discussing discussions

            From looking at the class transcripts, the pattern that really stands out to me is that if you label the teacher, T, and the students, S, the overwhelming pattern is T-S-T-S-T-S.  As we discussed in class on Friday there are different reasons for this: giving students encouragement and direction (both on topic, and who speaks next). 

            As for what I hope to accomplish with class discussions, one of the main goals is for all students to feel comfortable speaking and sharing ideas.  I understand the need to keep discussions moving in a certain direction, but I believe that comes after first setting the tone, or atmosphere where everyone is encouraged to speak. The idea of right and wrong and superiority/inferiority has been touched on many times during our discussions, and is one area I hope to keep in mind while teaching—I believe that it is very important to put a lot of time in at the beginning of the year, or semester to set a kind of tone where everyone feels their point of view is valid.  I was watching a TED Speaks talk about education and creativity, and how the older we get the more worried are about making mistakes.  The speaker made a point that has resonated with me ever since “learning is a process of making mistakes.”  In my classroom, I want to encourage my students to make mistakes, I want to encourage them to question each other, and question me.  I hope my classroom is a place where students do not feel afraid to speak out of a fear of making a mistake.  I hope that my students are learning from me and each other what they think for themselves by having discussions.  I realize that efficiency is important, and time is limited, but I hope that I am not just plowing through information and steering students towards answers just to save time.  There may be a place for this kind of teaching, but I would not call it a discussion, it is lecturing. 

            Now I think I am done Gregging!  I look forward to more discussions.

what we have in common

            College and career readiness means what it says, right?  Ready for college and ready for a career, now this seems too simplistic.  There are two different readinesses being described here—college and career, so are they the same, or do we need to define them separately?  Rather than make that distinction, I am going to assume that one of the goals of education is to make opportunities available to everyone, and therefore dive into college readiness.    

            For college readiness, we all are here in college, so we’ve went through a similar process: taking college entrance exams, filling-out applications (discussing our GPA, involvement in extra-curricular activities, an essay of some sort, and provide a couple of references), and a few interviews.  Now we’re getting somewhere, narrowing it down a bit.  So, without getting any deeper, college readiness seems to be defined by the ability to perform certain tasks: fill out forms (and read those forms), write essays, take tests, be involved in some activities outside of the classroom, get to know a couple of people to vouch for you, and be able to make it through an interview.  As for the task of defining the educational goals for college readiness, we then must include preparation for these things—filling out forms, writing essays, taking tests, working on social skills in school and in extra-curricular activities, and having some practice with interviews.   Ultimately it comes down to trying to do everything possible to prepare students for their next phase in life.  Aligning educational goals nationally, like common core, seems to be a very good, common sense idea.  Knowing that there are over 14,000 school districts in the United States, each with their own standard for graduation pulls me in two directions: 1) I can’t believe it, and it makes no sense; and 2) it makes perfect sense considering the history of the United States, its land mass, and population.  There needs to be some common ground between national standards and local autonomy, and the idealist inside me believes that it can be done, and should be done.  The teacher inside of me believes the testing needs some refinement.

            When thinking about other ways I want my students to be literate, I have a difficult time putting a label on it as a kind of literacy.  Let’s see if describing it leads to a connection with literacy… I believe it is very important for students to understand and be aware that there are different ways of viewing reality—we all have and bring our own biases to bear on how we view the world.  We are all human and living on the same planet, yet the reality experienced by a person who grows up in a city in China is different than the reality experienced by a person who grows up in a city in Brazil.  You can see where I’m going here, each person experiences the world at least a bit differently than another person, and some people’s experiences are so different that it may appear like they are on another planet, or at least in a different world. To the best of my ability, I hope to present different views of reality through literature and other media to students.  Ultimately, I hope my students are able to be approach life with an open-mind and be able to understand what Robert Byrne meant when saying: “Until you walk a mile in another man’s moccasins you can’t imagine the smell.”  There, that helps me to understand it best.  I believe the literacy I am talking about falls under cultural literacy/awareness.

