Excerpt from my Journal, Week 3

After reading chapter two of Ayers this week, I finished my journal entry. I did a lot of journaling this week and I was surprised what came up! This is an excerpt of mine from this week's journal:

  I love the questions that Ayers poses to his audience. Who is this person before me? What is the measure of her hope and hurt? What are his interests and areas of wonder? How does she express herself and what is her awareness of herself as a learner? What effort and potential does she bring? (pg 42) Those questions are so significant to making each student in the classroom visible. I think that I was given that luxury as a student. Each teacher seemed to focus on my strengths (because our school was so ridiculously small that everyone knew just about everything about everyone- it was easy to know who was struggling with what, but also who had strengths in these areas, etc.). I agree with Ayers when he proposes breaking away from the deficit-model of teaching. Narrowing in on perceived weaknesses of the students can be a very discouraging approach- for the teachers and the students. It also seems like it isn't the most nurturing model for teachers to take. This chapter reminds me of an experience I had volunteering in a 2nd grade classroom- the teacher asked me if I would type up each student's story they had written for an upcoming parent-teacher conference. I was instructed to type the stories exactly as they were written. Grammatical errors and all. The stories were absolutely fabulous! And I just remember learning so much about each student that I had previously had no idea about. One girl wrote a story titled "When I Lost My Fifth Tooth". Specifically fifth. I thought it was great! I started reading the story, and I was amazed by how much information I could get from reading this girl's story: a story that I thought would be a tale about the tooth she had lost, but it turned into this amazing tangent on pretty much every activity she had done that weekend, who she was with, where they went, and what they did. These were the things that were really important to her in her life and I was amazed by how much more I learned about her from reading her story. There was also another student who, instead of writing, did his entire assignment in pictures. It was like looking at a very detailed graphic novel. When you asked this student to tell you the story, he could point to each picture to describe what happened at that increment of time. The way he chose to complete this assignment expressed a lot about the way his mind works and how he can express himself best. On page 54, Ayers noted that, "The strongest source of knowledge about the student remains the student herself, and tapping into that knowledge is not so difficult.". I think knowing that, and knowing that there is always more we can learn from students is important as well. Students are multidimensional persons, and I want to keep in mind that, for all I learn about them and their stories, there will always be more that I do not know about them.