response to Tannen, “Teachers’ Classroom Strategies”

I think it is interesting that in class we discussed about issues involving the content of the paper and not the actual content of the paper itself. Furthermore we discussed about the agenda and motive behind the way the writer approach her audience, something which were not taught throughout the many years of education that i had. Author Deborah Tannen explained about how the different methods of learning by gender results in different opportunities to absorb the content of the classes. She mentions that in a conventional classroom where students are expected to speak up, male students actually benefitted more from such learning pattern as they better adapt at such challenges. This also led to the view that Tannen took an essentialist point of view as she simply separates the learning ability of her student based on their gender.

However she did provide some unbiased basis by including a personal experiment which splits her class according to their learning ability and their cultural background instead of their gender, and results was at variance of what her original idea was. I felt that this aspect provided her paper with a sharper edge to back up her claims of females being at disadvantage in classrooms, because she doesn’t just provide a one-sided argument, but the example she gave was not substantial enough as the sample size was only just one class, which was to be expected as studies as such required more manpower.

Another look at the publisher and one can tell that the intended audience for Tannen’s article is the teaching community, which reveals the purpose of her writing the article. She wrote the paper in a slightly informal tone as she constantly projects herself into the paper, using examples of herself and positive results to promote her cause. The reason behind her doing that might because she is trying to introduce a concept to audience who have worked with the same method for decades and might even be more experienced than herself. Hence, if she were to write the article in such a way that it contains only factual information, the audience might be turned off and end up being less receptive to the idea that she is trying to push through.

Overall i felt that the article was a good read as the author attempts to raise awareness of the difference in communication style which might be hindering female students’ chances of learning on the same platform.