Point A to Point Anything

What I can honestly say about literacy and teaching, is that it is not even across the board. This is not how I would normally start a post but I think what must be discussed and understood immediately is that not everyone’s experiences are exactly the same.

Hello, my name is William Cervantes, and this is Dateline. Sike.

But seriously, what’s the deal with literacy? It’s like one minute I read and understand “Green Eggs and Ham” and the next they hand me Shakespeare. Sorry for the Seinfeld; I’ve been working on Aiping’s final term paper for the last week and have almost lost my mind.

Now, to the topic at hand. What I know about literacy is that we are not all equal. Standards and suppositions of the learned knowledge only further divide those within society who discover that they are not on the same “level” as those who have met the requirements. This is assuming that the world only looks at numbers and statistics as opposed to actual students; and it does. Is this fair? No, not particularly, but it is what we have grown accustom to. But again, this begs the question: why are we not all equal? Well, in my humble opinion, it is because we fail to look past the numbers and into the customs of each individual. What one person finds important, the next person may not and this has a damaging affect on students. As I said before, we’ve grown accustom to the way of the world of education and because of this, we continue to add to the divide.

Students need help; not just in an educational institution, but also as being seen as an individual. Some argue that this would be better accomplished with smaller class sizes; maybe. But what really needs to happen is the world needs to help children ask the right questions when they have them, to approach things with an outside-of-the-box mentality, and to no longer believe in the idea of “pass-fail” but rather “trial and error”. We have a tendency to get stuck in the belief that a person must get the right answer or they’re wrong, and once they have the right answer they will then have the knowledge of the question asked. But if I wanted to find out what quantum physics was, I could go to Wikipedia, memorize the opening lines, and walk into a conversation and talk about it. Does that make me literate in quantum physics? No, it means I found a way around the system to appear as those I knew what I was talking about. The same can be said for a student who guesses a multiple choice question’s answer correctly. They didn’t have the knowledge of how to answer the question, but rather how the system works.

I feel like I keep going on tangents. Anyway, what I know about teaching is that there is always more work to be done. What I know about literacy is that there is always going to be a divide until we can tell ourselves that the individual is just as important as the whole.

I found it increasingly exciting at my placement at Chico High when I would walk into the room, week in and week out, and find every English teacher sitting in a room collaborating on how best to teach the students certain things that week. I found it amazing that they were still asking the questions we have as students, such as, “Why is there such a divide in knowledge?” and “How can I get them to understand this?” The fact of the matter is that we are still a work in progress, but for how much longer can we subject our children to being the experiment we wish to find an answer to? We need them to engage us, not the other way around. We need them to want to learn as badly as we want them to learn. We need to push past the ignorance of individual lifestyles being the end-all-be-all of learning, and show that each child, regardless of how they were brought up, has meaning, purpose and an innate desire to knowledge; we need to break down the walls of what it means to be literate and build a bridge with the pieces from our Point A to a child’s Point Anything.

I’m sorry if this was completely wrong, and not the assignment, but this is what I know.