Learning Letter/Plan of Action

During the course of this class, I have altered my idea about the reality of what life can be like for kids growing up in war torn or underdeveloped countries.  It was a subject that I have never really put any thought into because it simply did not affect me.  I have the "out of sight, out of mind" mentality.  While I do not have issue with this way of thinking, it can turn into ignorance or just "looking the other way".  After this course, I feel that I fall into the "looking the other way" category.  I know that a lot of this is happening around the world but it doesn't directly affect me, so I don't really pay attention to it.  While reading about all of these kids growing up in different circumstances, I realized that every kid grows up and all of these stories were coming of age stories, but from different and horrible perspectives.  It is odd to see that with their situations, they still had to deal with some of the same issues of growing up.  I feel that this connection between all the books was the most important aspect in my opinion.

While doing the projects, my favorite aspect was seeing others projects and how they did them.  With the Museum display, it was interesting to see what others did.  I noticed that a lot of people had family and religion as the main aspect of their displays.  This is something that I find interesting because I am detached from my family and non-religious.  Seeing how different people portray their family is something that is always of interest to me.  The part that I most remember is reading about a girl's father who was adopted and went on an expedition to find his birth parents.  Being adopted, I hear this all the time and get asked if I am ever going to find my birth parents.  To me, it makes no sense as i have no want to even think about it, they aren't my parents.  That is not how others feel, as I saw with this father looking for his birth parents.  I wanted to know why he wanted to do it, just to get insight into what drives someone who is adopted to do this.

I enjoyed the Book Talks project more than I expected.  When I have to work with five or more people, I cringe.  I am generally a solo worker, yet I had a great group who came up with great ideas and books to use.  I never thought of single parenting as issues with children's books.  I knew that single parent families are a huge issue in the US and the statistics that I found were quite depressing.  The ones who suffer are the children.  Seeing how many books there are on single parenting, I realized that I had seen these books before and didn't even notice that they were about the topic.  I think it is because single parenting is a normality in today's society and I don't even recognize it as being anything but normal.  While the amount of books was overwhelming, the ideas behind each was interesting.  I was really surprised by the topic of sibling abuse and the lack of content that the group could find.  While they were able to find material about it, it was surprising because it is an issue that we all know but maybe don't recognize as an issue that needs real attention.  The most important concept that I pulled from this activity was that there is a children's book for almost any situation.

While doing the Graffiti Wall, I enjoyed looking through all of the different types of graffiti.  There is so much out there and was very hard to choose from.  Like art, each piece that I found was meant to be thought provoking and something that went against the grain.  Seeing different types of resistance art showed that there is a commonality in all of these wars; the resistance and some people want the same thing, peace.

I feel that the main point of all the texts that we read was to get perspectives of growing children in very different settings.  Each kid had his or her own horror to deal with as they were growing up.  I imagine that students could read these novels to get an idea of what it is like for others around the world to grow up when they don't have certain amenities that we do.  War and strife is going to continue in the world, providing us with more of these horror stories of what children have to go through.  It was hard for me to believe that Sierra Leone's government was also using child soldiers.  I was under the impression that the rebels and the RUF were the ones that used them, but it was both sides.  I've always known that there is war and it destroys societies and peoples, but I never looked into or thought about what it actually does to the children.  These books have created a much more focus about people in these large scale situations.  Thinking about war in terms makes it much more personal as it isn't about the resources or land but individual's experiences with life and death every day.

As a person, I don't ever really think about myself as part of a bigger picture or responsible for something that happens half way across the world.  I do things for myself.  I am not selfish, just choose to live in my own world.  Is that good or bad? I don't know.  How much could I change if I got involved anyway?  I don't vote or get involved in politics.  I feel as if I am a bystander.  When looking through pictures of graffiti, I saw one that said "no one is an innocent bystander".  I found this to be really interesting.  I know about all of these things happening around the world but don't do anything about it.  Does that make me part of the problem if I just ignore it?  I could answer both ways.  I also ask myself what I could do that would even matter.  This class has lowered my ignorance level to some of the situations around the world and it makes it difficult to ignore them.  Not that I want to ignore them, but knowing more about what is happening makes me feel bad for doing so, which is a good thing and means I have empathy, so I am not a serial killer.

For my plan of action, I have thought and thought about what I would like to do for this portion of the assignment.  Figuring out a step to take from here is not easy and I won't settle with just increasing my own knowledge of the subject as I feel it is a bit of a cop out.  I chose a point to focus on in the course and go from there, which is parenting and issues that revolve around it from book talks.  In my student teaching, I have built great relationships with students yet neglected to do anything with parents.  It is easy to forget them as they are "out of sight and out of mind" for me as a teacher.  With my school placement, there is a very high amount of poverty and students that have to work to support their families.  As I resume student teaching in the fall, I am going to be involved more with parents from the start.  I want to create relationships with them too.  This is something that teachers must do anyway and I want to do it to better the relationships that I have with the students.  I am an advocate that better relationships promote better learning, so it should be a no brainier that involving parents is something I should be doing.  I never had to deal with personal parenting issues with my family, so I tend to forget that they can be issues.  Involving parents and getting to know them and strengthening the relationship because of it is my goal of what I would like to accomplish next as I progress towards teaching.