Anyone want to proof read three rough draft essays?

[Muad_Dib]

It would be a big help. Any pointers will be appreciated and considerd.
Please excuse th atrociousness of these essays. They are all rough drafts that were written in just a few hours, usually after not sleeping for a day or two.

Please excuse the look of it, much of the formating did not survive the cut&paste to the board.

Essay #1

Defining Literacy

What is literacy? Literacy is currently controversy. It is a word that everyone seems to know yet no one can define. Rather, preferring to live by the Justice Potter Stewert maxim of “'I cannot define it, but I know it when I see it.” Unfortunately such thinking has only led us into a quagmire of conflicting ideas, definitions, and arguments about what literacy really is. Literacy has started to mean all things to all people and defining it has proven more difficult as people try to expand its meaning to cover what literacy is for them.

Why even try to define literacy? Why do we care? We care because we know that literacy is integral to a healthy intelligence. In most basic tests of standard aptitude (i.e. ACT, or SAT) there are two parts, that which tests mathematical skills, and that which attempts to test literacy. These two poles of knowledge are used because they will show the level of structure and organization in a persons mind, AKA the level of intelligence. Language and literacy are the most basic and important of the two because it is language that must come first and be used to identify concepts to begin building ideas and understanding. Language and communication are often fuzzy ideas to pin down and codify with perfect exactness, this has been why literacy itself is so hard to define, because we most often intend it to mean having a increased communicative skills. So if we want to better teach language skills, it is obvious that we should try to better define what it is we are aiming for.

If we do not clearly know what it is we are striving for in literacy, the fuzziness will overtake and degrade us. We can only hold an ill-defined concept for so long, the mind cannot exist in a vacuum. We are now suffering the ill effects of this. Recent studies have found that “only one student in four can write well enough to meet future educational or job challenges” (O’Neill). O’Neill goes on to blame much of this fault on “[teachers] poorly prepared to teach the subjects in which they’d been certified competent”. These are people who do not know what they are teaching or why, and the students suffer for it.

Part of literacy’s fuzziness comes from applying the word metaphorically, then accepting that use as being literal. If I were to tell someone that “time will fly by” and “birds will fly by”, that person would most likely understand that I was speaking metaphorically, by comparing the speed that time will seem to pass and the speed which a flying bird will pass. However, someone unfamiliar with the phrase “time fly’s” may take me literally and rack their brain slowly growing frustrated as the try to understand how the nature of flight would describe both the passage of time and the movement of birds. This is the same mistake many are making in regards to the use of the word literacy. Phrases such as “video literacy” (O’Neill) and “a new system of literacy [with microcomputers]”(Scribner, 42) are mistaken use’s of the word. Where originally it was meant to compare proficiency in one field to that in language, many people have slowly come to accept that literacy has this universal usage. It is incorrect in that it has led to people trying to find the fundamental connection between reading, and anything else literacy is applied to.

What they should be examining is the act, not what is acted upon. The act of literacy, of any kind, has nothing really to do with what it is that you have become literate in, all that matters is that you have become literate. You are proficient then a layman or beginner. You understand many of the complexities and nuances of your subject and can apply them usefully. This is what connects all uses of literacy, and this is all they have in common. What is left is to define the specific nature of this proficiency in each subject. The nature of being proficient in language, will be different from that of electronics. So this then is where we must start if we are to define what proper literacy (literacy of language) is, by discovering what it means to be, and how to tell if one is proficient in it. Unfortunately this problem is not as easy to solve, but as long as we now know more exactly what the problem is, we can seriously attempt to solve it.

Essay #2

How then shall we learn.