 

.

literally literate

Literate, literacy, illiterate, illiteracy

            What first comes to mind when thinking about what the divide between being literate and illiterate is goes back to my work with the Red Cross… when you donate blood you have to ‘give consent’ by signing your name or leaving your mark.  When I thought of leaving a ‘mark’ in place of a signature the artist formerly known as Prince, and his replacing his name with a symbol came to mind.  Of course this is not why the consent form is worded this way, instead it is because some people are unable to read and/or write, and that is the first definition that comes to mind when I think of what divides the literate from the illiterate—a distinct ability to read and write vs. a distinct inability to read and write.  In reality literacy is not defined as clearly black and white, but is more of a gray area.  Instead of thinking in absolute terms, literacy can be better explained as a scale ranging from illiterate to literate; some people can read and write but struggle through it, while others may struggle with reading but not writing, and others are highly proficient in both areas.

            Last year I observed a teacher for 6 weeks who taught four ninth-grade English classes and two classes called ‘credit-recovery.’  During my observations, the students in credit recovery displayed literacy’s scale in very human terms.  Some of the students had learning disabilities, but many of them had simply slipped through the cracks and skated-by passing from one grade to the next without having ever really built a strong foundation in reading or writing.  Not learning how to read and write—reading especially—handicaps people in so many different classes and other areas of life, and the students in credit recovery told countless stories to provide evidence of this.

            As for a concrete definition, literacy has grown in its capacity to include more than just reading and writing.  The first example I think of is computer-literacy.  With this in mind, literacy is synonymous with competency.  And in many instances of pop culture, ‘illiterate’ is used as a kind of a catch-all put down.

Assignment 6: Putting grammar in its place

            The Hartwell article pointed out that there is really very little or no correlation between having a focus on grammar lessons in the classroom and students’ ability to write well.  My first instinct then is to throw grammar lessons out and focus class time on other issues, yet there is undoubtedly going to be issues with grammar for some students.  Plus I have my own issues with grammar—I’m not the best at diagramming sentences and identifying the dangling modifiers from the dangling participles.  However, I do feel that as an English teacher, grammar is an area that I should have a better understanding of.  This leaves me with the question: if I don’t know all there is to know about grammar, what areas of grammar are important, and how should I teach them?

            The areas I believe to be important are identified by Hartwell as the kind of grammar associated with ‘usage’; I do not care so much if my students know all of the rules of grammar, but I do care that they are able to put words together into sentences that make sense.  With that in mind, I believe I will cover some of the basics of grammar like subject/verb agreement and discuss some of the quirky verb conjugates like swim, swam, swum, but for the most part I believe that I will let grammar teach itself by my students living, breathing, and speaking in an English-speaking society.

            As for my worries about my own knowledge of grammar, I believe I will dig a little deeper into the rule book to get a better understanding of the intricacies of the English language.  This is a selfish endeavor, and one that is driven mostly by fear—the fear of a student, parent, or colleague asking me to explain the rules to them, and me being an English teacher and not knowing my own subject.

 

Texas Twang

Here's a great link to a site with examples of dialect from state to state.  On NBC Nightly news there was a segment on Texas twang tonight--it's amazing how with our class discussions, I am now picking up on more little differences in language diversity w/in our own language.  Here's the link:http://web.ku.edu/~idea/northamerica/usa/texas/texas.htm

Assignment 5 (repost) No Bedtime

A is for apple…, Z is for zebra        

            In comparison to the article by Shirley Brice Heath, my early language acquisition was probably most like the description of Maintown, but I also have memories similar to the descriptions of Roadville and Trackton.  As Ms. Heath discussed, much depends on your home life and your community.  My mom’s parents are both university graduates—my grandma was a librarian and my grandpa was a university professor.  Conversely, my dad’s parents were farmers (my grandmother is from Oklahoma and is ethnically Native American, Irish, and Welsh; and my grandfather is a first-generation Danish farmer—neither of them have more than a high school education, or a terrific grasp of the rules of the English language).  Like the Maintown example, my parents and my mom’s parents reinforced grammar and annunciation by modeling and providing feedback in the form of correcting my speech when I said something incorrectly.  I do not ever remember my parents using baby talk, and after talking with my mom, I know they purposefully talked to my brothers and I using ‘proper’ English grammar, and worked with us as soon as we were talking to pronounce words correctly by sounding them out.

