Following your bliss

Because my educational theory essays are at home and I am at the campus currently, I cannot expand on what I have written so far on the cultural competency prompts. Therefore, I'll return to the question of the writer and the educator as well as the question of a possible undergraduate thesis in the coming future.

By far, my literary theory class has been my favorite class of the semester. I reserve that judgment for the end of the semester, based on a large set of criteria that I use to assess each of the classes I have taken. This semester I have four classes amounting to sixteen credit hours worth of work -- Schooling in a Democratic Society, Introduction to Literary Analysis II, Creative Writing, and Zen and the Literary Experience. Each of my classes have been good classes, thanks to some good luck on my part in choosing good professors.

I take nothing away from my education class. The professor is an excellent professor, shares the liberal view of teaching that I have and has presented me with fascinating material that has both challenged and inspired me. Nor do I take away from my Creative Writing or Zen class either, as both have also challenged and inspired me.

Let me diverge then, on to what makes my Literary Analysis II class slightly more enjoyable than the rest. Both professors of my education class and theory class present the material in a passionate manner. I enjoy theoretical essays and material, therefore, I enjoy the material equally in both classes. Both professors are excellent as well, and then I think the differences come down to the atmosphere of the class created by the students taking the class.

In my education class, I'm the black sheep of the room so to speak. Out of twenty-two students, I'm the only male in the class. In addition to this, I'm one of only three secondary education majors. Writing and Reading are my strong suits, and as I can tell, not everyone in the room shares that same passion. The enthusiasm is strong, yet not as strong as my theory class, where 100% of the students sitting in the room are English majors, a good portion of them are also Secondary Education majors, and many of them are intristically interested in the material being presented.

Difference is important in a classroom, but so are shared interests and passions. There isn't a focus on group work in my theory class and there doesn't need to be a focus on it, because during class discussions, everyone participates. My professor for that class often says that our discussions in class are like a collaborative classroom consciousness writing a paper.

I've learned much from all of my classes this semester. In fact, today I mentioned a connection in my theory class that I made between John Dewey and post-colonialism. Though my theory professor wasn't well read in John Dewey's work enough to validate the connection, I feel that my teachers and professors have groomed me to the point where I can validate that connection on my own two feet. Should I choose to work on an undergraduate thesis through the departmental honor's program here at the college, I'll have to make a tough choice on what to write it on and who to work under while I write it. Since my American Literature class for the Fall is already full, I'm also faced with the choice of either taking Shakespeare and the Tragedies, or burning my only elective to continue studying under my theory professor in his Film and Dystopian Literature theory class. After talking with him after class, his only advice was to search within myself, find my desire and pursue it. I think that is good advice, and drawing upon it further, I'd like to quote Joseph Campbell -- "Follow your bliss."

The price of late night working

So, I missed my lectures again today. In the past two weeks, I've missed two lectures in my education class and was an hour late to another one. Since I only get four lectures in that two week period, I'm practicing poor reliability at the price of getting my writing and reading done. Because the only time of the week that is enjoyable for me are my lectures, I've been absolutely miserable. Doing the work is pointless when you aren't in class to share it, being in class is pointless when you have no work to share. It is equally pointless when you have partial work to share, because it is unfinished.

Some say I'm a workaholic and an overachiever. Those statements are rightly justified in my words and actions in my life. Some also say I'm a hypocrite. I'm the first person to say that I wish we could throw grades out of the book, yet at this time of the year, I find myself attached to the outcome of my grades at the end of the semester. To respond to the latter, I do wish that there wasn't so much pressure on the outcome of grades and test scores, because I know what kind of torment I go through as a student trying to achieve something outside my grasp. It isn't so much hypocritical as it is practical experience in knowing that teachers need a way to assess students at the end of a semester, and that not just myself, but others are attached to that outcome. My belief is that culture has had an influence in shaping those feelings and sentiments.

I'll be back sometime soon (Within the next day or so) to continue on with prompt 3 and Lisa Delpit. It'll be soon, because with the semester compressing down on me, I don't have much time to get it done.

