Engage in discussion about something that captured your attention over the past few weeks in the course. Relate it back to specific class discussions, readings, and your grading/teaching when possible

You're what's wrong with the education system, not me. Blaming, name-calling, pointing fingers, deflecting, what are we five years old? Apparently so, if we, as teachers, think that it's 100% the students fault who make the educational system fail, or inferior. I could go on a wild rant about how it's actually not the student nor teacher, but rather the politicians in office who rightfully deserve 99.8% of the blame for what's wrong with our education system, but I'll leave that for another time and another place.

Mina Shaughnessy's essay Diving In: An Introduction to Basic Writing really hit me hard this week. She says, "This system of exchange between teacher and student has so far yielded much more information about what is wrong with students than about what is wrong with teachers, reinforcing the notion that students, not teachers, are the people in education who must do the changing" (319). I reread this sentence a couple of times to really let it sink in; and she's right, absolutely right.

While I don't have college teaching experience, this easily transfers to high school students. The term "basic writer" is transparent across the board, the idea Shaughnessy suggests, that we need to STOP categorizing our students, "eighth-grade, fifth-grade, developmental, remedial, etc." as if they have some malady is crucial. How would you feel if at 18 years old if a teacher walked up to you and said, "your skills are about the same level as a fifth grader." I'm pretty sure you'd be like "what the...." and be even more discouraged than you maybe already were about the subject.

Shaughnessy provides four categories for teachers:
GUARDING THE TOWER- this is when we protect the academy, this is being more concerned about test scores, student feedback at the end of the semester, about making sure we hit all of the TEKS we need to in one lesson, and ensuring that the State, School, and Student is happy with our performance. Our performance, as if we are actors, we have a certain list of to-do tasks that we must accomplish each year, and if we don't accomplish them, because let's say we spent more than the two days the state alloted us on how to write thesis statements, then we fall behind on our to-do list and come the end of the year, we are told that we have failed our students and have not fully prepared them. So, we guard the tower, we stand at the front of the classroom as if we are Generals going into battle picking our front linesmen, singling out the weaker ones, the ones that might fall behind, the ones that we automatically think just by a pre-test performance that they need specialized learning, so we remove them from our classrooms, because God forbid we let one child make us lose the uphill battle against the State Standards.

But then, "Examined at a closer range, the class now appears to have at least some members in it who might, with hard work, eventually 'catch up'" (321). We've chosen the students we're willing to go to battle with, now it's training time. We've put our students through rigorous pre-testing examinations and lessons, to narrow down who goes in what position on the battle field, and after we have gotten rid of the obvious weaklings, the ones that we knew from the start would lead to our demise, we've chosen a few students who we think might actually be capable of holding their own on the battlefield, we're just hoping now that we can train them well enough to perform well and successfully when the time comes. This is CONVERTING THE NATIVES.

As preparations for battle and rigorous training begins, we stop and look at our students and say, " I dont understand what you dont understand about this? it's easy." As Shaughnessy says, it actually "only appear[s] simple to those who already know them" (322). So we stop and take a step back and try to see what it is that we know, and what our students don't know, and we must now approach a difficult concept from a different angle. This is called SOUNDING THE DEPTHS. We must figure out what and how to teach something that seems so easy to us, in a new way so that our students can grasp the concept. This might be the most difficult task for the teacher because we have to take what is natural to us and turn it into something else, something that may seem foreign to us but that might actually help our students learn the concept. "The experience of student hood is the experience of being just so far over one’s head that it is both realistic and essential to work at surviving" (325). As teachers, we must figure out and do whatever it takes for our students to succeed, to survive the uphill battle of learning, because with out student success, we, as teachers, fail.

Lastly, DIVING IN, this is when as a teacher we must become a student to ourselves, we must become one with our students. We must "become a student of new disciplines and of his students themselves in order to perceive both their difficulties and their incipient excellence"(325). How are we to succeed in the battle if we don't fight ourselves? If we don't be come a student, and learn too? We aren't learning what the student's are learning, but rather we are learning how the student learns. This is essential, if we can't view the world through the eyes of our students, then how are we to teach our students successfully? We must dive in, head first, into our students' learning.

The difference that Shaughnessy points out at the end of her essay, the crucial difference between high school and college, is the the very first notion of Guarding the Tower. As a high school teacher, we are allowed to move students to different classes, we can ask our administrators to remove to students and place them in remedial courses. But in college, we cant, we get what we get and we have to work with all of the students. We must make choices in our teaching and learning styles to help ALL students succeed.

As far as this essay relating to our class discussions, we've spent hours discussing how to help the struggling students who just might not be "up to par" with their peers. While I don't think there's a universal answer that will work for all, I think it depends solely on the students and the teacher. We must make a choice, do we spend an extra class day reviewing grammar rules for the five basic writers in our class and watch the other 25 student sigh and roll their eyes, or do we skip the extra grammar and push onward and focus on the 25 students who will succeed and just hope and pray the five other students will one day, "catch up"? I think the answer is obvious, at least it is for me, but I've had teachers in the past who have chosen differently and in the end, the 25 students helped win the uphill battle, while I and the other four students struggled measly along behind the crowd just praying for a C in the course, so I could just move on to the next required course.