Murray Ch. 7

Chapter 7 Responding to Surprise

            This chapter was all about papers, diversity in the classroom, and knowing yourself as a teacher to understand your students and their diversity. One of the facts was that the “most common cultural background shared by students is music and television.” (133) I thought this was interesting, but it is true that music is a huge part of culture, just like TV is a little bit different in every culture. Students have things in their backgrounds that are not going to be totally alike, but will be similar. They are also going to write through these similar but different takes on life. Our job is to meet them in the middle. We need not put pressures on them to write alike or even have the expectation that they are going to. Diversity is a challenge. The book comments that this diversity, in the many areas and forms, is significant to composition. Cultural, Economic, Experience, Educational, Sexual, Racial, Goals, Writing Tasks, Standards, Cognitive Styles, Personality, and different voices will all add to the variety of papers and paper topics that will create a diverse array in the classroom. It is important to embrace this paper diversity, because just like I write out of my experiences, so will my students. The differences, according to Donald Graves, bring out the significance of the writing that each student brings to the table. We must learn to teach to the diversity and embrace it for the writing that it can produce. They each will have diverse needs, diverse learning styles, diversity in what they say and how they say it, and we must learn how to address those issues through our teaching styles. The response theory of teaching was interesting. We need to be able to see and work out our own problems that we face on a day to day basis, and then we can aid our students in what they are going through. We need to be aware that any problem or issue is the key to who that student is and how we can reach them. “Response theory takes advantage of the inevitable but potentially productive student failures that frustrate teaches who attempt to teach before learning.” (138)

            Good writing, responding to papers and giving the grade are all a huge piece to the composition process. The diversity of our students will give a much different picture to how the composition process will go and end up.