Ian Post #5

Maybe this is an odd tangent to pursue as a blog response, but one aspect of Phillip's writing that I wish Brice had gone into further detail about (assuming she had access to the information) was WHY Phillip got a B- on his assignment. From what I read, Phillip's personal story sounded endlessly interesting, and I thought his decision to structure this tale of his life using the narrative tradition (the four-act structure) of his culture was ingenious/appropriate, a merging of historical form with modern content. So, even if the writing of Phillip's piece wasn't perfect (Brice notes his control over the piece wasn't universal), it sounds both entertaining and heartfelt, and what's more, conceptually ambitious. Basically, knowing nothing about the professor in question, but given the loose, informal-seeming tone of this project, and given Phillip's obvious enthusiasm for the project (he wrote 12 pages when only five were expected), I was really surprised to see the professor graded this assignment so harshly. If we had access in this essay to some of the feedback the professor provided to Phillip, I think we'd have a better understanding of whether this assignment suffered purely due to technical issues, or whether it suffered because the professor wasn't grading "in the contact zone," wasn't grading with a transcultural mindset. Brice herself references the disparity in representation in AUF's student body (only 15% of the students are Alaska Native), and I think that an environment that doesn't foster visibility of its natural populations enables situations where people teach before they learn instead of learning before they teach (as Brice advises). Again, I'm making a LOT of wildly unfair assumptions about Phillip's professor, but mostly I think Phillip's assignment sounds really cool, and I'm mad it wasn't appreciated for injecting a form specific to his cultural heritage with contemporary content, because I think when we don't promote stories that strike this balance of new and old we risk maintaining narrow visions of what native populations "are" (Tommy Orange talks a lot about this in his novel "There There"). Particularly when the parameters of the assignment sounded fairly loose/informal/etc., I think this is a paper that should've been supported instead of dismissed by the figure of university authority, and I'm hungry for some explanation as to why it wasn't.

Comments

  1. UnknownSeptember 26, 2018 at 12:46 PM

    I *very much* agree with you here, Ian. I think some more context around the B- grade would have helped me in understanding how to move forward with tutoring Phillip. I know from the text that Phillip's essay "seemed sprawling, disjointed, peppered with usage errors, and most seriously, lacking a central point or revelation" (170).

    This reminds me of one of our previous class discussions about Deductive-vs-Inductive reasoning within an essay, my takeaway being that neither is Better than the other--they are just different. Usage errors aside, just because Phillip's paper seems to sprawl or lack a central point doesn't make it a Bad piece--it makes his piece a product of his particular voice as a writer and reader of Alaskan Native folk tales. It seems that Phillip's professor, in grading his piece, seemed unwilling to either "Learn Before Teaching" or "Negotiate" the contact zone between their ideas of what "successful writing" is and Phillip's.

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