It has been quite a while since I have jotted down my thoughts on the plight of our young people in schools in the United States. I guess there are not too many people interested in this sort of thing, but I sincerely would like to see that change. I became more aware of how negative mindsets can affect our students through an incredible gentleman by the name of H Richard Milner IV. He wrote about the effect that color blindness on the part of teachers could create animosity in classrooms that could not be educated away.
I genuinely believe that any student I have in my classroom for ESL intervention is the smartest kid in the school. Even if I have twenty at the same time, each one is the smartest kid there. I am tough on them in my own way. They know that I expect them to excel, to speak, to write, to advocate for themselves and their peers. I do my best to cultivate their voices, their interests and their confidence. I am sure to others observing, I am not teaching anything at all some days. But if you ask my students, I am 100% certain that they would disagree.
In a program that I teach after school for several low-level English learners, I teach a concept from the students' content area and ask them to analyze the idea and tell me what they know. They tell me that they cannot remember what I told them. Last class we were reviewing for a re-test in World History and they could not recall how conditions were on the slave ships in the Middle Passage. I rebuked them for being small-minded and only trying to spit out what I had taught them. I encouraged them to think, to be one of those young men cloven from their land, their families, their languages, their livelihoods. I could not even keep them quiet after that. The words, phrases, ideas and conclusions came pouring out faster than I could note them on the board. I am certain that they will not leave that question blank a second time on a test.
In schools, there is a push toward cooperative education, as I have noted (ad nauseam) in previous posts. The problem with this is that our students have grown up with a banking system of education and do not know the rules of this new game. When we are used to just spitting out facts and figures, and someone asks us our opinion, or to analyze why something is how it is, we simply do not know how to proceed. Learners need to be taught how to analyze, how to form educated and sound opinions, how to debate the strengths and weaknesses of certain options that are open to them. I have always been a Socratic teacher. Of course, I was one of those students that a teacher would have hated to have. I found every error in every textbook, every logical flaw and every needle in a haystack. Unfortunately, my sons inherited that aspect of my brain and my character, which makes them also very trying students for their teachers. I am glad and proud that they have such strong opinions and can argue the merits of what they believe in, but it is heartbreaking to see them fail at school because they are not being asked to analyze, create or engage, but just spit out facts. It is a very hard sell for my kids to call what happens in their school each day education. They tell me on a daily basis that they are not learning anything, that they are bored and angry at having to attend a place where they already know the facts and figures that are being roughly related to them.
I cannot believe that the academic failure of my own sons in a banking system of education is an isolated event. Of course, no one at the school will recognize that they need to be challenged and allowed to use their voice because that would be contrary to what the school believes. I am, of course, seen as an overly permissive parent who does not control her children. It is very disconcerting to think that my own children are seen as problematic simply because they analyze everything around them every waking moment. Isn't that what a kid needs to do to mature? My own kids tell me that they think I have raised them incorrectly. they want to both stand out and fit in simultaneously, and the middle school years were miserable for me as well, for exactly the same reasons, though they could never see that commonality.
I am sure that there are other parents in the United States that are aware that their kids are not being well-prepared, or even adequately prepared for an increasingly global economy and work force that is growing day to day. I have not met any in my local context and even the parents of my students believe that preparing their children to be leaders is not a necessary part of their education. The parents want their children to be invisible and quiet adults who will not bring attention to themselves or their plight. I wholeheartedly disagree. I know that we should be educating every single child in our classrooms to be a leader, whether he is from the poorest neighborhood, is an immigrant with limited English or is a child from an affluent family in another town. Each of them has his own voice...and who is to say that my limited English proficient students are not the smartest kids in school?
Paolo Freire is alive and well. What I would not do to be able to have a conversation with that man and tell him how he has truly changed my life. I will be presenting a paper at a conference next month, a conference of Freirean educators in California. I am nervous about the actual presentation, but I am so excited to meet people who are as passionate about helping students shape their worldviews with language and literacy! I am sure that I will see Paolo Freire over in a corner eating barbacoa.
