10/23/17 - On Gallagher's "Readicide"

In Kelly Gallagher’s “Readicide”, he writes about the many ways schools are inadvertently driving students away from reading. One of the most interesting points he makes is how write that schools are both increasing the number of standards they need to meet as well as taking traditional literature out of schools in favor of preparing for standardized tests. At first, I thought this couldn’t be the case. That is, until I read some of the standards sophomore history teachers were expected to hold their students to: understanding the underlying philosophies behind Western civilization, give detailed analyses of World War I and II as well as their aftermaths, and explain how most countries fit into the world’s economy.

Now, I will say that I could answer these questions in high school – although that is only because I avidly read through whatever history textbooks we got, so much so that I usually finished reading them sometime in the second month of the school year. I love learning about history; that’s the only reason I could answer the questions. To expect the entire student body to meet these standards, however, is absolutely ridiculous. Personally, I don’t think students could explain these things until they got into college, and most of the history classes I’ve had in college wouldn’t tackle these subjects until they got into the late 200 level.

Schools also have the inverse problem: while many traditionally-taught books are being removed from classrooms, those books which remain are taught to death. As Gallagher puts it, schools chop books up, add worksheets every few minutes during cooking, overcook all the flavor from the book, and serve in bite-sized chunks (never as a full meal, only as a snack). All this says to our students is that we don’t believe in them. We don’t trust them enough to get through a book all on their own and develop their own ideas and opinions on it; no, we must make sure they fully understand it and that no little tidbit is missed. Yes, the student now “knows” whatever book they are reading, but they despise it afterward. What modern America has developed is a sure-fire recipe for ensuring students can pass any test on whatever book we assign them, but ultimately are worse readers for it and lose out on any critical thinking skills they may have developed from reading and understanding the text themselves.

10/18/17 - Tovani and The Art of "Getting It"

In Tovani's book, I Read It, but I Don't Get It, she outlines many of the issues young students have when it comes to reading. Most of them come down to the simple task of getting them to care. Now, simple does not mean easy. It is by no means easy to get students to care about what they read, but it is straightforward. All you have to do is help them relate what they are reading about back to their everyday lives. One of the better examples Tovani gives is when she is asking a male student to read an article about Area 51. The student tries and fails to read the article well, so she tries a different approach. She says to “use outside information”; to add the student’s preexisting background knowledge to the article to make it more relatable for him. And you know what his initial response is? “I thought that would be cheating.” That’s right, cheating. Students have been so conditioned to treat each source of information as its own self-contained bubble that they cannot connect the dots of information even if they are right in front of them. This allows the student to write about things which they might personally disagree with, but then they discard the information whenever they are done using it or file it away under “use only for school”.

Another reason students don’t care about reading is that they are easily confused by the text. This is not to call them stupid, just to say that reading something without really trying to understand what is being said can lead to a lot of confusion. While not the main cause of causing students to not care about reading, it is, in fact, an issue which compounds their already muddied understanding of the text. To counter this, Tovani offers many strategies: make a connection (as discussed in the paragraph above), stop and think about you have read, paraphrase what you’ve just read, or perhaps just increasing or decreasing your speed of reading. Personally, I think it’s amazing to see an author write about confusion among readers, which is often lamented by education but seldom worked on or ever resolved. 

10/16/17 - Racism in the Classroom

The article I chose to use for our Social Justice discourse was “Combating Racism in a Multicultural World: Classroom Ideas”. In this article, the authors write about teachers using other peoples’ cultures to combat the racism that teachers see in certain students. In a history lesson, for example, the class might look at how the Mexican people saw the Mexican-American war develop (among others) and use the war as a means to understand how and why some Mexicans are bitter toward the United States and its citizens. Another way might be to travel to a local museum to learn about the experiences some groups had to go through to get where they are today, such as the Native Americans. Books are also useful tools to discuss past and present racism in the United States, such as ­­To Kill a Mockingbird or The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn.

The reason I chose this article above some of the others I found was because the authors had an inherent assumption about students: that only a few students outright desire to be racist or think that racism is an acceptable expression in civil society. Some want to be racist for the sake of being contrarian and edgy, but neither the authors nor I think that is the case for most students – instead, racism tends to be born of ignorance, of a lack of interaction with people of other culture groups.

This is not to say that simple interactions will solve all issues of racism in society, just that it is a good start. What the authors definitely want to avoid is a message which is feel-good, but empty – that “all cultures are interesting and fun, everyone gets along”.  All cultures truly are interesting, but they almost always clash with each other. So instead of pretending all cultures are equally valid and there aren’t any problems between various cultures, just dive right into why certain cultures clash with one another. Try discussing the dichotomy between undocumented Mexican workers and the white working poor, or how urban African Americans are viewed by the media and contemporary society, or even how certain American companies and politicians cultivate and exploit racism for their own benefit. In order to truly combat racism in American classrooms, we need our students to understand why people are racist in the first place, only then can our student move beyond these notions of racism and become better members of society.

Link to article: http://www.educationworld.com/a_curr/combating-racism-multicultural-classroom.shtml

10/11/17 - Pedagogy of the Oppressed, Banking, and Adaption vs. Change

Within Freire’s Pedagogy of the Oppressed, Freire makes two very specific points that I wish to refute and/or confront. The first is that education should serve to make its student people who change the world instead of learning how to fit into the world. The second is that banking cannot exist in a truly beneficial education setting.