            My dad’s parents, on the other hand, were much more like the Trackton example; they spoke mostly with adults and when they did talk to me or my brothers it was often in the form of a story, but for the most part they were not very actively engaged with my learning how to speak, read, or write.  To this day, my grandma, on my dad’s side, pronounces California as ‘Cal-i-forny’ and Colorado as ‘Call-a-rad-a.’  They both are great story-tellers, and have always had a knack for stretching the truth in a fun sort of way—the same way in which you might try to embellish a story, or make up something ludicrous while trying to maintain a poker face.          

            I grew up on a crop and dairy farm in the Midwest.  The community was made up of a town of about 1200 people surrounded by small farms.  My dad was a math teacher/farmer and my mom was a stay-at-home mom.  Before going to school, I remember learning how to speak before learning how to read and write.  Some of my first interactions with language were learning the alphabet; I remember my parents and grandparents showing me cards with pictures of animals, trees, cars, etc. with the word representing the picture below it.  In order to memorize my ABC’s, I was taught to repeat them in a sing-song sort of way that is probably typical of many other people in this class.  I also remember mimicking, or repeating each word after my parents or grandparents said them.  Similar to the Maintown example in our reading, I remember taking walks around the farm or in town and having my parents or grandparents (on my mom’s side) name something and then have me repeat it back to them.  They also read books with me; pointing their finger at each word, or parts of words as they read aloud, and then had me repeat them.  I also recall learning to sing along to basic songs or nursery rhymes, like ring-around-the-rosy and Peter, Peter pumpkin eater. 

            Before starting school, my interactions with other kids consisted mostly of family, but I did go to Sunday school, and took swimming and skiing lessons.  So I did have some experience communicating in situations that prepared me for the classroom environment.  By the time I started kindergarten I had learned my ABC’s, how to count to 100, and was able to read and write my name and a few other basic words.  As for making sense, I believe my dad’s parents instilled a bit of their ‘fish-story’ like sense of humor in me because I remember just making things up when teachers asked questions that I had no clue as to what the right answer was.  Looking back, I believe this has helped me over the long run to make inferences, be creative and make the infamous ‘educated guess.’

             

Assignment 4: Reflection on dialect project

Dialectical Diversity

            From the class presentations on the four English dialects, I find a common thread connecting teaching and understanding language to be learning how to listen to, read and write each dialect.  Our class discussions about trying not to teach in such a way that makes students feel inferior due to their dialect is magnified when thinking that one of our goals will be to have each of them writing in SAE, regardless of their dialect.

            From my own research on Indian English, I found it extremely difficult to know how to say many of the words that I was reading.  By listening to video and audio clips, I was able to get a much better understanding of how the language sounds.  This leads me to appreciate efforts in the field of linguistics of creating a phonetic alphabet.  By not knowing how to pronounce many of the Hindi words written in English, I learned that I have some cultural biases which affect the way in which I read English.  Furthermore, I can see how the English language is very complex due to the different sounds letters, and combinations of letters make.  For example, knowing the difference between “th” in words like “there” and “with,” what sound does “ph” make, what’s the difference between “read” in the statements “I read” and “she read,” all point to the intricacies of trying to learn and teach SAE.  Plus, when studying Indian English there is the spelling differences between British English and American English: realise versus realize, traveling versus travelling, etc.  These examples plus the examples presented by the other groups make the idea of standardizing written language very appealing.  Yet the differences between written languages are inseparable from the identity of the people writing and speaking them, so it may be best to be able to learn how to read phonetic translations and thus keep the dialectical diversity intact.

            Our classroom discussions and presentations have shown me how part of our jobs as English teachers is to always remember that we are teaching language, and with that it is important to discuss with our students the diversity of all languages and especially the diversity within the English language.  In order to accomplish this it will be important to provide both written and audio examples.  Incorporating a project on dialectical differences (like the one we just did) will help prepare our students to have a better grasp of their dialect and an appreciation of others’ dialects.