Learning For Everyone

Frankenstein conference:
  I showed up a little early to the conference and got to catch the tail end of the movie section. I was entirely, completely, utterly grossed out. The movie clips they were showing were from gory horror films, with a transplant theme. It was, to say the least, disgusting.

The next section, while not exactly engaging in the way that the movie clips were, brought up some interesting points that made me think hard about my preconceived ideas of Frankenstein and social labeling. I had already thought of some while going over the plot overview, but the new points brought up by panelists were also intriguing.

NY Times: ACT v. SAT
  Previous to reading this article, I had no idea that the ACT v. SAT dilemma used to be solely based on where one lived. If one lived in the Midwest, one took the ACT. Anywhere else, or if one wanted to get into a prestigious school, one took the SAT. How is it that I had no idea? Because most of my friends and people I knew just took both tests (I only took one, because I came down with a very bad case of senioritis between June 2004 and May 2005). I knew that most colleges accepted ACT scores, and almost all colleges accepted SAT scores. To me, the tests were weighted slightly in the direction of SAT, only because it seemed to me to be more widely accepted.

However, with this new bit of background about the two tests, and statistics about boys and girls and levels of achievement, I began to wonder beyond which test was better. It made me speculate about why one test would be better for girls than boys, or vice versa. Are we stereotyping our children into something that they cannot escape from? The counselor interviewed in the article said that if one was just going to flip a coin, that it was better for girls to take the ACT and boys to take the SAT. What is this telling students? Girls are bad at puzzles and can’t handle how “tricky” the SATs are? Boys are bad at writing, and can’t remember trigonometry? This could be terribly harmful to students, and we’re going so far as putting these sexist comments in the newspapers that their parents read. Good job, America.

Frankenstein:
I guess I hadn’t realized how much the media had influenced my perception of this book. For instance, I didn’t know that Frankenstein’s creature had killed so many of his relatives, including his bride-to-be. It occurs to me that it is a very strange aspect to have been omitted from my knowledge – did I block that information out, because I didn’t like it, and it didn’t fit my conception of Frankenstein’s monster? Or was the omission the fault of the media that has surrounded me for all of my life? I don’t know, but it’s quite an interesting line of thought.

Subjects Matter:
I have been in English Methods classes for some time now, and not much emphasis has been put on workshops. Instead, we have focused on how important student responses are, and student choice; we have, however, discussed workshops as a means of getting student response and choice. I was surprised to see Daniels and Zemelman spend so much time on it, however, and go into so much detail. While I already knew the basics of the workshop, it was interesting to see the example of the science class bringing it into the classroom.

I was also familiar with the idea of the Book Club, so there was not much new information here either. I think that Daniels and Zemelman did a good job of explaining everything though. Had I not known about the Book Club idea, I would be completely convinced of its validity after reading this chapter – same goes for the previous chapter.

NY Times: Accused Neb. Teacher Appears in Court
I picked this article because it shows me, as a future teacher, what I need to be aware of throughout my career. It brought back memories of talking to one of my high school English teachers, and how he always seemed nervous when we were the only people left in the classroom. He would sidle towards the door, still talking earnestly, but ensuring that a passerby would see him – and more importantly, see him five feet away from me. While this article represents the most extreme of cases – something I will most definitely avoid, if I want to keep my future husband – it is still a warning to all teachers to be careful; not all students will always be honest.

NY Times: various “To the Editor” letters, in response to each other
The first letter, which set off all the response letters, was about encouraging reading at home in order to foster a love for reading.  The writer, Michael Winerip, claimed that it was encouragement from parents that truly set a student on his or her way towards a successful reading career. Response letters, many from teachers, agreed with Winerip, though many were skeptical. “If all parents followed in Michael Winerip’s footprints, the literacy gap between groups in this country would dramatically shrink. But this is highly unlikely because of wide differences in parenting style”; also that “too many parents themselves are poor readers” (Gardner). I agree with both Winerip and Gardner, though no solutions immediately present themselves to me – hopefully I will just be able to deal with problems as they arise.

