sometimes the blog is a place for keeping track

Deaths in the past week:

Saddam Hussein

Gerald Ford

Tillie Olsen

Donald Murray

A dictator, a former president, a feminist working-class activist writer, and a journalist/compositionist.

In J. Z.'s doctoral seminar on literacy at Syracuse, we read Olsen's Silences, and I went on to assign it in my own graduate course on social class and composition here at ISU. I'll never forget the night in that doctoral seminar when I was to present to the rest of the class on Olsen's work. Instead of doing the same-ol same-ol presentation with discussion questions, I asked everyone to write, including J.Z. Choose a passage from Silences that struck you in some way, and write in response to it. We all did, and then we all read aloud, and it was one of the most moving moments in a grad class I've ever experienced. And I remember thinking, "we don't do enough of this"--writing in class and sharing that writing. Since then, I've made a conscious effort to include not just content instruction in my grad courses but writing instruction and practice. I think Donald Murray would approve.