Peer Over the Walls and See the Horizon

Morrell discusses in this week's readings how literacy education today has taken the form of literature analysis (89) and procedural approaches to writing (84-5). The literature to be analyzed must be "sanctioned as meritorious" by those in power (89), and writing must follow a prescribed method of pre-writing, writing, and rewriting (85), where even free-form thinking takes on prescribed methodologies such as thought-clouds and brainstorming. Morrell discusses how these practices need to be enlarged to include other media, such as film, television, music and the Internet (90), and include other methods for creating media such as apprenticeship (86). The students need to look within to find forms of literature to study, instead of looking on teachers to provide it: "Their non-school lives [are] saturated with sophisticated literary practices ... students d[on't] just consume popular culture; they also produce popular culture" (92).

Morrell also discusses the value various elements of literacy have taken in our schools: "reading has taken the primary role, writing has a much smaller secondary role ... and the art of public speaking has virtually vanished" (104). Morrell tells us that we need to balance this out, and encourage students to talk and write about issues that they confront daily but have few opportunities to discuss. (109) These activities should be more about production rather than consumption (115).

Mathematics education has easily fallen into the same traps that literacy education has fallen into. Instead of sanctioned literature, we have sanctioned mathematical concepts. Instead of prescribed writing methods, we have prescribed ways to solve word problems. Math students are learning processes, and not concepts. They know how to solve problems in geometry and algebra, but they do not know how to use geometry and algebra to aid in removing the roadblocks they come to in their lives.

Consider these two math problems:

Question 1: A family of 4 goes on vacation. Airfare per person is $300. Tax on airfare is 17%. Food will cost $13 per person per meal per day. Lodging costs $200 per night. How much will the family vacation cost if they go for 7 days?

Question 2: A family has a limited budget to go on vacation. Plan out a vacation for the family and show how it can stay within a budget.

Question 1 makes so many assumptions: the size of the family, the fact that they have enough money to travel by plane, the fact that they are willing to go far for vacation, the time they have devoted to vacationing. There are racial, gender, social, cultural, and economic implications to the seemingly innocent "facts" given. Question one embodies the status-quo, and presents life as a simple package.

Consider question 2. THIS is real life! One can talk about a single working mom with 13 children. One can talk about how they take the bus to the beach for the day, instead of a plane trip across country. One can incorporate the need to tend to pets while away. One can discuss the potential lost income of hourly workers in the family while away. Question 2 removes implications. Question 2 challenges the concepts of family, vacation, budget, and cost. It does not present a problem where some students will say "Must be nice to have money!". Instead, it allows the student to come up with their own restrictions to fit THEIR lifestyle.

Rather than presenting the students with information, data, and pre-conceived notions of what it means to be a family and go on vacation, question 2 allows the student to use their own concept of family and vacation to solve the problem. In addition, instead of providing a neat list of items to consider which would yield a single answer for all students, the question allows the students to critically consider all of the elements involved in their taking of a vacation under their particular circumstances.

To help balance out the literacy components of writing and presenting, an entire project can be made out of this question. Students can present their budgets and trips to the class. They can be formal about it, or make a home-movie of the proposed trip, showing how the budget was spent. They can write an essay "How I spent my summer vacation?" They can produce a cost breakdown structure. Literacy extends beyond history and literature. It can exist in the math class as well.

Considering Freire in this discussion, while question 1 can potentially detach the student from their personal reality, question 2 connects to their reality (52). Question 1 poses the student as "spectator"; question 2 as "re-creator" (56). Question 2 allows the student to teach herself, "mediated by the world" (61). The response to the challenge of question 2 "evokes new challenges, followed by new understandings" (62).