Self-Assessment:
I found that I had a lot of trouble with the self-assessment at first, because I never like talking about myself very extensively. However, six years of high school training kicked in, and soon I was typing away in a sort of frenzy. The result may not be the prettiest thing in the world, but I think it’s probably the most honest.

Darling-Hammond:
Straight off, I want to say that the most important sentence in the entire article was on page 330: “We cannot remain a first class power in the new world that is emerging around us simply by calling for higher achievement and establishing more tests.” Now here is a sentence that can change the entire education system – all those people that are bent on staying Number 1 in the world? Here’s your answer. All those people that are convinced that our nation’s children are being royally jilted by an education system that has forgotten children? Here’s your answer. All those people that are embarrassed by our apparent national disease of stupidity? Here’s your answer. Don’t make the tests more difficult, just set them up differently. Darling-Hammond mentions students’ uncultivated abilities in the areas of problem-solving and critical thinking, a clear indication that our nation’s expansive, all-encompassing, multiple choice tests are just not cutting it.

Funny thing, I believe that the students seem to have been complaining about how ridiculous those tests are for years. I myself hate 11th grade English for exactly this reason. That class was the ultimate test of my devotion to English, and to this day I swear that I will insist on not teaching it when I get a long-term job. Ever. What does that say about those tests?

Other than the not-so-surprising discussion of testing methods, Darling-Hammond’s coverage of the various reasons for the Achievement Gap are also, sadly, not surprising. Advocates for changes in education have been crying poverty – quite rightly – for years as the Gap slowly but surely widens. Though it is my personal belief that money is not always the root of every problem (my high school had very little in the way of funds, but we performed very well in most subjects), money is definitely an issue. The only way to address this, however, involves a lot of government policies and a number of legal hoops to jump through. Despite the gloomy outlook, these policies and hoops will eventually have to be dealt with, because as Darling-Hammond says, the United States is headed for a modern-day fall of Rome.

I Stand Here Ironing:
This piece was quite a heart-wrenching story. The main thing that I took away was that a teacher has no clue as to the history of each student, and what they see in the classroom is merely a facet of that student’s personality and existence. Thus, when dealing with student problems, nothing can be taken at face value. This brings in the most important principle in teaching: don’t make judgments. Not only do we as teachers not have the right, we don’t even have the capability due to a lack of information.

Rigor + Support = Success:
This article was very optimistic and idealistic, I thought. The only reason I thought this was because while the goals were enthusiastically outlined, the means to achieve those goals were not so enthusiastically outlined. While it’s great to encourage students to delve into film, where is the money to fund that coming from? If the students are low-income, the school, logically, is also tending towards low-income. The teacher salary is low, the school budget is tight, and so on. I definitely agree with most of the principles, however (minus the one about asking the kids to “make a better decision”, because I know from personal experience that it almost never works ever).

Poverty quiz: 
I scored a 7 out of 9. That question about the minimum wage was a mean one – it sneaked in that “federal” part.

Audio tour: 
A revealing, terrifying breakdown of expenses – I hope that I’m above the poverty line when I’m on my own. Being in debt makes my head hurt.

NY Times: 73 and Loaded With Friends on Facebook, by John Schwartz
This article was all about the social networking of Facebook, closing intergenerational gaps, and the “aging” of Facebook. Since Facebook no longer excludes anyone from joining, kids younger and younger are beginning to get on and start networking. Facebook’s many good points include enabling people to keep up with long-distance friends, encouraging social networking in larger areas, and providing somewhere to be an individual without penalty. However, as the new technologies sweep the nation’s youth off their collective feet, who is going to be there to caution, teach, and guide them through? Why is curriculum not keeping up with student realities? While the traditional education is a fine thing to have, how useful is it to students? Understandably, this line of thought is idealistic, but…I don’t think it should be idealistic.

