Читать книгу Your Literacy Standards Companion, Grades 9-12 - Jim Burke - Страница 11

When I began teaching in the late 1980s, I asked my new department chair what I would be teaching. He smiled and handed me a single sheet of paper with a list of titles on it and wished me luck (always making time to help me if I had questions). Years later, many districts, mine included, had thick binders, binders so heavy with so many standards that they were all ignored since they did not come with the time to read and think about how to teach them. Now we have a new set of standards, which come just as a large group of teachers will retire, leaving an equally large group of new teachers feeling a bit up the river without a paddle, as the saying goes. This book is meant to be that oar or a map you or your faculty or colleagues can use to guide you through the curriculum (which derives from the words current and course).

These new standards offer me a view of the territory I have crossed to arrive here, having been the first in my family to graduate from college. In a section titled “A Country Called School” from my book School Smarts: The Four Cs of Academic Success (Burke, 2004), I wrote of my experience of being a student:

Learning is natural; schooling is not. Schools are countries to which we send our children, expecting these places and the people who work there to help draw out and shape our children into the successful adults we want them to become. As with travel to other countries, however, people only truly benefit from the time spent there to the extent that they can and do participate. If someone doesn’t know the language, the customs, the culture—well, that person will feel like the outsider they are. As Gerald Graff, author of Clueless in Academe (2003) puts it, “schooling takes students who are perfectly street-smart and exposes them to the life of the mind in ways that make them feel dumb” (p. 2).

This is precisely how I felt when I arrived at college. I lacked any understanding of the language. The culture of academics confused me. The conventions that governed students’ behaviors and habits were invisible to me. Those who thrived in school seemed to have been born into the culture, have heard the language all their life, and knew inherently what mattered, what was worth paying attention to, how much effort was appropriate. Teachers somehow seemed to expect that we all came equipped with the same luggage, all of which contained the necessary tools and strategies that would ensure our success in their classes and, ultimately, school. It wasn’t so. (p. 1)

When I enrolled in a community college all those years ago, I was placed in a remedial writing class, highlighted whole chapters of textbooks, and had no idea what to say or how to enter class discussions. School extended an invitation to me then that I did not know at first how to accept, so disoriented was I by its demands. Across the country, new state standards extend a similar invitation—and challenge—to us all, teachers and administrators, and all others engaged in the very serious business of educating middle and high school students. It is an invitation I have already accepted on behalf of my students and myself.

Reading these standards, I am reminded of a passage from a wonderful book by Magdalene Lampert (2001) titled Teaching Problems and the Problems of Teaching. In that book, she has a chapter titled “Teaching Students to Be People Who Study in School,” in which she says of students not unlike the one I was and many of those I teach:

Some students show up at school as “intentional learners”—people who are already interested in doing whatever they need to do to learn academic subjects—they are the exception rather than the rule. Even if they are disposed to study, they probably need to learn how. But more fundamental than knowing how is developing a sense of oneself as a learner that makes it socially acceptable to engage in academic work. The goal of school is not to turn all students into people who see themselves as professional academics, but to enable all of them to include a disposition toward productive study of academic subjects among the personality traits they exhibit while they are in the classroom. If the young people who come to school do not see themselves as learners, they are not going to act like learners even if that would help them to be successful in school. It is the teacher’s job to help them change their sense of themselves so that studying is not a self-contradictory activity. (p. 265)

Lampert’s statement goes to the core of our work as teachers and these standards, as well. The work ahead will be difficult, as nearly all important work is, because it often asks more of us than we knew we had to give, yet doing the work will give us the strength we need to succeed in the future we are called to create for ourselves and our country. The word “education” stems from the Latin word educare, meaning to draw out that which is within, to lead. This is what we must do. I offer you this book to help you do that work and wish you all the strength and patience your two hands can hold.