Literacy with an Attitude, Patrick Finn-Extended comments

                   Like many other’s from the class, I had a tough time with this reading.  To better understand the reading I used this summary to get the main points of this article. After reading the full article I felt as though I was able to make many connections to past articles as well as the promising practices and my service learning project. I felt as though I understood the beginning of the text better and was able to connect it more to that.

 

This week I am using Cindy Rojas blog to make some extended comments on this weeks reading of “Literacy with An Attitude” by Patrick Finn. This reading along with the past couple of readings we have done have really opened my eyes to how unfairly students are treated. I couldn’t agree more with Cindy when she says, “Dividing students into different classes depending on their levels of ability and social class is segregation” . Finn said, “There were four hundred eighth graders who were sorted by reading scores from the highest, 8-1s being the highest and 8-15s being the lowest” he then goes into saying, “The theory was the slowest students would get attention in smaller classes. The reality was that as the year wore on there were spaces available in the lower classes to dump the troublesome students”(3).  This just proves that schools are not providing the same opportunity to students. This article made me think back to Dr.Christopher Emdin’s speech from Promising Practices speech when he said that students would be at more of an advantage, if they weren’t so segregated, which I agree with him on that! This reading made me think of the movie the Blindside

and how  none of his teachers paid any attention to him, they would just pass Big Mike to the next level because they didn’t want to have him as a student again. He didn't start caring about school until a family took interest in him and supported him, what if he had that support  in the beginning?  It is really sad how those teachers exist today and give up on some of their students. For example, there is this one little boy in the classroom I am in for my service learning project. He is in my group for math which is the lowest level of students but he is extremely bright for example, he can count to 100 while the rest of them can barley count to 15 as well as be able to look at a picture that has 9 circles and be able to identify that there are 9 circles and he doesn’t keep counting over them. He is definitely in this group because he is a “troublesome”  student wh doesn’t sit still and is always getting yelled at by the teacher. It is clear that he is bored in  my group so he acts up. I hope this little boy gets the positive attention that he needs from his teachers, so he can succeed.

 

I think that more teachers need to have that attitude that Finn had when he says, “we wanted are students to succeed and move ahead” (7). Finn got through to his students and said that he was a huge success. He approached his students the right way and pushed them, it seems like he and his students were all on the same page.