Podcast:
The podcast was an interesting change of pace that I hadn’t expected. In some ways, I appreciated being able to sit back and relax, rather than painstakingly pay attention to every word on the page. At the same time, I missed being able to listen to music or lie down and curl up. Also, I had to utilize all my listening skills – something that is usually restricted to class. This time, I had to do everything while juggling distractions from dozens of other sources at the same time. I had to listen and silently annotate everything I heard so that I could understand it when it was over, as well as figure out what information I already knew from previous experience. I also had to readjust my thinking when confronted with the host’s singularly annoying habit of talking slowly. I am so used to hearing and processing fast dialogue that the slower pace tangled me up at first. I think, to help students with this, I would give them the same sort of strategies that I used while listening to this, though I would have them discuss it with classmates to solidify the ideas and the reactions they had.

The “civil discourse”, or disagreeing without becoming rude, always makes me laugh. I could hear how all of the participants admitted respect for the others, which goes a long way towards creating a thin veneer of civility. The politeness of all of the participants was also blatantly obvious. However, the debate would have been a lot more engaging if the guests had not been so painfully polite most of the time.

Teacher Man:
Reading this was a wonderful experience. McCourt talks in a down-to-earth, genuine style that appeals to just about anyone. He openly admits having no idea what he was doing most of the time, but he understood the fluctuations of power in the classroom extraordinarily well. I loved his easy-going narration as he slid from one event to the next, describing his scattered feelings and thoughts. If text books could be written like this, students would probably read ahead.

NY Times Article: Writing Frankly, Young-Adult Author Pushes Limits
This article was about Francesca Lia Block and her Weetzie Bat books. Her books are often explicit, detailing sexual encounters, out-of-wedlock pregnancies, homosexuality, and other “off-limits” topics for school libraries. This specific article deals with how several of her books have been banned, and this of course sets off a whole thought-process about censorship. Should we censor? In my opinion, we shouldn’t censor for the wrong reasons – aka only because we don’t like the idea of a book. Perhaps the twisted writings of a serial killer should not be on the shelves, but just because some may be squeamish about homosexuality doesn’t mean that we should ban books with homosexuality in them. We are supposed to teach our students about tolerance and how not to discriminate between ideas just because of preconceptions. Actions speak louder than words, though – and students will more quickly do what we do, not what we say.

Subjects Matter:
The first chapter (ch. 4), when I read it, seemed to be an affirmation of everything we’d already talked about during class. However, I was greatly intrigued by the massive list of books at the end of the chapter, and read them all eagerly – searching, of course, for something to offer my students that could pique their interest. Of course, I wouldn’t mind a bit of good reading myself. Chapter 7 was the real shock for me. In one fell swoop, one of my main ideas to engage my students with was destroyed. Telling students that the activities will help them with skills in college is not, in fact, enough to motivate them. This was shocking to me because I certainly would have jumped on the chance to enhance my college skills. The mention of boys needing something more short-term and concrete to motivate them opened my eyes to all the times my brother and my boyfriend have made comments related to this idea. I knew that boys needed something different to motivate them, I just never considered how I would bring it into my classroom. My own experiences and thoughts got in the way – something I will be sure to be on the lookout for from now on.

NY Times: A For-Credit Course
This article, while not directly associated with literacy, is directly related to the adolescents we will, as future teachers, be working with. The article was about how Chase started a Facebook group advertising credit cards. While the group educates the participants about smart credit usage, it also seems to speak of the new and scary ways that companies are finding the nation’s youth and getting inside their heads. How is a student to know about which credit card is right for them if they find it on Facebook? Is it right to encourage students to get credit cards at younger ages? The potential for increased student debt is terrifyingly multiplied many times. How, as teachers, can we encourage critical literacy among our students to facilitate better choices in their complicated worlds? Big questions with no big, easy answers.

