Brandt Dialectical Notebook

I think this is an idea that many people need to evaluate, since literacy feels to be declining.	Literacy looms as one of the great engines of profit and competitive advantage of the 20th century… (333).
This is such an interesting point, that we are influenced daily by it, just not recognizing literacy for what it is: a means of furthering and advancing.	When economic forces are addressed in our work, they appear primarily as generalities: contexts, determinants, motivators, barriers, touchstones. But rarely are they systematically related to the local conditions and embodied moments of literacy learning that occupy so many of us on a daily basis (334).
I love this idea. I’d love to write a nonfiction piece about my influences. My grandmother couldn’t read or write at all. She signed her name by making an X. I think I’ll also do this to learn more about my students’ experiences.	In the interviews, people explored in great detail their memories of learning  to read and write across their lifetimes, focusing especially on the people, institutions, materials, and motivations involved in the process (334).
I would love to do a study and series of interview with people n Scioto County. My assumptions would be that cultural influences their literacy greatly.	Patterns of sponsorship became an illuminating site through which to track the different cultural attitudes people developed toward writings. reading as well as the ideological  congestion faced by late-century literacy learners as their sponsors proliferated and diversified (334).
Agreed. Now how do we address students who come from very limited sponsorship opportunities?	In whatever form, sponsors deliver the ideological freight that must be borne for access to what they have (335).
People make impressions on our literacy, like cookie presses.	The concept of sponsors helps to explain, then, a range of human relationships and ideological pressures that turn up at the scenes of literacy learning (335).
“The literacy crisis” exists. People struggle everyday where I am from to meet the standards. The gap is sometimes visible to others, and sometimes not.	The three key issues on bottom of 336.
Twelve years old is still the average age in Scioto County of getting the first home computer. This is more than 40 years later than the period Raymond was born in.	Raymond [born in 1969] received his first personal computer as a Christmas present from his parents when he was twelve years old (337).
So peripherals for every student is different based on what the parents do for a living. Interesting.	Lopez was being sponsored by what her parents could pull from the peripheral service systems of the university (338).
Ordinary is what?	As I have been attempting to argue, literacy as a resource becomes available to ordinary people largely through the mediations of more powerful sponsors (339).
I love this quote. My husband is still part of the workforce that involves physical work and not a lot of challenging intellectual circumstance. He is eagerly awaiting his turn to go to school.	This move brought dramatic changes in the writing practices of union reps, and, in Lowery’s estimation, a simultaneous waning of the power of workers and the power of his own literacy (341).
The use of the word “arena” is great here. It shows the competition she alludes to so much.	These transformations become the arenas in which new standards of literacy develop (342).
This is confusing to me. I though the gap was the literacy crisis.	It is actually this gap or lag in sponsoring forms that we call the rising standard of literacy (344).
I would love to have a source for this.	Clerical work was the largest and fastest-growing for women in the 20th century (345).
So many things in our intellectual environment shapes us. It’s almost a percentage game to see how much we truly direct ourselves.	Just as multiple identities contribute to the ideological hybrid character of these literacy formations, so do institutional and material conditions (347).
This is so powerful. And people still question whether or not the American Dream happens. It does in forms, and it mattered to her.	Her efforts to move her family up in the middle class involved not merely contributing a second income but also, from her desk as a bookkeeper, reading her way into an understanding of middle-class economic power (348).
This is still a tremendous amount!	I am sure that sponsors play even more influential roles at the scenes of literacy learning and use than this essay has explored (348).
How true this is. I didn’t realize how interesting it is until now.	The history of literacy is a catalogue of obligatory relations (348).