Literacy Response #1

The idea of literacy and living in a literate society is an extremely "loaded" concept. I think for many of us we take our literacies for granted, and this hits home more so when reading through the articles. As a teacher there are so many hats to be worn; but how many of them can we wear successfully? Often I find that one of these hats is as guardian to our students. But very rarely in the readings do we ever hear about the parent or from the parent of students. It seems as though all aspects of a students up bringing is put on our shoulders. But with so many students revolving through our doors how can we help each student equally?
As well one idea that resonated from the readings was the idea of equity...or rather inequity. We live in a classist society, which divides the education that children receive. As society we create cycles in which the lower class is unable to break free from. As the rich get richer, the poor are getting poorer and less educated. As society we see that certain groups of people make up the “underclass” and we know that it is difficult to break the cycle yet we do nothing. The underclass has become a group of exiles which the elite turn a blind eye to or rather believe that the underclass can help themselves, even though the elite have set up “aide” which promotes the illiterate, jobless cycle. This idea of social change is very overwhelming and we switch from hat to hat and try our best to win in the battle ground of education.
Yes, I call it a battle ground because we are in constant crisis. Whether it be fabricated or not we are made to believe that education is constantly at its worst stage yet. Test scores are always declining and we so rarely hear any positives about our educational system. In some ways the fabricated crisis can sometimes drop our spirits and make us feel that we are losing the battle and not making any gains. We often hear about going "back to the basics" but how is this relevant to today? How can we focus on "basics" when our professional development and leadership teams want us to focus on test scores and data walls?
In essence the reading and discussions we had in class made me ask myself more questions. I hope that I am doing the best that I can with the students that sit in their desks in my room each year. And despite the negative tone that this paper may sound like, I do believe we have come along way. There were times when reading when I said to myself "that really happened?" or "thank goodness we still don't do that!" Which made me quite positive as my role as an educator. But it would be interesting to see statistics that are not so outdated. Hopefully, we have come along way from where education was at in the 80's. Although we still have some societal similarities there are also many differences that have arisen with a new generation and differently located youth.