Better look frogs now or Moammar will daily irritate them against you. Her cup was easy, hollow, and creeps in the autumn. It combed, you attacked, yet Hakim never nearly feared towards the corner. Tell Moustapha it’s noisy walking outside a gardener. As usably as Abu recollects, you can attempt the tree much more globally. How will we fill after Lara pours the unique station’s kettle? Generally, go love a pitcher! Who judges bimonthly, when Ahmed cleans the poor ball around the shower? They are helping under the stadium now, won’t kill lemons later. Osama wanders the envelope alongside hers and superbly sows. When doesn’t Hussein move eerily? I am wanly tired, so I excuse you. No polite butchers are distant and other open boats are pretty, but will Ayn smell that? Try opening the room’s lower painter and Oliver will nibble you! Do not join the porters biweekly, receive them slowly. Sometimes, Rasheed never expects until Waleed promises the strong bandage wrongly. Plenty of units truly attempt the bizarre cellar.

Program a computer with the rudiments of language, syntax, grammar, vocabulary and the previous is what you will get, gibberish. The rules mean nothing to the computer. They are just as arbitrary as any random stream of 1’s and 0’s that might pass through it. However man can see what is wrong, and can connect his information with the outside world because man deals with concepts. It is only within the context of concepts that information can gain value or context. Yet it is the state of the computer that most students find, or feel, themselves in.

Modern thought began when the ancient Greeks realized the importance of concepts, logic and reason, then tried to form an understanding of everything under one concept of philosophy. All forms of thought and study were held under the unifying roof of Philosophy, where they belonged. However as man progressed he would become more specialized in different fields until they would seemingly become worlds unto themselves, and at times even appear to be antagonistic. Some would even come to deny that they were ever anything but disparate, that this is their true nature and wisdom is in accepting that. This is where we have erred. We have forgotten that each branch of study is not an end in itself, but is part of the whole of man trying to find his place and purpose in the universe, and until we stop treating school subjects as facts disconnected from reality school will remain a frustrating exposure to information, if not knowledge, for an increasingly bored and apathetic youth.

Students are, especially for the first six grades, presented with a collection of facts and information, without guiding principles around it. I remember basically doing the same math over year after year, until I finally reached seventh grade and first year algebra. I had known nothing else but the same collection of addition, subtraction, and multiplication problems for years. My reading lessons were just that, reading a story, then answering some questions about it. Rarely did we right anything outside of a birthday card, and the only creative part of that was in drawing the borders and trying to outdo myself with how many times I could it ‘very’ in the phrase “Have a very very very very… …very very very Happy Birthday!”. Yet most teachers realize this. They know that they are coming from a system that was first designed to teach kids there basic numbers and letters so that they might leave for work as early as age 12, children who were destined for higher learning never went to public school. Public schools were (and too a large degree still are) ran like trade schools, for living. Teaching only the basic skills necessary for survival in a society and little more. But what is not taught, and rarely considered or realized, is why these skills are necessary for life. Without this unifying ‘why’ information is given to the students like some blunt instrument until they finally ‘get it’, it could be no other way.

Without that encompassing ‘why’ conceptualization of knowledge becomes impossible. “When applied to conceptual material, memorizing is the psycho-epistemological destroyer of understanding and of the ability to think. But throughout their grade- and high-school years, memo-rizing becomes the students’ dominant (and, in some cases, virtu-ally exclusive) method of mental functioning. They have no other way to cope with the schools’ curricula that consist predomi-nantly of random, haphazard, disintegrated (and unintegratable) snatches of various subjects, without context, continuity or sys-tematic progression.

“The material taught in one class has no relation to and fre-quently contradicts the material taught in another. The cure, in-troduced by the modern educators, is worse than the disease; it consists in the following procedure: a “theme” is picked at ran-dom for a given period of time, during which every teacher pre-sents his subject in relation to that theme, without context or earlier preparation. For instance, if the theme is “shoes,” the teacher of physics discusses the machinery required to make shoes, the teacher of chemistry discusses the tanning of leather, the teacher of economics discusses the production and consump-tion of shoes, the teacher of mathematics gives problems in cal-culating the costs of shoes, the teacher of English reads stories involving shoes (or the plight of the barefoot), and so on.
“This substitutes the accidental concrete of an arbitrarily picked “theme” for the conceptual integration of the content of one dis-cipline with that of another-thus conditioning the students’ minds to the concrete-bound, associational method of function-ing, while they are dealing with conceptual material. Knowledge acquired in that manner cannot be retained beyond the next exam, and sometimes not even that long.”(Rand)

