.::English 3201 @ LSU::.: Inquiry #5: From the Mouths of Babes

Tuesday, November 3, 2009

Inquiry #5: From the Mouths of Babes

In Victoria Purcell-Gates’s article, she acknowledges the fact that children come to school with some sort of “literacy knowledge.” This is something that I do not think occurs to many teachers. They think of the students coming to them as blank canvases or empty shells. However, these children know things or know that they do not know things. The child’s awareness of what he or she does not know can be built on to create new connections and learn more things. However, as each person differs, it may become increasingly difficult to determine just how much students about literacy and to what extent they know it. How should this be done? A diagnostic test perhaps?

2 comments:

Alaina JacobNovember 9, 2009 at 9:16 PM
I'm commenting now :)
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Alaina JacobNovember 9, 2009 at 9:54 PM
Response 5
In Kiki’s inquiry, she notes that the most successful students are the students who know they know information and know that they do not know everything. I believe she is correct in saying so because these students know that to get more knowledge they must learn. These students also have a foundation of learning. Kiki also says that it is becoming difficult to determine a child’s literacy in schools. If a person in going to high school, there should indeed be some kind of testing. This is not to say that a student should be failed or punished for a low literacy, but a teacher should know what level their students are on so that a teacher can better prepare and teach.
In chapter 12, we learned that even students who are some of the better writers could be intimidated to speak in front of a room fearful that they will not speak “correctly”. This crushes me to think that students are afraid to speak because of the way others will judge them, especially when they already have proven themselves as writers. I also felt ashamed as a future teacher to read about the future teachers who said those terrible things about AAVE. They said that Ebonics has absolutely no place in education. I felt sad for those students who do speak their home language as Ebonics because they are being pre-judged by teachers-the people who should be their voice in education.
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important technical notes

...it's a good idea to write your posts in a word processing program (MS Word has a "blog post" template that is ideal) before posting. That will allow you to save your work and avoid the extraordinarily frustrating experience of hitting the wrong key just before publishing a post and losing at all (not that I'veever made such a rookie mistake, of course).

...if you're having trouble posting an inquiry or response, you can print out your paper and bring it to class in order to receive credit. I'll still ask you to post it to the blog once we fix the problem, but that way you'll still receive full credit.

inquiry papers

response guidelines

Your response papers should be in the "comment" section of the inquiry paper to which you are responding.

1) Read a classmate's inquiry paper that has not yet been responded to.

2) Summarize the argument or thesis of the assigned reading.

3) Address your classmate's question(s) using what you've learned from this and other readings. You may not feel confident in your answers; that's okay. Speculate, brainstorm, explore, pose other questions, relate it to your life experience, expand on the stakes of the questions, etc.

.::English 3201 @ LSU::.