This post will bring this blog to a close. From the first post, the exploration of Delpit and Hirsch showed the importance of finding meaningful topics for discovery not based on some third-party's determination, but our own. We then discussed the importance of language and culture, not only in terms of foreign languages, but dialects as well. We took a view of the political realm of literacy through neoliberalism and neoconservatism. We challenged our traditional views of assessment and testing. We explored race and economics in the classroom, and how despite "equitable" measures from our government, inequalities prevail. We discussed the literacy surrounding our students in their own cultures, from video games to hip-hop. We explored gender, gender identity, and the no-so-black-and-white nature of a seemingly bipolar issue. In this final post, we are tying these elements together, challenging the "top-down" structure of most classrooms today, and allowing students to take greater responsibility in their own education, which will thereby incorporate more of all of the above angles.

In general, we need to give our students more credit. They deal with racism, sexism, classism, and every other -ism you can imagine on a daily basis. Pretending these -isms do not exist in the classroom is not fooling anybody. Exposing these -isms, and allowing them to become a part of our children's education, we can create an environment which is more in line with what they see every day, enriching them with the skills to challenge the status quo and in the process, challenge themselves.

Go forth and question ... everything.

Finding Your Voice

I was very interested to see Moses' piece "Algebra and Civil Rights" in our selection of readings this week. Obtaining my teaching certification in grades 7-12 mathematics, I did not expect to see the word "algebra" appear in the title of anything we would read in a literacy class. Unfortunately, I was disappointed in Moses' piece.

Although I am striving to become a math teacher, it never occurred to me that a course in literacy would ever be a waste. Being critically literate in a language allows one to "powerfully navigate socially sanctioned language systems as they also attempt to speak the truth to power" (7) and "is essential to the redefining of the self and the transformation of oppressive social structures and relations of production" (5) according to Morrell. In my opinion, this applies to any topic, be it literature, science, history, economics, health, or mathematics.

I was very much in support of Moses' method of social uprising around a cause, garnering "active participation of some critical mass" (16), getting young people to find "their voice instead of being spoken for" (19), and "getting people at the bottom to make demands, on themselves first, then on the system" (20). This is how our country broke away from Britain. This is how slavery ended. This is how women won the right to vote. This is how discrimination is being broken down. By focusing on mathematics, I believe Moses is breaking one the tenants of his own argument: "finding their voice instead of being spoken for". I understand that economic access is a difficulty for people of color (5), and the detriment technology has been on the Black community (10), but why is mathematics necessarily the answer? Why is it not education as a whole? After Brown vs. Board of Education, blacks have the same rights as white to attend school, but do they really have "equal" access? Is math really the problem? Moses discusses that Blacks are not "tinkering in the garage, with the ambition of designing something better than Microsoft Windows" (10). I argue that a lot more is needed than math for that. Intuition, innovation, social skills, psychology, human-computer interaction, business sense, marketing, economics ... the list is endless that one needs to start a business. Why does this innovation necessarily need to be mathematical in nature? Why can't it be social? historical? philosophical? Overall, a well-rounded education opens the door for advancement into ANY field. Why limit the opportunity to just scientific jobs?

I understand Moses' premise that the jobs of the future will be more scientific, but as Moses said himself, blacks need to find their own voice to fight for their own cause. Telling them to fight for mathematically literacy is not allowing them to find their own voice. Telling them to fight for equal access to education as a whole is not even allowing them to find their own voice. Showing the black community the trends in the industry and the skills they will need for tomorrow will pique their interest, but they need to decide for themselves what they need to fight for in order to get their fair share of tomorrow's jobs.

All Are Created Equally Different

In Gee's "Opportunity to Learn", we are exposed to the fact that not all students come to the classroom with the same background. Even though they all graduated from the same previous grade level, their knowledge level, and more importantly, their experience with that knowledge, is all different. Assessing all children on the same level, assuming they have had the same experiences to all of the same material, according to Gee, is "invalid and unethical" (28).

At the same time, we can not expect that all students will "want" to interact with material at the same level. All students have different interests. Some are fonder of math over literature, history over biology, Spanish over economics. Gee calls the different learning levels "active" and "critical" (32). Active learning allows you to experience something new, form new affiliations, and prepare to learn more on the topic (32). Critical learning allows you to innovate in the domain, and come up with something novel or unpredictable (33). Typically, critical learning will occur in those areas the student has a fondness for, but not always.

