Chapter 3 and 16

I was not learning anything new in these chapters, but I was reading something that seems obvious, at least to me. It seems unfair to me that kids are not learning things in the classroom that they actually use in real life, and vice-versa. If anything, these gaps are doing nothing but growing farther apart, which as a future educator, really frustrates me. Kids really need to be using the technologies in the classroom that they are comfortable with, and so they might actually enjoy doing their homework or group work outside of class. For my advanced writing profile last semester, we were encouraged to use new or comfortable technologies to make a profile that was unique to our own writing styles. I made a blog on Tumblr, which is a technology I particularly enjoy using outside of class. I feel like I got more out of the assignment because I was making something that I knew no one else could replicate, and I was proud to show it off.
Chapter 3 also brings up the idea of digital natives and digital immigrants, and the difference/distance between the two groups. Digital natives are people that I think of as being currently in 10th grade or lower. These kids have been raised on technology. The digital immigrants are the people our parents’ ages and older who are learning how to use technologies for everyday life, but might not be as comfortable with it as the natives. I feel like my generation is somewhere in the middle, which makes us sympathetic with the older generation, but well-equipped to teach the younger generations. We understand the importance of technologies in the classroom.

Chapter 16 brought up a point that I really like. The book says that teachers work smarter to make kids work harder. This is a good point because some of the older teachers really have to work outside of their comfort zone in an attempt to reach younger students that are more and more accustomed to technologies. This also disagrees with the next point I want to make: there was a statistic in the textbook that said that 85% of students cannot read their textbooks independently, but because of the demands of NCLB, teachers have to assign independent reading anyway.  Students are continuing to not do well because teachers cannot stop in the rigorous teaching they have to do. This is because of the idea of “sanctioned literacies” or the idea that some literacies are better than others. We need younger people in the government working on behalf of education. These younger people would have a much stronger opinion of what realistic literacies are for students, not outdated ones that the older people who work for the government do. People that make up policies for students need to be connected with them.  While NCLB is good in theory, nobody can really learn anything that might help them in real life, which is what students care about. Students drop out of high school because Beowulf has nothing to do with culinary arts or mechanics or medicine that they want to study in later life. We need to connect with our students in new ways if we want them to succeed.