Talking Points Finn

Literacy with an Attitude
Reflection

      Reading the chapters from Finn's work I couldn't help but look back at my own elementary school days and notice how my experience is identical to the working class schools that Anyon had described. But I also noticed that I had teachers that looked to try and help some of the more "ambitious" students. I use the term ambitious because I cannot think of a better word. I was always at the top of all my classes in elementary schools and sometimes my teachers would assign me special projects because I would be bored in class. When I got into 4th grade I was put into a program called enrichment where one day a week I'd spend all day in the library with a group of maybe nine other students and we did some pretty fun stuff like play a stock market game and even went often on trips to Boston and once to New York City. But this article made me curious on what exactly made me one of the people that did this. why were the other students not getting as good of grades as I did. While I went to a school that Anyon would have classified as a "working class" school, I had opportunity that seemed to coincide with the middle class and I am thankful for this opportunity because it taught me a lot.
      I just can't wrap my head around why I was successful where a lot of kids my age were struggling to just pass simple things like spelling and simple science. I had been with these kids since kindergarten and I was doing complex work that most of the kids in my class couldn't comprehend, but then I think about home life and I can honestly say all the kids that I was with in enrichment came from "solid" families, whom I saw at church on Sunday and the baseball and soccer fields, the other kids in my class seemed to have different home-lives. This is really the only difference I can think of.
    In a final thought, reading this article made me feel robbed. Why couldn't I go to a school where I would have been completely challenged and had all the opportunities that these other kids in the article had. I'm a person that always thinks I could do everything better, and reading this I feel like a higher class school would have put me in a position to obtain utter excellence. I was quite bitter after reading this article and I feel that definitely comes through in this rant of a blog.