Interversity.Org

I finished reading this book today.  I read it as a marathon just about--all Saturday evening and Sunday evening, and finishing it this morning.  So much of what Tatum says makes some sense to me.  There are not a lot of positive reading role models for AFrican-American students, and fewer for males.  Therefore, we have to find texts that speak to them in personal ways.  Tatum is all about achievement.  He does not believe in strategy and skill instruction to raise test scores (although that will undoubtedly be the outcome if we teach meaningful texts and the strategies to comprehend them); he is about achievement as a way to cope with the turmoil of growing up as a black male and as a way to change one's circumstances.  He believes in success, not failure.  His idea is that failure and lack of participation is not an option for anyone, but in particular for black males. I don't know how I'm going to implement the ideas from this book in my classroom.  I have focused so much on literacy instruction that I've kind of blinded myself.  I know the research-based strategies.  I know what should work and what doesn't work.  I know that test-preparation isolated from meaningful and integrated instruction is worthless.  But I get caught up in the teach-the-strategy syndrome without necessarily showing how it is helpful outside of the classroom. Tatum is all about helping students integrate and cross between their two worlds of the "streets" and the school.  He wants school to mean something to these boys.  The questions, though, are many.  I don't know what it means to be a black male because, obviously I'm not one.  I might can understand the poverty bit--a little, but I never considered my family poor.  We had what we needed--not a lot of luxuries, but we didn't have to make serious sacrifices to have the things we needed and some of the things we wanted.  I can't appreciate the world that many of my students grow up in because it's outside my realm of experience.  I have to rely on reading to take me into those worlds.  Perhaps that could be a selling point for reading.  There are things that i cannot experience personally, but I can read about them and live through the experience vicariously (just as I did when I read the introduction to this book--I really did feel his humiliation at the end of his story).  That has to be said to students as well. I have to figure out in my head, and on paper, how to put these theories into practice.  How do I meet the cultural as well as academic needs of all students and engage every single one of them?  How do I make instruction and reading relevant when students themselves from all social levels see it as irrelevant?  This text really opens up a lot of questions for me to think about. But it's time to find another book.  Do I want to read for professional reasons or for pleasure?  One day, I will find the balance to that dilemma as well.