Is your education depicted by your social class?

Kylie Kohut
September 23,2015
Proffessor Young
English 1100

       

A frequent topic up for debate is if your social class molds you in your education for future jobs. Jean Anyon wrote an essay on the topic stating that if your poor, rich, or from a middle class family your education is depicted because of your class, called “Social Class and the Hidden Curriculum of Work. In the essay it discusses the fact that she believes that your life is planned out already from your current money situation, I don’t believe that is true. I went to what is considered to be a lower or middle class school system for the grades Kindergarten to 8^th. During these years I found out that the amount you learn depended on the teacher you had. I had mostly good teachers and could easily retain the information and memorize it while friends in other classes could not. But, after 8^th grade I went to a local private school for high school and learned that the education level was much higher than the education level for my public high school. With that being said though I was still well prepared in the material from the public elementary school and the public high school. The only difference I found in the curriculum in the schools was that in my private school our standard classes were taught the same information as the AP classes in the public high school, and even at a faster rate than the public high school. I also figured out that the social class your born into does not mean you will be taught at the standard of that social class, instead the teacher and your work ethic will decide the “social class standard” that you would be taught at. Coming from an area of mostly working class people or blue-collared jobbed people when reading Jean Anyon’s article this sentence stuck out, “the procedure is usually mechanical, involving rote behavior and very little decision making or choice. The teachers rarely explain why the work is being assigned, how it might connect to other assignments, or what the idea is that lies behind the procedure or gives it coherence and perhaps meaning or significance.” In the schools in my area I found this not to be true because we were always explained what the project was and why we were given it. In my opinion your social class does not make your value of education.

The Students Write to Their Own Langauge

Kylie Kohut
Professor Young
September 16, 2015
English 1100

A common argument in the academic field of writing is whether or not the teachers should allow students to incorporate their own language into their work. Even though there was a law passed in 1972 called the “Resolution on Student’s Right to Their Own Language”, people still have the thought that students need to speak “proper English” in their writing.  According to the law students can use their own language to give their papers a sense of style and show the diversity in the Country. I think that students should be able to write with their own language, because it would help a student be able to put their own thoughts on the paper in easier ways. It is a way to make every paper seem different and have a paper show you more of who the author is. When you take away the right for someone to use their own language you are taking away their culture and making it seem as though your culture is more important. In the Resolution it states, “The claim that any one dialect is unacceptable amounts to an attempt of one social group to exert its dominance over another.” Also as a nation that is supposed to welcome all different cultures and be so diverse we should take in the fact that other cultures have different languages. If we want to claim to be a diverse nation we should show that we are proud of it and one way of that would be to make students be able to write in their own language.

What Identity Means to Me

Kylie Kohut

Professor Young

September 2, 2015

English 1100

    Identity according to dictionary.com is the state or fact of remaining the same one or ones, as under varying aspects or conditions. To me Identity is how you or others look at you and think of you from the way you dress, your socioeconomic status, gender, race, etc and is unique for everyone. How I would describe myself is completely different from how you would picture me if I said I was from Trenton, NJ. For starters I am insanely in love with horses, the country, country music, and rodeos; now when you think of Trenton, NJ you think of “gangs” and rap music and people that are up to no good. I also am very into my polish roots, I eat polish food cooked by my grandma all the time and know how to make chicken poplagosh and krushiki because of that. In “How to Tame a Wild Tongue” there is a quote by Kaufum, that says “Identity is essential to the core of who we are as individuals, the conscious experience of the self inside”, this quote stuck out to me and made me remember about how much my grandparents and parents made sure I always knew who I was and where my roots came from. They always wanted me to be my own person and because of that I am my own person with a huge personality. How I dress, what my origins are, and how I was brought up make my identity. Without my identity I would be diminished into the nothingness of everything around me, my identity is what makes me have purpose and makes me “me”.

Work Cited

Anzaldua, Gloria. “How to Tame a Wild Tongue.” Teaching developmental Writing. Ed. Susan Naomi Bernstein Fourth ed. New York: Bedford/ St. Martin’s, 2013. 245-255. Print.

Dictionary.com. Dictionary.com, n.d. Web. 02 Sept. 2015.