Before prompt 3

Before I expand on the third cultural competency prompt, I need to take the moment to respond to each of my peers blogs. My responses will only be 300 to 400 words each (And I'm holding to this. My apologies for the longer Dewey entry, but he is a very dense theorist), so I am expecting this to take a couple of hours. When I return from blog surfing, I will explore the third prompt in relation to Lisa Delpit's "The Silenced Dialogue."

Honors?

Before moving on to Lisa Delpit and my third prompt, I'd like to give my audience another glimpse into the internal writer/educator conflict brewing within me. At this point in my college career, I'm beginning to get comfortable at my new college, and with that comfort comes choices. I've been considering doing an honors program here at this college, since I completed three honors programs at my previous community college. However, I'd like to point out that this motivation for taking up honors is not driven by my open agenda of becoming a future educator. It has nothing to do with padding my resume with dozens of academic accolades; that has nothing to do, in my opinion, with practical experience gained in the field of pedagogy.

Rather, this intuitive motivation to take up an honors project here has to do with my hidden agenda at the college -- the agenda of becoming a published author at some point in my life. It is an agenda I keep well hidden from most of my peers in class, and I'm willing to share it here because everyone has a hidden agenda, including educators.

Why do I write? It is not only a valid question to ask, but a crucial one as well. Is there some dark part of my ego that can only be satisfied by the fleeting satisfaction that one has in the moments just prior to finishing a good piece of work? Maybe I have something to say, or maybe there is something to be said (Fitzgerald would agree with the latter over the former). What matters more to be as a future secondary educator, the content of what I teach, or the vehicle in which it will be delivered? I get the sense that many of my classmates in my education class do not have such a conflict, perhaps that is because many of them will be elementary education teachers. But it is a question that holds important truths for the secondary teacher, because they pick a subject to specialize in. The love of English and of pedagogy are both strong in me, and there are moments of great collaboration between the two, but there is no denying it -- they are both vying for a special place in my heart.

Prompt 2 - Theorist connection - John Dewey

Here, I will explore the seventh chapter of John Dewey's classic "Democracy in Education."

The chapter is titled "The democratic conception in education" and it is a very dense body of work. Therefore, I will cover only a few specific quotations from this piece of work thoroughly and weave them in with my experience I have had in the classroom. I encourage readers who are more interested in the work to check it out from a public library or purchase it online, because frankly, an entire course could be spent on this theorist and still only skim the surface of what this man has to say.

Let us begin from the very beginning of the chapter with the following passage: "To say that education is a social function, securing direction and development in the immature through their participation in the life of the group to which they belong, is to say in effect that education will vary with the quality of life which prevails in a group. Particularly is it true that a society which not only changes but-which has the ideal of such change as will improve it, will have different standards and methods of education from one which aims simply at the perpetuation of its own customs" (Dewey, 1).

Here, I will return to culture in a classroom. There are ethnic cultures in my classroom, yes this is true, but at some point, I will engender in the entry. First, I'd like to mention that there are both Latino-American and African-American students in my class. Both bring with them a different ethnic heritage, yet our society as lumped them into a labeled category, the category of "minority." Here, in this classroom, that label is turned upside down; white is the minority here. I think that both the Latino and African students have a unique opportunity to connect however, within the commonality of being apart of the same labeled group, with differing cultural heritages. Because my middle school is an inner city school, it also has a different budget than that of a suburban school. Economics is another shared culture within this space and because of that, I think every student in my classroom as the potential to realize "The American Dream." They have the capacity to become aware of their position, and when that happens, they can realize the ideals that Dewey is speaking of. The direction of their lives can change if they come to the realization that they see difference and want difference, rather than the perpetuation isolated poverty.

