Friday, September 7, 2012

Bartholomae, D. Inventing the Universiy

Bartholomae, D. Inventing the Universiy

In this article Bartholomae discusses how college students make so many mistakes when it comes to writing. He refers to us as "novice" writers. He asked a group of students to write an essay on certain subjects ( English, Science, History, Ect..) this engaged student into a discourse community and they started to stress because they were not to familiar with the jargon of these subjects. They started to feel insecure about there writing skills and knowledge on these topics because other people were going to be writing about them too and they didnt know if they were more experience than them.

He says that one must stop thinking about high school and learn to define ourselves as researches  because we tend to over dramatize our writing and tend to give too many 'life lessons" in our writing. We must write for the reader, and learn to speak their languages ( mimic our leaders "languages".)

What I got out of this article was to try to better your language skills. Mimic other people that know what they are talking about because that is one of the main ways of learning and it helps you improve your writing skills. "one does not have to be an expert but pretend to be one"

Momma's Memories and the New Equalities

Momma's Memories and the New Equalities

This article by Young talks about racism today. Racism today it different than it was back in the 1950's that colored people couldn't sit in front of a bus or had to go to a different school from the whites. Today's racism deals with Microaggression ( making sterotypical assumptions).

People now a days try to ignore the fact that there are other races by just being "color blind" this is just an atteempt to ignore the existence of another race. School teachers now are "code switching" meaning that they are translating black dialet into standard English for students. This is wrong in so many ways because they  are making it seem like color people are aliens to our society and the feel like its the right thing to do to translate they way they communicate, the way the express themselves. People drown in their own ignorance a perfect example of this is Senator Harry Reid when he commented on how Obama is such a successful Politician because he has "light skin and he does not have a negro dialect, unless he wanted to."

Young's argues his point of view by sharing a story that his good friends daughter Shayla experienced microggression first hand. Some of her classmates where asking her why she was so black, why was her hair so curly, why was her but so big? They did not mean to be racist towards her they were just curious why she was so different than they were. Other meaningful key terms in this article where Microinsult (which is communication that convey and demean a persons racial heritage or identity) and Microinvalidation ( communication that exclude, negates, or nullify the psychological thoughts, feelings, or experiental reality of a person of color)

This article made me realize that racism isn't no where near over and that some times racism isn't intended but it still occurs. We need to create racist free place for the future generations to follow.