What is Worth Learning?

 Things that are worth learning vary from person to person. There are things that people enjoy learning about or things that people feeling they have to know. The worth of learning is based on each individual and how they perceive learning.

In my own class we learned about the different type of curriculum taught to children and how what teachers do can help children become better people. One of the tasks was to create a black out poem of an excerpt from the article Ending Curriculum Violence by Stephanie P. Jones. Mine was as follows:

Doing Right By Our Students

In order to reclaim our schools as sites of real learning and safety rather than suffering and racial trauma, it is necessary to help prepare teachers to critically examine what curriculum violence looks like within their discipline. Both prospective and current practitioners should continue to frame teaching as a reflective and reflexive practice by asking important questions of themselves and their curricula. Teachers should have continued support for professional development that is antiracist at its core and includes narratives of joy and resistance.

Most importantly, it is the wrong reaction for teachers to avoid teaching Black histories for fear of perpetuating curriculum violence. Remaining silent or choosing to omit certain elements of history has the same impact. We must want to do the right thing by our students, even if that means we have to struggle to learn more and seek feedback from students about the impact of our curricular choices. We should want to review and revise our existing lessons to ensure we’re not wreaking havoc on our students’ emotional and intellectual lives.

We do this so that we can begin the process of educational reparations—wherein we repair the harm that we have done to children by reconstructing curricula that have failed them.

I chose to try to create short sentences that can be read as a whole. I think the first line brings a powerful impact, "reclaim safety rather than trauma". In our world is it easy to blame behavior on trauma but why not introduce safety to students who need it. Another line I really thought would stand out is the "Teachers support resistance" line. It is sometimes hard to admit that the people we think should do the best are probably hurting our children. Not physically but in a way where students may not get to learn about certain ethnicities or certain parts of the world because the teacher is not willing or able to teach about those subjects. I think the ending line can be interpreted different ways which may provoke thought on what is supposed to mean. For me "Our students can begin repair to children that have failed" is supposed to be a call to action. "Our students" meant us, the educators of tomorrow that were taught a certain way by our own teachers can help fix the education system so that children can learn more and better. "Children that have failed", I wish there was another word in there to show that the children did not fail because of anything that they did, but because the system does not allow them to be anything other than what it has designed for them.

For me, it is worth learning everything that I can in order to better understand others and to help me pass along information. Everything is worth learning because how can we know what others know if we do not seek out the knowledge ourselves.