conscious of whether or not my attempts were interesting her or frustrating her. Through trial and error, experimenting with the best-researched methods I had found and inventing our own, my daughter suddenly started reading fluently. Within her first weeks of reading she was devouring Junie B. Jones, and within a year she had read the entire Harry Potter series. I don’t feel like she ever struggled, and at 5 years old I considered her a precocious reader. Even still, when I tallied her total words read to over 5 million in just two years from age 4 to age 6, I was completely floored.
My son was 4 years old at the time, and I decided to attempt to replicate the success. But my son struggled. The two of them, my children, were so completely different. I worried about my son’s success in school. I could see how much he struggled and knew that other children would quickly leave him behind in a traditional instruction environment. My own little brother struggled, a close childhood friend struggled, and I knew that my emotionally sensitive son would be devastated by a struggle. This is why my profile of my little brother, Struggle, is the centerpiece of my work this semester. We consistently played with simple exercises for over 10 months, the same simple exercises that transformed my daughter from a non-reader to a devourer of Ivy and Bean in a matter of weeks. Only after ten months, ten long months, right when he was starting kindergarten, only then did I begin to feel at ease because he finally began to read a little. He’s now finishing the first grade. He’s not as strong of a reader as his older sister, but he does read several years above his grade level and he loves to read.
The first piece I wrote this semester was a flash memoir about my own struggle with language. It was a great piece to write, and I felt like it may have been my best writing this semester, but I didn’t include it in the magazine project because my little brother’s struggle is so much more tangible than mine is. There’s a lot of overlap in the themes of my memoir and my profile. There’s not much point in simply writing about struggle without speaking to its origin and solutions. So my magazine project centered around his Struggle rather than mine. When I interviewed him for the profile I had a pretty poor audio recording which lasted over an hour. I transcribed it and used several of his direct quotes to write the profile. I opened the written essay with the word ‘remeliptivate’, leveraging the fact that nearly all readers would need to slow down to sound out the word, some even being reminded of how uncomfortable it is. When I adapted the profile to an audio recording, it was difficult to maintain that effect. But I wanted an audio recording for this piece because it is more accessible. A lot of people don’t enjoy reading and prefer to listen to audio or watch streaming video to meet their casual entertainment and educational goals. So when I published this profile I kept that written introduction side by side with the audio player. There were other things I changed in the flow of the audio recording, not reading the essay verbatim because of the additional dimensionality that audio provided.
It was good to collaborate with Allyson and Kirsten on the magazine project because our issues we choose to write about really complemented each other. I spoke to that in my section of the Editors’ Note. In collaborating as peers I felt like it was a little more difficult to make the magazine visually cohesive from cover to cover. If my job were Visual Editor at a magazine I would have taken a more authoritative stance about layout standards and theme. But I did provide some feedback and recommendations, not all of which were followed. I did monitor the direction the others were going with color and visual theme, and I tried to adapt to it rather than change it. Overall, I am pleased with the final project, but would have liked to continue making some changes if there were still time.
Flash Memoir — Mastering Language
https://medium.com/@rfugal/mastering-language-234240d2fdd2
Language eludes me. I hear it fall around me like powdery snowflakes precipitating out of a harshly cold but beautifully still, white atmosphere. When people speak, I listen intently. I prefer to listen because I fear that the myriads of amorphous thoughts in my head will rarely coalesce into constructions that even crudely communicate my meaning. Speaking, to me, is like attempting to shape a snowball from snow too dry to stick, momentarily forming the shape of a ball before falling apart to dust in my hand. So, when it is silent, I listen to the silence. I’m not introverted, but I fool most into thinking I am.
Something about how I’m wired seems to make language, even reading, elusive. Reading isn’t a leisurely pastime for me. In my fourth-grade year 71% of us performed below the Proficient level on the NAEP reading assessment (Nationsreportcard.gov, 2018). That is not for a lack of trying. Fortunately, I didn’t struggle as much as others. I never felt illiterate as a child. I hadn’t experienced that feeling until this year—Heaven help me if I don’t learn to read Chinese.