Subject Matters:
I found these two chapters extremely helpful, even though as a future English teacher I won’t have as many textbooks as other disciplines. The parts that I did find helpful dealt with how to jigsaw a novel to make it less tedious and how to identify if a book is helpful for the right reasons, and suits my needs as a secondary English teacher. I loved how the chapters spoke to me as if the authors were on the same level as me, rather than high-and-mighty experts that snickered at my sad lack of knowledge – the “same level” approach helped me to accept the information more graciously. I’ve found that it’s easier to swallow advice if it’s coming from a peer than if it’s from someone “higher up”.

Tovani, Chapter 3:
I am very excited to have read this article. Again, the “same level” approach was hugely helpful. Her real-life examples for every point were also very helpful, as they transformed theory into practice and gave me something solid to remember her theory by. I love how she engaged the students in Frankenstein, openly admitting that it was massively boring until page 53. I’ve had so many teachers that just support a book like a fanatic – but it didn’t get interesting until halfway through. By that time I didn’t care anymore, as I’d burned out on the book through “lit logs” and “lit circles” with no content matter to talk about or write about. If someone had just said “Look, I know it’s boring, but here’s a preview of when it gets really good…if you can hold out until then, it’s worth it!”, well, then I may have actually tried to care. Tovani has great ideas and great ways to implement them. I respect her for her courage to face industrial tech teachers with her reading supplement instruction.

NY Times: “Abroad at Home: Something Rich and Strange”:
My article, while not directly pertaining to literacy, did have something to do with school and what we teach in school. The article noted that Kansas has been removing evolution knowledge requirements from state assessments and many people are all for bringing creationism into the curriculum. This is a tiny bit alarming, as there is supposed to be a separation of church and state – not that I’m against creationism (I AM Christian, though I have a less literal view of creationism than most Christians). Also, the article mentioned that in a Gallup poll, 68 percent of those polled thought that creationism should be brought back in, and a whopping 40 percent thought that evolution should be dropped completely. How terrifying is that? How are students supposed to have a well-informed view of the world if we only teach them one way to look at something? How are we supposed to facilitate tolerance in the long run if our students know only one way to look at a situation? As the author of the article so eloquently states, “We thought we had advanced since Galileo was silenced for advancing the theory that the earth revolves around the sun”…well, apparently not. Shame on us, wouldn’t you say?

Pahl and Rowsell, Parts 1 and 2:
The second paragraph in this reading really caught my eye and defined the entire article for me: “What if, instead of assuming that our students are not engaging with literacy outside school, we bring our students’ literacy practices into the classroom? What would happen then?” (p. 1). This is an excellent question, and one I found myself considering last semester when I researched grammar rules in AIM conversations. Why do teachers assume that students turn off the literacy awareness and comprehension when they step outside the school building? How do they not realize the extent of every student’s immersion into a whole world of literacy at home? Television, movies, the internet, and AIM (especially AIM, which I found to have grammar rules every bit as strict as conventional English in the adolescent world) all involve literacy, and require the students to use their skills to navigate as best as they can. As the article suggests, we need to “widen our frame of reference” when discussing literacy, which in my opinion could be extremely helpful for teachers-in-training such as myself.

Reading study:
This study reminded me of an activity that we did in high school, where every word was spelled with the first and last letter correct, but the middle letters mixed up (for example, “paly” for “play”). I always figured that the way I usually read quickly was holistic because of that activity, and that I rarely used the other two techniques. The findings of this study surprised me, then, because I had not expected the three techniques to work additively and in harmony. I then paid an enormous amount of attention to how I was processing while reading, which resulted in my having to read several paragraphs over again because I could not remember what I had read. Excellent.

National Reading Panel FAQs:
This article discussed phonemes and phonics, which I immediately connected back to my History of English class. In this class, we talked about the differences between phonemes and phonics and why each is important to reading and writing English; however, until this article, I hadn’t related this importance to literacy in education. This article cemented this extremely important “bridge” in such a way that I will not easily be able to dissociate them.

