Saturday, May 11, 2013

Writing In Community Final Essay, Draft 2



Defining Literacy

Although it is well established that there is a 'problem' with public education in America, there is no consensus as to what caused it: is a lack of funding for critical academic programs? Or is it because many parents don’t help their children with their schoolwork? Erica Goldson, who graduated Coxsackie-Athens High School in 2010, argues in her valedictorian speech that the root of the problem lies in a current overemphasis on standardized testing. "We are so focused on a goal, whether it be passing a test, or graduating as first in the class. However, in this way, we do not really learn. We do whatever it takes to achieve our original objective." (Goldson) To become valedictorian, Ms. Goldson had to give up learning for the sake of her objective; the almighty 'A'. Non-valedictorians must also do 'whatever it takes' if they want to achieve their original objective, which, according to Ms. Goldson, is usually "to get out [of school] as soon as possible." (Goldson). This means that pursuing their passions, whether in the areas of literature, music, technology or the sciences, must take second seat to their schoolwork. For Ms. Goldson, the tragedy in this is that schools are failing to give their students a proper education; by forcing their students to adopt a "whatever it takes" mentality, they suppress their natural propensity towards intellectual inquiry. But the success of Ms. Goldson and others like her seems to contradict this idea; if some students are able to finish public school with an education, why can’t others?
            Peg Tyre, author of "The Writing Revolution", argues that public schools fail to educate students by not teaching them how to write analytically. Backing her claim is the success story of New Dorp High School, a formerly failing public school on Long Island that succeeded in improving its graduation rate from 63% to 80% between 2009 and 2011. Observing that its worst students were usually the least adept at expository writing, New Dorp’s principal changed the curriculum to make analytic writing a central component of every subject, from science and mathematics to history and english. Students were taught "how to turn ideas into simple sentences, and how to construct complex sentences from simple ones by supplying the answer to three prompts - but, because and so." (7) Once they had mastered the basics of sentence construction, they were taught "how to recognize sentence fragments, how to pull the main idea from a paragraph, and how to form a main idea on their own." (7) Although the program is ostensibly a "rigid, unswerving, formula", it worked: from 2009 to 2011, New Dorp's passing rates on the English Regents exams jumped from 69% to 80%, and its passing rates on the Global History Regents shot from 64% to 75% (3). These statistics support the idea that analytical writing is a critical skill for any student's education. Although this may be the case, it is certainly not the whole picture. Erica Goldson would argue that, despite an improvement in passing rates on the regents, students were still not really learning, and the unless New Dorp stopped ‘teaching to the test’, it would continue to fail to educate its students.Both authors are trying to answer the question of what, exactly, students need in order to succeed within the education system. But neither Goldson nor Tyre can hope to find the answer without understanding what schools are supposed to be teaching in the first place.
Paolo Freire, a writer best known for his work teaching Brazilian peasants how to heighten their critical consciousness, believes that schools aren't supposed to teach using any form of rote memorization, or lessons that involve a lecture, because these teaching methods create a disconnect between the lesson and the real world; something Freire refers to at “narration sickness” (368). Instead of immersing students in the world they are supposed to be learning about, the imperative of the lecture "leads the students to memorize mechanically the narrated content." People, places, and events, become discrete facts embedded in the matrix of the test they are taught towards, and students' minds become "receptacles to be "filled" by the teacher." (368) Because of this, public education becomes reduced to a series of business-like transactions:
Education thus becomes an action of depositing, in which the students are the depositories and the teacher is the depositor. Instead of communicating, the teacher issues communiques and makes deposits which the students patiently receive, memorize, and repeat. This is the "banking" concept of education, in which the scope of action allowed to the students extends only as far as receiving, filing, and storing the deposits. They do, it is true, have the opportunity to become collectors or cataloguers of the things they store. But in the last analysis, it is the people themselves who are filed away through the lack of creativity, transformation, and knowledge in this (at best) misguided system. For apart from inquiry, apart from the praxis, individuals cannot be truly human.
(368-9)
Like Erica Goldson, Freire believes that the education process provides negative feedback upon a student's willingness and ability to learn, which is inherently dehumanizing; if the best that students can aspire to do with the information they receive is collecting and cataloguing it, they have been gravely underserved. The daily transactions of lessons to be received, memorized, and repeated, serve to wear down the primal urge that all humans share to discover everything they can about the world around them. If Freire’s assertion holds true, then we cannot fix our education system without levelling the playing field; a greater level of communication must be established between teachers and their students, both in and out of the classroom.
There is one instance, in my mind, where such communication has happened, which is between Ian Downing, a high school senior at Humanities Prep, and myself. For the past several weeks, I have tutored Ian on writing his PBAT, an essay that is prerequisite to his graduation, and we have often talked together on Skype before and after our Thursday afternoon tutoring sessions. Halfway through the month of April, Ian had not yet written the introduction to his paper, when the final draft was due the first week of May. When we sat down together that Thursday, I held my breath. How are we going to get this done in time? If we didn't do any writing that day, there would be no way he would finish his work by the deadline. I scribbled down a skeleton outline for the introductory paragraph, before sliding the paper over to him and explaining the process step by step. "Your first sentence is the hook; the statement, as in-your-face and controversial as you can make it, that will get your readers interested. In the second and third sentences, you expand the idea in question and give the readers a taste of why the issue is complicated - opposing sides of the 'debate', and so on. Your last sentence is the 'thesis' - the platform on which the rest of your paper will stand." I looked him in the eye and asked: "Are you up for it?" Ian nodded his head. "Sure, I can do it."
Ten, fifteen, then twenty minutes passed. I kept trying to surrepititiously glance over at his work, but he kept turning the computer screen away from me. When he finally turned the computer around, what I read was even more than I'd dared hope for: he used an analogy to introduce his topic ("Our current economy is like an outfield in baseball. There is such a large area to cover and only three people available to do so.") Building on the analogy, he made the argument that a lack of economic diversity in the U.S. poses a significant risk to the middle and lower classes. He pointed out that the government bailouts of the banking and auto industries were largely ineffective in stimulating economic growth, and argued that greater economic strength would come from the encouragement of small businesses:
Because the government does not prioritize these [small] businesses, they are not only taking a gamble with little industries, but are not motivating small business owners to grow enough to become major sources of income.
