Algebra, Spanish, Geography, Chemistry, Literature are just some of the myriad of dishes being served on online education buffets. At these buffets students are free to pile their plates high with the sciences, the arts, the languages, and countless other subjects due to the growing trend and popularity of distance learning courses offered through the Web. In response, however, teachers are becoming more dissatisfied with distance learning methods and remain adamant about face to face courses; due to the continuous competition between online and face to face courses’ values and ethics, discord has erupted among teachers and their students. Ellen Laird effectively uses comparison and contrast techniques to analyze and to dissect the benefits …show more content…
Laird uses specialized organizational strategies to examine online and physical teaching to find what method is more inferior. One of Laird’s major organizational techniques is to juxtapose the different qualities of the teaching ideologies, such as deadlines, syllabus and assignments, and the relationship forged between teachers and students. By analyzing each feature of the two processes, she quickly distinguishes how at the superficial level the two teaching processes are similar but are complete opposites underneath. For example, Laird acknowledges how students in her online and physical courses both often miss or forget deadlines. She, however, immediately focuses on how students in her physical courses regard the deadlines as real and rigid and on how students in her online courses regard the deadlines as imaginary and fluid. By comparing different …show more content…
When initiating the discussion, Laird explains how online learning is guilty for making a, “talented teacher feel like an unmitigated failure.” She demonstrates that she can create an antithesis that allows her to assert that traditional learning makes teachers feel adept and deft while online learning makes teachers feel inadequate; antithesis is a rhetorical device that is a catalyst for comparing two topics. Laird also relies on the magical powers of an allusion of Cinderella to help her evaluate differences students have about deadlines in different teaching environments; the allusion serves to demonstrate the importance of a deadline, an important factor to consider when comparing teaching styles. Cinderella is prompt to sticking her deadline, but, as Laird notes, students not so much. Laird commonly shows the similar struggle of keeping to deadlines that students from both teaching backgrounds have, but how the students’ beliefs regarding deadlines varies dramatically. Not only are rhetorical devices appropriate in the essay because Laird is a composition teacher, but because they help Laird successfully better analyze online and physical learning