After reading Christensen’s article, I
became extremely irritated with the concept of teachers whitewashing students (complex sentence: dependent
clause first, followed by a comma and the independent clause to emphasize my
irritation with whitewashing). The idea that it is the teacher’s job to
whitewash the students especially annoyed me. Purposely wanting to diminish
another’s culture is extremely unfair and insensitive to the people within the
culture. Another component in the article that rubbed me the wrong way was when
Christensen stated Spanish speaking has been banned from classrooms across the
country. I never even realized this was an issue or was so common in many
states. Christensen completely understands my perspective regarding me not
noticing the power standard language has. I would not say it was invisible to
me like she said in the article, although I was not as aware of the power of
language until after reading the article. Something I was really curious about
in the article and something I felt was left sort of foggy, was her comment
about needing to teach students why some languages have power and others do
not.
The Tea
party activity we did in class was far more communicative about the issues in
the article. I felt like when I was just reading about the tea party in the
article I did not see the importance as much as I did when we actually
interacted as the people in class. When we actually interacted as the people I
felt as if my classmates and myself were more aware of the struggles each
individual faced throughout their lives. It
truly was touching: hearing stories of the traumatic experiences people
endured, and also the uplifting stories of people persevering (what follows the colon both describes
the trauma the people experienced as well as the strength people embodied). I
felt as if everyone was very sensitive and respectful regarding the stories,
which made the experience that much more insightful.
I feel as if one way teachers can be
more cautious of the dominant language occurring in classrooms, is by being
accepting of students who do have another language that is their first
language. An idea I have as a teacher, is when I find out a student does have another
language as their first language; I will set up a meeting with that individual.
Within this meeting the student and I would create an understanding regarding
the language in order to be on the same page and show the student I respect he
or she and will do whatever I can to make sure the classroom environment will
be as respectful as possible. A challenge, which I feel would be common to have
occurred in the classroom, is when students begin to bully another student
whose first language is not English. This occurred in my classroom once during
my high school experience and my teacher has a conversation with us all and
asked how our ancestors who came to America for the first time felt. Then she
went on saying that everyone has the ability to be judged because of his or her
culture and language, and to respect others the way you would want to be
treated. My teacher was a very respected teacher, and I felt as if the students
really listened to her after this discussion occurred. I really want to teach
an open to discussion-based class. I feel like great ideas and thoughts come
from discussion as long as it is in a controlled and respectful environment.
When researching scenarios and languages,
which have experienced this type of scrutiny, I want to really dive into the
struggles a specific language has endured. I specifically want to research
Pidgin. My family has been vacationing in Hawaii for as long as I can remember
and I want to really delve into their culture. Gaining insight about the
language of Pidgin would be ideal for this project. Regarding this blog, I felt
as if this was the hardest set of patterns to accomplish and work into my
writing. I really had to think about where I wanted to place some of the
patterns of the week and am not sure how well I incorporated the patterns into
my writing, but I tried! I would love to know opinions about whether or not I succeeded
so that way I could fix what is not working in my writing.
I completely agree with the you regarding teachers misguided beliefs that whitewashing students is their job, on top of teaching their lesson for the day. Taking someone's culture away from them through their language is one of the most horrible things I had ever heard. Reading your blog only made it more pronounced and really drove home the die of teaching students without washing away who the student really is. I like that you brought up the idea that Spanish is beginning to become outlawed in some schools to speak. This also came as a surprise to me because of where I come from is so immersed in the Spanish culture it would be impossible to separate the two. I also found it very confusing when Christensen said that certain languages have power while others don't. However, now I think she was speaking from the perspective that some languages are used more, thus are more "powerful" in that sense. It doesn't mean that a language that isn't used a lot isn't important, they are simply two different things entirely. I also very much enjoyed the Tea Party activity as much as you because it allowed us to stop speaking in vague examples and really get to know different people that have suffered through the oppression of their language.
ReplyDeleteI believe that you used the patterns correctly and your sentences for each were correctly constructed. The first pattern you used with the dependent clause works perfectly because you used a dependent clause followed by a comma and then a independent clause. The next pattern you used was the colon which you used to give more detail besides using a list. You used it to give more information about the Tea Party activity and the peoples stories that we learned about.
A place that you could use pattern two in your paper is in this sentence, " I feel as if one way teachers can be more cautious of the dominant language occurring in classrooms, is by being accepting of students who do have another language that is their first language." This sentence while a good thought can be heightened if you use a complex sentence with a relative clause to reinforce actions teachers can take in their own classrooms.
My new sentence, "One way teachers can be more cautious of dominant languages taking over in the classroom, is to be accepting of all students who are linguistically diverse or even students who have another language as their first will feel included."
I really liked how you incorporated the patterns. I wouldn’t have noticed it if wasn’t bolded but I really like how both of the patterns used in the sentences flowed along with the paragraphs they were in. I really liked how you started out with a complex sentence, and it worked well with the material you laid out afterwards. Using the colon was a perfect way to describe the importance of the trauma that was experienced by the students! I also liked how you used personal experience within your blog post. I really like seeing and reading about some personal action good or bad! Good job!
ReplyDeleteYou could also have used the colon when describing what your teacher did and the actions that they took with your fellow students :)