Blogging Times - a reflection on the blogger and the readers/participants

The encyclopedic but hardly creative Spanish literature professor returned the very early draft of a curriculum proposal. It was sent without corrections, asking for a set of suggestions before the final proposal would be written and corrected at a later date by members of the committee. The encyclopedic professor returned the proposal with corrections on some run on sentences. She re-wrote every sentence in what one of my colleagues, a linguist, called well written high school English as a second language. The Professor did not suggest anything on the ideas themselves being proposed. Repeat: nothing on the ideas. Quite often in those departments, ideas were the least important matter

A few weeks later a patronizing Spanish as a second language professor, speaker of very academic, pristine Spanish as a second language also returned a propsal written by a native speaker of Spanish, a colleague, She corrected some missing accents. When returning the very early draft, using a direct tone, she scolded the colleague. "The proposal is full of mistakes", she said.. The arrogant, “presumida”, attitude of the dogmatic, feminist reflected what colonial relationships can do to liberating souls. Just like the previous case, this professor did not make any suggestions on the ideas proposed. 

There they were, without self awareness, projecting more than knowledge on mastery of forms  The subject-predicate syntax. of the first professor or the attitude towards the colonials of the feminist esdrújula, white mama reflected their own limitations. They both knew very little on how knowledge is acquired and transmitted. Well, had they read the big ones, from les Greeks to Illich or Freire, Iglesias, and Ferreiro,  they would have understood other ways of going about documenting and evaluating the place, the purpose, its possibilities: Socratic or Ferreiro’s Piagetian methods (pardon the poles) or Skinnerian or Gardnerian….... .     

As part of my documentation of selected practices on the teaching of reading and writing, I recorded the previous and similar cases on how orthography or narrative styles or syntax were discussed and taught. And among the findings, the disconnection between postures and practices among selected professors at CCNY were among the most common. .

Academic research  focuses on the positions towards Socrates ideas but rarely on the professor's ability to use the method. Progressive teachers of literature are more concerned with mastery of linguistic forms than with the genius of the writer and his/her view on a given author.

If form would not be so intrusive, perhaps the nascent story teller can write an original interpretation thru his/her version of,  whatever!

(Siempre se puede escribir al margen: vela los acentos, las comitas, etc. etc. sin ser invasivo y dejar que el proceso del escritor fluya….)