It's been an interesting week for all the right reasons. I started my student teaching at a great school: Evan Hardy Collegiate, or as some of the teachers call it; "Heaven Hardy Collegiate". I feel like such sentiments can mean nothing but good things. Although teaching experiences have been thus far limited, I have had a great deal of interaction with the students through aiding them with whatever I can when the students need help. I feel like the readings that we looked at in class for this week will aid me in understanding how to improve my lessons when I finally do get more into the teaching mode for some of the classes that I am observing.
A particularly interesting concept that I have had on my mind a great deal this week is that of the effect that certain perspectives have on the messages that novels portray to the reader. I have always been certain that as a teacher, I would want to use Adventures of Huckleberry Finn in my classroom, not only because I am passionate about the novel, but because I feel it teaches very important social and historical lessons to students. I still do feel that this is true, but after reading the second chapter in "Critical Encounters", I feel that the point of view of Huckleberry Finn may not be the most effective perspective for all students. Especially in a multicultural classroom, perspectives on racism from a young, white male may not be respected as well as those that come from a person of a more marginalized background. I acknowledge for the first time that there may be more effective novels with more authentic perspectives on racism that ALL students would be able to more easily identify with. This is certainly not to say that I do not plan to include Huck Finn in my future lesson plans. But I will be more mindful of the potential for other texts to be more effective based on the point of view from which it is told.
The other text that I had to chance to look at was "Deeper Reading" by Kelly Gallagher. The first chapter turned out to be exactly my type of textbook reading: short and large font size... and not entirely uninteresting either. The chapter emphasized the importance of TEACHING challenging reading to students rather than ASSIGNING it. Students need to be taught to pull the deeper meanings out of novels in order to truly appreciate them. It seems that effective reading is a critical life skill that escaping more and more of our youth. I feel that there is some truth in this claim following this week when I had the opportunity to sit in on a couple of ELA 9 classes. Teacher opinions and my own observations agreed that the students seemed to have reading comprehension levels that were behind grade 9 levels. It will be interesting to track their improvement over the course of the coming months.