Life context, however, is not merely ignored by some today, it is denied. Multiculturalism, the theory that ideas, thoughts are defined by the culture you were brought up in, is in vogue throughout the teaching world. They believe that a persons class “shaped values, attitudes, social relations, and the biases that informed the way knowledge would be given and received.”(hooks) What they fail to mention is which ideas are right and which are wrong. Implicit in the arguments of the multiculuralist is that there are no ideas that are better or worse then any others, since all thought is defined by your arbitrary culture. Without context to the world around us thought takes the form of my opening paragraph, it has form, perfect form, but its form is without meaning. When you deny all context you deny all meaning, and how can there be learning when you have decided that there is nothing set to learn about?

As it stands now, American public education before college is a craps game, and a self conscious one at that. Although not restricted to it, math is the area where this is most visible. Some students will just ‘get-it’ while others won’t. Those that do will go on to bigger and greater things and understanding, those that do not will often be told, or themselves resign to the idea that they ‘just aren’t math people’, as if it was some innate ability, a mathematical divine right. In my own fourth grade classes we were split up into three groups based on our mathematical ability. There was no mobility between groups. There were only those that had thankfully gotten it and those who had not. This ‘it’ is what separates men in the modern world. It is what we must stop considering a bonus, and instead a necessary to education.

What is ‘it’, this method of thought that makes learning and growth possible? It is “That idea that we all hope you have learned in studying science in school—we never say explicitly what this is, but just hope that you catch on by all the examples […]. It is interesting, therefore, to bring it out now and speak of it explicitly. It’s a kind of scientific integrity, a principle of […] thought that corresponds to a kind of utter honesty.”, said Nobel Laureate and legendary teacher Richard Feynman. What it is, what was meant “honesty”, rationality. The clear, sober scientific thinking that unflinchingly faces reality. “This above all else…” for only in the uncluttered truthful mind can connections, generalizations, and concepts begin to form and learning take place.

[Meatros]

*Originally posted by Muad’Dib *
**It would be a big help. Any pointers will be appreciated and considerd.
Please excuse th atrociousness of these essays. They are all rough drafts that were written in just a few hours, usually after not sleeping for a day or two.

Please excuse the look of it, much of the formating did not survive the cut&paste to the board.

Essay #1

Essay #2 **

I’m sorry, I couldn’t read the first one…

[Muad_Dib]

Essay #3 I should mention that I am rewritting this at the same time. For numerous reasons including plagerism in certain parts (it don’t count as plaagerism if it don’t make it to the final draft)

After a long nightmare, man woke up. For one thousand years, since the fall of the Roman Empire, Europe had been living through the Dark Ages. A time of ignorance, savagery, and suffering that followed in the anarchy of Rome’s collapse. The re-discovery of the writings of the ancient Greeks and Romans sparked a revival in thought and art that quickly outstripped the cultural achievements of all previous civilization. It was the Renaissance, the rebirth, and with it came the most important change of all, the birth of Humanism. Something that had not really been found anywhere outside of ancient Greece, humanism is, at its heart, the belief in rationality. It is the belief that we live in a rational world not a random nightmare controlled by an unseen, unaccountable, capricious God, or gods who act in mysterious ways. It is instead the universe of Newton’s clockmaker. It was a world in which man, while no longer a slave to his old superstitions and dogmas, was now responsible to discover truth, beauty, and the path to salvation for himself, not to simply follow what has been told for a millennia, but to earn his own soul, to follow his own path, wherever it may lead. It was a world of Leonardo da Vinci and the workshop in Milan, of Dante and the Divine Comedy, of Mirandola and his Oration on the dignity of man. It was a world of Shakespeare. It was a world of Hamlet.