The second passage which I will examine from Dewey is "the terms society, community, are thus ambiguous. They have both a eulogistic or normative sense, and a descriptive sense; a meaning de jure and a meaning de facto" (Dewey, 2). Dewey I think is making a clear and important point here -- that the term society, community, and I would also add in culture, are ambiguous in nature. They are broad terms that do not really say anything but rather encompass deeper subjects. When I noticed one of the girls in my classroom I am working in fixing her hair, and putting makeup on during class rather than paying attention to instruction, I came to the realization that she is apart of more than one culture. She has an ethnic culture, but she also has a culture as a female. I also noticed how much pressure that the larger society of America has put on the culture of being a woman. The feminist culture has secure, in a large part, the de jure notion of a woman being equal to a man in law. For those unfamiliar with de jure, and de facto, I will define them. De jure is in concordance with the givens of law, while de facto is in concordance with the givens of the way things are. Though I know that women have fought hard and gained many rights equal to that of men, I would argue that the presence of the stereotype in the mass media of "pretty" women, that women are being objectified in a de facto sense. My feeling on this subject is that the presence of such pressure on young women in public school is distorting and stagnating their potential growth.

Lastly, I'd like to cover one more passage from Dewey: "In order to have a large number of values in common, all the members of the group must have an equable opportunity to receive and to take from others. There must be a large variety of shared undertakings and experiences. Otherwise, the influences which educate some into masters, educate others into slaves" (Dewey, 3). On the wall of my teachers classroom are her four principles of pedagogy, which end with participation. Her focus on developing the voices of her students in commendable, because each of the students need to be comfortable with their own voice in order to engage in meaningful narratives with those who are different from themselves. Diversity in a classroom is one thing, and it is one challenge. However, there is yet another challenge beyond that, which is the challenge of getting student who are different from one another "to receive and take from" one another. Everyone deserves an equitable shot, and that shot is taken away if a student never speaks up or raises their hand in class. It is an easy, unconscious trap to fall into, but the stakes here are high. The students that don't speak need to learn to develop their voices, to consider their audiences, and to teach and learn from one another. What one student struggles with, another student may not. These opportunities are special chances that don't come along everyday, and when they arise, they should be taken advantage of. There is only the fear of uncertainty prevailing in the heart of humankind, the uncertainty of not knowing. When the greater degree of diversity is achieved in public schools, so will the degree of the fear of the unknown decrease.

Prompt 2 - Cultural Capital

Because I am working at an inner city middle school this semester, I have had the opportunity to work with students from many distinct and diverse sociocultural backgrounds. Rather than make assumptions based on my observations, I’d like to take this opportunity to use some statistics from a reputable information gathering website (For the privacy of my middle school, I will not post the exact web address. It is produced by the Center for School Improvement and Educational Policy in partnership with a state university).

Approximately 74% of the students at my school are eligible for free or reduced lunches, 48% are Hispanic, 22% are African-American, 21% are White, and 9% are Asian. From this data, I can shatter the first assumption that the public has about inner city schools: they aren’t always filled with students from African-American ethnicity. It might not be the ideal diversity mosaic with 48% being Hispanic, but it is a far cry from the middle school that I attended which has a student body made up of 98% White students.

What kind of cultural capital does one gain by providing a cultural mosaic for students to be a part of during the educational process? This is a loaded question in the field of pedagogy, with many interpretations and feelings surrounding it. First, I’d like to define by what I mean by the term “cultural capital.” By cultural capital, I’m referring to the metaphorical spending power that an ethnic heritage has within a society. But that definition in and of itself I feel is too narrow; let us not look just at the race and ethnicity of the students but also their social class, their gender, their sexual orientation, their religion and faith, their physical and mental abilities or disabilities. Cultural in contemporary society is a broad term, and therefore, should be handled with delicacy as to not fall into the trap that culture is something that can be immediately seen at the first glance of a person.

The first, and maybe most straightforward benefit (or disadvantage, depending on a persons view point) is the diverse linguistics that a cultural mosaic can provide. One war happening right now in the field of pedagogy is the debate over whether or not classrooms should be “English Only.” I happen to believe that if critical thinking has been developed in a student, then it does not matter what language the skill has been developed in – it can be transferred over to English. Notice that I don’t say that our cultural doesn’t need English (I’d be crazy to say that as an English major), but that other languages can be just as beautiful as English, and that language is a corner stone of a persons ethnic heritage.