The idea that education should shape its student to change the world is one that I fully support, yet the way Freire describes what comes afterward is what troubles me. He writes that students should not learn how to fit into the world. That right there is an absolute lie. There is no way any given student or even group of students will change the entire world. They may change part of the world, but human nature is immutable; the world will always try to revert to the simpler system, to make people fit into its own framework. Furthermore, students learning how to fit into the world is not inherent negative. As educators, we may want to change the world, but we have to do it in an acceptable and legal framework. As educators, we ourselves adapt to how the education system works and attempt to make do with what we have. In short, it is impossible to avoid being changed by the world while we and our students are changing the world.

Banking alone cannot work in an educational setting. You need input from students to ensure they are learning and to spur on their growth. However, if, like Freire write, we were to take out all banking-style teaching in schools, then education will inevitably suffer greatly. Why? Because certain subjects need banking – certain subject have immutable facts that need to be passed on: math, science, history. Regardless of student input or student opinion, two plus two will always equal four. Despite what Little Susie might say, certain compounds will always have the same exact reaction when they come into contact with other certain compounds. And in history, events will always be the same as they have always been: the Roman Empire collapsed, the United States had a revolution to break free of Britain, and China went communist in the 1930s/40s.

This is not to say that these subjects are exclusively banking-style, only that they and many other subjects need an initial basis of knowledge which may require banking from the teacher.  Once student have this basis of knowledge, then they may move on to problem-posing, to applications of these subjects: how would we use advanced mathematics in our everyday lives, does evolution really work the way we think it does, how did the fall of the Western Roman Empire change the course of European history, etc. We definitely need problem-posing in schools, but to pretend that banking has zero place in the education system is bunk. Nor, as Freire writes, can education depend purely on banking when students need to develop critical thinking skills. Instead there needs to be a health balance of banking-style to problem-posing (probably at a 25-75 ratio or something like that). Education needs these two styles two work in conjunction with each other instead of in opposition.

10/9/17 - Critical Pedagogy and My Own Experiences

In Critical Pedagogy in an Urban High School English Classroom, Duncan-Andrade and Morrell write about how a change toward more student-oriented pedagogy will produce better-educated and well-rounded students. It certainly sounds interesting and I do have a few reservations with the way the authors put their ideas forward, but the other portion that caught my attention was the year in which it was published: 2008. In 2008, I was a sophomore in high school, so I can compare my own experiences with what Duncan-Andrade and Morrell are writing about.

I can wholeheartedly say the wonderful changes the authors of this piece are advocating for were nowhere to be found in my high school. My high school valued traditional/classical curriculum and obedience to the system. There was very little discussion about current events or potential deviations from preapproved curriculum in order to better reach the student body. Heck, our history textbooks did not cover anything after 1994. It served as a good marker for how the school operated, because it certainly did not feel as if curriculum had changed in that school for a good fourteen years. It is a little bit jarring to see people putting forward these ideas on pedagogy when I have zero experience with said ideas and do not have a decent framework to view it from.

I would like to touch on how the authors put forward their ideas on how use popular culture, mainly because I disagree with it. Personally, I don’t think popular culture is worth much at all (neither is the culture of America’s elite, but that’s another point entirely). Duncan-Andrade and Morrell almost come across as idolizing popular culture instead of carefully and thoughtfully using it. Popular culture can be extremely toxic and problematic when applied haphazardly. I realize that the authors were far more careful in their applications of popular culture in the classroom, but I had to draw that from inferences. Plus, drawing from popular culture can politicize a classroom and deepen the divide between students just as easily as help them to realize how they should empathize with each other. Teachers should use popular culture to connect with their students, yes, but a teacher’s ultimate goal should be to help students move beyond their own cultures and view cultures as they truly are. Duncan-Andrade and Morrell indeed write about how students need to provide counter-arguments against the elite’s culture, yet they ultimately do not go far enough and should help students realize they are subject to their own culture’s flaws as well.

Tldr: I cannot relate too well with the Duncan-Andrade and Morrell and their ideas due to my own high school experiences. Popular culture is not as great as the authors make it out to be and students need to be aware of its pitfalls.

10/4/17 - Student Assessment in Light of the Fall of No Child Left Behind

Assessment has gotten a pretty bad rap lately. With the poor implementation of No Child Left Behind and its heavy-handed focus on standardized tests, it’s no wonder that many feel this way about the program, but why have tests as a whole been under attack? Testing and general assessment has always been around in schools and always will be. There will always be a need to determine whether or not students are learning the material they are being taught. The disagreement, then, should not be on whether or not we assess students, but rather on how we assess our students.

As Beach & the other authors of Teaching Literature to Adolescents state, there are two main areas to focus on for assessment – through knowledge of what is written and whether or not our students can apply said knowledge. Both types are necessary in learning and understanding literature. Yet it is often the first style that receives most of the attention. It’s easy to teach, easy to grade, and it works if all we are looking for in our students is a base level understanding of how literature works. But the issue is that we want more from our students. Students need that initial layer of understanding so they can move forward to applying that knowledge toward putting in critical thinking about whatever piece of literature they are reading.

If these are the ways we focus on assessment, then what are the standards by which we assess? The answer is a simple rubric which both the students and the teach hold to. Regardless of what subject is being taught, the rubric needs to be easy to understand and fair to all students, with clear definitions of what consists of above-average work, average work, and sub-standard work. As we have discussed previously in class, holding a student to a high standard does not require standardized tests or sacrificing critical thinking skills. In fact, high standards will inevitably support a student’s academic growth.