Chapter 6 and Common Core

Under College and Career Readiness Anchor Standards for Speaking and Listening for Grades 6-12 it says: Presentation of Knowledge and Ideas
4. Present information, findings, and supporting evidence such that listeners can follow the line of reasoning and the organization, development, and style are appropriate to task, purpose, and audience.
5. Make strategic use of digital media and visual displays of data to express information and enhance understanding of presentations.
6. Adapt speech to a variety of contexts and communicative tasks, demonstrating command of formal English when indicated or appropriate.

If I were to read these points out loud, they would sound different than they do in my head. In chapter 6 of our book, Gee says we "unconsciously use and recognize stress". This is noticed in spoken word but not when I read this passage in my head. It would be rambling and boring if I read aloud the exact way I read it in my head. This is an interesting revelation to me because we are often required to have our students read silently and maybe the stress, tone, and certain emphasis we make on certain syllables is what makes reading aloud more interesting.
If I wanted to take one sentence from the above passage and write it in the "informationally less salient" format Gee uses, I could do so by taking out a few conjuncting words and the sentence would still make sense.
Adapt speech to a variety of contexts and communicative tasks could read...
Adapt speech to variety contexts communicative tasks. We are aware words are missing but can still make sense of the phrase and understand what it means.
When I read these points, I first want to look at what they're actually saying my students should know for speaking and listening standards. This idea is formed by the words on the page making sense in some fashion to me. All the tricks and things that come natural to us mentioned in chapter 6 are how this making sense happens. It's interesting to think many of those things just come natural.

CCR

The first thing my mind sees when thinking about CCR is a problem. That is, by saying our students need to be college and career ready, we are saying every student will fit into one of these. Granted, most students will but what about the peace corps? Does that fall into the career path? What about the student who finishes out their high school summer job for a year but has no intention of working there long term? And most importantly, what about the students who don't know what they want to do after high school yet? This CCR idea causes me some slight anxiety. One thing I would like to help my students with is exploring their options after high school and helping them choose what they may want to do. If they can openly navigate through those big questions, that is one form of "literacy" I would like them to be fluent in.

On the flip side, I think CCR is a valued, reasonable goal for the general population of high school students. I do feel one of our main jobs as teachers is to prepare our students to be involved, successful, fully-functioning members of society and being ready for a career or college is one way to achieve that. This idea seems very generalized rather than specific to each student but for a school as a whole to be successful, this is a reasonable standard.

I would like my students to be literate in many things and I feel like this could be an ever-changing list that I would like to continue to edit. First, I feel acknowledging and embracing diversity in a classroom is a must. If my students can appreciate diversity and not criticize anyone for being different that I would feel successful as a teacher. That ties into my above mentioned idea of preparing students to be successful members of society because diversity is always present in society. I would also like my students to have a good understanding of the literature and material taught in my English classroom, even if it's not being perfect at it. I would like them to be able to always question, especially when reading and to be able to seek answers to those questions the feel they really need answered.

Literacy and being Literate

I have never had this thought before now, due to the way this question was asked. In a way, teachers are the ones who define literacy especially in the classroom. I suppose the whole school board sort of helps start the definition for society since they decide what needs to be taught to make our future society members be literate. When first starting college, I used to think if literacy meaning somebody could read well. Now I know, that is only a very small part of what being literate actually is and it doesn't pertain just to the subject of English. Somebody can be literate in math, science, history and any other subject.

I would venture to say litearacy almost has two definitions. Being able to read, write, and communicate in a language, particularly English is one basic definition of literacy. The second I would say is not just being able to do those things but to comprehend what is actually being done. Therefore understanding what is being read, understanding what is being written and the form of communication will then be understood. Does this mean somebody who can't read is illiterate? I think that would qualify as partially illiterate but I don't think literacy is solely dependent on being able to read therefore I don't think fully illiterate is for people who can't read because they still can communicate.

I work in two medical offices and one of the families that comes in, the mom cannot read. She has 8 kids, 6 of who are adopted and she stays home with them (because logically, what job can you do if you can't read). She of course didn't openly admit it right away. Whenever we would give her the paperwork to be filled out, she'd say "oh my eyes are bad today I can hardly see" and excuses like that. Finally, one  of her children were too young to fill it out and she said would you just ask me the questions and I'll give you the answers for you to write in. I thought, how in the world does this lady function in modern society? I would say she is illiterate because the lines of communication were certainly blocked between the paperwork, her, and us.

I kept thinking about her while writing this post and thinking about what it means to be literate because she is by most definitions illiterate but I don't think she's fully illiterate because I feel some part of literacy is comprehension and communication. Once those questions were asked, she understood and could answer she just couldn't read the questions herself. In general, we would call her illiterate.

One other interesting thought is to consider literacy across a multi lingual perspective. I would certainly be called illiterate by our definitions in Japanese because I have had no exposure to it. I can't even say "hello". It makes me wonder if other countries have the same sort of definition for literacy as we do. If broadening away from just English, I could also say I'm barely literate in math. When thinking this way, it makes me have a little more empathy for the lady who can't read.

