The Skin That We Speak

                As the author of this passage spoke about the little girl Shannon who said “I ain’t writin’ nuttin,” I thought back to some of the other students in my freshman English class in High School. While the majority of my English classes were honors or AP, my freshman English class included several other students that did not move on to those higher-level classes, and they greatly resembled Shannon. I imagine that many of them grew up with that same mentality, and were “permitted to fail.” Even up into high school, they were permitted to fail, and that is the reason that most of them did not move up into the honors and AP level courses.

Sometimes, I worry that in my own classroom I will unknowingly give my students permission to fail, and that my students will fall through the cracks one by one. I really like the idea of demanding success from my students. I plan to work in a lower-income neighborhood, so I am expecting that this may be hard work. I will not accept my students considering themselves victims, and I plan to make sure that they always try the assignments. I know that as a science teacher, there will be many students who don’t understand the complex subjects in the class, especially in the required freshmen gen. ed. classes. Rather than allowing my students to get away with “I don’t understand this,” I will make sure to poke and prod my students for some sort of attempt at the assignment until I am sure that they have come to some form of answer. I think that helping students think through difficult concepts step by step is a good way to provide scaffolding for them to develop their critical thinking skills. I plan to assign regular short answer papers for my students to think through and write out processes and cause and effect ideas, so that they can understand that all parts of science are interrelated. I may also use activities to help my students learn how science relates to their own lives. After using these activities to give them ideas, I plan to ask my students to write a short paper on a particular subject that is important to them, and relate what we learned in class to that subject. By providing these connections and allowing my students to pick what they want to write about, I believe that they can learn to truly enjoy writing and to be fascinated by science each and every day.