Teaching Reading, Teaching Writing, and the Hochman Expository Writing Method

My program's getting changed again.  It's the way things go.

Anyway, I've been learning about Judith Hochman and her Teaching Basic Writing Skills, along with the method that goes with it.  It's expository writing broken down to the sentence level in a way that makes a tremendous amount of sense.  So often - particularly given the NYC focus on Common Core Writing Standard #1 - we've got students writing arguments of one kind or another, going through revision processes, talking big talk, but without an understanding of what a sentence is.

That seems unbelievable, but stodgy old grammarians have been griping about it for years with a bit of sympathy from me.  Teaching students to correct - much less avoid - fragments and run-on sentences is a nightmare if they don't have words like dependent clause or even noun and verb in their active lexicons.

I'm not a disciple or anything - just doing some PD when I can - but it seems like Hochman's method for teaching writing lines up with my method of teaching students to break down and annotate texts for comprehension while reading.  The link between sentence-by-sentence comprehension of a text has always seemed glaringly related to the process of expository writing, which is how I got cover fire in the early days of the Common Core pre-rollout, using the writing standard #2 and the reading for information standard #2, which basically ask students to explain what a text means and how it conveys that meaning - lots of things about author's craft and rhetorical work.  It was good stuff before the hammer came down and everything was around the focus on a position (which used to be a claim, which used to be a thesis) . . .

So hopefully this is relevant and I can do something with it.  If any of you bare few out there reading this have any input or thoughts, it's been too long since I've heard from some of you.

A Version of an Ignorant Schoolmaster?

This is a half-formed thought, really. The child of necessity. But it might be exciting. 

I got a new student yesterday, 3 days out of DR, with almost no English. It happens. But the question is how I work him in at all, given language obstacles and the fact that we're halfway through a unit. Oh, and I found out about him when he sat down in my class.  So I started with a bit of a cop-out.  I told him that I wanted to see his general reading abilities.  I handed him the text my other students had been working with, a Spanish-English dictionary, and some looseleaf.

I'm terrible.

So I checked in with him quickly a few times while managing my biggest and most needs-intensive class and, honestly, forgot about him for bits of time.  By the end of class, he gave me just shy of three sheets of looseleaf with these translations of the first few pages of Aristotle's Metaphysics.  I was floored.  I guess I often forget that students come literate in reading but illiterate in speech, strange because I would say nearly the same thing about my own Spanish.  But it seems to me that I can work with this.

Of course, Rancière and Jacotot came to mind.  I was certainly an ignorant schoolmaster at this point, though perhaps a lot closer to the blustery fool type than I'd like to admit.  But still, the method might hold something here.  Todos los hombres por naturaleza desean aprender.  (I would've put in ser instead of aprender . . . I'm not sure if this is intonation or intention or if I'm just wrong).

Is this a student who I can work with along the lines of Jacotot's Calypso could not . . . a word by word translation to learn a language?  I feel like the pressures of a huge classroom are going to drown this.  How many students did Jacotot have?  Rancière never really mentions that, does he?  

I always assumed that I would use The Ignorant Schoolmaster in conjunction with my reading and annotation method in an English to English translation, but this seems even more in the spirit of Jacotot's project (at least as Rancière frames it).