The first thing that popped into my mind when I saw that Mr. Rafe’s 5th grade class was reading Shakespeare’s Hamlet was, “You’ve got to be kidding me.” There’s no way on earth that 5th graders can understand Hamlet. High school kids have a hard enough time with it. College kids have a hard time with it. And you expect 5th graders to not only memorize all the ridiculously complex lines and perform a well-acted play, you actually expect them to understand what they’re saying?! You’re insane. You’re unreasonable. You can’t pull this off.

He pulled it off. And apparently he does it year after year too. Alright, all my aspirations for being a good teacher were just shot down.

I mean, holy shit. That’s what Mr. Rafe mouthed himself when part of the video showed the girl who ended up playing Ophelia read her lines. And that’s exactly what I was thinking in my head. And I don’t swear.

Alright, all interjections aside, I was blown away by what Mr. Rafe was doing with literacy in the 5th grade. I would never have thought it possible that you could get kids that age to read and understand Shakespeare. And the things he was doing with it, with literacy. He was getting kids to think critically about a text. He was getting them to understand it to the point where they could act it out. He was giving them the confidence to do so. He was allowing them to see where a text could take them and what working together looked like. He was inspiring them and empowering them. All from the dark and depressing play Hamlet.

Not only that, but through the video, he allowed me as a future teacher to be inspired. To realize that yes it could be done and that students can achieve so much more than might be expected.

The second thing that really impacted me was his trip to D.C. Every year he would take his kids and literally walk through history. He would make it come alive for them. All of a sudden, the Vietnam War is not just a war read about in their textbooks with no real context or meaning; the Vietnam War is made up of real people and real names that are etched indelibly into that ebony wall. He made them see that and appreciate that, through literacy, and through real-world experience. That’s the best thing a teacher could do, I think. That’s what Moje was talking about when she urges teachers to go beyond the textbooks and get to source material. Make it real for kids so they understand where the textbooks are coming from. So when kids read the words on the Lincoln Memorial, they associate it with the giant statue of Lincoln staring down at them and they connect it with real life, with a real historical figure and a real historical event that can actually mean something to their lives. That’s what a good teacher does. I was blown away. What lucky 5th graders.

I think the most interesting thing that I read for our article groups was Elizabeth Moje’s take on textbooks. Although we didn’t really talk about it in our presentation, I kind of wanted to because it really struck me as such a common sense approach to teaching. In an article by Art Peterson, he sums up Moje’s take on textbooks. “Textbooks…[provide] content area teachers with a vehicle for covering vast amounts of information in short periods of time at the expense of the understanding that makes for true engagement. Moje would replace dependence on a single text with the tools that workers in a scholarly field actually use. Students of history, for instance, would have at their disposal a variety of source documents that would help  them construct their own narrative and understandings.” Because according to an article by Judth Rodby, Moje “argues that students’ understanding of how knowledge is produced in the subject areas as is more important than the knowledge itself.”

Students are routinely asked to memorize dates and events and lists and formulas from textbooks, often with the unfortunate consequence of students asking, “When are we going to use this in real life?” or having them promptly forget the information immediately following a test. The information mandated for them to learn has no value to them. Instead, according to Moje, “Learning must be linked to everyday life.” In the first chapter of the book Education Nation, the author Milton Chen dives right into this idea when he says we need to reshape our very approach to thinking about education. He writes about the simple questions that children ask: “Why is the sky blue?” “Who’s the tallest person in the world?” “How do we talk?” “Why do people get sick?” We never address the simple questions we have that really drive our desire to learn. Instead, “learning” has become this static, boring requirement that has children consequently sitting in a classroom for 7 hours a day, not even addressing the questions that make kids curious to learn in the first place. If we utilized Moje’s approach, with Chen’s ideals in mind, teaching could become much more hands-on and beneficial, not to mention fun. Use more primary source material. Explain why the kids have to learn this, why it’s beneficial, how the people in the field use the information, how they come up with the information, and have them learn what Williams suggested in his article: Learn for what context you are reading and writing, and act accordingly. This is the key to success. And I believe this is the key to interest in learning, because it then becomes beneficial to the kids learning it.

