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

Listening to my grammar brain

Speaking of who/whom, here’s a pronoun case chart from cengage.

I assume it’s from the textbook Evergreen: A Guide to Writing by Susan Fawcett.

Personal narrative: I saw a pronoun case chart for the first time in my life when I started teaching freshman composition. Up to that moment, I had no idea what the grammatical distinction was between who and whom; I certainly had no clue what the word “case” might mean, or what part of grammar it applied to.

The chart was a revelation.

Very satisfying!

Interestingly, I discovered that in fact I did know the distinction unconsciously, deep down in my basal ganglia, where grammar resides. I had picked it up in spite of the fact that whom has been dead for a century.

My basal ganglia knew the dead-for-a-century business, too.

Grammar brain knows.

The basal ganglia are much smarter than we give them credit for, but that is a subject for another day.