Exploring
the Readings
In my English class, we have had a few different reading
and video assignments. Some of the readings and videos are drastically
different, but others had some common themes. One of the videos that we were
given to watch was a Ted Talks video, “Does School Kill Creativity?” Sir Ken
Robinson is the speaker in this video. He talks about how children are born
with many talents and they are not afraid to share them. As children grow
older, they become afraid of sharing their talents with the world, they are
afraid that they will mess up or people won’t like what they have to share. Sir
Ken Robinson makes a great point that we beat talents out of children and make
them afraid of the talents they were given. An underlying theme that is
consistently shown in this talk is how some students get to use their talents
throughout life while others don’t. A few of the readings that we were assigned
in class are “In the Basement of the Ivory Tower” and “Women without Class: How
Working Class Chicas get Working Class Lives”. “In the Basement of the Ivory
Tower” is about a middle aged student in her 40s who decides to return to
school to pursue a degree. The reading focuses on an English class where a
research paper had been assigned. The student proves to be horribly unqualified
for college. She doesn't know how to use a computer, do research and she writes
her paper on a level that is far from college. The underlying theme presented
in this reading is why some students are qualified for college and have no
problem while others don’t seem to have what it takes to hack a college paper.
The last reading, “Women without Class” is about a group of “underprivileged”
girls in a high school class. The author studies these students, talks to them
and forms a hypothesis about why they act the way they do in class and why they
don’t seem to care about their future. Some themes that these readings and
video have in common are how students react to learning and education
differently and how some students overcome their deficits and some can’t.
In the Ted Talks video, Sir Ken Robinson uses a quote by
Picasso, “all children are born an artist, the problem is to remain an artist
as we grow up” (Sir Ken Robinson (Picasso), “Ted Talks: Does School Kill Creativity?”). Why do
some children remain artists, while others “grow out of” their artistic
abilities? Some students grow up in an environment and go to schools that
encourage art and creativity. Most of the time it is the privileged students
that go to private liberal art schools and have parents that encourage their
creativity that remain artists as they grow up. The speaker, Sir Ken Robinson,
uses an example of a dancer in his speech. There is a very successful,
multi-millionaire dancer in England that he was talking to one day. He asked
her how she became a dancer. She said that when she was in school, she could
never sit still and couldn't pay attention in class. Her teachers thought that
there was something wrong with her, so they told her mom to take her to a
doctor. After meeting with her and her mom, the doctor took her mom out of the
room to talk privately, as he left he turned on the radio. They watched through
the window as the student began to dance to the music. He told her mother to
take her to a dance school, she did and that student became one of the most
successful dancers in England. This serves as a great example of how having
teachers and parents and resources that enable creativity can help a creative
student achieve great success. If these aren’t available the creativity will
most likely be suppressed and the student will wander through school without
any real direction.
In
a slightly different assignment, we had to read “In the Basement of the Ivory
Tower”. In this reading, Ms. L is a middle aged woman who has returned to
school for a degree. She is assigned a research paper. She will need to use her
computer skills in order to do the research for the paper and to write the
paper. The only problem is that Ms. L doesn't have any computer skills, she is
computer illiterate. She has never even sat in front of a computer. The teacher
tries to help her learn the basics of computer/internet research, but Ms. L
just can’t understand. The problem here is that Ms. L didn't learn some very
basic things in her earlier years of schooling. The only problem wasn't with
the computer; she couldn't even write a cohesive paper or form intelligent
sentences. Ms. L wasn't willing to learn, she had already put up her wall of
defeat. If there had been more resources available to her, perhaps a class on
internet research or basic computer skills then she would have been better off.
She didn't have the skills and the people whose job it was to teach her only
looked down upon her for not knowing the basics. A theme of this reading is how
maybe college isn't for everyone. Based on the readings and video, to say that
someone shouldn't go to college because they aren't prepared is ludicrous. The
author says, “I had responsibilities to the rest of my students, so only when
the class ended could I sit with her and work on some of the basics. It didn't go well. She wasn't absorbing anything. The wall had gone up, the wall known to
every teacher at every level.” (Professor X, “In the Basement of the Ivory
Tower”) The teacher reached a point in which he decided it was pointless to
keep trying to teach Ms. L, so he gave up and left it up to herself to learn,
which didn't go well. Educators need to step up and help these people learn to
succeed.
In
“Women without Class” the author is a researcher that goes to a high school to
study different groups of students. She observes the ways that different
classrooms are constructed and how different classes are handled. She observes
the over achieving, college-bound students and finds that they are engaging in
intelligent, academic conversations in class and they are given assignments
that really challenge them. The researcher also decides to observe the other
end of the spectrum in the same high school. There are classes of under
privileged teenagers that just don’t care about their education at all. She
observed a group of teenage girls in this type of classroom. She found that
there would rarely be a permanent teacher, mostly substitutes there to babysit
these students. During class time the students would talk about anything they
wanted from their nail polish to what they were going to name the baby they
were pregnant with. This type of classroom consisted of mostly girls and some
boys that had given up early on and in turn, no one cared about them. These
students came from neighborhoods with a lot of trouble, parents that couldn't care less about them, and teachers who just wanted them gone. The researcher
shows his shock with how little the teachers care. “When I told these teachers
that I wanted to talk to some of their girl students about their aspirations
beyond high school, teachers shook their heads and laughed together in a knowing
way, one man joking that ‘They’ll all be barefoot and pregnant.’” (Anyon, “Women
Without Class”) There is a big contrast with these students versus the ones in
the higher level classes that come from better homes. When these two different
groups of students started school, they were automatically put into categories
that most of them never broke free from. Students in the lower category aren't given any resources, opportunities or help from teachers to succeed. This is a
serious problem that comes up everywhere that happens in every area with every
age group.
Works Cited
1.
Professor
X. "In the Basement of the Ivory Tower."
2.
Anyon,
Jean, comp. "Working Class Chicas Get Working Class Lives."
3.
Robinson,
Ken. "Does School Kill Creativity?" Ted Talks. Speech.
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