Comments on Facts Artifacts and Counterfacts: Theory and Method for a Reading and Writing Course by David Bartholomae & Anthony Petrosky

I began reading this book very casually since Mark said it was a lot of reading and asked if people were having difficulties with it.  I guess my strategy was if I approached the reading as reading for pleasure I may retain more.  It was not until about the eighteenth page that Bartholomae and Petrosky reminded me that this was a foolish idea so I took out my highlighter.  I like how Bartholomae and Petrosky want to show their students that they can read for pleasure.  Some of my best professors were ones that got me excited about reading outside of the classroom.  The authors talked about if a reader could remember everything they read from a text it would be madness and that the writer has the opportunity to be creative in their composition.  I think if these thoughts are conveyed to student readers and writers it would take a lot of the burden off them in regards to reading and writing.  I like the idea of making the course like a graduate seminar and immersing low level students in an academic discourse community because it may help facilitate them rising to that level.  I believe we read in this course about creating materials that are just slightly above our student’s abilities so they can learn. I believe this course does that with this type of setup.  The collaborative learning environment of this course is also appealing to me as teacher because I believe we can learn from our peers as well as inform them about things they may not fully understand.  I think the bound book of student writing is a really cool idea as well, but I do not know if that would be possible in a regular sixteen week remedial or freshmen writing course.  One of my questions would be with the current state of education and funding being cut, would this fifteen student two teacher course be freezable today?  One of my favorite activities from this course was the one where students write a journal entry selecting a quote from each chapter that seems to be the authors main point of the chapter and then they have to explain how and why the quotes they have selected relate to the authors overall message. This enables the student to analyze a text and discover what they think is significant about what the author is saying.  That seems to be one of the core objectives of this course.  I think this is something I would like to add to my unit.  I will have to ask my partner what she thinks.