e-mail me at billdeg@umich.edu

4/19/2005

what's the haps?

What's the haps, you ask?

*House went on the market yesterday. One family had a look this afternoon, and another is coming by tomorrow. One step closer to the new job; one step closer to Detroit rock city.

*Spent most of today working on presentation/article on faculty attitudes toward (il)literacy. More thinking on the rhetoric of "range of abilities." A majority of faculty reported (on surveys about student writing proficiency) frustration at classes made up of students of varying ability. Many reported not knowing what to do in the classroom when ability differs widely. This says much about teaching practices--the idea that there ought to be a homogeneity of proficiency. Certainly this stems in part from the culture of testing, right? The idea that a test can generate like-abled communities of learning. And I think this also has much to do with who (the teacher) defines ability, proficiency, etc. Still tentative...More later.

*No time to say much about news from Rome, except to say that the word "church" means people, not person.

*Tomorrow Julie Lindquist visits my grad. class to talk about her outstanding ethnography of working-class tavern.

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