Literacy With An Attitude

Jeannie Oakes talks in her writing, "Tracking: Why Schools Need To Take Another Route" about the ways that tracking students is setting them up for failure. She compares it to keeping the rich, rich and keeping the poor, poor. Students are placed in classrooms based on their academic abilities. There are students placed in honors classes and students who are placed in remedial classes. By doing this, schools are giving better teachers and more opportunity to students who are considered honors. The students who just might be slower learners are placed in classrooms where they aren't given the same opportunity or education. They aren't forced to push themselves, and aren't nearly as encouraged as students who are honors. We've all see it growing up. I was a very average student, and as a result I don't feel like I was ever pushed to my full potential. That's what school is supposed to be all about. Students are supposed to feel like there are teachers who believe in them enough to push them and think than they can do better than even how well the student thinks that they can do. It's not fair that we have different students who are being pushed, and taught differently based on how they test. Every student has the same ability to succeed if they're given the right tools and education and I firmly believe that. I don't think it's fair the way that tracking students sets certain students on a pedestal and makes the students who aren't placed in these honors classes believe that they can't do it. Every student should have the same opportunity to succeed and it isn't something that should be taken away because schools are using the "tracking" method. Oakes discusses alternatives to tracking, and she says that in order to do so, "The most important and difficult task for those who would change tracking is to confront deeply held beliefs, such as the belief that academic ability is fixed very early and is largely unchangeable or that achievement differences can be largely accounted for by differences in ability." She's arguing that the idea that academic ability is fixed very early needs to be changed and I completely agree. If students are being tracked at early ages, and they remain in these same classes where they are placed for their entire academic career, that's not fair. Students change as does their academic ability, and students who are placed in remedial classes might be a lot more successful if they were just pushed a little bit harder.

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.

 

Between Barack and a Hard Place: Challenging Racism, Privilege, and Denial

Tim Wise opens his discussion talking about how we use the line "Some of my best friends are black" to make it seem as though we can't be racist. He compares that to having no true validity because that's the equivalent of saying that all heterosexual men aren't sexist because they're married, or they're attracted to women. As we all know, sexism and racism are still very much so happening in our society every day, and it certainly isn't only homosexual men who are sexist. This really struck me, because I've absolutely heard people say that line at different times, "I'm not racist, my best friend is black." or "I'm not racist, I dated a black guy." and hearing it in the terms of comparing it to sexism really made a lot of sense to me. He later talks about a time in his life when he got on to an airplane and saw that two black men were flying the plane. He says that he thought to himself, "oh dear god, can these men fly this plane?" and he says that he instantly was able to defeat the thought and once he sat down in his seat and could think about it, that he realized that it wasn't a logical thought, and more likely than not these men flying the plane had to go through a lot more in order to be qualified to do so than white men would have had to. His point in this however, is that even though he was able to defeat the thought it still popped in to his head. He makes a comparison here between programmed thought and counter conditioning. He says that we operate on a lot of subconscious things that we are programmed to think, but it's how we think of them after that and how we condition ourselves. Later in his presentation, he talks about privilege and how white people could benefit from better equity. He says, "Privilege softens you to a point where you can't deal with set back." He also says that privilege is dangerous in this sense. I could really connect with that because I know that there have been a lot of times in my life when I've looked at people around me and really not understood how they overcome something tragic that happened to them. I can't imagine how I would handle certain situations that I've seen friends of mine go through, or how I would be able to find the strength in myself to get through them. I think a large part of that is because I'm softened to the point of not necessarily knowing how to handle certain situations. He compares this to The Great Depression when the rich people were killing themselves meanwhile, poor people were standing in line to get soup from the soup kitchen. He talks about how rich people couldn't cope with being poor, but poor people knew how to handle the stock market crash. I took a lot away from his speech and I feel like he really hit the nail on the head in his discussion.

"In Service of What?" Kahne and Westheimer

This article talks a lot about the difference between charity and change. Teachers and educators who have their students participate in service learning projects take two different approaches. There are the teachers like, Mr. Johnson who was an example given in the reading, who take the approach of charity. His goal for his students was to help those in need. On the other hand, there was Ms. Adams who advocated change. Mr. Johnson's students were required to do things like volunteer work, and help those who were less fortunate. Ms. Adam's students did a lot more analyzing of the issue. They chose to focus on homelessness and they had class discussions, and really focused on the issue rather than focusing on just helping the issue. There is a table in the article that describes the difference in the two. It is shown here.

