READING, WRITING, and RISING UP

After reading the first half of this book, I got a clearer understanding of what it is actually like to be a teacher in a classroom. Even though I won’t become a teacher for another couple of years the book really made we aware and it was a great perspective on what a classroom environment is like.  

The book focuses on diversity in the classroom and assignments used by Linda Christensen in her classroom. The assignments main purposes are to let the students open up about themselves and be engaged with everything that happens in the classroom. It is understandable that all students are different and some may connect with and assignment while others don’t but I think that as teachers or even future teachers it is important to understand that no two students are the same. I think that the way Linda teaches her students and the assignments that she does is a good way to let students feel more comfortable around the other students.

 

Almost all of her assignments are based on the student’s life and just parts that they want to share. For example one of the many assignments that she mentioned in her book is the praise poems. I absolutely love the idea of these poems. I think that teachers could use these if they are teaching a book about bullying or if there is even a situation happening in their classroom that involves the students. In this section of the book she states, “I encourage students to praise themselves, their “people”, their culture, their language, their school, their neighborhood”. With these poems it is very easy for students to open up about anything that they want and to praise it.

She uses these to have students praise an aspect of themselves that they really like, but I think it could be flipped around. Like I said this could work every well with bullying. If you flip the assignment to have the students write a praise poem about something they hate about themselves I think it could get a really good outcome with students and self-confidence. I think it would even be interesting to see the student peers reactions to the poems.

I learned a lot of new ideas that I never would have thought off from this first chapter and I’m excited to read the second half and learn even more.