READING, WRITING, and RISING UP PT. 2

At the end of last class we had the opportunity to try one of the assignments from the book call I am from poems. And then at the beginning of next class we got to go around and share them. I really enjoyed this assignment because it brought back my childhood and all the adventures and crazy things I did at my lake when I was younger. I also thought it was nice to hear everyone else’s stories about their childhoods and where they came from.

 

In the second half of this book it focuses more on the importance of language and the student voice. Diversity is a major topic in the section as well. I think that it is important as teacher to understand the effects of having a diverse classroom. In my opinion having diversity in a school is a great thing to have. By having students or different races and background brings difference aspects and conversation to a classroom, especially in English classrooms. After reading stories from classmates about their background and seeing how different it is from their own can really open students eyes and perspective.

I also think it adds to conversation. After reading books and short stories or even poems about different cultures students compare it to their own and learn things that they might not have known about. You can learn everything in textbooks, so by having different cultures and races in the classroom helps with the understanding of cultural diversity. In this short article it talks about how teaching different cultures in the classroom is important.

Another assignment that stuck out to me in the second half of the book was the remember me poems. I think that this really shows the students own voice and how they think about themselves or even in some of the sample essays how other students think about them. I think this project could be fun for seniors in their last few weeks of school to write about thinks that have happened to them during their four years of high school. i think that they would really like this assignment and I think it could be interesting to hear what the student would want their peers to remember about them as they will soon be separated by college.

This was definitely a good read for future teachers. It gave me a whole bunch of ideas that I wouldn’t have thought about on my own and also a lot of ideas that I would like to try out in my first few years of teaching.