Feed is now one of my new favorite books. I don’t care that it is an adolescent novel! I think it speaks volumes about what our future could look like if we that live in the core (not those who live in the periphery) continue to live as we do now. In America at least, our consumerism and greed has overtaken our endeavors in life and our measurement of success. The capitalist economy has created an apathetic attitude towards anything lying outside of individual self benefit. I could go on and on but I loved this book because of the ideas expressed in it, and I always am a sucker for a love story. I also like sci-fi thrillers if they’re not too weird. It’s funny because I always try to make predictions for what the future will be like and what technology will bring us – one of the ideas I had before this book was that instead of iPods, we will have a chip in our head that whenever we think it will just play a song. And Feed definitely took that to a whole other level! I picked the Group 3 dystopia theme because I love books like this. I could definitely see myself teaching this in my classroom.
Webb’s chapter about Huck Finn definitely challenges any plans I had to teach that novel. It is one of my favorites and I would love to teach it, but I feel like I would be throwing myself into the middle of a hot debate by doing so. However, it presented a solid argument for why Huck Finn is racially inappropriate, and it made me see a side of it I’d never seen before. However, I still don’t see the novel as negative because while it is showing a depiction of Jim as a uneducated black man who is surrounded by the white people who betray him, I still look at the book in its historical context and I think that it is not condemning black people to this image but I think rather “exposes injustice” about attitudes toward the African population during the time period. I also wish to point out that throughout all this the book is about more than race: it is a coming of age story which shows what Southern culture was like in the early twentieth century.
The NCTE article, however, made a very good argument as well and took the other side. It makes bold statements like the one saying that teachers who only use bland, “safe” pieces of literature are “lying to their students about the nature and condition of mankind.” Besides showing how censorship has had harmful repercussions throughout history, it mentioned a lot of things I found generally interesting as a teacher. One instance is when the article mentions how John Knowles’ A Separate Peace is a good choice to teach because the book has received wide critical recognition, partly “because it is relatively short and will keep the attention of many slow readers, and partly because it has proved popular with many students of widely differing abilities.”
When I read about Carole Marlowe being fired for using a certain text even though it was approved for the classroom, I instantly thought of a documentary I watched where college professors were fired for including any suggestions of intelligent design in their lessons, theses, etc. Noll writes on the practice of experienced teachers guiding novice ones on what literature to use, “They have become keenly aware of their own precarious positions in the school and recognize that fighting for the right to teach certain literature could cost them their jobs” (60). I think it shows that we as teachers are only valued so far as we teach to the school and state standards, to what is PC; it is amazing that a teacher would be fired due to an ignorant comment made by an unnamed parent who had never even read the disputed book. I think there is a difference between when students oppose a book being taught and when parents step in whose views are threatened. The NCTE statement says that protests also derive from outside groups as well as instructors themselves. The point is that students need exposure to conflicting viewpoints and debatable topics in order to form their own opinions about the way they see the world. Keeping uncomfortable topics away from children only hinder them from realizing the truths about history, culture, society and so much more.
Tuesday, October 25, 2011
Tuesday, October 11, 2011
More on Literature Circles
Reading these chapters opened up to me the options a teacher has with LCs. If I do choose to use this method in my classroom (which is pretty likely) I would probably use them a couple of times a year intermittently, but not all the time. The roles seem like a good idea to start off with, because I do worry with this method that students will not vocalize as much as they'd be expected to, especially with those students that are not "readers." I would probably use the roles as journal prompts in order to eventually assimilate the students into free writing journal entries. The book talks about teachers who are too interruptive and try to control the discussions too much. Again, I think a little more teacher facilitation at the beginning of the process would be helpful, but out of place once the students got the hang of things. I also found a lot of the general tips for up-and-coming teachers really helpful. For instance, Daniels gave the listing of favorite Lit Circle books in Appendix C, the listing of peer reviewed journals and the methods for building one's classroom library in order to show us what we will be dealing with once we get in the classroom.
However, I found it interesting that in Nancy Steineke's section, she said that groups need to mix it up so that they don't fall into the same ruts. Somehow I don't think students would do this on their own, so there would probably need to be days when the teacher says, "Today, do this first..." or "Consider this in your discussions." I also wanted to point out Sharon Weiner's observation: "Too many of my kids were unwilling to trust their own responses - they far too often wanted to know what the 'official' interpretation of an event or character was or what I (the allegedly infallible teacher) thought the story 'meant'" (Daniels 172). I feel like I always was, and to a degree, still am that student. I always think back to the first time I read "Metaphors" by Sylvia Plath in my AP English class. When the teacher announced that it was about a pregnant woman, all the other students agreed that's what they thought it was about. But I didn't get that at all out of the poem, and it seems like I never seemed to get that "accepted" meaning everyone else understood. So in this way I can identify with the suggestion that students should not be told the accepted interpretations of a work, but instead discover what their experiences lead them to believe about it. Maybe once students are done hashing out their viewpoints they can be told, but they need to understand that it's not always about seeing what everyone else sees. In fact, a perspective that strays from the everyday is what is truly valuable in my eyes.
