He Pushes Me to Succeed
Group-focused activities provide adolescents with chances to check their understandings of lesson content with other trusted individuals—their peers—before teachers assess them. Students’ reflections and images revealed that urban English teachers might provide youth with extended periods of time to draft and revise their writing efforts, after interactions with these members of their social circles, who may or may not have known literacy task success in their own educational experiences. Jon’s reflection on the impact of his father’s sermons about school Cartier Replica accompanied an image of his dad with a just-caught fish:
“He Pushes Me to Succeed”
My dad gave me his pole after he caught this fish and I caught something immediately…. My dad only has a high school diploma, but he took education into his own hands by reading books and writing…. He pushes me and tells me that I should go to college and get a good job. It gets tedious hearing him talk about it, but if he didn’t always nag me about it, I’d probably slack off. Just like he shared the fishing pole with me… he shares the idea that education is needed to lead a good life.
These youth were grateful that we and other adults in their lives spoke with them about the importance of school and about simply showing up for class. And when we allowed students to write over longer periods of time, they found greater writing success and reflected more deeply on their images.
Finally, these young women and men need compassionate adults who will pay attention to them— over time, without discrimination—when they are ready to disclose what they are thinking, doing, and failing to understand. In one young man’s words, “If teachers listened to us about life, we’d listen to them about school.” It seems reasonable, then, that if English teachers listened to students Cartier Replica Watches about their out-of-school lives, these youth might listen to us about the literacy tasks we are assigning. And if we organized our instruction around these more inclusive and responsive structures, over a more extended period of interactions, and then they might listen to us about the importance of their writing efforts.
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