Secondly, a diverse classroom setting allows students to see difference in a positive light. Students can either be fascinated by difference or live in an alienated fear of it and public school helps to shape these views. At no point should it be made invisible, nor should it be made to seem inferior either. Difference is the term where I turn culture up on to its head for some readers, so to be explicit, I mean difference in every possible sense of the word: students need to be made aware that there is difference is language, in skin color, in gender, in rich and poor and everything in between, difference in faiths, difference in politics, difference in the way that people think, and mostly importantly, that difference is an intimate relationship between systems of power in society and identification of the self. Therefore, no ones difference is a crime, rather it is a gift that everyone can learn from and should be valued as such.

Time management

I think it would be a nice time to explore time management in the classroom, as my Spring semester begins to wind down and everything in college starts to become compressed. As stated before, I will have difficulty as a new teacher someday working on time management, because as we know, in college I have no sense of the word. To give my audience a brief overview of what is on my plate right now in college, I have 16 lecture hours per week, in addition to 2 hours at the middle school and 24 hours of work at the go-kart track Friday through Sunday. I have a diversity essay to write for my education class, one more ten page essay for my theory class, one more essay for my zen and the literary experience class, a short story and four more poems for my creative writing class, a writing journal for my creative writing class, two more novels to read for my theory class, three more books to read for my zen class, the Praxis I exam to take, a tech competency exam to take, this blog to finish up, a roundtable discussion to prepare for in my education class, and sometime after all of this is finished, I'm planning to write up a poetry lesson for my middle school class in May once college has let out. One wonders where the time for all of this comes from (And by the way, I didn't even bother to mention the critical essays I'm suppose to be reading for both my education and theory class). For me, the solution is simple -- stop eating, stop sleeping, and do your work. Such is the life of an academic scholar: a life of seclusion.

Back to the concept of time management in a classroom. There are inevitables I mentioned in my practice of pedagogy entry. For example, in my classroom I am working in, there is a phone that the office uses to call up to the classroom. The phone rang five times in the span of two hours, and each time the phone rang, my teacher had to drop the instruction she was giving to answer the phone. No wonder students are having difficulties learning, when the phone in the classroom won't stop ringing. In fact, at 8:49am, when the phone rang again, my teacher said "And you wonder why some kids don't learn. This is crazy." In addition to the phone, another teacher came up to the classroom to take one of the students away, which was another distraction that my teacher had no control over. When my teacher was going through testing material, she was rather quick and on the spot. I noticed that during their spelling test, for example, she spent about 30 seconds between giving each word. She also walked around the room and corrected the spelling tests while students worked on the next assignment, both providing immediate feedback and helping the pace of the lesson move along.

At 8:54am, when my teacher started the audio tape of a story for students to listen to, she said to me "I didn't do a very good job there of time management." I don't think it is necessarily her fault when distractions start making their way into the classroom. First of all, the place where she spent most of her time was on the creation of a position statement (I call it a thesis). It is the most crucial piece of a paper, if the thesis is weak, then the metaphorical cookie of your paper crumbles. When she noticed students were having difficulty with the position statement portion of the lesson, she spent more time on it.

Why would the curriculum spend so little time on the thesis and move on to the next lesson? For Gods sake, its the most important part of the paper. Once the introduction and thesis are written, you have only to follow the thread of the thesis to write the rest of the piece. In fact, once a solid thesis is established, the body of the paper practically writes itself. Lets look at the thesis statement from my critical essay I recently wrote and published on this blog: "There is a civil war being fought in the field of pedagogy with high risks at stake, between competing discourses and whichever discourse rises up out of this conflict victoriously will have the power to decide what is, and what is not a 'legitimate' education for the youth of this nation." Once I have that thesis written, I know my argument for the whole paper is going to surround around competing discourses in the field of pedagogy. I follow the thread of the thesis, first defining discourse for my audience and then moving forward, support the notion of politically driven discourses that are vying for the power to control the curriculum. I also make it clear in my paper that by "high risk causalities," I mean the students who are being left out while all of the conflicts continue on. I even split the term civil war in my conclusion, noting in my conclusion that "constructive conflict can be civil; it does not have to be a war."

All being said, I wonder sometimes if the writers of these lessons themselves have any sense of time management. Certainly, some concepts deserve more time than others.