Exploratory Essay

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. I think that an underlying theme 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 40's 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 is 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”. 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. I think 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. I think that to say that everyone doesn't have the basic skills to succeed in college therefore they shouldn't go is quite ludicrous. Educators should 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. 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.