maeve66 | (Reply)

From:

maeve66.livejournal.com

I love your icon. I may look for another (different) picture of her and use it, too. I've always had a strong hankering for Jane Addams.

This next bit is both responding to your comment and to

mahogany's. I don't think it comes down to how good the teachers are, or not entirely. I do think that a great deal of it comes from how much literacy there is in the home before kids ever get to school, but not only that, either -- because a lot of these English Language Learner students don't necessarily have the highest level of home literacy going on. Some of them do. Some of them have fascinatingly mixed cultural knowledge bases. I am thinking of one kid in particular, about whom I may blog at some point.

But... I think it's something about the general environment and a sort of majoritarian tipping point. If the school and the teachers privilege and model literacy, and if students see enough valuing of literacy in their neighborhood or social experience, then the atmosphere as a whole tends to pull students towards enjoying reading. I don't know -- I'm only going from observation of the two places I have worked.

The opposite held true at my other school -- kids who came from better functioning schools and better functioning communities and transferred to our school (which had HELLA dedicated and hardworking teachers)... instead of maintaining their own attitudes towards learning and reading, after about three or four months, for reasons of social survival, as far as I can tell, they would almost always have stopped reading or glorying in being curious and book oriented. I think if you took kids FROM that school and sent them elsewhere, to schools where they were in a minority (not a painful one, I'd hope -- a small group, let's say), they would adapt in the other direction, too.

All of which evades the central question, the answer to which is "I don't know."