Prompt - 1 - Analysis

I’d like to welcome my reading audience back, it has been awhile, and I’d like to apologize for the long between my description and my analysis. To recap briefly on my description, the middle school I’m serving at is an inner-city middle school, which does not have all of the luxuries and privileges that other suburban middle schools might have. My analysis of my surroundings will be two-fold, answering two crucial questions: What is valued in this school and what is valued in this classroom that I’m working in. I will start with the larger apparatus first, which is concerned with the macrocosm of society, and then move to the individual classroom, which is concerned with the microcosm of the individual students and teacher that exist within a smaller community.

The school as a whole, as I see it, is interested in both educating and socializing the students into society through discipline, by teaching them the basic skills needed to succeed in life and also the rules of what is and isn’t acceptable behavior in the general population of American society. There is a risk involved in authoritarian discipline, however, as Ira Shor states in “Empowering Education: Critical Teaching for Social Change” in that “Education can socialize students into critical thought or into dependence on authority, that is, into autonomous habits of mind or into passive habits of following authorities, waiting to be told what to do and what things mean” (Shor, 13). The risks must be carefully weighed and balanced and I believe that most educators realize this and are making the best decisions in the interest of their students. We cannot, as educators, become doormats for our students to walk all over us. At the same time though, we must carefully plant the seed of critical thought at the exact precise moment in an adolescent’s life, where they will be able to handle the shock of being awakened to the responsibility of critical thought and all that it entails. The power of critical thought must be wielded delicately, to the consideration of others feelings, and to flip that switch of critical thinking early would be disastrous. It is like balancing a scale, being careful not to pigeon hole students into being robots while patiently waiting for the student to mature to the age of responsibility where little by little, more decisions and power can be handed over to them.

To quickly wrap this point up in the actual classroom that I am serving in, the teacher I am working with also seems to be aware that at some point in her student’s lives, they will need to be able to think for themselves. She commented on how the curriculum has a tendency to oppress student spontaneity, which is a critical component in the creative drive that produces critical thought. However, for now, the students need a concrete structure that provides the support for scaffolding the basic skills needed to learn a fluent mastery over the English language. When the time is right, I have faith that each of these students will become responsible, critical thinkers of their own.