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The day of the presentation came for me with lots of conflicting feelings. We had worked really hard, and yet not hard enough. It was a great collaboration, and yet I was afraid we pushed and led too much towards the end. Because there was too little time we ended up doing a lot of in between steps, both the tedious process work that they could have learned a lot from, and the theoretical questioning that we were one step ahead, pulling at every step. In any case, the day came and we wrote up their presentation the night before they were to present it. We planned on meeting ten minutes before the presentation, so that they could prepare, but it seemed like they didn’t see this as important. Most of them were late, and straggled in. Li Huan and I frantically went over the plan for the presentation with them, and they didn’t seem excited or scared. They asked few if any clarifying questions. (I don’t know if they were actually feeling nonchalant, or just felt like they had to act that way in front of peers.) The first boy to show up said, “So this is actually going to happen, huh?” (I wrote about this interaction more clearly in my field notes, which I will look up, but that’s the gist). In an effort to make the short prep time they had valuable, we had planned ahead by jotting notes underneath the topic they were supposed to address in the presentation. We meant them only to spark ideas. We picked the two students we knew had thought deeply about their topics and could communicate well to explain the hardest points. We had jotted down notes underneath his topic like most of the others, and he seemed before the presentation the most confident. The night we compiled all of this we could not come up with precise notes we were satisfied would jog ideas to bring up about the topic the girl was going to bring up, and figured we would have enough time to at least talk with her about it beforehand. Before the presentation, while we were waiting in the hall and most of the other students were chatting about unrelated things, she was the only one that was preparing, jotting down what she was planning to say in a notebook leaned up against the wall. Before the presentation, I had every reason to believe they would perform similarly. But when it came to his part, he recited almost verbatim the points we meant only to be starting ideas. She used her own words, and successfully conveyed the point.
*************** This vignette came up in a discussion of how over-structured a lot of “literacy” teaching is, and in connection to the 5-part essay that *ms* people were talking about, where the students couldn’t think outside of or beyond that context/ couldn’t see writing as primarily communicative.
