Blog Post 2.5

I found the Mcgee article to be intellectually bankrupt and devoid of any useful insights. On page 9 Mcgee tells us that, “The real purpose of response centered talk is to use children’s responses or ideas as a springboard to reasoning and problem solving”. Reasoning and problem solving are admirable goals to have for teaching students of any age, but response centered talk as it is described in the article won’t contribute to this in the slightest. On page 3 Mcgee tells us that, “fleeting images, feelings, impressions, and thoughts work along with their respective responses to form the reader’s unique and personal understanding of the literary work.” Feelings, impressions, and thoughts are based on nothing. Just because someone feels as though something is true, doesn’t mean that it actually is. Things that are true are testable, conceivable, and arguable. Arguments can be falsified, feelings cannot. The worldview advocated by Mcgee is one where there is no truth, only feelings. On page 5 Mcgee tells us that “Carlos… suggests that her cockscomb could be a spying device. “Although I have not read the book referenced in the article, I can be sure that the idea that the hen had an electronic listening device implanted in her body was completely invented by the student. I am perfectly fine with having a literary text in class where there are different points of view about the motivations of the characters, or why something happened. But to claim that there are no wrong answers so long as you persuade others of what you believe is nonsense. The Almasi article takes a different approach in advocating for a subjective/relativistic view of reading literary texts. Almasi gives us many reasons for why discussions, are better than recitations. These reasons include cognitive, social, and emotional benefits to working with other students. I can see no reason though for why these benefits can’t be realized while still maintaining that the information lies in the text and not the person reading it. In reading a particular text there can be more than one interpretation of what is written, and working collaboratively can help students understand and enjoy the reading more. However, a person’s culture or background, or whatever only acts as a filter through which the information contained within the text is understood. Those characteristics can cause the person to not understand, or misunderstand the text, but no additional information is added to the text based on the reader’s filters. Unfortunately, I have not seen classroom discussions taking place in the classroom I do my service learning in. I would not have response-centered talk as it is described in either of the articles in my classroom, because they both suppose that there is nothing that is objectively true. I do think though that having students learn concepts through the discovery process is a great way for them to learn. As a teacher it will be my job to guide the students in an experiment, or class discussion to learn whatever it is we are studying. Something that is a useful strategy for getting quiet students to participate in class discussions is to have the teacher draw popsicles with the student’s names on them, so that a student could have to respond to something that is said at any time. Students in this system all participate equally, because they all have an equal chance to be called on.

Blog Post 2 1/19

I have noticed that in my fourth grade classroom, the students are writing papers about Black historical figures related to Michigan. They were given articles to read, and then were asked to incorporate the information into the papers. The students were also being taught the importance of introductory sentences in their papers, and how to structure paragraphs. The way this lesson is being taught, seems to be a lesson that combines social studies and language arts. This lesson seems to give the students a brief overview of what happened and what the people went through. It seems like what the Leland article was encouraging teachers to do, was to have students read articles that would illicit an emotional response from the students reading it, so that the students could better relate to what the person in the story went through. While I think that it is important and good for articles to question people’s assumptions and prejudices, the Leland article went too far in the other direction. On page 10 it says, “In an all-white community, it can become ‘normal’ to assume people of color are somehow ‘different’ and maybe even ‘dangerous.’ An example of the dominant discourse” (10). However, the CDC disagrees with the above claim that it is just a dominant discourse with the below link showing the per capita homicide rate among different races of people in this country over the last 20 years. In 2010, the White homicide rate appears to be about 3, and the Black homicide rate appears to be about 30. http://www.cdc.gov/mmwr/preview/mmwrhtml/mm6227a1.htm#fig3

1st Blog Post 1/14/14

Some of my goals for this course is to try to understand what type of learning works best for me and to become familiar with other types of learning that may work best for my students. I understand that everyone has strengths in different areas so I want to be able to incorporate as many different techniques as possible. I hope that this class will help me better understand other techniques I may not be comfortable with in the beginning of this class.

I hope to teach in a community where I can challenge myself as well as my students. In order to achieve this I hope to learn new and different literacy strategies of teaching.  I want to be able to help my students succeed, but challenge them at the same time. I am not the best in logical instruction so if I can better myself in that type of teaching I could help my students who are more skilled in that context.