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

Being of a different gender, I find it interesting to see things from a "boys" point of view. When discussing the girls, the majority of them at least wanted to be good and please the teacher by doing what they can. Reading about Jake I realized I relevant we need to make assignments for our students. As he completed his Science notebook he said it was, "dumb". He found relevance in writing about his own life in the Writing Workshop, and he enjoyed the experiments involved with the insects, but didn't see much point in writing about the insects. As a student in grad school, I feel his pain. There have been assignments given that felt are given as "busy work". I personally want the work I'm doing to be meaningful and useful, so I need to make sure I do the same for my students. I know in my head why the assignment is meaningful and useful, but it is my job to make my students understand this and get them motivated and personally involved in the literacy tasks at hand.

Another characteristic that stood out to me about Jake was how he would interact and get involved when he became interested, but during group-time, or "learning" time, he would pull back and not get involved. I find it heartbreaking to see such a young child already frustrated with his education. I feel that this should be the time when we can still "trick" our kids into learning and they think it is play time. My daughter just finished her kindergarten year. Everyday I would ask her what she did at school. She would reply, "We played and colored." I would then ask her, "What did you learn today?" Her reply, "Nothing." Throughout conversations things that she learned would come up, or she would start teaching her sister things she had learned at school. She thought of school as being fun. Even though she was working in stations that involved literacy and math activities, she just thought they were fun and enjoyed them. Now, she doesn't struggle in school, but I also think her teacher did a great job of making learning fun. I know we find ourselved entertaining our students, but I have found that I enjoy teaching and my students enjoy learning if we are having fun!

I also found it interesting how differently Jake wrote when writing about an educational topic (Apollo 13) and when writing about his homelife. He wrote this entry later in the year, but it exhibited more writing control than all his other entries. Earlier we discussed children code-switching between the slang used at home and Standard English at school. It seems that he is making this switch as he works on an educational topic. It seems that he wrote in the same ways he talks as he wrote about his homelife, but switched to writing expected in schools when writing about Apollo 13.

As I read the last chapter it was such a reminder of how we as teachers need to develop strong relationships with our students. When you know your students well, you know information about their family, their neighborhood, and their community. The more we know about where our students are coming from, the more we can alter our classroom decisions to provide the best educational environment for these students. We need to ensure we aren't leaving these students behind and are giving all students a chance to learn at their pace, but still hold high expectations for these students. We all have students that struggle with grade-level material, but we can still hold high expectations for where expect these students to be by the end of a period, year, etc.
-Angie Sigmon