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John Lennon's Use of Writing in Lyrics Essay

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John Lennon, the late Beatle, and immortal Walrus, said, “I am he as you are he as you are me and we are all together. See how they run, like pigs from a gun, see how they fly-I’m crying.” And, the strangest thing about it is, after A Hard Day’s Night of typing this into my computer’s grammar checker, the program didn’t indicate a single error. Imagine, three decades before the age of the word processor, Lennon made his words Come Together.

Think back to secondary school. What would many of your teacher’s reaction have been had you written what John Lennon did? I think I have an idea how some of my teachers might have reacted. I’d likely have been referred to the guidance counselor for drug counseling, and I’d have been sent home with …show more content…

In fact, some went so far as to compare the work to poetry. Based upon what we perceived to be indicators of his social background, many of us may have felt pressure to be politically correct in our initial evaluation of John’s assignment. In her essay, “On the Subjects of Class and Gender in ‘The Literacy Papers’,” Linda Brodkey writes, “Since writers cannot avoid constructing a social and political reality in their texts, as teachers we need to learn how to ‘read’ the various relationships between writer, reader, and reality that language and discourse supposedly produce” (640).

I believe the opinion was unanimous that his writing skills are poor and in serious need of attention. Therefore, based upon the vague parameters of the assignment and the fact that it was an initial paper in a remedial composition course, agreeing on a letter grade posed some problems for us. If you recall, there were those of us who were quite lenient in our assessment, and there were those who tended to grade the composition more strictly. I’ll add that even those who went easy on the assignment agreed that they would get tougher on John’s future writing. Brodkey adds, “The question then is how to read what students write. And at issue is the unquestioned power of a pedagogical authority that insists that teachers concentrate on form at the expense of content” (640).

I suggest that the scenario posed by this student presents an ethical question: Is it fair to judge

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