Social Class Reproduction

Four Rules for Teaching Writing:
Image result for image: joy of writing
Always give writing assignments that

1. you will enjoy reading;
2. students will enjoy writing;
3. students will enjoy reading what others in the class have written
4. you will enjoy writing.

If any one of these conditions were not true, then it probably wasn't a very good assignment.

Advice I give to my students: When your words surprise you, you know you are writing.

Sunday, September 21, 2014

Genres and Black-holes

I was thinking about black holes this morning, linking them to writing in- or out-of-genre, and social class theory (reference is always Bourdieu, but one also has to think about Giroux's Border Crossing).

Spacetime curvature.pngIn brief, one can't learn about an event by always being inside the event. One has to move inside and outside the event. Giroux's point was that people learn about social class by crossing the borders between classes. People who hang around in one class are less likely than border crossers to recognize what Bourdieu calls the structuring structures of social class fractions.

I don't know where black holes come into this--but I do know that strange things happen to time and space when you're caught in an event horizon. In some way, genres might be like black holes.

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