RES 5535: Race, Class, and Gender in Literacy Research (summer 2010)

In reading the last two chapters, 5 & 6, I thought back over the years I have taught to a few boys that were like Jake, one in particlular I taught this past year. I'll call him Tim (psuedonym) for the purpose of this post. Tim, like Jake in chapter 5 would let his mind wander off many times throughout the day. I would call on him or use other strategies to draw him back into the lessons. He had some trouble with reading and writing but was always right there teetering on the edge of being on grade level. His parents & I talked about this throughout the year and came up with different techniques and tools to help him, but I still worried about how he will do next year. He expressed often times he just couldn't think of anything to write about, even when given a topic. He said things like, "I just don't know what I want to say," or "I don't know how to spell that." So he and I would work together on getting his ideas down on paper. He got better at writing and being able to express his thoughts, but he still said he never liked it that much. He had a love for the fantasy world of Star Wars and could talk for hours on length about the battles and characters in each of the movies. We used this interest to get him excited about reading. His mom and I found Star Wars books written on his level and some that were a little more difficult that mom read to him. This seemed to help him and got him reading things he wanted to read. I noticed at recess time, when we played indoors on a rainy day, he always was engaged with either blocks or legos and loved to build things. This characteristic reminded me of Jake as well. I didn't thing about it then, but perhaps Tim was tuning out sometimes because he felt disengaged with the lesson. He said over and over how he had dreams of one day being in the Army and helping people, maybe he thought he wouldn't need to know how to write for that job, just like Jake felt writing about science was dumb.

Writing is one of the hardest things I teach in my opinion. I feel this way because it's difficult to teach very young children who are just learning how to read to take their thoughts and put them onto paper. It sounds so simple, but when you think about it there are so many things at work when we write. You have to think of what you want to write, formulate thoughts & ideas, and for young students, they must also think of how to spell what they want to say. Tim was also not a strong speller and that made the daunting task of writing much more labor intensive for him. By the time he was finished, he looked tired. Jake had much more success when it came to his writing experiences in 2nd grade, at least when he wrote for Writer's Workshop and was allowed the freedom to write about topics meaninful to him like his family and NASCAR. Tim too is a fan of NASCAR and racing. I am going to implement Writer's Workshop in my classroom next year. I am excited to try something new with a new group of students and I hope I see excitement and enthusiasm for writing as well as progress without the stress. We want all of our students to be successful, we need to find out their interests and tie our instruction into those as much as possible! Furthermore lessons need to have real-world connections and our students need to see how the things they're learning can be applied to real-life situations just like the things Jake's dad taught him at home. He was interested in those things because he knew they meant something and that his dad was doing them for a reason.
Reshawna Greene