The Politics of Teaching: Discourses

In this class, we are reading selections from Lisa Delpit's book "Other People's Children - Cultural Conflict ini the Classroom."  There was one particular passage from our latest reading which stood out to me.

"The second aspect of Gee's work that I [Delpit] find troubling suggests that an individual who is born into one discourse with one set of values may experience major conflicts when attempting to acquire another discourse with another set of values.  Gee defines this as especially pertinent to women and minorities" (pg. 154).

I agree with Delpit in that Gee's work to be troubling.  What I don't like is that Gee asserts that women have to acquire another discourse.  I know that in the corporate world, women have historically hit a "glass ceiling," and therefore had to possibly adopt a different set of values than their natural values in order to succeed, but this is changing.  I personally do not feel as if I have had to acquire another discourse, and I think that I have been quite successful thus far with my natural discourse.  I am not quite sure why Gee assumes that women have to give up our natural discourses.

Case Studies

In class on Monday, we split into groups to discuss five different case studies. My group was in charge of deciding how to cut our school's budget. It was very hard for all four of us to agree on what to cut, and in the end, I don't think that all of us were in agreement anyway.

While discussing what to cut, it was interesting how much our individual school backgrounds affected our opinions. I, coming from a small school district, did not want to increase class sizes. And I must admit, besides not wanting to sacrifice individual attention with each student, I was thinking selfishly in the fact that I would not be able to teach thirty students in each class period to play the recorder. I don't think that my ears could handle that. Each of us in the group grew up with different "normals" in our schools, which greatly affected how we would handle the budget cut. For example, I paid $30 per extracurricular activity, while another girl paid $250 per activity, and yet another paid nothing at all. As you can imagine, I did not want to help our budget by having the students pay $300 per activity, while the second girl was perfectly fine with that.

I can only imagine what the real process of budget cuts would be like, with more than four differing opinions and versions of "normal" to try to reconcile in a way that will make everyone happy.

First Paideia Lecture

In our first Paideia II Lecture, we brainstormed about the purpose of education and the function that teachers serve in educational settings.

I believe that there are many answers to the question "What is education for?" But my answer is that the purpose of education is to encourage individual and social growth. I think that this is much more important than just learning skills to prepare for a future job. My answer to this question might change as I move into the next stage in my career and actually start teaching.

My answer to the question "What are teachers for?" is that teachers are to get children to like to learn, or to create life-long learners. This involves motivating the students, creating a safe learning environment which will foster inquiry and creativity, and becoming a role model for the students.

The only part of the lecture which bothered me was that Max said that all of our answers were very idealistic and typical of first-year teachers. That comment made me wonder what causes teachers to change their answers to these questions. Also, why should I have to change my answers once I become a teacher? Are these not worthy goals to strive for?