It’s 6:30am. My 同伴—my roommates and fellow missionaries—are just waking. We live on the 8th floor of an apartment building in Kaohsiung City’s ZuoYing District. When I first came to Taiwan—nearly 12 months ago—I was jaw-agape awed by the city. Having come from rural Southwest USA nothing was familiar to me. A dense, unending maze of high-rises towered over me with majesty not unlike the great ponderosa pine forests of the mountains I was familiar with. Most jarring of all, perhaps, was that I was now illiterate. Street signs, advertisements, marques, and billboards were all unrecognizable and unfamiliar—all but the ubiquitous corner convenience store 7-11.
The hours I devote to learning to read Chinese characters is my feeble attempt to compensate for my seemingly total inability to learn the language by ear. I get up every morning at 5:30am, 7 days a week, to go through my deck of flashcards for at least an hour before anyone else wakes up. Throughout the day I find more time to study, averaging around 3-4 hours per day, every day, for a year.
I haven’t previously been enamored by my mother tongue the way I now am by Chinese. The etymology preserved and laid out in Chinese writing gives new depth, denotative and connotative, to even mundane vocabulary of my mother tongue. I relish the language—the new, different, interesting, beautiful, and ancient ways of expressing those amorphous thoughts in my head. After constant immersion and seventy-two thousand eight hundred thirty-three minutes of study, give or take a few hours, only now—finally—at 6:30am—I’ve reached a milestone. 3,000 characters recognized. It’s a hard won battle, fought tirelessly.
Like snow in the Southwest, my accomplishment won’t be long lived. My brain just doesn’t seem to be wired for it. Without constant thrust my altitude decreases, characters are quickly forgotten, and language once learned sublimates into the warming air.
Notebook Activities
April 25, 2018 — Late Notebooks
Notebook 5
Responding to prompt 6c.
Learning sight words does not require Phonemic Awareness; phonemic awareness is the awareness that spoken words are composed of blended phonemes. Phonemic Awareness is not a prerequisite for learning to use spoken language, because children do not hear and process words as blended phonemes (neither do adults, in conversation). We hear a syllable as a single event, and a sequence of syllables (a phrase) as a rapid sequence of events. Learning to speak is as easy as learning to imitate these sequenced event sounds.
Although the elements of written words (letters) can be mapped to the elements of spoken words (phonemes), written words are visual objects. For a fluent reader, 99.99…% of words read are Sight Words. This means that we recognize them as single objects rather than as sequenced alphabetic sounds. Fluent reading is not well-practiced and rapid Phonemic Recoding.
Inside the brain, vision and hearing both are simply electrical impulses. A person can memorize sight words as skillfully and prolifically as he can memorize spoken words. Over time, a child may begin to recognize the common phoneme patterns in spoken words. This is the beginning of phonemic awareness. Similarly, with enough reading the brain begins to recognize the patterns of letters in written words — they can see that ‘range’ rhymes with ‘change’, and that ‘change’ has the same onset as ‘chance’.
By reinforcing the phoneme patterns in spoken words with these visual patterns in written words, learning sight words can actually accelerate the onset of Phonemic Awareness. Children who have memorized hundreds of sight words before learning Phonemic Recoding will experience less frustration.
Notebook 9
Responding to prompt 2g.
www.sara.ai/ebook/source.bios.html
Notebook 10
Responding to prompt 6f.