Pretty much my favorite video in the whole world right now is this one. It captures much of the frustrations that I experience with the education system, and I think all its points are spot-on. Kids need to be emotionally involved in school; it needs to be “exciting, challenging, and vivid,” according to Chen, not a place where we anesthetize our kids to try to get them to “focus” in a classroom when we live in such a visual and engaging world that is constantly clamoring for their attention through media and technology. School has become boring. It has lost its ability to teach and has instead adopted a facade of academia through standardized test results. School needs to be about learning again, being a hands-on place where kids can explore the things that make them curious about what they “see, feel, and touch every day” (Chen). So instead of having kids memorize the dates of the American civil war, have them read personal letters, re-enact battles, have them understand how and why the author of a textbook wrote the information they did, and get a deeper understanding and appreciation for a subject that is mandatory. I sure would like school a whole lot better if that’s how it was run.

Another thing that stood out to me was our groups book experiment where we asked everyone to pick a book and then divided them up into genres. I found it interesting, that similar to our infatuation with textbooks, schools also seem to have an infatuation with the classics. I noticed that unless you are the amazing Kim Jaxon and use alternate texts, the only texts lauded in the classroom are the classics. And yet we have 5 out of 6 tables filled with students who would readily read other genres. Are they not beneficial as well? Do they not also have rhetoric and morals and excellent plot lines and twists and every other thing that the classics possess. Granted, some to a lesser extent, but also in some cases to a higher extent. For example, if the rap song “Affirmative Action” could be picked apart by undergrad English majors for its rhetorical devices and complex meanings, then I think that genres other than the classics have something to offer the classroom. And seriously, then we wouldn’t be excluding 5/6 of the people in the class! Imagine that.

So, I am usually not a big fan of studies. It seems to me that they are a bunch of useless results that either people overreact over or no one cares anything about. I admit that’s a bit cynical, and in reality, it’s a tenuously held belief and wouldn’t be strongly defended by myself. However, when I read Just Girls by Margaret J. Finders, I found a study I actually enjoyed reading. Maybe it’s because it rang true for what I remember going through in junior high, or at least a mindset I could relate to. Maybe it was because it related to teaching practices that I could potentially put in to use in the future. Regardless, I enjoyed and appreciated it.

Finders’ describes her purpose as this: “Building on research on gender, socioeconomic class, and literacy, this study carves out how early adolescent girls use literacy in multiple contexts and, in turn, examines how social roles are shaped and mediated by diverse literate practices” (Finders 14).

My junior high experience was generally undramatic and relatively stress-free in terms of social interaction. I know from what I’ve heard in my group that that is not typical. This book definitely gave me a new vantage of the whole experience and the complicated web of pressures that some girls go through. “Students’ performances within the classroom cannot be free from sociopolitical tangles,” she claims (5). This affects what teachers know about teaching, or think they know. Often driven to create a comfort zone for students where they feel free to answer and feel comfortable around each other, teachers “[deny] the power of the peer dynamic” (5). Teachers fail to realize that a comfortable classroom to them does not necessarily take into account the accurate judgements of a student’s peers. In a time of their life where students are redefining themselves and rising into new-found social roles, personal comfort in a classroom is not always an option. In fact, a student might define “comfort” as being acceptable to peers, and not necessarily acceptable to the teacher.

These complexities come into play in Finders’ text as she urges teachers to realize the complex social world that these adolescence live in, not just the academic one. For this reason, I really appreciated Finders’ study. Although I didn’t go through nearly as harrowing a time as some of the described girls, I think everyone can relate to the concept of having peers’ opinions shape who we are even in some small way.

So, as the girls signed yearbooks (or weren’t allowed to) or gratified the bathroom walls or passed secrete notes to each other during class, something we all related to in our group, we easily recognized the stressful (and sometimes fun!) time these girls were going through!