Wanted: I.T. Experts (No Adults, Please), by Michelle Slatalla
This article explores how the younger generation is more literate in the areas of programming, technology, and media than their older counterparts and parents could possibly hope to be. I connected this to my MSTI 131 class, where our professor tried to teach us the hard cold fact of our own possible “obsolete-ness”. With technology advancing at an explosive rate, it does not surprise me to go home and find that my sisters of 12 and 9 know how to work certain aspects of the computer better than I do. The author of this article notes that her daughter had been requested in place of the father, and recognizes the need for humility in these situations. She did not feel inadequate in the face of her daughter’s knowledge, rather she felt that it was a learning experience – another nugget of knowledge that a teacher should always keep in mind. One will always be forever learning throughout one’s life – it’s unavoidable.

Subjects Matter:
I felt that this was a great start to a helpful text. I really enjoyed this down-to-earth writing style and easy-to-read layout. The information presented seemed pertinent and could be instantly related to my goal of improving the literacy of my future students. My favorite thing about the text was the number of excellent tables presented on various pages that summed up key points in an appealing fashion. It made it easy for me to understand, process, and recall the information.
As far as the information presented, I was very impressed with the plain rationale that accompanied each “nugget” of information. I love how finally, someone noticed that reading text books was not engaging, and there are ways to deal with the common response of “but we HAVE to use the text books! It’s not my fault!” – a response I always considered ridiculous, considering the number of teachers I had that got around the text book problem. I also agree with the concept that the subject itself is not always the problem, but how to read for that subject can be the root of it.

Teaching and Learning Multiliteracies:
I was not impressed at all with this text, though granted my opinion is not exactly requested nor needed. I found maybe two good pieces of information – one, that technology has impacted our concept of literacy in a major way, and two, a person needs to be skilled in more than one type of literacy in order to be a successful member of society. I found these two things in the introductions of both chapters and the summaries of both chapters. Were I not a dedicated student, I would have read only these pieces and not bothered with the rest. It seemed, actually, to be the direct example of what the first book cited as a text that one would have to learn how to read – certainly not something that a literacy book should make one do.
The content itself was not the only problem. The layout, with undoubtedly good intentions, only served to confuse me and cause me to eventually lose much of my initial interest. The constant repetition of each chapter theme blunted my interest first, then the lengthy “Reflection” sections that frequently interrupted the text, then the intricate “Theory into Practice” sections that refused to flow nicely. I decided that it was a good thing that by the end, the authors summarized the chapter…otherwise everything blended so well I had a hard time remembering what I had just read.

Nature of Literacy:
This piece reminded me why I want to be an English teacher: love of language. I thought that the author’s definition of literacy, with a foundation of love of language, was a great place to start. His argument for encouraging a fascination, continuous and spontaneous, was fantastic. A critical lens formula is not what kept me interested in English, nor was a carefully cultivated ability to expand on the use of literary elements in a short story. I agree, as an English fan, that literacy should be achieved through a “joyful means”, and as a future English teacher, I hope to be able to incorporate that into my curriculum among all the state mandates for achievement.

Insights: Racial Disparity Affirmed in Tobacco Advertising:
A study published in the NY Times claims that there are 2.6 as many billboard tobacco advertisements in black neighborhoods as in white neighborhoods. The “cure”? An increase in media literacy, so as to help young people sift through the thousands of advertisements thrown in their face every day. Racial issues aside, because I wasn’t interested in those issues for this article, advertisements in general threaten to undermine how a person consciously thinks, processes, and forms beliefs (as mentioned in the Multiliteracies text). Students are being subtly herded in a desired direction by advertisers, and the media literacy mentioned could truly be a way to cope with advertisements and help students form their own ideas and beliefs.

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