Becoming Something Different

In the reading, “Becoming Something Different: Learning from Esme” by Colleen M. Fairbanks, Penny Mason Crooks, and Mary Ariail, they follow a Spanish speaking Latina, Esme Martinez, from when she is in the sixth grade, all the way through eleventh grade when she moved away. I summarized briefly what each year was like, to show the ways that’s he changed and developed through the years, both socially and academically.

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Sixth Grade – Teachers positioned her as needing help. She made it clear that she wanted to learn but she wasn’t receiving the one on one attention that she needed and the teacher was explaining things to her as if she was supposed to understand, and it frustrated her that she didn’t.

Seventh Grade –placed in resource language arts class to assess her difficulty in reading. She enjoyed the more direct help from the teacher and thought it was helping her to have slowed down a little bit. She felt she was being taught the important things she needed to know in order to be successful. By the end of seventh grade she felt she had become a little bit more of a stronger student.

Eighth grade – She felt as if her resource classes were moving a bit too slowly. She expressed that she helped another student in her class and she transitioned from helper rather than the helped. She became more confident in her academic success and saw herself as a different kind of student than she had before.  

 Ninth grade- Placed in remedial English, but was placed in honors classes for geography, algebra, and biology. Over the course of the year she elected to step down to taking all regular classes instead. She spoke with a counselor in order to do so. This shows a change in Esme because she likely wouldn’t have taken that initiative in middle school.

Tenth Grade – She joins the cosmetology program at her school. Through this she participated in school and community activities which showed her desire to be a normal high school student. Her biggest change in her school trajectory was her enrollment in the cosmetology program. This took up three class periods, and she made the first cut at the end of her tenth grade year. She learned cosmetology through a hands on approach. This was her way of achieving the larger goals she had.

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When her family moved away, she hadn’t passed the TAKS which was a graduation requirement. Even though she hadn’t passed the TAKS, she had established herself as a successful student. She was involved in Student Council, as well as doing cosmetology. She had even been placed in honors classes for a time. Esme was clearly a good student both at home and at school. She showed great progress through the years both socially, and academically. Focusing this reading on the standardized testing aspect of it, it makes you question the validity of these testing policies in our schools. It’s hard to understand how a written test can be a true guideline to see if a student is eligible to graduate from high school. A lot of different things can impact test scores, and all students are different. Not to mention, English wasn’t her first language which goes back to a lot of things that we have discussed in class. Yet despite this, she made her best effort to be as successful as possible, and I don’t think that a single test should be able to decipher who we are as students, and what we know. Standardized testing isn’t really a test of all that we know, but a test of if we know what’s on the test. That’s not always a fair way of determining student’s academic abilities.