
I do like this guy, aka The Write Guy. Mainly his attitude, which really came across in these first two chapters, but also his overall approach of teaching grammar and mechanics as part of a writer's craft… or focusing on "a writer's secrets," as he tells his students. (However, I'm not always as fond of his individual lessons—as we will see in Part II of his book.) He's absolutely right about the importance of pseudo-concepts (basically, overgeneralization or hypotheses that don't hold) in lasting learning. Rather than take the right/wrong stance toward sentence-level error, he urges us to teach the "thinking stance," asking students to see how grammar and mechanics affect and enhance meaning. I also liked the idea that taking care with one's sentences is something a "courteous writer" does…implying that correctness and rhetorical effectiveness are matters of manners. I like recasting g&m in this way, actually: being kind to your readers. And too, something that real writers do NOT do just as the final stage of the writing process—the editing stage—but while they are actually writing. That then means that sentence-level issues are "creational" rather than "correctional" issues. Love it.
The other big message, for me, was that these minilessons need to be ritualized routine, preferably at the beginning of each class. Amen. If you don't take this 5-10 minutes each day, this kind of instruction just won't happen, believe me, or it won't happen systematically.
[get on soapbox]
I was a bit miffed, though, when Anderson mentioned at least twice that he teaches in an "inner-city school"—which is code for students of color, and usually African-Americans, and usually African-Americans who don't care about schooling. He also mentions that he teaches in San Antonio, so we can assume he teaches predominately Latino students of Mexican descent. Okay. He's just stating the facts, right? But I just hate that when teachers/authors let drop this kind of information, which then gets translated, subliminally, as "And I should know! I teach in the hardest fuckin' situation in the world: the inner-city!!!" Instead, (a) don't use the phrase "inner city" at all; and (b) if you do want to point out that you teach students whose first language is Spanish, please just say so—and then say why/how that matters or helped you develop this particular method.
The Wikipedia entry on "inner city" agrees with me that this phrase is a euphemism… but even Wikipedia doesn't mention that it's also racially coded.
[get off soapbox]
Still, these two chapters are chockful o' great practical advice... as I'm hoping we'll get into during fishbowl discussion on Tuesday.