Literacy with an Attitude

By

Patrick J. Finn

Reflection

First, I would say that I’m impressed by what the author came up with from his experience of humility, and how it changed the way he taught to find a more enthusiastic audience. I completely appreciate such a kind of change. We can never find listening ears if our speech is not delivered humbly, and delivering speech, for example, in a humble way doesn’t necessarily mean that it’s coming from
humble hearts. Let me please share my experience of being a Sunday school teacher for two years. I always read about humility in the Bible, and I always taught my kids about it, but I always find most of the students unengaged or bored. After I’ve been thinking a lot about what the reason could be, I found out that even though I could be knowledgeable, I wasn’t humble in my teaching, critiquing a lot of the churches and their priests. Why is that? It’s because I didn’t live humility, as I always believed: Things can never be learned if they are not lived. And sometimes, as happened to the author, we need a shocking experience that will be a turnabout in our whole way of thinking. So, going back to Finn’s experience, his studies using Anyon’s research would’ve never found such appreciation and importance if they weren’t addressed in his new, humble manner. Following this method in his studies, he could discover exactly the opposite of what he used to teach, finding out that teachers, even at poor schools that have bad performance reputations, do a great job facing all kinds of challenges from students’ social issues to the government’s poor funding. So, what he discovered reminded me about the article we previously studied by Jean Anyon, who blamed the government to be too slow in solving our social and financial issues affecting our schools’ performance, when Finn explains that undereducated students don’t really result from having bad or careless teachers, but from the unsolved social and financial issues that the government didn’t make serious efforts showing the intention to address. After reading Finn’s article and having spent some time observing at Central High School, I can clearly affirm the author’s point about the teachers’ hard work, and get to know the real causes of such students' performances, and so the bad reputation of such schools that suffer socially and financially. So, I would share the author’s opinion that no one can come up with the appropriate solutions for our public schools’ social issues to advocate for students’ learning equity more than the teachers themselves, who represent the frontlines by knowing the best about their students’ learning challenges.

Question to share in class

While observing, I’d like to know if my colleagues found the teachers they worked with to be “hard worker teachers” as Finn would describe them.

Prompts

I uploaded the file to ChatGPT and asked it to summarize it. After reading everything, I started asking it every time I think I need more understanding by letting it expand more with examples. I keep doing so until I think I got everything clear and understood.

This is my method in studying all the texts.