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I must admit that I found this chapter just as difficult to read as Chapter 1 and was disappointed that Hicks found it necessary to use intellectual ramblings rather than the personable and understandable prose she used for the rest of the text.

Despite this downfall, I found Hicks' recounting of Mike Rose's study from his book Lives on the Boundary intriguing. His personal connection to the lives of other working class families was very interesting. "There are some things about my early life, I can see now, that are reflected in other working-class lives I've encountered: the isolation of neighborhoods, information poverty, the limited means of protecting children from family disaster, the predominance of such disaster, the resilience of imagination, the intellectual curiosity and literate enticements that remain hidden from the schools, the feelings of scholastic inadequacy, the dislocations that come from crossing educational boundaries." I can very much relate to having seen some of these things in the lives of my students this year. One student in my class, for example, probably suffered from isolation due to social status more than any other student in the entire fifth grade. She came from a working class family. She frequently wore the same clothes multiple days in a row, was constantly picked on for her “buck teeth”, and suffered the loss of her dad to suicide due to her parents’ ensuing divorce. She rarely paid attention in class and I found her drawing pictures more than anything else in our classroom. She struggled greatly to succeed academically. Despite all of these hardships, she demonstrated enormous resilience and strength of character. She never once lost her imagination, creativity, or personality. If anything, she allowed these struggles to more clearly define the young woman she was becoming. As an educator, I saw the need for her to express herself in multiple formats. She was given a journal to write in and I allowed her to draw a picture depicting her thoughts or feelings. Trying and testing new methods like this for different students, helped me to become a better teacher, as it gave her the opportunity to become a better student. Rose stated, “ To truly educate in America, then, to reach the full sweep of our citizenry, we need to question received perception, shift continually from the standard lens.”

Reasons such as these are exactly why we must embrace a hybrid teaching philosophy. There is no one right way to expose a child to literacy learning. There is not one specific way to teach so that every child succeeds. It is absolutely necessary to be willing to try and use a multitude of teaching strategies, to better enable our students to learn in a way that is most comfortable for them. If I teach something in only one way and only one or two students truly connect to the curriculum and understand what I am explaining, then am I really teaching? Shouldn’t being a teacher automatically create an opportunity for others to learn from your example? ~Allison Reese