Hamlet is in many ways the embodiment of the Renaissance man. He is an accomplished swordsman, he is a good playwright and knows the workings of acts on the stage, he has had an extensive education in foreign lands, and most importantly (and ultimately, most tragically) Hamlet thinks and questions about the world around him. Shakespeare wrote Hamlet, whether consciously or not, to be a true man of the Renaissance, one who did not necessarily take what truth was given him, but instead tried to reason and discover on his own. Even if he personally failed in his pursuits, it was still possible for truth to be discovered once reason was properly applied. Nothing could be held back from the light of knowledge forever in an objective universe. A man from the Dark Ages would never have asked “To be, or not to be?”. His answer would have been, “as the LORD wills it”.

This faith in a definite, objective truth has not survived in popularity since then. For with the Greeks came Plato and his rejection of empirical truth, which would lead to the most influential philosopher of the last 500 years Immanuel Kant, and his rejection of certainty in any objective truth at all. The popular ideology of today is a type of multiculturalism, wherein, each group, each race, people etc has their own reality, their own rules for existence that are separate and unrelated to any others. Your reality is not my reality. If you believe that Mozart sounds sweet, or that ice cream tastes good, it is not because they do in any objective sense, you only believe that they are good because that is what you have been brought up to believe. This is antithetical to a man like Hamlet.

So, is human nature the same for all men; are our fundamental dispositions and traits identical to those of our brothers? The debate that is illustrated anew in “Shakespeare in the Bush” by Laura Bohannon. Initially believing that human nature is the same in all people she goes to Africa and tells a tribe the story of Hamlet, believing that they, as fellow humans, will understand the play. She fails. However I hold that she does so not for the reasons she implies. The ideas of Hamlet are, indeed, universal; Bohannon failed because she failed to clearly define the particulars, thus clouding the universal. Almost every time she introduced a new plot point or important idea in the play it was lost on the tribesmen. All were lost because of misunderstandings, not because of fundamental differences between the thinking of the different people. The ideas of Hamlet were understandable by all, they were just presented poorly.

Bohannon immediately causes confusion when she speaks about the ghost of King Hamlet. The tribesmen do not believe or understand Bohannon when she tries to explain what a ghost is to these people who have no concept of it.
The idea of a ghost itself is not an essential part to the idea’s uncertainty in evidence, believing your senses and sources, and mind itself. So for the Tiv to not know what a ghost is does not mean that they are incapable of understanding the nature of epistemological uncertainty. They are only ignorant of the method by which Shakespeare used to convey it. She falls into a trap of telling the story as if it really happened, and thus limits herself in how she can explain it to the Tiv. In the end she falls into a “they do in my country” trap. As if saying that what is real for you is real for you and what is real for me is real for me.

Hamlet and Ophelia
In the play, Hamlet could not marry his true love, Ophelia, primarily because he was royalty and she a commoner. The Tiv disagreed with this as well. They felt that the marriage should be permitted because since Hamlet was royalty, then he could shower Ophelia’s father, Polonius, with gifts and money. Bohanon describes only particulars. Blunt facts of how life is lived here and not there. It becomes as a matter of fashion for not marrying Ophelia. She needed to discuss the morality governing the decision. And show how it is explains how in Hamlets situation, marriage would be a no-no, but would be allowed for the Tiv.

Hamlets madness
The Tiv felt that Hamlet’s madness was attributed to witchcraft. They feel that witches cause madness, and that this was the only reason as to why Hamlet went mad.
Again, she seems not only afraid to criticize the Tiv, but seems to have not even have the idea occur. When speaking to them she finds that she cannot breakout of the trap she set for herself by telling the story as if it is true. However, even that would not have been necessary. She could have explained that there are different kinds of madness. Or, that she was simply talking about something different from what the tribesmen thought. Or, simplest of all, she could have explained that Hamlet was faking it all along. All would have held true to the plot and theme of the story.

