Post by Lizzie Horne
As we do our readings this week, our book talks about race and the ways that racially identity plays out in the classroom. Our other block 2 courses also talk about student differences and how we can help them achieve at the same level. In chapter 4 of our book, Adolescents at School, it talks about high achievers, and how they often receive discouragement from their peers.
All of this discussion about treating everyone the same made me think about a short story that I read in the ninth grade, called Harrison Bergeron. The link can be found here:
http://www.tnellen.com/cybereng/harrison.html
I encourage everyone to read it. It's not very long, and I think it applies to our current topics beautifully. In this story, everyone is equal. Unfortunately, because of this equality, people are being handicapped in order to be the same as everyone else. In an effort to put everyone on the same level, they had to pull everyone down to the level of the lowest achievers. I wanted to share this story because the reading for Thursday reminded me of this point.
What do you guys think? Do you think this happens in the classroom? What can we do to celebrate our students' differences while still encouraging everyone to achieve to their fullest potential?
Monday, September 2, 2013
1 comment:
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Thank you Lizzie for sharing this! As I was reading I began to realize I had seen or read this somewhere before. Then I remembered it was made into a movie which I watched: http://youtu.be/Tvqsv1pPSbg
ReplyDeleteYou bring up interesting questions. This story brings up a lot of important points and great dialogue! for me, it is playing with the problematic notion that equality is synonymous to sameness. And that inequality is synonymous to difference. As you very nicely said, equality doesn't mean we loose our differences. I believe that one of the reasons we have inequality (whether in terms of gender, race, class, sexual orientation, body size, etc.) is because we insist to have sameness, a norm, because we believe in tolerance of difference versus acceptance of difference. Scholar bell hooks states "Beloved community is formed not by the eradication of difference but by its affirmation, by each of us claiming the identities and cultural legacies that shape who we are and how we live in the world."