Everything I would expect of a college-level paper, I found in this first draft of the introduction. It did need editing, but it showed me that my student had a firm grasp on the fundamentals of good writing. Although I would need to continue to push him to write more, and to expand and challenge his ideas, I did not need to pretend that this was a remedial English class. When I recently asked Ian via Skype what he thought the most helpful things I'd done with him in tutoring were, he listed my helping him with his intro as number one; "since I didn't know what to write for it exactly." Moreover, the second most helpful thing was "seeing your reaction to my paper each week, it kept me really motivated to write more." It seems as if what Ian needed from me was not a lesson on how to write a paper, but rather he needed me to teach him specific tools he could use to better express his ideas.  He already knew how to write a paper, and how to both research material for that paper and integrate what he learned into the 'big picture' topic. As far as I can tell, Humanities Prep does a good job ot educating students like Ian who take the time and effort to apply the lessons they learn in school in their everyday lives. However, Humanities prep is a high school that a. uses the New York Regents exam system and b. is a public school whose curriculum appears to match Freire's description of "The Banking Concept of Education." So why is its program still effective?
Perhaps the efficacy of an education program is not measured by what it does wrong, but by what it does right. What Goldson, Freire and Tyre all have in common is that they acknowledge that a school's success can be measured by what students are able to do outside of school. In a word, this can be boiled down to the concept of literacy. According to writer Sylvia Scribner, functional literacy is defined as "the level of proficiency necessary for effective performance in a range of settings and customary activities." (9) By extension, Sylvia argues, functional literacy also applies to the ability to use computers and other now-commonplace technologies, which are forms of "second-order literacy" (11). In other words, literacy is the ability to use tools and concepts that you know to learn something that you don't yet know. This is why Erica Goldson credits her education largely to her 10th-grade English Teacher, Donna Bryan, who taught her how to open her mind and "ask questions before accepting textbook doctrine." (cite) Knowing how to ask questions before accepting doctrine is part of learning how to learn, which is exactly what functional literacy entails.
There is some trouble with quantifying and measuring functional literacy, which makes it difficult to evaluate in a classroom setting. When Ian and I first began to work on the body arguments of his PBAT, he had written his first argument on the economic vulnerabilities caused by government reliance on major corporations for tax revenue. As I read what Ian had wrote, I noticed that although he had a cogent argument, that a large public debt would contribute to the downfall of the middle class, there was a major logic gap between his argument and his main piece of evidence, which was that Apple, Inc. and other related tech companies represented a disproportionately large chunk of the U.S. economy, I stopped reading to point out the error. "You've got a great idea, here, Ian, but your discussion about Apple has nothing to do with it... at least nothing your readers will pick up on their own." Ian frowned a little and nodded as he re-read the passage. "Uh-huh." I backtracked in case I had hurt his feelings. "That's not to say you shouldn't talk about Apple at all; just not right here." Drawing on what I knew, I explained to Ian that he needed to talk about other sectors of the economy, and to find a way to compare them to the economy as a whole. Ian gave me a puzzled look; "And... how do I do that?" Both of us fell silent for a minute. I didn't have the answer off the top of my head; I'm not an economist. Then, I blurted out "Let's find out how much money Apple and other big companies make in yearly revenues, and then compare that to the U.S.'s GDP. That'll give readers the sense of perspective that you're trying to convey." I knew where to look up a company's annual revenues, because I had worked at a hedge fund two summers back as a summer job. Even though that knowledge couldn't be considered a form of functional literacy, at least by societal standards, it was for Ian because his paper revolved around economics. In this instance, it was no big deal because I was able to help Ian find a solution to his problem. However, for other students working on their PBATs, they might not have learned how to find the information they need - or even what sort of information they're looking for. That tutoring session impressed upon me that internet research, in of itself, is a form of functional literacy that any student - any adult - needs to master.
Although functional literacy is, ostensibly, a good and necessary thing for a person to possess, Paolo Freire does not view it as such. According to Freire, the fact that the educator's role is "to regulate the way the world "enters into" the students" is reprehensible, for, following this same thought process:
The educated individual is the adapted person, because she or he is better "fit" for the world. Translated into practice, this concept is well suited to the purposes of the oppressors, whose tranquility rests on how well people fit the world the oppressors have created, and how little they question it. (373)
Cast in this light, the standard of functional literacy is a weapon used by the oppressors - those who maintain the system of Banking Education for their own gain - to keep the status quo. Those who comply by studying under Banking Education are, effectively, allowing themselves to be brainwashed because their mind, the way they interpret the world, is molded to better fit the world they have grown up in. Rather than changing the more unsavory aspects of the world, they are taught to 'just roll with it.' By contrast, liberating education teaches its students that they can change the world, and that - in fact- they are obligated to do so:
Students, as they are increasingly posed with problems relating to themselves in the world and with the world, will feel increasingly challenged and obliged to respond to that challenge. Because they apprehend the challenge as interrelated to other problems within a total context, not as theoretical question, the resulting comprehension tends to be increasingly critical and thus constantly less alienated. Their response to the challenge evokes new challenges, followed by new understandings; and gradually the students come to regard themselves as committed.
Peg Tyre would agree that Freire's concept of education, which promotes critical thinking in all domains of learning, is sound. However, she would disagree emphatically with the idea that functional literacy is a form of oppression used on high school students like those at New Dorp. In fact, one technique used at the school to develop students' analytical skills, developed by Judith Hochman, uses classroom discussion of canonical literature texts (in this case, Arthur Miller's Death of a Salesman) to teach the socratic method. When students speak in class, they were required to use specific prompts, "I agree/disagree with ___ because...", "I have a different opinion...", "I have something to add..." and "Can you explain your answer?" Students in one particular English class got into a debate about why the protagonist, Willie Loman, was described as being tired in the opening scene. One student proposed that Willie was tired because he was old (63, according to the stage directions), while another student argued that he was tired because his job was very hard and required extensive travelling. A third student spoke out, "I disagree with those conclusions," he said, glancing at the prompts. "The way Willie Loman describes his job suggests that the kind of work he does is making him tired. It is repetitive. It can feel pointless. It can make your feel exhausted."
As Tyre relates, the class was silent for a moment, acknowledging that Robert had analyzed the scene and derived a fresh idea from his own experience. (9) Classroom discussions like these prompt students to continually ask  