Polonius’ death
When Hamlet discovered that Claudius killed his father, he attempted to kill him while in his mother’s quarters. He thought that Claudius was hiding behind a curtain, and so he plunged his sword into the curtain. It was not Claudius, but rather Ophelia’s father, Polonius, behind the curtain. The Tiv believe that one cannot kill or attempt to kill his elders. They felt that Hamlet should have contacted his father’s friends to avenge the murder of King Hamlet. The Tiv thought that Hamlet was wrong to try and avenge the murder himself.
The Tiv believed that was horribly wrong for Hamlet to attempt to kill the king himself. This event could have been the easiest of all to explain. She could have easily told them how hers, and all other people basically agree here, but that the matter was so extreme as to warrant the direct action of Hamlet. And in her land this is allowed. That in fact there are no strict rules for familial relationships.

Ophelia’s drowning
Ophelia, Hamlet’s love, was so distraught after hearing about how Hamlet killed her father, she committed suicide by drowning herself. The Tiv were strongly opposed to this. They felt that only witches can make someone drown because water alone cannot hurt someone. They felt that Ophelia’s brother, Laertes, killed her to sell her to the witches because he ran out of money. Also, at Ophelia’s funeral, Laertes jumped into her grave to say his last goodbye. Hamlet then jumped into the grave to say his last goodbye, also. The Tiv thought that Laertes was trying to steal the body so he could sell it to the witches. Since Hamlet jumped in, then he saved Ophelia’s body from being sold. They felt that Laertes wanted to kill Hamlet because he prevented him from selling Ophelia’s body.
This is the point where her hand should have been forced to confront the Tiv about their ideas about madness and water. This is not a matter of their opinions, or their world view. They are simply wrong about a demonstrable fact.

The final duel with the Poison blades
This was only misunderstood because of the previous misunderstandings. Its meaning could only be cleared when the mistakes made before were corrected.

In the end all of the mistakes of understanding by the Tiv were those of an incidental nature. No ideas were really inaccessible to them. But does any of this matter? Even if they had understood every word of Bohanon’s story, it would not have been Hamlet. It would have just been a simple story. From the begining we see that she is only trying to make sure that they understand the plot. That is all the article itself is concerned with. But misunderstanding the story and the motives are not what was important. Whey Hamlet, and all great literature, and all great things, have survived because they discuss, enlighten and expose the universal in all of us. The thoughts themes and ideas that can never grow antiquated because they discuss what each of us are, our nature as concious rational beings. “Shakespeare in the bush” was never concerned, if even aware of it. The auther never looked beyond the facts of the plot, never saw the forest for the trees. The underlying theme of the impossibility of certainty was therefore lost to the Tiv, no matter how well she explained the story. Because Bohanon would have never explained the ideas.

[monica]

First of all, Maud’Dib, let me warn you that you may be yelled at by some people about not wanting to do other people’s homework. That being said, I actually enjoyed reading your papers, they were well-written. I only had time to edit the first one, and I bolded my corrections…maybe I’ll have time to get around to the others tomorrow.

Defining Literacy

**A question one may ask oneself is, “**What is literacy? ” ** The definition of literacy is currently controversial. It is a word that everyone seems to know yet no one can define. Rather, people prefer to live by the Justice Potter Stewert maxim of “'I cannot define it, but I know it when I see it.” Unfortunately such thinking has only led us into a quagmire of conflicting ideas, definitions, and arguments about what literacy really is. Literacy has started to mean all sorts of things to all sorts of people and defining it has proven more difficult as people try to expand its meaning to cover what literacy is for them.

Why even try to define literacy? Why do we care? We care because we know that literacy is integral to a healthy intelligence. In most basic tests of standard aptitude (i.e. ACT, or SAT) there are two parts, ** one** which tests mathematical skills, and one which attempts to test literacy. These two poles of knowledge are used because they will show the level of structure and organization in a persons mind, AKA the level of intelligence. Language and literacy are the most basic and important of the two because it is language that must come first and be used to identify concepts to begin building ideas and understanding. Language and communication are often fuzzy ideas to pin down and codify with perfect exactness; this has been why literacy itself is so hard to define- we most often intend it to mean having an increased communicative skills. So if we want to better teach language skills, it is obvious that we should try to better define what it is that we are aiming for.

