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

I teach at a school that has a high population of working class families. I do not consider many of the families to be middle class; in fact the middle class would be the minority at my school. The students at our school do not seem to struggle to relate to each other and develop a “we”. When they branch out into the community, then I think that they struggle socially with belonging to a group. I think that some students struggle with finding their place in certain groups more than others. For those students who do struggle it is important for them to find the relationships that they need. I think that poor working class children are often culturally disconnected from middle class values. They seem out of place because they have often not had the experiences that middle class children have had. We learned in one of our classes that poor working class children are read to less at home when they are young and this robs them of the book language that they need when they enter school. They are at a disadvantage from the beginning of their school career. So I think that poor working class children are definitely overlooked because they are not a so called minority. Laurie and Jake struggled in kindergarten and beyond. The book stated these students attend schools that are very traditional and pushed for grade level expectations in reading and math. This push is driven by state and local agencies that mandate the certain student levels. I think that because of this the so called “fun” has been taken out of the classroom. Teachers are forced to almost teach the test so that their students can succeed. It should be about teaching a student at their level regardless of what it is. If a student is not reading on grade level then having them read on the grade level they are in will not improve their reading. They have to read at their instructional level in order to make any growth. But end of grade tests are written on grade level so students who are not reading on grade level are set up to fail from the beginning. Students should be measured on their growth not on whether they make a three or four on their end of grade test.
Students come to school driven by the social and cultural practices that they grew up in. That is their world and the only world that they know. It is their voice. Poor working class students do not know any different until they encounter it at school. They do not realize that they may have been deprived of something because their way is the only way that they know. I agree with the quote from the book on page 19 and 20 that states that lived moments have a lot to do with how students engage with school literacies. Our way with words in our families and our cultures is evident when a child goes to school and reads and writes. Those ways with words come out in their communication orally and written. Problems do arise when their ways are not the ways of the school and how the school communicates with the students. In the roadville elementary school example those children’s stories that they told spontaneously held no value with the teacher. She was looking for elaborate stories on the material they had read. The students probably could not make connections with the literature so they could not relate. The stories that they wanted to tell the teacher were relevant to them and they made far better stories than the ones they had to tell that did not hold meaning to the students. I find this true in my classroom. When my students come to school with stories I try to listen because they do have a difficult talking and writing about things that they have not experienced. At writing time I remind them to write about the stories that they tell me during the day, and if they do write about those things then their stories are usually better than the ones I might have them write or talk about.
Students do come to school with certain values and words that are learned from the home. For instance Lee Ann and Jake definitely held their mom and family’s stereotypes. The way the problem was solved was evident of how the mom and grandma and other family members handled situations. It was a learned behavior. The problem arises when the kids go to school and they try to handle things the way they were taught to handle them and it is not the way the school or teacher finds acceptable. The child is then punished for something he did not know any better not to do.

Michelle Moffitt