Warm up #2, Rose 5-6

1. What kinds of reading and writing did you see students doing in school? Why do you think Rose chose these assignments?

Students at the Veteran’s Program did reading and writing that consisted of summarizing, classifying, comparing, and analyzing various texts such as poems, music lyrics, and other written literature. Rose chose these topics because he said they “were strategies that kept emerging as [he] reflected on the life of the undergraduate” (pp. 138).


2. What “rules and regulations” did students appear to be following as they read and wrote? In light of the students’ overall schooling experiences, did these seem useful or not? Speculate about how they might have influenced students’ literacy development.

The rules and regulations that students appear to be following as they read and wrote at the Veteran Program were very different from student to student. It seemed that experimentation was a very important point that Rose made. No matter what the students were writing about, what was important was that they were experimenting with different styles and different types of writing. Yes, I saw them as useful. As Todd Mitchell said, it is not what you write about. It is the act of writing that makes you a better writing. So, experimentation is the best way to learn to write. These men in the Veteran’s programs were man who were, for the most part, trying to escape their lives in the service and were trying to branch out from that life. By experimenting, they were in a way stepping away from their orderly life in the military. These exercises probably taught them that all is possible in literature and in their lives.