Kozol Response

I'm not really sure what chapters we're supposed to be blogging on for Kozol, so I'll just talk about a handful of things that caught my interest in the book.

In Chapter 10, Kozol discusses high-stakes testing--something that puts a great deal of pressure on my cooperating teacher on a day-to-day basis. She is constantly talking about the Keystones. In the faculty room, it's no different. Teachers are constantly talking about their former students and how well they did or did not perform on the test. It's depressing. When Penn Manor receives the results for the Keystones they entirely restructure the schedule and send students who failed into a remediation course.  Pairing this up with Kozol's attack on high stakes testing made me uneasy about the whole process. It's pretty clear that the whole drilling sessions thing doesn't work. If test-drilling, or remediation as it is called at Penn Manor, was actually effective Kozol points out, then "it would [be] given to all children in the school throughout the course of the entire year" (113). The fact that test preparation has caused kindergarten children to lose their nap time is absolutely disgusting (114). It's also distressing to think that a teacher must manipulate a poem into curriculum by attaching it to some "officially ordained proficiency" (117). Why must exposure to something new and beautiful be justified? Why can't learning just be organic? Why must education be viewed as "industry" creating products (139)? The education system seems to mirror an assembly line at times. Students are not Ford automobiles. They are human beings; some times it's beneficial to deviate from preordained plans--at least that's my opinion.

In Chapter 12, Kozol advocated for teachers to stop teaching lies. I was particularly inspired by Kozol's suggestion for teachers to rebel against the textbooks that are riddled with lies by supplementing the text with clippings, articles, and other 'corrective' texts (154). Detecting truth from "crap"is an important skill for our students to develop in our information-saturated world. By bringing alternative texts in the classroom, a teacher can empower students by asking them to question the things they read, hear, and see. Additionally, this transparency on the teacher's behalf allows the students to challenge the teacher in a similar and healthy manner, thus leading to a never-dull class (159). This invitation to challenge and question engages students; it forces them to think. THAT is precisely what I want out of my students. I want to abolish passivity. There is no room for that in my classroom.

In Chapter 14, Kozol relays a great story about how he was fired for reading his students Langston Hughes' poetry. To me, this story was insane, but I can make sense of it since it happened in the climate of Boston in the 1960s. Overall though, the story (up until the getting fired part) showed me, yet again, the importance of Ethnic Literature. The way his "stoic" students interacted with the poems was really moving and it solidifies the importance of a wide array of literature in the classroom. We cannot force our students to read the works of dead white men solely. Occasionally (or frequently), we need vibrant, modern writers to seep into our stuffy curriculum, even at the risk of being charged with "curriculum deviation" (197).

All in all, Kozol's book was a great read. It forced me to view the world of education in a much different (and more enlightened) way.