Critical learning was very evident in Mahiri's piece "Street Scripts". The pieces of work and art created by these low-income African American students were "powerful lenses" into their lives and their struggles in their community (24). Their focus was not on getting a better job, or buying a house, or participating in the stock market. These educational topics would be of little interest to them, since they are focusing on survival at the moment. Allowing the students to explore these topics by their own choosing allows us as educators to "step back" and let them express themselves, instead of us reinforcing negative stereotypes of their race and socioeconomic status (22). They know the situation they are in; they don't need us to lecture them about poverty and the importance of finding a good job in the hopes of "getting out". If we let them express their frustration and anxiety over their condition, only then will they begin to listen to us about topics such as buying a house or participating in the stock market, because only then will they see those things as potential opportunities for them in the future.

This was the focus of Tatum's work with Quincy in his piece "Toward a More Anatomically Complete Model of Literacy Instruction". Tatum tells us we need to "address both the literacy needs and life outcomes of African American male adolescents in order to improve the conditions of these young men in school and society" (156). These children need to experience "psychosocial membership" (160), feeling that "they are in the presence of an adult advocate who is not going to give up on them" (160). By finding texts that engage African American adolescents (163) that discuss the typically taboo topics of a social, cultural, political, spiritual and/or economic focus (164), we can create interest in the text. THIS is real life! Real life is not a clean slate where everyone is equal and has equal opportunities and equal value. If we stop pretending this is the case, and deliberate in the actual, the interest level of the students skyrockets. This was shown with Quincy in the texts Tatum assigned him.

Stanley, however, shows us that we also must be careful with texts that the students show interest in. In "Practicing for Romance", Stanley shows us that sometimes the texts chosen "had the effect of undermining their own interests, and of preserving the dominant ideology" (178). These texts can not be considered in a vacuum. They must be discussed and evaluated. In the case of romance novels, we need to question the character's actions, and have the readers wonder if they could do more, or if they could have taken the story into a different direction if they acted differently.

Maher and Hill's pieces show us just how differently the world can be viewed. Life is not A or B, black or white, yes or no. Feminists views in Maher's piece range from conservative to liberal-progressive, and "woman-centered" to social reconstructionist. Some believe schools should focus on academic achievement, but instead "have fallen victim to a series of foolish gender and culture wars (268). Others believe single-sex classrooms might be the answer (270). In Hill's piece, what would seem to some to be one of the most "basic" binary choices in life, sex and gender, involves a lot of "gray" area. Maher sums up these concepts very succinctly: "Teachers ought to engage with the whole child ... and confront societal inequalities" (270). As teachers, will we always say the right thing? Will we always do the right thing? Will we always value every difference displayed by our students in the classroom? If we answer yes, we are fooling ourselves. We have been brought up by society to conform, and when we struggle, that is the education we will fall back to. In our attempt to recognize that and combat it, that is where the true education of our children lies.

Real Life Education

Gatto's butterfly project as described in "Success Guaranteed Literacy Programs: I Don't Buy It!" is a wonderful example of how "true" literacy should be taught in the classroom. Gatto's premise behind this project is that "I do not consider myself the giver of knowledge. I view my role as constructing an atmosphere where the children see themselves as valuable to the process of learning within the classroom" (75). She employs ""substantive engagement", a term from Vygotsky, which encourages authentic questioning, examination, elaboration and revision. (75) She has results as well, showing that her students' standardized test scores are equal to or surpass school and district norms (76). Not only is Gatto teaching literacy, speech, and writing, she is teaching geometry, measurement, biology, history, and business. She is showing that education is not a set of time-defined periods in which math is only spoken about for 45 minutes each day, but that math and other topics are intricately intertwined with real life. Gatto is showing her students not to avoid situations because they are not the subject they are currently studying, but to question and tackle issues head-on, regardless of topic. THIS is real life. THIS is teaching students how to learn.