Adaptation of Greg's profile into an audio essay.
https://soundcloud.com/assisted-immersion/struggle/s-ptyxp
Notebook 11
Responding to prompt 9b.When I was writing my fictional story about learning to read, Sara and the Pooka, I was struggling with ways to increase interest in, identification with, and empathy for the protagonist. I decided to re-write the narration to a first person present style, but before I did I wanted to make sure the decision was sound and figure out how to do it well. So I picked up the book by David Jauss called On Writing Fiction: Rethinking conventional wisdom about the craft. There were two really good chapters in the book on narrative point of view and present tense in contemporary fiction. In the chapter on present tense, "Remembrance of Things Present: Present Tense in Contemporary Fiction," Jauss gives some pros and cons to the now common practice of writing in present tense. One of the downsides is the pacing and ability to control time. There were some structural adaptations about how time flows that I would need to make to my narrative if I was seriously going to consider changing the narrative style. In the other chapter, "From Long Shots to X-Rays: Distance and Point of View in Fiction," I learned about how aspects of point of view, including the narrator’s person (first or third), the narrative techniques (dramatic and omniscience), and locus of perception and affect my reader's connection to my character.
Mar 25, 2018 — Late Notebooks
Notebook 3
Responding to prompt 8g.
Thinking about the Persuasion Effect, I went to the reading gallery and looked at three examples of Position Arguments. Those were “Built to Last” by First+Main Media, Clay Shirky’s TED Talk “How cognitive surplus will change the world,” and Lindsay Abrams’ “This one policy change could prevent up to 450 billion tons of carbon from polluting the atmosphere.”
The main argument in “Built to Last” is that Sprawl = Built for Extinction and New Urbanism = Built to Last. I really like the use of visually dynamic typography and alliteration. Using only a few hundred words, repetition of sentence structure (via changing out only one word, for example), and alliteration they cleverly expand an argument in only 3 minutes.
Similarly, Lindsay Abram’s piece is only about 400 words. The argument is very short, simple, and focused: the U.S. government should stop leasing out federal land for fossil fuel production. All four supporting paragraphs are hyper-focused on this argument while bringing in supporting evidence.
Notebook 4
Responding to prompt 2c: A biography of Nell Duke in 50 words
Dr. Nell Duke, a professor of Literacy at the University of Michigan, has authored numerous articles on early literacy development with emphasis on poverty and equity in instruction. She speaks widely on literacy education and has been named one of the most influential education scholars in the U.S. in EdWeek.
About 100 words
Dr. Nell K. Duke is a professor of literacy, language, and culture at the University of Michigan. Her research focuses primarily on early literacy development, with an emphasis on poverty. She is the author of Beyond Bedtime Stories: A Parent’s Guide to Promoting Reading, Writing, and Other Literacy Skills From Birth to 5.
Dr. Duke speaks widely on literacy education. She has been named one of the most influential education scholars in the U.S. in EdWeek.
Duke earned a B.A. from Swarthmore College. She earned both an Ed. M. and an Ed. D. in Human Development and Psychology from Harvard University.
About 300 Words
Dr. Nell K. Duke is an educator and professor of literacy, language, and culture at the University of Michigan. She has authored numerous articles and books on topics such as early literacy development, reading comprehension instruction, and informational reading and writing in the primary grades. Her research focuses primarily on these topics, with an emphasis on children living in poverty and issues of equity in literacy instruction. Her most recent books are Inside Information: Developing Powerful Readers and Writers of Informational Text through Project-based Instruction and Beyond Bedtime Stories: A Parent’s Guide to Promoting Reading, Writing, and Other Literacy Skills From Birth to 5.
Dr. Duke serves as a consultant for a number of education and policy organizations, and speaks widely on literacy education. Dr. Duke has been named one of the most influential education scholars in the U.S. in EdWeek. In 2014, she was awarded the P. David Pearson Scholarly Influence Award from the Literacy Research Association. She has also received awards from the American Educational Research Association, the Literacy Research Association, the International Reading Association, the National Council of Teachers of English, and the Michigan Reading Association.
Duke earned a B.A. from Swarthmore College in 1993. She studied Linguistics, Psychology, Education, Black Studies, and Elementary Education. After completing her B.A. Duke was the Supervisor of the Harvard Literacy Laboratory and a Teaching Fellow at Harvard University from 1994-1996. She then served as a trainer for various programs including Reach Out: Help Teach a Child to Read, America Reads, Harvard Emergent Literacy Project, and the BELL Foundation. She earned both an Ed. M. and an Ed. D. in Human Development and Psychology from Harvard University.
