What I’ve been thinking about for the last 6 months (besides SentenceWeaver)

Some things that have been on my mind:

• Catherine and my many recent conversations about the new SAT reading sections
• Related thoughts we’ve had about SAT vocabulary challenges
• Thoughts on verbosity and hedges (“obviously”, “apparently”).
• The Dreamy Child Syndrome, aka Multi-Factor Introversion (not autism, and not in the DSM!)
• Beyond background knowledge: other background variables in reading comprehension
• How the Curiosity Mindset (or lack thereof) affects comprehension
• Clues that “kids these days” are doing less and less careful reading
• Clues that they’re getting less and less writing instruction
• Thoughts on “Why do you think that?”, “Yeah!”, “It’s a good question”, and “one less thing to worry about”
• The ongoing recovery of the English language from the Norman Conquest (or is it something more sinister?)
• J’s adventures as a college undergraduate

For now, I’ll share the following email exchange—a sign, perhaps, of things to come:

E: Katharine, happy to meet with you. I will have my new assistant help us. Amy, can you help set up a meeting with Katharine next week?

E: I forgot to cc Amy.

K: Great—Thank you, E! Next week I am quite open Wednesday, Thursday, and Friday.

A: Hi Katharine. Just wanted to check in and confirm what action you’d like me to take.

If this is an entirely new meeting you’d like me to get on the calendar, just let me know “Amy, please schedule a meeting” and CC in the people you’d like to meet with.

Alternatively, if you’d like me to make any updates to an existing meeting, could you please resend this message in the original thread for that meeting?

For now, I’ll take no action on this.

Amy

E: Katharine, Thank you for your patience with my new assistant. I guess “forgot to cc Amy was not understood.”  So trying again. I will take over if it doesn’t work.

Amy can you please schedule a meeting with Katharine next week?

Thank you.

A: Hi Katharine,

Does Monday at 11:00 AM EST (Eastern Daylight Time) work?

Alternatively, E is available Monday at 2:00 PM or Tuesday at 10:00 AM.

The meeting will be a web conference.

Amy.

At this point I was ready to type an exasperated “As I said…”– but something made me to look back through this bizarre exchange.

It turns out that Amy, whose last name is Ingram, has an email signature that concludes with the following details: “Artificial intelligence that schedules meetings. Learn more at x.ai”

 

 

Reading & writing in the second person

Speaking of what we’ve been doing for the past 6 months ….

I hadn’t taught freshman composition for two fall semesters while Katharine and I were working on the textbook (and I was working on my neverending basal ganglia project…)

When I got back to the classroom last September, I found something new: my students seemed to have spent an inordinate amount of time in K-12 reading and writing in the 2nd person.

I’m never surprised to see a lot of first-person papers — not given how many personal narratives K-12 students have been producing for the past … how many years has it been?

Twenty?

Thirty?

Twenty at least. Twenty that I know of personally because I lived through them.

That reminds me.

My neighbor told me about her then-8th-grade son’s reaction to being assigned a personal narrative about an “afternoon memory” or some such. He had been writing personal narratives since 3rd grade, and now it was 8th grade and time to write a personal narrative about an afternoon.

He told his mom: “I’m running out of memories.”

We cracked up over that one. Kids are so sweet.

Anyway, back on point: I’m never surprised to see first-person writing in freshman composition.

But I don’t remember ever seeing so much second-person. This fall, reading my students’ work, I felt as if I were seeing as many “you’s” as “I’s.” Maybe more.

To some degree, that was my fault. I was teaching a brand-new course, and the first two topics I assigned left themselves open to advice-giving.

But I saw the same thing in reading, too.

My students always find college-level texts challenging. This semester, however, I encountered a form of comprehension error I hadn’t noticed before.

My students would hopscotch through a sentence, lighting on some words and not others, then repeat the process with the next sentence and the next until the end of the paragraph, where they would fashion the words into an injunction.

“You should be yourself.”

“You should set goals.”

“You should write the way you talk.”

Things like that.

This is in no way a criticism of my students! They haven’t been taught to read college-level prose, and all of a sudden here they are, in college, reading college-level prose. They don’t complain and they don’t balk; they put their heads down and plow ahead. I admire them.

I’m not complaining or balking, either. I love teaching these students.

Instead, I’m writing this post to report a college-reading issue people may not have picked up on.

I have a couple of takeaways that I’ll circle back to tomorrow.

And see:
Reading and writing in the second person 
Common Core in the 2nd person
Injunctions of yore