Bedtime Stories

I remember my parents reading stories to me but it was more because my sister and I thoroughly enjoyed books. Not because my parents felt reading to us before we could read to ourselves was going to help us succeed in our futures. One thing I thought about while reading this that does pertain to my personal life is when my sister and were younger, we loved to play school. We were constantly recruiting parents, grandparents, cousins, and eventually a little brother to be our students. my parents never formally enforced the importance of school, reading, or books on us and yet we would go to school 8 hours a day and then come home to play school. We also loved working in educational workbooks that my grandma would buy. it was like extra homework but we would work on those for hours. This doesn't pertain to language or English only but more the constructs of school itself in general. When reading this article, I definitely thought beyond just the English classroom to school in general.

Question

One of the questions I had came from the webpage about AAVE. It said that "contact language is developed through processes of second language acquisition." I'm wondering what exactly contact language is. I'm thinking it's like the "bridge language" that can connect the two languages. This web page also mention universal grammar playing a big role in processes and I would like some elaboration on "universal grammar" and how this should pertain to us as teachers because I have never heard this term before. I'm wondering what falls into universal grammar and how we can teach it.

Social Linguistic Divide

I must first admit I was guilty of making the assumption that colored people did not speak "correct" English. I have since learned this is certainly not the case. I've been pondering since we've been talking about A.A.V.E. why I held that assumption and I think it is primarily related to region. I grew up in Montana in a city where we didn't see many colored people at all. Therefore, my exposure was limited. As for keeping that assumption out of the classroom, I think exposing them to it right away can give them awareness. Exposing them to the dialect and letting them know it's accepted and making it clear it's not "bad" English rather just a different form. I do not think we will be able to completely keep the assumptions of society out of our classroom but I do believe we can keep our students well educated. I plan to teach middle school age and I think students are very easily influenced at that age so exposing them right off the bat will be beneficial to them in high school as it won't be a surprise.
I think we are quite ignorant however if we expect our students to speak "standard English" if they are raised with a different dialect. I also feel though that if the student is speaking a completely foreign language we can expect them to speak English. If we English speakers travel to a country where English is not their first language, I would expect to need to learn their language to function in society.

Introduction

I was born and raised in Montana in Helena until I moved in 2007 to come to MSU. I was originally majoring in nursing until I got a taste of an English course and pursued my long ago passion of teaching. This revelation took a year to discover- of course a year after paying for nursing courses. I was home-schooled all through middle school until my senior year of high school when I went to public school full time. I had the reverse experience that most future teachers have. Going to a public high school my senior year was the most disappointing and scary decision I made. I was not impressed academically and certainly did not fit in socially therefore I decided I would like to be a teacher to create my own environment students like me would feel welcome in. Granted, I had some good teachers but overall, it wasn't as good of an experience as home-schooling was. I think education is such a rewarding field and I look forward to helping students become successful in their futures while enjoying language!!!

A True Story

First off, I have never read a story written in almost entirely African American vernacular. One thing that was very dramatic to me is listening to black vernacular I can usually understand but reading it was so much harder to understand. It was like my brain was working twice as hard to gain the concept. This story used a lot of words that were broken off for lack of a better term. All the apostrophe's in the article can attest to that. Many of the words are missing the last letter when written that I don't think is as pronounced and noticable when African American vernacular is heard rather than read. The words used are common usage that would be heard in an everyday conversation. There are no "scholarly" or "big" words. I use those terms loosely only to prove my point about word choice because I don't think you can actually classify words that way.

 I think our society today would say this lady perhaps sounds "uneducated". I am not entirely sure what classifies a person as sounding "uneducated" and this is something I hope to explore further this semester. The social stigmas placed on a person simply because of their use of language is fascinating.

One quote from Mark Twain himself that I found very interesting was, "sobered my manner and my speech". At first I took this to mean he felt like she was "dumbing him down" or that he would need to use smaller words so she would understand. It could mean he felt brought back to reality with her language choice. One thing I would like to explore more is how we classify people based on their use of our language because Mark Twain seemed to subtly classify her.

What English Teachers "Should Teach"

I think as a teacher of English, one of my primary goals will be to assist my students in becoming educated members of our society. It's obvious some sort of language is needed to function in society. I would like to think of English education as a means of achieving that or at least starting on that path. The apparent things such as grammar are clearly important but I think the beauty of English educators is all the other things we get to "play" with. English education has many possibilities for creativity and one thing for us to teach our students is to embrace that creativity. I also think it's important for our students to learn how to write well. IF they can write and read well, they can function in almost any job they chose. Part of our job as educators is to prepare our students for the world outside of school and providing them with the means to achieve their goals.
English teachers should also be able to teach students to creatively think outside the box. I would like my students to challenge their own minds when reading things and in their own writing. I would also like my classroom to feel safe and productive enough that they can provide each other with positive feedback. I do not think our job as English teachers is to simply "teach English". I'm not sure I even know entirely what that would be defined as but I think it's something that is ever-changing and that we all learn as we go.