Freire – Second Letter (Don’t Let the Fear of What Is Difficult Paralyze You)
This article really hit home with me. I actually just recently put a note to myself on my refrigerator that says “God honors faith. The enemy attacks with fear.” I have never in my life put a note to myself up anywhere, so when I read the title to Freire’s Second Letter, I felt like I should really pay attention to the message in the letter, since I had just been reflecting on fear. In Freire’s letter, fear is defined as a “feeling of unrest before the notion of real or imaginary danger”. Freire also says, that fear is concrete whether or not it is real or imaginary. He says that we shouldn’t allow fear to paralyze us, cause us to quit or face a challenging situation without a fight. We all have fears, and we must find a way to overcome these fears. Freire speaks of the fear of not being able to understand a text and goes through the steps one should take in order to overcome this fear. No matter what our fears are, we can reflect upon them and instead of being immobilized, we can meet these fears head on and fight to overcome them. When speaking of difficult texts, Freire points out that through listening to points of view other than our own, we can “enrich the production of text comprehension”. We can in fact do this with our students as well as with our grad school cohorts! I found one additional interesting point that Freire makes about helping young readers and writers. He says that good writers are in the habit of “leaving certain information suspended so the readers could exercise their imagination”. I wondered, as I read this if this is the reason why we are almost always disappointed in a film if we have first read the book. That is, we feel that our own imaginations are (most of the time) far superior to someone else’s.
Elizabeth Jaeger’s “Silencing Teachers in an Era of Scripted Reading”
In my opinion this article was disturbing because no one in authority was willing to listen to this intelligent teacher who obviously is very aware of current research and who also cares deeply for her students. I was reminded of the difficult situation I was put in this year as I read this article. I am, for the first time, in an EIP classroom this year. This means that I have a full time EIP teacher in my classroom all day long. The other teacher in my class has not been in school for many years, and is unaware of what the current research says about scripted programs. She believes our Open Court phonics program to be an excellent way to teach children. I, on the other hand, do not like the program at all. I feel that it tries to teach skills in isolation, and that for students, little learning will occur. I was very vocal about my opinion at the beginning of the year. I told her that current research suggests that this type of teaching is outdated and ineffective. I also actually told her that I thought Open Court would be a waste of time. She, however, refused to back down, saying that this is what our county mandates. I felt that I had no choice, but to let her teach Open Court. I had to bite my tongue and let her do things the ways she felt she should. To me, the time she spent every day doing Open Court was a total waste of valuable time, but I felt that my hands were tied. In the past, when I have been the only teacher, I made a decision not to use Open Court. We are so lucky in our particular school, that our administrators don’t breathe down our backs and force us to teach from certain curriculum. I really felt for the teacher who wrote the article since her administrators forced her to use Open Court. I really began to wonder about the schools on the other side of my county…are teachers forced into using curriculum that they know to be ineffective?