Gutierrez discusses in "Sameness as Fairness" that today's educational practices attempt to "facilitate the homogenization of vastly different students" (111). By creating curricula servicing "color-blind equality" (110), we are "detach[ing] from literacy practices and contexts that bring meaning and purpose to people in sense-making activity" (111). Gutierrez celebrates educational methodologies that focus on cultural and historical traditions (118). While successful for Gatto's class, Gutierrez tells us the butterfly project will not work in every classroom. Every class is different. The teacher needs to find the element that will connect with the students. In Arizona, the project might be a cactus experiment. In Maine, it might be lobsters. In Florida, lizards. What is important here is not the subject, but the method. By understanding Gatto's method, Gutierrez tells us that any subject can be interjected and be made to be successful, as long as it has meaning and connection to the students.

Ladson-Billings shows us in "I ain't writin' nuttin': Permissions to Fail and Demands to Succeed in Urban Classrooms", how drastic picking the wrong subject can be. Describing a writing exercise in which students group together and come up with sentences, pick one sentence, and write it as a group, she highlights Shannon, who declares "I ain't writin' nuttin'!", since she can not associate with any of the sentences her classmates are coming up with (110). The sentence has no meaning to her. Why would she take the time to write it? Ladson-Billings tells us that academic achievement should represent "intellectual growth and and ability to produce knowledge" (111). The production of knowledge is not the reiteration of facts, but the use of "reading and writing fro real purposes" (117). What better way is there to get students to produce real knowledge than to have them explore topics that are important to them. Without this, we are diluting our children's education to memorization and regurgitation of fact.

Lastly, Purcell-Gates discusses how open we must be to student's language, culture and background in "...As Soon As She Opened Her Mouth!". By describing the concept of "literacy knowledge" (124), the author shows us how students bring various backgrounds of experience to school with them. By forcing all students to perform the same tasks, we being to accentuate these differences in the negative. By mandating certain types of assignments which focus on the strengths of students from literate home backgrounds, we are propagating the power stereotypes associated with different socioeconomic classes (133). Instead, by having a diverse classroom where many ideas and concepts are encouraged and accepted, a student with less literacy knowledge can thrive in other areas their fellow students are less knowledgeable about, expressing her strengths as she develops her weaknesses through interactions with students more versed in those areas.

Through Gatto's butterfly project, we see the template for a classroom environment which can explore topics of meaning and significance to its students, breaking down barriers of language and socioeconomic class structure that tend to separate our children today rather than bring them together. It is my wish that I can design my classroom around these concepts, and show my students how to express and develop their strengths.

The Measure of Success

What does the word “learn” mean to you? If a child can tell you that 4 times 5 is 20, did the child learn multiplication? What if you ask the child “If George is given $5 a day for four days by his father, how much money does George have?” and she comes up with $18. Would you still say the child has learned multiplication?

Personally, I believe the above example demonstrates the difference between “fact” and “knowledge”. It appears that our children today are learning a lot of “facts” in school, but less and less “knowledge”.

In Catherine Luna's piece this week, she discusses the learning styles of students with learning disabilities. We all have “preferred” learning styles. For example, I prefer discussion over lecture. It does not mean that I can not learn from a lecture, but I definitely get more out of a discussion, hearing how other students interpret something and finding out what their struggles are in understanding the material. With respect to learning disabilities, the differences in success are more extreme between the amount of learning occurring between “preferred” and “non-preferred” instructional methods. Given a freedom as to the method of instruction, or the way to express their knowledge, students with learning disabilities do very well. Should these students be punished for the fact that they can not learn the same way as “everyone else” does? What counts more, the actual knowledge, or the delivery mechanism?

In my opinion, the students in Luna's article are more “knowledgeable” than your average student, despite their learning disabilities. They know what methods work best for them, and which they struggle with. They are trying to work with their teachers and staff to be able to maximize their learning, instead of just “surviving” with the method prescribed by the instructor.

