Race, Class, and Gender in Literacy Research (Summer 2011)

While reading about Jake in Chapter 5, what stuck out the most to me was the need to provide work and readings that have a purpose. I’ve heard this so often in many of my Reading Education classes, but I appreciated the real life example of Jake to showcase why purpose is so important. As with Laurie, it broke my heart to read about Jake’s struggles as he made his way through first and second grade. I can understand how activities like finding hidden words and story maps would seem pointless to a boy like Jake who has been raised in an environment in which reading was a seamless part of everyday life, not something you stopped and analyzed piece by piece. A lot of the classroom practices that Jake balked at are practices that I have witnessed in most of my peers’ classrooms, and I know I have used some of them in my own. Although I know that I can identify a purpose to all of the activities I’m performing in my classroom, I realize now that the purpose may not always be clear to my students. I wonder how many of them have been resistant to work because, like Jake, they thought “It’s stupid.” I find myself, in this respect, lumped with Jake’s first-grade teacher Mrs. Rhodes, and I am hoping to get myself out of this position. As with most other steps towards becoming a more effective educator, this will take time. Perhaps if Mrs. Rhodes had taken the time to explain the purposes behind her assigned activities, Jake would have been more engaged in them. When in Mrs. Williams’s second-grade class, Jake continued to struggle with having no purpose for classroom activities such as writing sentences with weekly spelling words. He was thriving, however, at home where he was accompanying his dad on repair jobs. Hicks wrote:
“At home, he continued to be a brilliant young apprentice learner. In the classroom, he increasingly began resisting the values that defined being a successful student.” (p.120)

If we could manage to treat our students as apprentices, learning by acting and doing, instead of our audience, learning by watching, we would have less situations like Jake’s where they lose interest because it has no purpose for them. How to get to that point is a long process, but simple things like providing more hands-on activities and allowing more freedom of choice when selecting writing topics and books will send us in the right direction.

The biggest connection I noticed between Laurie and Jake was that both of them struggled after kindergarten due to a lack of differentiation. As the anthologies became increasingly difficult in the second half of first grade, Jake struggled because he had not yet solidified his emergent reader skills. Hicks noted that Jake needed more time to focus on these skills before being pushed on to more difficult ones. Jake’s mother questioned why it mattered if he was reading at a different pace than his classmates… as long as he was reading, why not let him read on his level? I agree with her wholeheartedly. That is another concept that has been emphasized in this Reading Education program: students will not learn if they are being taught at a high level that will cause frustration for them. That knowledge needs to be kept in the minds of all teachers as they split off from the standardized text and begin to plan readings for students to meet their individual needs.

Andrea Schlobohm