Other People's Children

The quote that I selected from Part 1 of Other People’s Children is as follows:

“Rather than think of these diverse students as problems, we can view them instead as resources who can help all of us learn what it feels like to move between cultures and language varieties, and thus perhaps better learn how to become citizens of the global community.”

I will answer the three questions for the blog somewhere in here I promise. First, I will give the reasoning for selecting this quote. It just happens to be the last paragraph of part one and I feel that it was a good summary for many of the writings in Part 1. There were many quotes that hit me in Part 1, so I figured I would go a bit broader with a little more explanation.

I really enjoyed reading Part 1. It really forced me to stake a step back and look at what I have been doing in the past and look to see how I would change things in the future. Looking back, I saw myself doing some of the negative things in Taiwan, like constantly correcting their grammar, spelling, sentence structure and more. I did notice a significant change in their willingness to participate in lessons. I tended to balance the classes with a bit of both ways. During grammar class and some others I would correct them more, but during writing class and speaking class I didn’t correct because I wanted them to just not worry about it at all and just speak. And as Delpit explains in this book it makes a very big difference. It is amazing to see.

But the parts that stood out a lot were the things she said about being direct about what you want in the classroom, asking questions for specific purposes, and students ability to change what they are reading into their own dialect, thereby signifying they are understanding what they are reading and saying it in their own natural way and personalizing their learning more.

I think that Delpit is wanting us all to just take a step back from our habits that we have done for years because, well, that’s the way it has always been done. She wants us to really look at all other cultures, not just the African American culture and really listen to the dialects and not force our way of speaking, reading and writing on them and to use their own dialects, which are part of their cultures, to help them learn in the classroom and build their skills in the classroom.

I think we all need to take the time to really get to know, not just each of our students, but the cultural backgrounds each of them comes from, so we can know better how to adapt our teaching styles to match their abilities and strengths. We need to understand that even though, they may be speaking or writing in ways, that every part of our background screams “WRONG!” it isn’t necessarily wrong. It’s just different and in today’s society different is what makes everyone special and the more we take the away, the less special each individual becomes.