RES 5535: Race, Class, and Gender in Literacy Research (summer 2009)

I enjoyed reading the last two chapters. I could relate to bell hooks reading on being treated differently than her brother. During my upbringing my parents allowed my brother to do a lot more things than I was, using the reason “because he is a boy and he can handle himself out there. Still when I was in college and would come home for the summer I would have a midnight curfew, unless I was out with my brother than I could stay out till 2:00am. My brother, who was two years older then me, would be able to go out snowmobiling with his friends, but if I wanted to go with my friends, who mostly were guys, they would have to come in and endure the grueling “If anything happens to our daughter out there” speech from my parents before they would tell me if I could go or not. I can relate to bell hooks, in this sense of gender roles in the family.
I also thought it was very interesting that she was told to fear the white folks, but didn’t really have a clue as to why she was doing it. This is a prime example on how not to teach equality and respect. I actually had a mother one year tell me that her daughter would not respect me because I am white. I was SHOCKED and didn’t really know what say to the mom, except that we needed to figure out a way for us to be able to respect each other because, at that time, there was only one black teach in the whole K-5 school and her odds of having another white teacher would be very possible. How a child is raise in their household before coming to school and during has a huge impact on their education. I do not treat my students any differently. I love them all and couldn’t picture tuning one out because of race, class, or gender.
The theme I came across in all four stories, from bell hooks, Janet Frames, Hicks, and Laurie was that imagination plays a huge part in a girls upbringings. Hicks’ story about her childhood kept me nodding my head and relating her middle class upbringings to mine. I too was the teacher pleaser that didn’t read much outside of school. I used my imagination all the time in my basement to entertain myself. I could also relate to her story because my mom wanted my family to look “classy”, just as her mom did. While taking notes as I read I wrote a whole page in my notebook alone writing the similarities of Hicks childhood to mine. The only big difference was that she grew up in a small southern community in the piedmont escaping her small town life through school, reading, and writing, and I was raised in a small northern community in the Upper Peninsula of Michigan and escaped small town life through music, dance, and sports. I really felt that connection of being a girl in a middle class, small town.
Laurie’s story was another two pages of written comments in my notebook, but I wanted to focus on the fact that her “good behavior cloaked her academic distress”. We have so many students out there that have slipped though this same crack in education. As a teacher, I feel that her first grade teacher should have picked up on this then. Instead Laurie was going unnoticed, as Hicks said, from day to day. Even though the teacher was experienced and she did know Laurie was struggling, it did not appear to me that the teacher was doing all she could with her to help her get caught up. If the gap is not corrected early on it hinders a child from feeling successful as their school years go on. In Laurie’s case, by second grade she already coined herself as the “slow one”. Thank God she had a second grade teacher that focused on Reading/Writing Workshops. This seemed to help Laurie a little bit. It just breaks my heart to see how much Laurie struggled with school, which was very apparent in her writing journal entries, and because of her competing identities between school and home, it makes it a lot harder to help Laurie the older she gets.

Barbara Terauds