However, I found it interesting that in Nancy Steineke's section, she said that groups need to mix it up so that they don't fall into the same ruts. Somehow I don't think students would do this on their own, so there would probably need to be days when the teacher says, "Today, do this first..." or "Consider this in your discussions." I also wanted to point out Sharon Weiner's observation: "Too many of my kids were unwilling to trust their own responses - they far too often wanted to know what the 'official' interpretation of an event or character was or what I (the allegedly infallible teacher) thought the story 'meant'" (Daniels 172). I feel like I always was, and to a degree, still am that student. I always think back to the first time I read "Metaphors" by Sylvia Plath in my AP English class. When the teacher announced that it was about a pregnant woman, all the other students agreed that's what they thought it was about. But I didn't get that at all out of the poem, and it seems like I never seemed to get that "accepted" meaning everyone else understood. So in this way I can identify with the suggestion that students should not be told the accepted interpretations of a work, but instead discover what their experiences lead them to believe about it. Maybe once students are done hashing out their viewpoints they can be told, but they need to understand that it's not always about seeing what everyone else sees. In fact, a perspective that strays from the everyday is what is truly valuable in my eyes.
Sunday, October 9, 2011
Literature Circles, Linguistics and Tracking, Oh My!
Starting with the Literature Circles readings, Daniels sheds new light on an age old concept: the book club. When he talks about using this concept to get students reading who normally wouldn't, for some reason it made me think of the movie Mean Girls where Kady is made to join the Mathletes because her grades are so bad. While the circles are a great idea to get students who are lethargic about literature motivated, you don't want to make it a punishment. How to do this? Expanding lit circles into your classroom gets everybody doing it. It may be a little scary as a teacher to allow so much free discussion based on reader response, but Daniels seems to have this practice down to a science so that it is done right. I also like how Daniels says that we need to keep these groups permanent, though members will be mixed up according to what book they choose.
After reading "Untracking Students" I started thinking about the pros and cons to tracking. Basically, I concluded, that tracking is beneficial because students' learning styles can be identified and they can be placed where they are getting the specific attention they need. Tracking is disadvantageous because it labels students and segregates them. Christensen notes that "the notion of great differences in student capacity is false" (171). Students "come with different sets of skills, but not necessarily different sets of intellectual capacities" (172). I used to think that all types of students were being put in the general education classes just to save money in school districts. Even so, this can be a great thing as longs as every student still has his or her individual learning needs met as fully as possible. Daniels offers LCs as a method of detracking because it creates a diverse, yet "heterogeneous" learning environment where these different personalities and "sets of skills" come together.
"When more attention is paid to the way something is written or said than to what is said, students' words and thoughts become devalued" (Christensen 101). This sentence really seemed to sum up the article for me and got me thinking about my place in the argument. Honestly, it is hard for someone like me who plans to teach the importance of grammar, syntax, etc. to read that maybe it is not so important, especially when I already can already feel these lessons slipping out of classrooms. In a txt msg world where proper English seems to have less meaning every day, I must say I don't think we need to put less importance on liguistics to put more emphasis on student voice. If we help students realize their opinions are important by demonstrating this on a daily basis, a grammar lesson is never out of place. I believe that since their opinions are valued, it is their right to be taught how to communicate them correctly.
After reading "Untracking Students" I started thinking about the pros and cons to tracking. Basically, I concluded, that tracking is beneficial because students' learning styles can be identified and they can be placed where they are getting the specific attention they need. Tracking is disadvantageous because it labels students and segregates them. Christensen notes that "the notion of great differences in student capacity is false" (171). Students "come with different sets of skills, but not necessarily different sets of intellectual capacities" (172). I used to think that all types of students were being put in the general education classes just to save money in school districts. Even so, this can be a great thing as longs as every student still has his or her individual learning needs met as fully as possible. Daniels offers LCs as a method of detracking because it creates a diverse, yet "heterogeneous" learning environment where these different personalities and "sets of skills" come together.
"When more attention is paid to the way something is written or said than to what is said, students' words and thoughts become devalued" (Christensen 101). This sentence really seemed to sum up the article for me and got me thinking about my place in the argument. Honestly, it is hard for someone like me who plans to teach the importance of grammar, syntax, etc. to read that maybe it is not so important, especially when I already can already feel these lessons slipping out of classrooms. In a txt msg world where proper English seems to have less meaning every day, I must say I don't think we need to put less importance on liguistics to put more emphasis on student voice. If we help students realize their opinions are important by demonstrating this on a daily basis, a grammar lesson is never out of place. I believe that since their opinions are valued, it is their right to be taught how to communicate them correctly.
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