Reading Lives – Chapters 3 & 4
It is essential that we as teachers become as vulnerable, as we ask our students to be. The vulnerability comes from those differences in discourse…How we think about femininity, how we address conflict, etc. We cannot ask them to write, read, or even know how to act in the lunchroom without having taught them how to do these tasks. We ask our students to write…Yes, writing is both personal and a craft. We have to mold students to become “readers and writers”.
Reading and writing are not skills that are perfect from the beginning; we don’t enter Kindergarten and once we can write our own names, begin to write novels. The way we read and write, as well as, and the way we make connections to texts ARE influenced by where we live (culture) and how we grew up (socioeconomic status). My first year of teaching, naive as it may seem, I asked students to write about a trip to the beach; most of my students were able to complete this task. I remember one of them coming up to me within a few minutes and telling me they had never been to the beach. This is a prime example of discourse of social standing. I know now to keep writing topics more open, so that all students can be successful.
Will all our students become authors? No, but they will use some form of writing in their everyday lives. So we have to teach them those stepping stones to improve their writing. Chapter three begins with a quote from Jane Miller, “A reader is a person in history, a person with a history.” This same quote could apply to a writer. To me this means that you can always have some connection to make with text, and always something to write about, YOU! These ways of thinking may be different, but it is the teacher’s job to make that student comfortable with what they need to “get off their chest”.
Both Chapter 3 and 4 give information about students’ writings. The author of Reading Lives has made herself vulnerable to us as readers of her book, but also to students she has come in contact with. Making myself vulnerable has not been easy…In one of my Graduate School classes, I was asked to model poetry. Once I did modeling, writing in my classroom became more rewarding. When I ask my students to write, I often write my own Journal/Writer’s Notebook entry to show students that writing IS important.
Through this experience I also recognize the importance of using a mentor text (a text that you can model writing after). In this same experience, I used what my professor had made me do and carried it into my classroom. My students were totally engaged; not only were they engaged in the reading, but also in the writing process. This is true for both memoir and fictional writing.
Am I the perfect writing teacher? Not even close, but using tools from other Graduate classes and readings from this one will improve my teaching. Reading needs to bring forth that imagination, as it has done for Hicks; and writing needs to be free for students to have an outlet, when they can’t always say it out LOUD!
Angela Steele
Comments (3)
We must open our hearts and minds to our students. They have a genuine desire to please and it is usually a sarcastic or flip remark that makes them view the teacher as the enemy. For some of my colleagues the remark is usually about the student’s parent and I have seen “the line drawn in the sand” so to speak. Young children are shaped by their family experiences and until they are exposed to other ways of life they don’t know that they don’t have the best family in the world. When they enter school they begin to hear stories and wonder about other families. For example I had never heard of Santa Claus until going to school and I wondered why he did not come to my house. It takes years of assimilating information before a child can begin to re-define who they want to be. For me, I did not know that we were dirt poor until my teachers and classmates told me so. I felt like Summer, in the book Missing May, when students were asked to write descriptions of each other and Summer did not recognize when they had written about her. She had a positive view of herself because she was loved by her Aunt May. After that she was always aware of her “poor” appearance. We must be careful how we treat and respond to ALL children.
Elizabeth Achor
Posted by Elizabeth Achor | June 24, 2010 6:15 PM
Posted on June 24, 2010 18:15
I think you have hit on an important topic, the idea of being vulnerable. In order to really identify wiht our students we must make ourselves vulnerable by viewing the world through our students' eyes. We need to see things as they do, and feel things as they do in order to reach them and meet their needs in all aspects of their development. We have to remember that we are not just growing students, we are growing people.
Posted by Marcia Smith | June 25, 2010 2:38 PM
Posted on June 25, 2010 14:38
Angela,
I could not agree with you more! When I was a first year teacher and we would have our writing prompts I thought all of my students would be able to write about a special day, but I was wrong. So I've learned to tell them to write about something they did on a Saturday with their mom and/or dad and that really seemed to help. A lot of times in the beginning of the year my students and I will do writing together and they get so excited when they read what we wrote as a class. Yes it's not perfect but I make such a big deal about it that they start to love writing and it is so exciting to hear. Yes they cannot write perfectly in the beginning but it is so exciting when they show me what they wrote and read it to me.
Posted by Natalie Enns | June 25, 2010 9:56 PM
Posted on June 25, 2010 21:56