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

When I first began reading this book I worried that once again I wouldn’t be able to relate to the stories that were being told. I didn’t grow up in a working class home, my parents were married, and education was regarded very highly in my home. Yet as I read I began to realize that I could relate quite a bit to Laurie. As I child I was constantly looking up at the clouds to see what animal I could see. I had a grand imagination and I often played pretend. In my pretend games I was sometimes a princess and I was running away from the horrible monster who was trying to eat me, (my brother). Sometimes I was a teacher, sometimes a doctor, and sometimes I was a lawyer. I also loved to read and be read too. I still remember reading The Babysitter’s Club books and being so excited every time a new one was published. My point in saying this is that I didn’t read or pretend to escape a rough home life. I did it because I loved it and it was who I was. I do think a number of the things that Laurie does are a direct result of her upbringing and the fact that she has to take on a “mothering” role at times; however I think you could find many of those same traits in other little girls no matter what their socio-economic background. The other trait that I identified with and can relate to in my classroom was Laurie wanting to be the “good girl”. I teach Kindergarten and have taught it for seven years. At this age my students take on somewhat gender specific roles. My girls have no trouble answering a question or bragging to a boy that they know more sight words than he does, but when in play centers they take on more feminine roles. When the text was talking about the example of the girls telling the little boy that he wasn’t doing a good job coloring his rainbow because he colored out of the lines I felt as if I was sitting in my classroom. In my room I do try to use positive reinforcements. I want the students to feel good about the choices more often than they feel bad about them. It is my experience that my girls generally take on the role of wanting the praise more so than my boys. My girls love when they get a sticker or a compliment where as my boys seem to like it for the moment but the goal of “being good” quickly fades as soon as the reward is gone. In my opinion this is more of a gender issue than it is a socio-economic one. In my classroom I teach students who live in poverty and others that are very wealthy, no matter the wealth or lack there of , my girls in general strive to be “good girls” across the board.
The other part of the two chapters that really interested me was the difference in both performance and confidence from Kindergarten to First Grade. I teach Kindergarten and have often heard First Grade teachers talking about how badly a child is struggling in their classroom. I am sometimes shocked because when I worked with them, they weren’t my highest student but they were performing at grade level. I think in our school we try to make it so that the First Grade teachers are doing small group work and working with students on the instructional reading level and not just reading from a basal but I am curious to know what happens during that transition that can make a student go from average to below average in just one year. I have always wondered about this and next year I will be teaching First Grade so I am very excited to see the transition first hand. I think after reading about Laurie and her struggles with having to stay focused and sit with out movement for longer periods of time, this will help me when working with my lower performing students.
Katie Templeton