Later Thoughts on Gaughan

I had a lot more to say before it took me five hours to return to Austin instead of the usual three.

I have a lot of conflicting thoughts about this book. First off, I think his classes sound stimulating, and it's clear that his students are not pressured to fall in line with a certain way of thinking. He raises some challenging and important issues, which is easier to do since his classes are electives. I appreciated his understanding that he can't force students to think a certain way, but he can help them to think, period, about their own beliefs and what undergirds them. (I haven't changed my mind from my first post, though. I definitely have problems with him telling a student that other students are racist.)

I took a class very similar to this my first semester in college. Its title was something like "Fighting Racism, Sexism, Antisemitism, and Homophobia Through Education," and it was taught by my mentor (the term my college used for advisor) and still-in-my-top-five-favorite- professors, Dr. Platizky. Roger has faced a lot of discrimination in his life (he's Russian, Jewish, and gay) and so this class was clearly close to his heart. We read things like The Fixer and a lot of pieces about AIDS--this was the early 1990's. What made the class I took different from the ones in this book, I think, is the honesty of the students, and I think that's something we should speak to. Classes like the ones Gaughan teach don't work if students bring in their dishonest best, if they only say and write what they think the teacher wants to hear. I think it says a lot about Gaughan, but also a lot about his students, that they wrote honestly. In the class I took, our discussions were okay, but no one really tried to say anything against the grain. Perhaps that's truly how everyone felt; we had chosen to take this class, after all. But without honest dialog, well, that's the whole point. That being said, I would have liked Gaughan to have written more about how talk occurs in his classroom. I get Four Corners and stuff like that, but I'd like more details about discourse structure. Is most everything written response? If so, that creates a different sort of dialog than oral discussion--perhaps a more honest one?? I don't know, but I am curious about more than the texts and written assignments. How do kids talk in this class?

I was left with some other thoughts, too. For one thing, I wasn't quite sure what this book was supposed to be. At times it seemed a book about teaching strategies; at others it was about analyzing and evaluating students' writing. At still other times the author seemed to be defending his curriculum. All of this could happen in the space of a couple of paragraphs.