Notebook 7
Responding to prompt 2f.
Ms. Karen Tankersly,
I’m writing you in response to Chapter 1 of your book, Literacy Strategies for Grades 4–12. I have some disagreements with certain claims and characterizations, and I wanted to share with you some arguments that you don’t address in the text.
You open the chapter with a characterization of phonemic decoding as a low-level cognitive skill. I believe that placing phonemic decoding as more basal and fundamental than it really is creates a faulty concept of disability. Low-level cognitive skills do exist in the brain, such as object tracking in vision and auditory word recognition. What motivation is there for labeling phonemic decoding as low-level? I think the motivation is primarily that a predominant paradigm in literacy education is that understanding “how letters and letter combinations represent the sounds of speech” is prerequisite to “significant gains in reading fluency.” This assumption does not hold up to a close reading of the latest science. Phonemic decoding is a highly complex skill heavily reliant on parietal lobe pathways, so intensive and complex that its pathways are rarely used by fluent readers who can reach achieve recognition through occipital-temporal activity without parietal lobe involvement.
The sentence you use to open the second paragraph is problematic: “Dyslexia is a reading disability that can affect those who otherwise demonstrate the intelligence, motivation, and education to develop into good readers.” The connotation is that these disabled students would be considered intelligent, motivated, or educated but for their lack of it in this knowledge area. Perhaps by itself, such a negative reading could be written off, except that you later follow it up with this: “Struggling readers often attribute their problems to the difficulty of the task, interference, too much noise, vision problems, or unfair teachers; seldom do they acknowledge that their own lack of skill is at the heart of the issue.” To what do you attribute their lack of skill? Insufficient intelligence, motivation, or exposure. The difficulty of the task is downplayed. To me, this language is very symptomatic of the paradigm of limitation. These children are victims of a system not fit to the natural and appropriate structure of their divergent neurobiology, and you seem to blame the victims rather than the unfit system. You label the problem as “not that the children were not developing skills,” again denying the difficulty and complexity, “but rather that they had fallen behind their classmates and were never able to catch up,” implying again that it’s the victims’ lack of intelligence, motivation, or education which is to blame.
This cannot be the only factor. Environment, whether academic, pedagogical, parental, or socioeconomic, cannot be the only factor creating struggling readers. Siblings often will demonstrate that there are significant differences in apparent efficacy of instruction at the same school, even by the same teacher. An appropriate approach will consider that efficacy is not simply a matter of equal exposure to text. Brains are different. Most students do not reach proficiency benchmarks while others do with ease.
Evidence supports the theory that fluent, lexical reading is not rapid and well-practiced phonemic decoding. Phonemic decoding is easier for one fraction of the population and difficult (in varying degrees) for other significant fractions. Phonemic decoding is a tool that can be used to reach fluency, but is not requisite. Systems and paradigms should be changed to reflect this.
Notebook 8
Responding to 3c.
I published my novel on literacy which I have been revising this semester. It is significantly longer than a two-page flash fiction story, but it is tied to my social justice issue. It is available on Amazon.com and at www.sara.ai/ebook/pooka.pdf
Feb 22, 2018 — Notebook 6
The hypothesis annotations are only visible for me when the hypothesis plugin is installed and active.
Jan 26, 2018 — Notebook 2
This mix of conversation is from several sources I found while researching the questions:
• What factors of a solution would appeal to children?
• What do children think of solutions?
I really want to approach this issue from the struggling readers' perspective, to make their voices heard. The sources for the mix are:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=sLWBqz_GrRQ
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=d3EI4eSozjw
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uj4x4ioXpNU
Jan 19, 2018 — Notebook 1
Astronomy is the oldest science
Reading the stars comes naturally to those who read nature
It isn't learned overnight
It isn't learned by all
It's as complicated as we make it
Which ussually isn't simple
But we're not alone
Unless we're left alone
Stick to it
It'll bear fruit
It opens to the world
While it isn't learned overnight
It does come naturally