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.