Throughout this entire semester, while we’ve been trying to form a definition of literacy, I have been trying to remember my first memories of reading and hearing my parents and being exposed to books; really all of the scenes that we have heard people recounting. I can’t remember any of it. I know my parents exposed me to books; I have the books to prove it. But I don’t know what they did before I was old enough to form memories. For some reason this bugs me. I want to know because I want to know what I should do with my children or how to approach that with my children. While I don’t need to know how my parents did it to teach my kids, I feel like that would be valuable information to have.
I also spent most of my time in this class trying to think of how I would approach these things with my kids. Would I try to teach them their letters and how to write their name and how to read before they started school? If so, before kindergarten or preschool? There is no solid answer to these questions and this causes me some anxiety because I want to know what to do—I want to be given directions. I don’t want to just do that I think would be best and then see how my kids end up doing, that’s too unpredictable. I’ve seen too many preschool children years behind their peers to leave my children’s reading and writing skills up to chance.
I think my time in this class has taught me that to be a great teacher, I need to take every circumstance into account. If one of my high schoolers is a few reading levels behind or struggles with writing, I need to not assume that they are slow or not doing their homework but that there are these developmental circumstances that may be affecting them. I need to consider these things and build a plan for their improvement around those circumstances. I need to be careful not to make snap judgments. That is the biggest lesson that I have learned in this class, and I really appreciate that.
In some ways, the amount of circumstances we need to take into account makes me hopeless about my ability to be effective as a teacher. For all of things I can provide–focused attention, encouragement, a supportive environment–it doesn’t seem to be enough to contend with the situations outside of my classroom that I can do little if anything to control.
I’d like to think I can be a Freedom Writers type of teacher that inspires all my students to rise above the struggles of their personal lives and the residual effects of a poor education system, but as hard as I try, there will be students I will be unable to help.
I know it’s not completely up to me as an individual to “fix” a child’s life, but success as a student depends on that child’s access to support and resources during the times I can’t provide them. It’s a paralyzing idea–we bill education as a way for students of difficult backgrounds to transcend their circumstances, but they need to transcend their circumstances to do well in school.