I really connected with Patricia Cohen’s article “Long Road to Adulthood Is Growing Even Longer” that was published in the New York Times, particularly with the article’s closing quote: “We have not developed and strengthened institutions to serve young adults…because we’re still living with the archaic idea that people enter adulthood in their late teens or early 20s.” While the data was not surprising to me, I was struck by Mr. Furstenberg’s quote. It made me ponder how little transition help is available for adolescents becoming adults. Continue reading How should adulthood be defined?
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MVP #2
- 32, Joaquin’s dilemma
Third, teachers can find ways to incorporate information related to the history and culture of students into the curriculum. This is important in helping students understand what it means to be who they are, an essential aspect of the identity formation process for adolescents.
It was hard for me to choose just one mvp in the section “What can educators do?” in the chapter entitled Joaquin’s dilemma. “Understanding and debunking racial stereotypes, breaking down racial separations, and challenging the hidden curriculum” as Nogeura says, are overwhelming tasks as an educator, yet, his suggestions on how to promote positive racial identity development seemed implementable. Specifically, I saw Nogeura’s third point as being especially applicable to the foreign language classroom. The student body I’m currently student teaching at is, like the rest of New York, incredibly diverse. While it may be challenging to incorporate every students’ culture and history into the curriculum as the text suggests, in a foreign language classroom, there is room for cross cultural reflections. I’m currently teaching French for high schoolers, and I’ve noticed how my cooperating teacher makes an effort to get to know each of her 170 students’ background and culture from the firs day of school. In two weeks of school, she has already fostered an environment of cross-cultural communication by asking students about their own backgrounds via written and oral surveys. She frequently refers to her Hispanophone students when introducing a new vocabulary word, and she told me she made an effort to include Haiti in the curriculum this year, as several of our students’ families have Haitian ancestors.
MVP #1
MVP:
Found at the bottom of page 15 and top of page 16 in “Scenes of Silencing”
“In the face of these social realities, principals and teachers nevertheless continue to preach, without qualification, to African-American and Hispanic students and parents a rhetoric of equal opportunity and outcomes, the predictive guarantees of a high school diploma and the invariant economic penalties of dropping out. Although I am no advocate of dropping out of high school, it is clear that silencing—which constitutes the practices by which contradictory evidence, ideologies, and experiences find themselves buried, camouflaged, and discredited—oppresses and insults adolescents and their kin who already “know better.”
I found this example of silencing particularly intriguing vis-à-vis the article of Murray and Naranjo, “Poor, Black, Learning Disabled, and Graduating,” which focused on the positive outcomes of educators and parents encouraging and placing an emphasis on students receiving their high school diploma. Granted, in Murray and Naranjo’s study, the authors did not conclude that educators and parents must promote high school graduation with the promise of “equal opportunity” upon completion of their diploma, yet the students who referenced their favorite teachers or counselors often cited their motivation as a factor in their success. After reading the data comparing the employment dropouts from wealthy neighborhoods in NYC to high school graduates in the poorest neighborhoods in “Scenes of Silencing,” I’m discouraged to think what I can do as an educator to encourage these “adolescents and their kin who already ‘know better’.”