Yeah, yeah...I know. I am really late with my readings for this course. While I read all of these very clever commentaries posted by other students on the forums, I wonder how in the world will I be able to sound like I should be one of them. To put it quite simply, I don't feel that I am clever enough in order to become an astute and articulate commenter as my peers in this course. However, that is not going to stop me from continuing on with my studies as I believe that I will improve as time (and extra effort from myself) goes by.
I can't tell you how interesting it is to be involved in tertiary studies again after being a teacher for 20 years. I believe that I will be a much better teacher after I have completed this course, (note that I did NOT say pass this course) and I am looking forward to using my new found knowledge into routine classroom practices.
Now, onto my musings about Jack Thomson, which I regret to inform you, is NOT the hunky all Aussie bloke with a drawl as wide as his ever endearing smile. (As a side note, I recently saw the that Jack Thompson's nude shoot for a women's magazine eons ago...Risque for even modern times, let alone in the 70's!!)
It is interesting to note in his preliminary notes on page 5 that Thomson discusses the Australian government's aim to follow a business style model of education by introducing school league tables, as has happened with the introduction of the MySchool website last year. Since then, teachers are now teaching to the NAPLAN test, whereas before, we deliberately did not teach to the test as the results were tied to our funding for lower ability kids. We would prefer to have extra help in our classrooms in the way of teacher's aides or smaller classes perhaps..But Nooooo!! We now struggle to teach our ever reluctant learners without extra help and usually to the detriment of other students' education. Good teachers are also proud of their school and their students and do not want the school to be seen in a bad light in the way of poor literacy and numeracy levels. Once again, we are between a rock and a hard place in ensuring our students are taught well with the bare minimum of financial help from the government. RANT OVER...for the time being anyway.
Lots of the points discussed by Thomson were familiar to me in that he was talking about the teaching of language, as a language. This fits very neatly into my area of expertise as a language teacher. "...we learn by using language"(pg 7) sounds fairly straight forward to me. I also heartily agreed with his comments in the fifth section; Learning about language: the contribution of linguistics, where he states that "language difference is not a language deficit" (pg 8). Naturellement M. Thomson.
His references to textuality had me constantly singing that word to the refrains of k.d. lang's sultry song, Sexuality, one of my faves. But I digress (again!). Imagine if students were able to analyse and deconstrct a poem by John Milton and the lyrics and music of Elton John, side by side, to analyse the language features and style of each, which is exactly what we have in the Stage 6 syllabus for the HSC. In fact, having that possibility is why I started this foray into mature age tertiary studies in the first place!
Thomson goes on to say that students need to be taught to understand and analyse all forms of text forms and not just to adher to a select, elite canon of literature. As teacher's, we need to be able to give students the tools for understanding the values that are implicit in the choices and judgements they make when they are confronted by modern day propaganda from multi national companies that do not have their health as their first priorioty. These faceless, greed driven executives are only interested in the emptying of our students' pockets.
That's enough for now. Reading 1.3 on its way!!
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