words

SMAGOR who-is-at aardvark.ucs.uoknor.edu
Wed, 11 Oct 1995 06:48:39 -0500 (CDT)

>From Lisa Delpit's Other People's Children: "Another example of
the decontextualizing ritual often enacted in schools is our
insistence that children verbally mediate any action. The
action itself is not evidence of its existence--it must be
put into words. Native teachers often told me that one of their
greatest frustrations was to have one of their instructors in
school insist that they explain how they solved a problem. Doing
it was not sufficient; unless it was accompanied by words, it
didn't count. How many times do we insist that children talk
through some problem they have already solved? We think we
are 'checking for understanding,' but could we merely be
helping children to learn to ignore context? Could we be
asking them to ignore knowledge they've acquired through a
variety of nonverbal sources and to limit their understanding
of the world to the word?" (p. 99)

Peter Smagorinsky