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educate2liberate

This blog explores my experiences as an educator in the INequitable Philadelphia School District. I am a PSD graduate and I teach education with the intent to liberate.
Feb 08, 2010

Elizabethan English and Education for Liberation

RealRenaissance
 

Periodically,  I wonder if I’m going too far in my classroom. I stare at the time line for the core curriculum. I copy down the skills to be taught then I create an excel  spread sheet to  track my progress at teaching those skills and finally I do away with the rest.

You see, I majored in the classics,  so I empathize with the school of teachers who believe that our kids must know the canon—but then I do away with those thoughts too. Last year, many people were incensed when Ackerman compared working in a high needs school to being a  triage doctor-- but to some extent, I actually agree with that assessment. 
The school that I work in is an emergency room. Every day, we bleed students into the   abyss of push outs, juvenile delinquency, and functionally illiterate—those  forgotten until they make the news.  Students leave my school  so often, that it is not peculiar  when a child disappears and never returns. So  yes, I’d say the emergency room analogy was warranted.

For that reason, I strongly believe that  days of spending six weeks on Julius Caesar “because all kids must know it” are over.  It is sardonically ironic that as educators, we often lack the most important facet of learning: reflection.

We educators  must acknowledge that we have failed class after class of students because we decide to be married to the content that we teach and not the skills necessary to produce informed and engaged citizens. Instead, we waste our time struggling over Elizabethan English when many of our kids can’t read contemporary English. Reflection would help us to see that an entire unit on Thoreau may not be  as relevant through our students’ eyes as it is through our own. Reflection would help us to understand, that the same principles and lessons we want our students to learn via Chaucer could be acquired through more  culturally relevant content. Reflection would help us to understand that the behavioral problems we face in our classrooms are a reaction to a lack of engagement that we help foster—with our everyday choices in teaching.  Reflection would force  us to listen to our students.



Posted by: RealRenaissance
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