I believe this is what Carini is referring to in “Valuing the Immeasurable”. Rather than “fact” and “knowledge”, Carini discusses “training and schooling” and “education”. Carini takes the Luna piece on method one step further. Carini talks about how “in the name of efficiency and homogeneity” “variety is minimized”. Our schools today are focused on covering so much “material” in so little time. Legislation such as No Child Left Behind has forced more standardized testing and education on our children. We are creating economies of scale not in the corporate world, but in the classroom. We are trying to figure out the best way to teach students how to pass a test given a minimal use of resources. Obviously, customized education plans per student would not be cost-effective in this approach. Instead, we drill our students in how to take standardized tests. We given them strategies for eliminating derailing answers, and giving them the best odds at getting a question correct. Then, we drill them in the facts these questions will be asked on. Sometimes, the students are given a free-form essay, but even that has an “equation” to follow in order to maximize your potential score (introduction, supporting idea 1, supporting idea 2, supporting idea 3, conclusion). Could you imagine the look on the evaluator's face if a student responded to an open essay question of “Describe how the American Revolutionary War was influenced by the French Revolution” with a comic strip instead of a written essay in the prescribed form? Does the comic strip necessarily imply that the student knows any more or less on the American and French Revolutions simply based on her choice of medium? It is this idea of measurement which Carini says “is valued and recognized to be important in education.”

Delpit reinforces the need for freedom of expression in her piece “No Kinda Sense”, in which she focuses on language, and more specifically, verbal language. Too often we correct children as they speak to us … grammar, pronunciation, use of slang. Why? Is the use of slang that critical if the child is discussing his understanding of plant cell reproduction? By focusing on the correctness of the language, and not the thought behind the language, Delpit says we are stifling out children's thought process. She says school has become all about the language, and not the content, and we are actually encouraging our students not to gain more knowledge to talk about. She reinforces the “push” nature of our educational system by saying “students rarely get to talk in classrooms”. When they do speak the “standard dialect is embedded in instruction that has little connection to children's cultural lives and personal interests.” When they do get to speak about something they care about, “the children whose language is considered defective are themselves viewed as defective.” The children consider both themselves and the topic they want to discuss as wrong. Would that encourage you to explore beyond the topics listed in the syllabus?

Hilliard expresses how much a person's language actually tells us, both about that person's knowledge abilities and their personalities. Some language dialects are based in persuasion. Some are based in song and are artistic and more illustrative. Some are more scientific. The use of one dialect over another means that the individual thinks best not just in the technical aspects of that dialect, but using the qualities of the dialect as well. Our culture today has written in all of these assumptions about dialects of the English language which are baseless, and the metrics used to test our children's knowledge, the almighty standardized tests, are based on a very specific dialect of the English language. Students who do not perform well on those standardized tests might very well perform better if the test were written to their dialect and culture. These tests are not testing knowledge, but expression and comprehension in a particular dialect. Can you imagine having to go through high school and taking every exam in the foreign language you were studying? Math, Biology, US History … all the tests given in German and the answers expected in German? Do you think you would have done as well in school?

We see from these readings from Delpit and Hilliard that our evaluation system today is very focused on a particular dialect, and much research has been done showing increased learning capabilities when children are taught in a dialect more closely aligned with a child's history and culture. Luna questions even further the methods used, and Carini questions the medium. We might not get to Carini's ideal classroom overnight, but this display of articles gives us a good spectrum to begin making progress toward that ideal.

Doom and Gloom to Hope

It is very easy to come away from this week's articles with a very negative flair. Before exploring these readings in further detail, we need to realize that NOTHING in life is perfect. Nothing is flawless. Everything can always be improved upon. Sometimes, in steps meant to take something forward, we end up sliding backward. This ebb and flow occurs on so many levels and in so many aspects of our lives. We must recall, however, that it is the long term view that truly determines whether we are improving out situation in life or making it worse.

