When I wrote my first final reflection piece I thought I had said everything that there was to say. After going back and reading it again I feel that I left some critical points out and I am now going to add to them. The quote I chose does represent this class but it also represents my life as a teacher and a reader. I began to think of all the times a year has ended and I began to reflect upon what has happened. I have never reflected on a year the same way twice nor do I believe I ever will. As a teacher I am always trying to improve my practice and way of teaching. It is my belief that one of the best ways of doing this is through reflection of our practices. Just like the quote says, sometimes we have to think differently in order to change. That is very true for me of teaching. When I began to teach a unit or subject I strive to teach it in the best manner that I know of, in my mind I am doing what is right. Sometimes it works and sometimes it doesn’t, in order to change what didn’t work I have to think in a new way and see the topic through the eyes of my students. Doing this is something that I struggle with daily but also daily try to achieve. I applied the same principal to these articles.
After I read an article I would sit down and blog about it, making the points that I thought were most important and influential to me. After I posted my blog and began to make comments on others blog’s I began to reflect on what others were saying and I almost always thought, “I never thought of it like that”. After reading what others had said I could reflect on the article once again and just as Foucault says, I could perceive things differently than what I originally saw. Take for instance the “No Kinda Sense” article. When I blogged about it, I immediately thought of how I expect students to speak to me and other adults in my school in a certain way. I expect them to use correct English in terms of their grammar. After I read what others had written I began to perceive things differently. What is so wrong with allowing students to speak in a way that they are comfortable speaking. They are no less intelligent because they too have had to learn their speech pattern just as I had to learn mine. I still hold true to the belief that students need to learn to speak using correct grammar in certain social situations, but I now have resigned myself to allow students to communicate among themselves how ever they see fit. The same idea was true for me when Reading “Hustle & Flow: a critical student and teacher-generated framework for re-authoring a representation of Black masculinity. Although part of me was appalled that students were allowed to see this movie in school and work with such offensive language I began to see that this particular story related more to their lives than most any other piece of literature they could have been given. These young men are engrossed in an environment where drugs, violence, and foul language is a way of life. When I got over my own hesitations of doing an activity like this in school I could finally understand how this activity was quite useful for these young men. The work related to their lives and it was something that they were interested in, what better choice could there have been. The same was true for the chapters on working class boys and girls. When I first began reading I didn’t realize there was such a clear distinction between middle class and working class. Even though I saw it in the book it was through reading people’s blog’s based on their lives in a working class family that allowed me to reflect on what I had read. Whether we are reading a research article or working on plans for the following school year, we have to be able to think differently and perceive differently if we are to truly gain anything from our reflections.
Katie Templeton