Anyon's talking points

1. "In both working-class schools, work in language arts is mechanics of punctuation (commas, periods, question marks, exclamation points), capitalization, and the four kinds of sentences. One teacher explained to me, "Simple punctuation is all they'll ever use."
- This quote bothers me a little bit because it shows the attitude and the expectations that the teachers have for the students. The teacher's attitude to me says that they feel the students aren't going to need to know a lot about grammar because they won't be going that far in life. It seems that at the working class school the expectations for these children are very low and are expected to grow up being in the middle class and they won't get any higher.

2."Work tasks do not usually request creativity. Serious attention is rarely given in school work on how the children develop or express their own feelings and ideas, either linguistically or in graphic form."
- I think that this is a problem because all children are different and you shouldn't ignore their creativity or differences. All children learn in different ways and have a lot of interesting ideas and they should be able to voice and talk about in class what their ideas are, because a good way to learn is by learning other people's stance on things and getting other people's point of view.

3. "Language arts emphasizes language as a complex system, one that should be mastered. The children are asked to diagram sentences of complex grammatical construction, to memorize irregular verb conjugations (he lay, he has lain, and so on ...), and to use the proper participles, conjunctions, and interjections in their speech. The teacher (the same one who teaches social studies) told them, "It is not enough to get these right on tests; you must use what you learn [in grammar classes] in your written and oral work. I will grade you on that."
- What I find most interesting about this is how different it is compared to the lower and middle class schools. In the lower class schools, they only had to do simple grammar, and in middle class schools the grammar that they did was grammar that they had to use in everyday life, or for business letters and such. The were tested on the grammar they learned and that was that. However, in the elite school they grammar that they learned had to be used all the time.

What surprises me most about this reading is the difference in the way that the children were taught. It seems to me that the lower class schools were most strict with the children about what they learned and how they learned it, when with the elite school the children thought a lot about how to solve the problem on their own. Also, in the elite school the children were expected to do a lot more than in the lower class schools. They were allowed to venture out in the hallways by themselves, and they didn't even have bells for when the class was over. In the lower class schools everything was very routine and organized and watched over.