January 17th Readings

Overall I found the readings for this day to be useful, but in general for me they were a lot of information that I have learned before, just restated.

The first article that I read was the Gibbons article involving teaching ELLs. I am a TESOL minor, so a lot of the information given was not new, but it was helpful to reread it. I think it's extremely important for teachers to understand that as the article said, even though a student may appear proficient in English in a social setting, that does not always necessarily translate over to an academic fluency. It's difficult to assess fluency completely, and often times I think that ESL students who perform poorly academically are labeled as unintelligent since the teacher may not recognize that social English fluency does not mean academic English fluency. Though not directly correlated, in my TE494 class we just learned about assessments and how important it is to offer a wide variety of assessments to students to truly find out their level of language; a student may be able to ace a written exam, but may fail an oral one, or vice versa. Being fluent in a language involves many components and it's not black and white at all teaching ELLs, or any second language.

Tieing into the idea of teaching students in a variety of ways the Tompkins article was a good refresher on the wide variety of learners and teaching strategies/ideas. There are so many theories out there about how students learn, and from what I've seen I don't think that any of them are right or wrong in general; every student is different and unique and will respond to each strategy accordingly. If used correctly each strategy can be used to really help the student to learn and grow.

One section of the Tompkins article that was brought up that I always personally have an internal battle about was the "Students Use Literacy to Challenge Injustices and Inequities" section. I know it's extremely important to address topics such as these since children are part of real life and real life is quite unpleasant at times, but I always find myself having an internal dialogue about when and how to approach these topics. My favorite thing about children is their innocence, and I worry that by presenting tough dialogue to them too soon that may be taking it away from them before necessary. For example, the book they suggested about the black and white soldiers to me seemed that if presented too early it might be presenting children to a problem they may not even know exist yet involving inequality and racial tensions. On the other hand though, if you don't present them with these things early enough it's a serious question of who will be beating you to the presentation and in what manner will they learn about it?