Moje Article

I will admit that I did not read this entire article AND I missed the day in class where we read it together. BUT, I did glance through it ( a little bit) and found the few snippets I read very interesting, especially the part about the girl, I think Adrianna, who spoke about keeping a diary. I have always kept a diary and have them all archived in a big old green trunk in my room. It’s kind of fun to back and not only see the way I was feeling at the time, something that is difficult to keep a hard copy of in my mind, but also how I have developed as a writer. To be honest, I was kind of good at writing even from a young age, but I can see the ups and downs of my creative side shine through in those pages. Anyways, that’s besides the point. The real point is this: I feel like we underestimate kid’s ability to do ANYTHING. We give them the title of “adolecsent” and for some reason that transpires into this stigma of being incapable of grasping new concepts, concepts that older “adults” are supposed to know. What I believe to be the really problem is this: we don’t believe enough in children’s capability to comprehend things that we, as adults, comprehend and in doing this we don’t challenge our young adults, in school or at home. Why do we, as a culture, have such a fear of what we term “failure”? Some of the best lessons I have learned in my life come from trial and error, failing and then accomplishing. In school, because children are graded on their efforts and because schools (public schools only, of course) gain money based on academic achievements of their students, I feel they learn that to get a bad grade or not really understand all the things they are learning means they are failures. So they either give up entirely or they over-achieve and stress out. The teacher I am observing for informed her class to really think about joining the AP course studies at P.V. high school because they are grueling and a high percentage of students have actually committed suicide over the stress (I think she estimated 1 per year, but who really knows). That’s crazy! High school students killing themselves because they didn’t get a good grade or couldn’t handle the pressure. Beyond it being an incredibly sad statistic, it also throws a question into my head: what is the faculty, and furthermore society, teaching our children to make them feel like messing up is the end of the world?

When it comes to literacy studies, I think this is a subject in school that could be condusive to a child’s coping skills. Maybe coping isn’t the best word. There are so many facets that come with literacy skills, such as critical thinking skills, speech skills, writing skills, social skills, etc., that I believe it to be one of the most important subjects you learn in school. But how do we expand the methods of teaching literacy to reach each individual student? This is a problem that I hope to carry with me into teaching and try to come to some conclusion.