Blog Post Terry Meier Why Can't She Remember That?

Quotes:
For this blog entry I chose to look at three quotes from the text and then explain their relevance.

1.) "Almost 40% of the total US public school population is made up of student of color, a percentage that exceeds 80% in many metropolitan school districts (National Center for Education Statistics)."
    The importance of this quote is that it recognizes the vast diversity in our schools. As we have been discussing in class, and as we have seen through the articles we have read, diversity and culture play a huge role in community, society and conclusively in teaching. This article will further explore how diversity and culture affect literacy in schools. Children from different backgrounds have a variety of literary experiences prior to entering pubic school, and it is interesting to look at how those experiences influence the education of literacy.

2.) "Periodically she would interrupt her reading to ask questions about the illustrations or the text, the same questions she had asked during the two previous readings. At one point when the teacher asked, "How many mittens are there?" Gabriela, the bilingual Puerto Rican child sitting next to me, turned and asked me, in an exasperated tone, "Why can't she remember that?"... The teacher's likely assumption in this case was that Gabriela did not know the answer to the question, possibly leading to the conclusion that she needed more simplified instruction, or perhaps more English-language vocabulary..."
     This was the part of the article that struck me the most. The first reason is because I can somewhat identify with Gabriela. While in elementary school, I can still remember now occasionally having those feelings that the teacher was asking very obvious questions, or repeating something too many times, and I can remember feeling anxious to move on. The second reason this stood out to me though was because it reminded me of the article by Robert Lake. Much like the teacher's were assuming the young Indian child, Wind Wolf, was a slow learner due to his cultural background, here Gabriela may also be assumed to be a slow learned due to her cultural response to not answer questions that have obvious answers. Due to the fact that this has been in two articles, the importance of not assuming too much about a student is really standing out to me.

3.) "Not every book used in as multilingual, multicultural classroom needs to represent people of color or incorporate linguistic diversity, but if bilingual children and children of color make up the majority of the class, then the majority of books used in the class could reflect that fact."
     I chose this quote because it goes along with some of the points made by McIntosh in White Privilege. Not all children have equal access to books with characters of their same race. In many diverse classrooms I have been in, there are usually a few books with minority characters in them, with the majority of the books having white characters. As pointed out in the quote, however, the ratio of books with colored characters should be equal to the real life diversity.

When looking for a hyperlink to include, I "googled" multicultural books for children and was overwhelmed with the wealth of books available. There were so many books that seemed so interesting and would be welcome in any future classroom of mine. I decided to include a few websites that had some of those books on them.

http://ccbc.education.wisc.edu/books/detailListBooks.asp?idBookLists=42
http://flavorwire.com/400364/10-great-multicultural-childrens-books
http://www.goodreads.com/list/show/3721.Best_Multicultural_Books_for_Children

Talking points in class:
In class I would bring up a few things:
- others experiences with multicultural books (if they had them available in elementary school)
-other ways to teach reading behavior/ make stories come alive other than those described in the article
-other ways to make children fall in love with books