 

 

 

 

I completely agree with the over all idea that service goes hand in hand with learning. I think a lot of times students just get put in a classroom and are expected to learn the material by sitting and listening to a teacher talk. I don't think that's a realistic way to learn because we all need to do hands on activities and have a better understanding of life outside of the classroom. I've definitely taken a lot more out of a class when there was something that was required in the means of service outside of the classroom. I felt like I learned more about things of importance than I would have just sitting and listening to a teacher.

  

Unlearning the Myths That Bind Us

"Unlearning the Myths That Bind Us" is an article written by Linda Christensen. She discusses how our society teaches us how to "act, live, and dream" through cartoons, Disney movies, and movies that we see as children. She argues that we have been manipulated by children's media and advertising. She focuses on the movie Cinderella and how we are taught as women to believe that our main goal in life is to get a man. In the version Cinderella as well as Cindy Elle, the girls compete with their sisters to achieve it.

 

 She asked her students to generalize what they got from stereotypes in cartoons, and some of them were as follows: "Look, Ursula the sea witch is ugly and smart. Hey, she's kind of dark looking. The young, pretty ones only want to hook their man; the old, pretty ones are mean because they are losing their looks." Another student noticed, "People of color and poor people are either absent or servants to the rich, white, pretty people."

 

I've thought a lot about all of these things since reading this article. I definitely think that these ideas that we have put in to our heads as young children mold the way we are as adults. A lot of children connect so much with characters in Disney movies, or any other cartoon for that matter. If children are connecting with characters who are only searching for men, or stories that teach us that only pretty and rich people are successful, then what does that set them up to believe as adults? Parents spend so much time trying to teach their children the right lessons in life. We're taught that we should always be confident, and as women we're taught that we don't need to depend on anyone besides ourselves. How can these lessons really be learned if we're being poisoned with false ideas of happiness and success from such a young age? We can't. It's not realistic. These movies disguise these anti-feminist values through makings it's viewers identify with these so called protagonists.

Speaking The Unspeakable

After reading the article "Speaking The Unspeakable", I spent a lot of time thinking about what it was like growing up in a public school system when someone chose to openly come out as gay. This article talked a lot about how schools are set up for heterosexuals, and that's very much true. Homosexuality was always something that wasn't really talked about, or it was considered taboo. People acted shocked when someone they grew up with, and had known for most of their childhood, finally admitted that they were a homosexual. It's sad, but truthfully, we live in a society where if people aren't the exact same as us, or part of what we consider "normal" then they're judged. Just because they aren't a part of this cookie cutter idea that we're all supposed to be the same, they get made fun of, bullied, and are told that they're wrong becasue they're different.  In this interview of Rayven-Symone, she openly talks about being gay, and not wanting to be labeled for anything that she is:

 

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QXAho8vlmAI

 

She says, "I don't want to be labeled gay. I want to be labeled a human who loves human."

 

 

The reading for this blog entry is "Hunger of Memory". It's an autobiography by Richard Rodriguez who came to the United States as a child, who only spoke Spanish. The autobiography takes you through his life, and his development. Initially, he thinks of the way his family speaks in Spanish at home as a type of intimacy. Over the course of the reading, as they all learn to speak English more fluently, his family life changes. They go from a family who only felt they could communicate freely at home, to being a family who is connected to the outside world. It changes the dynamic of their relationships. Towards the end of the reading, he reaches a point where he doesn't even really feel comfortable speaking Spanish at all. He uses the example of his grandmother however, who only spoke Spanish to prove that their intimacy didn't depend on language. He understood Spanish, so he would just listen to her and nod a lot of the time, but they still had an intimate relationship. He argues, "Bilingual enthusiasts, moreover, sin against intimacy." These are the people who argue that people should keep their family language. He claims that these people credit their language to what they should credit to their family members. It’s the people who depend upon their language and think that that's what keeps their family intimate. He disagrees, because he feels like intimacy isn't about language. I think it's interesting because he's someone who comes from Spanish as his first language and had to go through a lot of difficulty in order to speak English, and he still doesn't agree with it. It wasn't what I was expecting to come out of the reading, especially with how it started out as him really appreciating that his home life had a different language than most of the people around them. He felt that it bought them closer. His argument shows both sides, because as a child, he seems to be a bilingual enthusiast. However, as he grows up, his perspective changes.