Late night with Bob Fecho

Fecho sounds like a really caring, thoughtful teacher. I'm down with the critical inquiry stance. I love Rosenblatt, Freire, and Delpit, too, who he sews together so nicely (maybe too nicely?). I like you, Bob. I like your message. So much so that I'll forgive you for the following bits of prose:

* "the summer institute had me wading waist deep and then diving through the swells of pedagogy"

* "As I let the waves of ideas... wash over me, I managed to catch hold of a starfish or two."

* "dialogue with colleagues... served to knit my various skeins of understanding into an intellectual comforter that knew no end" [I'm a knitter, and even I hated that line]

And did anyone else notice his penchant for making goofy reversals like:

"not all questions are inquiries, and not all inquiries are questions"

"in search of wise beauty and beautiful wisdom"

Seriously, though, there are so many beautiful, quotable lines in this book. My favorite today, as I tore my hair out over my syllabus, was this quote from Aaron in Chapter 8:

"You can make your decisions, but you just got to make sure you can back them up."

Don't remind me...

NRC recovery

Hi friends,

Well, NRC was amazing. I'm in recovery mode, paying the price for skipping out from writing papers this week to see the rock stars of the reading research world. Seeing Donna Alvermann speak about popular culture and literacy was the best field trip for this class! She absolutely sparkles. Deborah Dillon and David O'Brien were so gracious (and, neat, they're married!) I got to tell them about my Deer Hunter blog, and they told me about their adolescent daughter, who recently came to terms with deer hunters. Did anyone go see Alfred Tatum?...

At one point, I found myself sitting at a round table of English teacher educators, talking about reader response theory and how it can be use to transform the thinking of preservice, Mormon teachers in Utah. At Utah State, the English teachers have around 4 semesters of methods courses, so they have time to spend an entire course exploring Reader Response theories in depth (they read Stanley Fish and Judith Langer, in addition to Rosenblatt). The teachers at my round table recommended a book called Critical Passages (for teaching teachers how to get away from the 5 paragraph essay) and Reading the Media (which, apparently, is a meaty sort of look at how using multimedia has been shown to improve reading skills).

Even as I write to you at 1:43 a.m., trying in vain to catch up with my work, I loved this week. Rock on.

*Bonus!* 10 points for any one of you fellow NRC-goers who can explain what the 'spirt of sankofa' means...