ED3351; Purcell-Gates

"...As soon as she opened her mouth..."
If we claim to allow equal access to educational oppurtunity to all children in our schools, then we must. The way we interpret "differences" among children, and/or adults as deficit or difference depends primarily on our preconceptions attitudes towards, and stereotypes we hold towards the infividual children's communities and culture. A child with a nonstandard dialect, poor/uneducated family, we are much more likely to intrepet experiential difference as a "deficit" in children, their parents, their home, and sociocomnnunity the child grew up in. **And when we do this, we play God. Conferring or denying educational opportunity to individual, socioculturally different, children. And we do NOT have the right to do this.

Alot of reactions all throughout article, but this is the one that struck me as most critical. This section in the article is saying that as teachers, "we are playing God" in the lives of these innocent children, because of the experiential difference they may have. The next section below this talks about what the schools were doing about all this? Simply nothing. Not only failing to address experiential diference, not even concerned about it. "It's the boys failure to learn." It was very hard for me to think about such people, not caring one bit about children and their well being, and these are teachers! But I know what I read couldn't be more correct when talking about how the past has been if a student was from upper, middle, lower class and what minority group. As a teacher, I will never "play God" in the lives of my children. As a teacher, we must accept, believe, and act upon belief that ALL children are learning, have been learning since birth, ready to learn at anything, and WILL LEARN. ALL CHILDREN.