If we do not clearly know what it is that we are striving for in literacy, the fuzziness will overtake and degrade us. We can only hold an ill-defined concept for so long; the mind cannot exist in a vacuum. We are now suffering the ill effects of this. Recent studies have found that “only one student in four can write well enough to meet future educational or job challenges” (O’Neill). O’Neill goes on to blame much of this fault on “[teachers] poorly prepared to teach the subjects in which they’d been certified competent”. These are people who do not know what they are teaching or why, and the students suffer for it.

Part of literacy’s fuzziness comes from applying the word metaphorically, then accepting that use as being literal. If I were to tell someone that “time will fly by” and “birds will fly by”, that person would most likely understand that I was speaking metaphorically, by comparing the speed that time will seem to pass and the speed which a flying bird will pass. However, someone unfamiliar with the phrase “time flies” may take me literally and rack their brain slowly growing frustrated as the try to understand how the nature of flight would describe both the passage of time and the movement of birds. This is the same mistake many are making in regards to the use of the word literacy. Phrases such as “video literacy” (O’Neill) and “a new system of literacy [with microcomputers]”(Scribner, 42) are mistaken uses of the word. Where originally it was meant to compare proficiency in one field to that in language, many people have slowly come to accept that literacy has this universal usage. It is incorrect in that it has led to people trying to find the fundamental connection between reading, and anything else literacy is applied to.

What they should be examining is the act, not what is acted upon. The act of literacy, of any kind, has nothing really to do with what it is that you have become literate in, all that matters is that you have become literate. You are **more **proficient then a layman or beginner. You understand many of the complexities and nuances of your subject and can apply them usefully. This is what connects all uses of literacy, and this is all they have in common. What is left is to define the specific nature of this proficiency in each subject. The nature of being proficient in language will be different from that of electronics. So this then is where we must start if we are to define what proper literacy (literacy of language) is, by discovering what it means to be, and how to tell if one is proficient in it. Unfortunately this problem is not as easy to solve, but as long as we now know more exactly what the problem is, we can seriously attempt to solve it.

[Primaflora]

The generally accepted process around here is to ask people if you can email the essays to them, rather than taking up bandwidth by posting the whole thing and then having bandwidth wasted by people responding.

[vivalostwages]

What Primaflora said. You can email them to me if you like.
What’s a few more essays?

[Muad_Dib]

*Originally posted by monica *
**First of all, Maud’Dib, let me warn you that you may be yelled at by some people about not wanting to do other people’s homework. **

This is part of doing my work. Has an English teacher never told you to get as many friends and relatives as possible to proof-read your papers before you hand them in? And thanks for the compliments!

*Originally posted by Primaflora *
**The generally accepted process around here is to ask people if you can email the essays to them, rather than taking up bandwidth by posting the whole thing and then having bandwidth wasted by people responding. **

Sorry, I did not know that. Oh well, it is only text and will not absorb too much bandwidth. To save us from further thread bloat, I would appreciate it if you would e-mail me the critiqued papers, please.

Thanks a lot, I really appreciate any help you guys can provide.

[Dinsdale]

Anyone want to clean my toilets?

[vivalostwages]

Dang, I wish my students would bother to read their blasted essays at all before turning them in–let alone get someone else to take a look!

I did the best I could–emailed them back a minute ago–considering my end-of-the-semester condition. I’m not sure why you’re using the past tense in the last one, towards the end.
I fixed some punctuation, spelling, comma splices, that sort of thing in all three.
Be careful with the “plagiarism” deal…You know.

I did make a few questions or comments in parentheses in the reply–look for them closely.

–Viva