Pauline Lipman discusses the concept of neoliberalism in "Education Policy, Race, and Neoliberal Urbanism." She defines neoliberalism as the withdrawal of government from providing for social welfare, replaced instead by economic and special policies that promote the primacy of the market. The heart of neoliberalism in education, according to Lipman, is the No Child Left Behind (NCLB) Act, which she claims is paving the way for large-scale privatization of public schools. In an effort to make education equal for all, Lipman proposes that we are instead further distancing the spectrums of the highest achievers from the lowest achievers. While well-performing schools are given greater flexibility in the ways to educate their children, poor-performing schools are given further restrictions, and risk losing funding without promoting government sanctioned programs and demonstrating increased student performance, usually through standardized tests. Looking at segments of poor-performing schools, Lipman highlights that these clamp-downs on school districts are disproportionately occurring in non-white lower socioeconomic classes, indicating that the new business involvement in education is helping to promote our future white leaders of companies, and helping hold-down the lower class diversified population for our future blue-collar workforce.

Apple, in "Whose Markets, Whose Knowledge?", takes this concept a step further. Instead of talking about how schools are influenced by business, Apple talks about the school AS business. Students are the new human capital, and school budgets, how they are proportioned, and how they are expended are the new business. Apple also introduces the concept of neoconservatism, or a return to more traditional values and the "morality" of the past. Through NCLB, and the advent of charter schools, upper-class white parents can make sure their children are educated in the same manner they were, without the influence of lower economic classes or outside cultures. The highlight of Apple's article, in my opinion, is the discussion on the changes in the teaching profession itself, how the profession has moved from one of "licensed autonomy" where teachers, once licensed, were trusted to educate their students, to "regulated autonomy", where every aspect of their interactions are now policed and questioned. We can see the concepts of neoliberalism and neoconservatism working in concert as well. The neoliberals are seeing to it that well-performing school districts continue to receive their funds, with limited interference, while struggling school districts receive less funds and increased scrutiny. The neoconservatists are making sure that increased scrutiny reflects "proper" educational methods. We measure the progress of these students with standardized testing which reinforces the superiority of the upper class and further diminishes the knowledge of the lower class.

Dan Osborn's "Digging Up the Family Tree" solidifies this connection between neoconservatism and neoliberalism, drawing lines between individuals in for-profit corporations creating canned literacy programs and individuals involved in the creation and measurement of NCLB. Both Osborn in his work and Irvine and Larson in "Literacy Packages in Practice" connect the political and economic handshaking going on in education, in particular with literacy, back to the racial divide, pointing our how these canned literacy programs, intent on making literacy education neutral in term of race and economics, are actually polarizing students of different racial and economic backgrounds even further.

After this summary, it is difficult to see how any of this can have a positive light. We have for-profit corporations influencing school policy and education, and politics reinforcing for-profit corporate agendas through the auspices of educational "reform", intent on closing racial and socioeconomic barriers, but actually increasing the distance between the "haves" and "have nots".

These articles, however, were all written before our recent economic crisis. We need to look at what impact that has had on our neoliberal and neoconservative thoughts on education today. We have just seen a near collapse of our nation's financial industry. Huge corporations, in existence for years, and synonymous with American production and innovation, are filing for bankruptcy. The American taxpayer is footing the bill for a lot of the stimulus to bring us further from the brink of collapse, at a time when more and more of taxpayers are losing their jobs. One thing is very evident in the news broadcasts today, and that is the finger of blame, trying to pin down who and what and when caused this to occur. The American people are calling for accountability.

We have seen CEOs crumble. We have seen golden parachutes taken away. We have seen executives forced aside. We have seen governments take controlling interest in large corporations. We have seen a major upset in who is sitting in the seats of Congress and our White House. Changes are happening. No longer is the large monolithic corporation king. It is now seen as the enemy. It is seen as holding America back from prosperity and progress. It is being bailed out by the government and told to make progress. It is seeing stress tests placed on it to determine its stability and ability to be saved.

The model of corporate America that schools are being based on is not working, not only in schools, but in corporate America! We are seeing a paradigm shift in how we view business. The arguments that schools should work like businesses does not hold the same weight it did even just a year ago.

