Monday, June 30, 2008

Why I Find Konrad Glogowski Completely Unreadable

If you were to come up with a list of the five most important ideas for K-12 teachers of English to arise in the past 50 years, I think most people with some knowledge of the discipline would cite the basic premise of the Writing Project: that teachers of writing should write and engage their students in their own writing. Or maybe nobody believes that anymore, or maybe I'm just wrong, but I've always taken that as a foundational concept since the 70's. Whether or not English teachers do it, they certainly talk about it periodically or did as of 10 years ago.

So I can't read Konrad's blog because he constantly does things like this, which is a post on a nice project which essentially uses some new technology to make a nice little multimedia project (of the type that people have been doing since the 70's) easier and includes the WP teacher as author/peer angle. It is a perfectly fine assignment, but as a blog post, it drives me nuts because I don't want the high level Dewey quote and then the "look at the cool idea I pulled out of the blue." If you understand the discipline of teaching English, you cite the obvious practical precedents and precursors, it doesn't diminish the originality or success of the execution or the novelty of the technologies employed. If you don't know the obvious precedents and precursors, you've got a big hole in your knowledge, which I could deal perhaps if the overall presentation was less pretentious. Konrad seems well versed enough that he should know all this, so I figure he's leaving it out on purpose, and then I have to figure out why, and it really just isn't worth my time.

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