The battle of smagorinski

As I grappled with the Smagorinksi reading I found myself conflicted. The ideas and warnings that he highlighted for us were shadowed by the negative assumptions that he had about both his colleagues and those that are reading his book.

When Smagorinski introduced contructivism in the preface I found myself nodding along to his assertions "people learn by making and reflecting on things that they find useful and important." (XI) to me this highlighted what learning is, a construction of knowledge through the reflection of information gained in teaching. It encourages the teacher to explore the idea of how our students gain the knowledge that we attempt to teach them. Later on he expanded this idea by speaking to the relative meaning of literature. "People learn by making and reflecting on things they find useful and important. " (XIII) In this way Smagorinski highlights what I've seen elsewhere speaking to how the meaning of literature is something dependent on the lives and history of our students. Because of this it is imperative for us as teachers to differentiate the way that they teach to access the history and context of their students. Smagorinski takes this further in chapter 1 by speaking to the dangers of assessment that is not tailored to their students. By creating an assessment that stands independent of the teaching of the information we deny the organic nature of literature analysis that I mentioned being so important just before. Because of this our students will not seek to understand their literature as something that grows and is something to reflect on. "what you test is what you get. By this I mean that assesment tends to set the terms for what the teachers emphasize in instruction." This is an idea of self-fulfilling prophesy that I have seen in many classrooms over the years. In these classrooms the teachers would set a concrete answer as the one to be found and once the students found that answer they shut down. While this does not seem to be a problem within the classroom I feel that we are not just teaching our students to succeed in the classroom but beyond it. By encouraging the students to seek a single answer, provided to them by a greater authority they will seek that one answer when they move beyond graduation and read for their own pleasure.

 But while I agreed with the assertions that he made about teaching and education I had a huge problem with the assumptions that Smagorinski made about his colleagues and the readers of his book. In the preface he warned against the danger of going on auto-pilot when it came to teaching. He warned that in order to be a constructivist teacher that we would need to be willing to work harder, to adapt and differentiate to each of our different students. While I agreed with these assertions my immediate reaction what "what teacher wouldn't?"  He basically treated his readers as if we were all free loading and lazy who want nothing more than to get paid for 9 months of coasting and three months of vacation. And later when he spoke of his colleagues he assumed that they willingly and without thought gave the quiz about death of a salesman, which in my opinion it was just as likely that the teacher took the quiz as a jump off point for their own quiz. In short, maybe I'm being sensitive but I took offense to smagorinski's assumptions that we are all the worst of the education commmunity.