In addition to the economic model that neoliberalistic education is based on, the neoconservatist ideals are most likely to fail in the short term as well. One of the biggest weaknesses of NCLB is also one of its supposed strengths: frequent standardized testing. There is so much data present on our schools already. Overlay that data with student test scores, and we can expose the fact that NCLB is not working. Another factor to take into account is next year, 2010, is a census year. Huge emphasis is already being placed on the proposed diversity counts. Compound recent census data with NCLB data, and we may very see the final word on NCLB, for it will be blatantly obvious that children ARE being left behind, and they happen to fall into very well-defined categories, being economic classes and racial backgrounds.

So yes, this week's articles are very negative and depressing. But there is hope. Maybe NCLB is one of those steps forward that ends up sliding us backward. But if we look at the changes in education since the 13 original colonies, can we say that overall, changes have been made for the better?

Week 2: Which language is "right"?

In this week's readings, we see further evidence that literacy can really be split into two different components. First, there is the very mechanical element of being literate in the mechanics of a language, meaning the vocabulary and grammar of the language. Second, there is the content, which we have seen from this week's readings can very often be cultural.

It seems clear from "Indigenous Bilingual and Bicultural Education" that the more familiar one is with the mechanics of the language they are speaking, the easier it is to learn the content. Learning mathematics and science in one's primary language is the best way to learn mathematics and science concepts. However, we have seen from Haneda's work "Becoming Literate in a Second Language" that content can not always be separated from the actual mechanics of a language.

In Haneda's piece, we explore cultural elements of a language, where religious schools and cultural classes are teaching concepts in a tongue more native to that religion or culture than English. Can these concepts not be taught in English? Yes, they probably could, but with greater difficulty. It is here that we see that the language itself carries culture within it. When learning another language, one is bound to come to a point where they are trying to translate a word or a phrase into the other language from their own, and they are having a hard time doing so. Sometimes the word doesn't exists, and the similar words that do have translations are just missing something on their meaning. Sometimes it is a phrase that can put something so eloquently in the native tongue for which there is just no equivalent in the secondary tongue, and the only way to express that thought or feeling or emotion is to explain it with many more words, where the eloquence of the initial phrase is now long gone. Such is the place with learning religion and culture in their native tongues. 

Sometimes, historical significance is wrapped into the language and the culture. For Native Americans on reservations and Jews in World War II, many times it was a crime to write or speak in their native tongues. Incidents like these make it more important for the cultural conversation to happen in that tongue, to show the strife and struggle that has been overcome and express pride in being able to still speak the language spoken by family members generations ago.

Baker, in her work "Trilingualism", goes even further by suggesting that each language, native or not, has within it its own varieties, from the informal and conversational to the formal and "correct" way of speaking it. Here, the argument turns from the ease to express content in a native tongue to the ease to express content in the most comfortable way in that native tongue. The formalities of a language can be learned in a grammar class, and the structure and use of those formalities should not stand in the way of allowing students to develop their minds and think critically using language as a medium, and not a barrier, for expressing their thoughts as easily as possible.

Lastly , Michael Stubbs reviews that no language is primitive to any other, and that each suits the community it serves. In effect, it does not matter if students debate in an Amazonian tribal language, Harlem street slang or proper Merriam Webster's English, the tools needed for those students to debate properly and effectively are present in each language. He furthermore goes to show that the stereotypes associated with different dialects and variations on a language are unfounded, and do not connote a level of intelligence or understanding.

What these readings lead us to is that literacy is not about words, or grammar, or punctuation. Literacy is about thought. Once the ability to create and communicate rational thought is developed in one language, it can be communicated in other languages. The thought process, however, is key. Forcing an individual to learn how to think through a language he or she is not comfortable with will only stifle the individual's thought in ALL languages. Therefore, the individual should be taught to think in the language that is most comfortable for them. 

We must also realize that not all thoughts and ideas can be communicated in other languages with 100% accuracy. Learning different cultures and their languages will give us better insight into the thoughts capable in the world, and give us a better understanding of our fellow human beings and their rich heritages.