SED 445 Blog

When I think about standards and standardized testing, I immediately cringe because these were things that haunted me throughout my public school experience. It started with the NECAPs in elementary school which was just plain awful for second grade Allie because I couldn’t sit still for the life of me. My teacher told us the test was very important and to do our best but I had never taken anything like it before. I remember feeling like a fish out of water. I had to take the NECAPs again in fifth and eight grade. I remember feeling so lucky all the years in-between because I hated the testing so much. I hated being stuck in one room, forced to sit in silence, not allowed to go to the bathroom, or even read a book when I finished. It felt like torture. It was especially bad when I got to high school because as a junior, we had to take the NECAP but it became a graduation requirement – if you didn’t pass you didn’t graduate. I failed the math portion my junior year and had to retake it...

I went to high school in Cranston where the population was pretty diverse. I never felt like I was the majority as someone who is white and there were plenty of people that were Hispanic, African American, and Asian descent. So this being said, I heard a lot of different languages every single day. It never bothered me, and I never really thought about it until reading Christensen’s chapter on Language and Power. Obviously, I knew already that English is seen as the primary language in America and everyone is expected to be proficient in English. I didn’t occur to me that people who spoke different languages were oppressed in schools because that just wasn’t my experience. I even had some teachers learning words in languages like Filipino, just to talk to the students in their language.  What also didn’t make sense to me is that the chapter noted on the fact that several classrooms in America have banned Spanish but in most schools it’s also a requirement to take a foreign lan...

In “The Politics of the Paragraph,” Michelle Kenney highlights the structure of writing that is taught in schools and the problematic repercussions of formulas that students are taught. 5 paragraph essays are something I struggled with all throughout high school. In the beginning of the piece, Kenney talks about her student Erica, and I identified with her so much reading this. Not in the outside of the classroom problems so much, but the fact that I felt like such a crappy writer because I couldn’t fit all of my ideas into a 5-paragraph essay formula. I was told my ideas were too broad and I needed to narrow my ideas down. Less is more sometimes, blah blah blah. It gives me skills when I think about my high school English classes. You would think that these formulas would make it so much easier to write papers, but for me, and I’m sure several other students all over, it makes it so much harder. There’s a quote from Kenney’s piece that really stuck out to me – “ Systems like these en...

Coming into this class at the beginning of the semester, I had never heard of The Poet X.  I knew it was a book and assumed it was just like any regular other novel. It wasn't until last week that I realized it was a book of poems when I went out to buy it. I'm going to be completely honest, I have a...complicated relationship with poetry and tend to shy away from it from past experiences. I took a poetry class at CCRI, and the professor assigned us some poems that even after she told us what it meant, I still had no idea. Like, the whole class made absolutely zero sense and I struggled really bad. Before this class, throughout my public education, there had been numerous poetry units that always ended in writing my own poem, which I always felt awful at. It's definitely not my most skilled writing area, and after this college course I sort of just said to myself, "If this is what poetry is like, I'm all set!" Obviously, I've had to read poetry in othe...