Delpit/Discourses- robert jarosz

Hoping that I will become a teacher someday I would say that I agree with Delpit. After taking out the words “dominant and non-dominant” and “discourses” Gee is pretty much saying that people can’t learn and can’t change. If people can’t learn from what they already may have been able to figure out then the world would feel very empty and progress might as well be stagnant in fields of human relation, the sciences and technology. I disagree that people can’t be inspired to learn.

I can’t say that I have be involved or witnessed many cases of someone learning a new discourse solely because I have not lived a full life of holding a number of different jobs and moving to different cities. I believe this because for someone to learn and change it takes many years and much practice, it’s not something that happens over a summer vacation. For someone to learn and know a discourse it’s got to take at least close to a decade. Maybe Gee finds it impossible to teach or learn a new dominant discourse because he had not stuck around long enough to witness any results. I will use one of my discourses as an example and I have been practicing this trade for around eleven years solid. I use the word solid because for eleven years I would practice this trade in the fall, winter, spring and summer. Now after years of this trade I am still no professional, just a little better than maybe an average person. This trade has become one of my dominant discourses and it still took me awhile to learn and I did not have to block out previous discourses I’ve learned, which can slow down a person’s progress even more. As a teenager in college I can’t say that I have witnessed someone completely learning a new discourse besides my own.

I agree with Delpit about how it is possible to learn new discourses but I am not one to say that it is easy to learn a new discourse. I have yet to learn a different discourse from what I know and I have not had to teach someone something they are not necessarily comfortable with. I have only taught kids and adults what I know about my trade and it was not like they were forced to learn from me, they wanted to get better for themselves. I have only had the pleasure of teaching my trade/discourse to those who are listening and I have not taught them everything they know but I slowly see this trade become a little more dominant in their lives. When teaching someone anything there always has to be a degree of patience and when the magnitude of what is being taught is greatened the same has to happen with the level of patience. Teaching one who wants to learn a discourse is different from teaching someone something they do not necessarily want to learn and a life they do not necessarily want to live and that can be very difficult, not impossible.