Re: Students' Right to Their Own Language

Don't worry about taking the wrong position on this topic. I've argued both sides. In graduate seminars in Education, they teach that educators struggle to balance 3 needs or demands: the student, the society and the curriculum. No one can privileged all of these needs equally, and making any one concern a priority reduces the focus on the other 2. My position depends on the environment and what concerns seem the most critical or neglected in that context. Don't try to guess my position. It's a recipe for disaster for several reasons. I tried this a few times with professors and it never worked out.

The 4C's statement of students' right to their own language privileges society over individual students - as I see it from my seat in an American community college - and my bias runs counter to that. My experience and interests also lie with non-Native English speakers and linguistic minority groups, and yet I come to conclusions that may differ from the majority of my colleagues with similar experience and interests. My childhood personality and a variety of influences that shaped me since - thru my admiration or thru my rebellion - result in a pragmatism. Many colleagues I respect, and my sister, reject pragmatism.

How this relates to your writing:

Sometimes we write for discovery, not figuring out what we truly believe until we finish. Sometimes we start with a problem and write our way out of it - figuring out in the end through examining what we believe. Maybe in the past teachers taught you to start with a rockin' thesis statement and then find quotes to support your position, but isn't what true scholarship looks like at the college level. I recently made the analogy in class that too many students were using research the way a drunk uses a light post, for support rather than illumination.

Learning changes the way we think, or the tools we have for understanding. It stands to reason that what we read will affect our thesis. The thesis typically evolves.

More than a few students in my office this week have decided to scrap their papers and start over. That isn't a sign of failure. I've done that more than a few times myself. This happens in the writing process and we shouldn't consider the effort wasted.