Sylvia Scribner does not, however, believe that literacy is solely defined as functional literacy. In fact, like Freire, she proposes that literacy is also a form of power; although, historically, literacy has been used as a form of oppression by the ruling elites to maintain their social status, it has also been a powerful agent for societal change (12). Because illiteracy is, in America, largely endemic in marginalized groups such as the urban poor, especially african-americans and latino communities, increasing literacy within these communities could potentially be a catalyst for political and social change (12).

Paolo Freire proposes a method of teaching literacy that, in contrast to The Banking Concept of Education, emphasizes "acts of cognition, not transferrals of information." (372) Dubbed "Liberating Education", this model places teacher-student dialogue as a centerpiece of the learning experience, such that "the students - no longer docile listeners - are now critical co-investigators in dialogue with the teacher." (373) This, too, is another critical aspect of literacy; the ability to communicate what you know and what you think with those around you.

ENDING: There are too many schools, and too many teachers, for any comprehensive education reform plan to be feasible. The public education system is simply too large for any single curriculum, or any one test, to be applicable to all students; in this instance, one size does not fit all. But there are guidelines that can help individual teachers and principles decide on what is best for their pupils. Peg Tyre's analytical writing program could help show students how to learn, when they might not otherwise know how to. Paolo Freire's model of liberating education could help give an education to students who may have given up on learning. Sylvia Scribner's metaphors for literacy can help give educators insight on how to gauge a student's progress without resorting to written examination.
1. Propose the concept of asymmetrical testing
2. discuss the idea of allowing teachers to choose their own curricula, within a level of oversight similar to what clinical psychologists & psychiatrists face.

Works Cited
Freire, Paolo. "The “Banking” Concept Of Education." Dwc.edu. Daniel Webster College. 11 May 2013 <http://faculty.dwc.edu/wellman/Friere.htm>.
Goldson, Erica. "Here I Stand." America Via Erica. Blogger.com. 11 May 2013 <http://americaviaerica.blogspot.com/2010/07/coxsackie-athens-valedictorian-speech.html>.
Scribner, Sylvia. "Literacy In Three Metaphors." 11 May 2013 <http://www.eric.ed.gov/ERICWebPortal/search/detailmini.jsp?_nfpb=true>.
Tyre, Peg. "The Writing Revolution." The Atlantic. The Atlantic. 11 May 2013 <http://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/2012/10/the-writing-revolution/309090/>.

1 comment:

  1. http://journals.ohiolink.edu/ejc/article.cgi?issn=10883142&issue=v11i0001&article=169_tmoadltweit1

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