Other People's Words: The Cycle of Low Literacy

If Dr. Purcell-Gates did not undertake the task of teaching Jenny and Donny how to read, many people would not know of this "invisible minority." It was certainly news to me. However, it did open my thinking to how children are and/or were traditionally taught using the word recognition view of reading with preconceived notions about what they should know entering kindergarten. My frustration with the education system that Jenny and her son, Donny encountered caused me to wonder how many of the visible minority are experiencing the same dismissiveness in 2011. Although I'm not in a classroom setting yet,this book posed an interesting dilemma. Would I do what was in the best interest of the child, or would I ignore the pleas of a mother and move the child along to make my principal and the school look good on paper? I'm sure teachers today are stuggling with this question and college remedial classes are full of the choices that these professionals have made. How can we as graduate students be different? How can we act as Dr. Purcell-Gates did in discovering how literacy functions in Jenny and Donny's lives and then find ways to make it more accessible to them in the small amount of time we have with students?
This book has allowed me to see literacy from the perspective of the have nots with which I'm unfamiliar. I'm sure there are more. Knowing what their culture is like, investing in finding out what their culture is like can only enhance my ability to teach. It is likely I will come across students of different ethnicities, backgrounds and cultures living in this city. My assumptions about my students cannot be more important than my desire to teach. My desire to get everyone on the same page cannot be more important than the one student that is lagging behind. I do not want to be that teacher who dismisses someone because I think they can't learn or they are too far gone to be helped. After reading this, I'm convinced there needs to be literacy centers outside of a school setting that can help facilitate learning in an enviornment that is non-threating, non-assuming and places an emphasis on the student's progress instead of the institution's status.

Response to Embracing a Multicultural Rhetoric

By embracing a multicultural rhetoric in the universities we embrace the changes that hare happening more rapidly than we ever fathomed. Our schools are no longer populated by monolingual students with knowledge specific to our culture. Our city, in fact our country has taken to heart “give me your tired, poor, your huddled masses yearning to breathe free” found at the base of the Statue of Liberty therefore as educators the author believes we should embrace these changes in our classrooms to make students feel more inclusive, instead of excluded. When we do, we may just open ourselves up to ideas and rhetoric that may have been unfamiliar to us. Whereas public education are concerned with test performances, universities should consider ways in which “students can make connections between home and academy…(as) their experience at the university will be enriched” (26). Thankfully we’re not teaching for any purpose that will deem whether our institution will be said to fail after not meeting a certain set criteria. Therefore when we engage others, without regard to their history, we negate their experience as one that doesn’t matter mainly because they are in America now.

Response to Literacy and Cultural Literacy - E.D. Hirsch

This article was written a few short years after I graduated high school and I had no problem understanding the cultural inferences that were made in the article so I wondered how this idea came about. However, I agree with the author, because some 20 years later with this new generation, the argument is proves to be true. Try talking to a teen about Chernobyl, Mother Theresa or apartheid and you will get this blank look in return. As a mother who has sat in classrooms, attended curriculum night and assisted with homework, I find that educators now focus on the literacy of test taking. That is they teach strategies in how to find the correct answer, how to read for the main idea, etc. I understand the bureaucracy of having children perform well on standardized tests, but I also know how rich their impact could be if cultural literacy was somehow incorporated into the curriculum. Knowing the significance of Lake Placid may not enhance a student’s cognitive abilities but knowing that this is one, if not the only, eastern city to twice host the winter Olympics and the game that was won there might make the student more culturally well rounded.
My initial thought was to say that parents should teach this at home as part of everyday vernacular. Unfortunately, we are living in a world where parents aren’t always home when a child walks in or perhaps cultural literacy hasn’t been impressed upon the adult.

"Writing" and "Chinese Writing" response

I've taken away from these articles an entire new appreciation for language and writing. The adaptation of our little 26 letters from its early Semitic roots amazes me in how compact they were able to develop this system and how efficiently it works for the purpose that our society need. This is not to say that Chinese is inefficient or that it does not satisfy their requirements. On the contrary all the writing systems discussed in the article "Writing" are best suited to their language it serves. Our seemingly simplistic system juxtaposed to the logograhic script of the west seems almost inferior. We can arrange these letters into a multitude of texts that can serve a toddler as easily as it can serve the highbrow. We may not understand the specialized writing for genre specific settings however, it is not beyond our reach to do so. The complexity with which I imagine that can come from learning 4,000 characters in order to be considered literate would be a dauting task for a person like me with no knowledge of the language. Therefore, I wondered how are their children taught. Western cultures will sing the "ABC" song allowing it to become part of a child's oral vocabulary ever before they are ready to learn to hold a pencil. What are the fundamentals, the basics steps taught to the children in logographic systems? Where do they begin?