As a fourth-year college student, you are rarely asked to write about yourself. We know from early education that in grooming people to think alike for a centered, moral, and consistent workforce you must first produce a lot of like-minded people. As an education major, we're taught from our first day to dismiss any idea of what a classroom 'should' look like from our minds. We acknowledge the image below and reflect briefly that a predominantly (...exclusively) white, male, able-bodied classroom is no longer the reality - psych! Contemporary classroom may not look exclusively white but damn, they're so white.
I really love thinking about this idea alongside Hayles' article and the ways we approach a changing field of study. Personally, I don't understand why educators, and/or the systems they occupy, are so reluctant to admit that the ways we educate now vs. then is simply different. I refuse to believe that kids are getting stupider - even though that's exactly what test results are concluding. I think the image above allows us, as readers, to do something more - to me, it allows us to evaluate the idea of productivity and why, to this day, individuality is something feared in these taught spaces. Hayles says, "After more than two decades of symptomatic reading, however, many literary scholars are not finding it a productive practice, perhaps because (like many deconstructive readings), its results have begun to seem formulaic, leading to predictable conclusions rather than compelling insights" (65). I think all these ideas overlap in some ways - teaching reading skills looks different than our ingrained image of education because our students and their needs are different. I recently did a report of education policy changes for a class last semester and through that process of actually reading laws and policy changes decade after decade, I realized that not much has changed. Language changes, quite regularly to apply to the relevant situation and classroom spaces, but the actual content of the policies do not change very much. "No Child Left Behind," the state standard testing incorporated by the Bush administration still exists, it just got a makeover and is now called the "Smarter Balance Tests." The rules are different and the funding is different but the tests themselves are still what they always were - standardized. Now they're online!
Below, I've included a trailer to a fantastic documentary series named, America to Me. While this trailer focuses on the racial inequalities happening in diverse schools it does raise an interesting point, "We're preparing our black students less well to compete with their peers" (w.p.). I think this documentary is one way of looking at the current issue of teaching, in general, the same traditional literary cannon-esk ways to a large body of difference.
Current education classes circulate around the ideas of teaching the skills rather than the content. To a point, this seems like the right way to go. Based on statics and test scores - students aren't reading as much or as well as they did 15 years ago. This is true, but it doesn't mean students got dumb. It means their needs, expectations, and pressures are different then they were 15 years ago and school needs to adjust themselves to fit the current students. We're taught in my own education classes that it's silly to prepare for a hypothetical class you might have - it doesn't matter because the content and the ways you teach that content will change from class to class. If teachers are taught to adjust based on the needs and realities of the studnets then I don't understand why educational systems can't follow the same fluidity. "The crucial questions are these: how to convert the increased digital reading into
increased reading ability and how to make effective bridges between digital readingand the literacy traditionally associated with print" (62).
Wow, way to really dig in deep for this week's blog post! I totally agree with what you're saying about education here. With the changes in how people experience reading and writing, the way we teach those things needs to change as well. If we aren't teaching our future generation to change and adapt with the times, what are we really doing? And to sort of add my own experience into the mix as a non-white person, it's usually something I don't notice a lot. I mean, when I moved to Bozeman I was very aware of how little diversity there was. I come from a town in Washington that is very diverse, a large amount of the people I went to school with were Filipino, Latino or African American. So it is a little weird for me, but it hasn't been something that has held me back - which I am quite fortunate for. I can't really speak to what it's like to be treated differently in a academic setting because of my race, and I can't imagine how disheartening it might be for some young people.
ReplyDeleteCassie
Gorge Carlin once said that the only purpose for the public education system was the to produce units. Initially that was all the public education was good for. Anyone who needed to think like an individual could afford to go to a private school, public school was for farmers and factory workers to learn the basics and go from there. Individuality is a liability on the factory floor. As for falling test scores there is an easy fix for that. Teach every student in America to be test literate. I remember the standardized testing in school. The days before hand were spent just teaching us how to take the tests not anything that was on the test. The government tests never had anything to do with what we were learning other than this is what we were expected to know. I always did pretty good on those tests because they were easy. There is one right answer, a close answer, an obviously wrong answer, and a wild card answer. It was more like playing a game of match then it was comprehending anything and the standardized test days were free form homework so I kind of liked them but I can't see for the life of me what the hell they were doing for me. My scores no matter how good weren't going to raise the average in a thousand+ class and tying funding to test scores makes no sense to begin with.
ReplyDelete-Cory Smith
I like how you open about how in college, us students are rarely asked to write about ourselves. Which is why maybe I have been enjoying this class far more than any of my other writing classes. For me and many other writers, writing is an outlet for our own personal thoughts to reach a wider audience. As you said, "From early education that in grooming people to think alike for a centered, moral, and consistent workforce you must produce a lot of like-mind people", which is why I am so thankful for outlets like this class, so writers can express themselves openly and hear back from the professors and peers.
ReplyDeleteVery interesting take on how you related this to the education system and race. While I believe race is a factor, there are many issues with the current school system that are leaving students of all ethnicities in the dust. I have felt this pressure as someone with a learning disability and has always struggled with both 'standardized tests' & academics. What drives me crazy about the school's function is basically the students who get good grades get elevated with motivation and scholarships, while the students who struggle with school are pretty much left behind, making it difficult for students with learning disabilities, lower incomes, etc. reach the same level as the students who do better at succeeding academically. I was wondering how you would implement and change the school system and adjust teaching styles so everyone gets equal opportunity.