Parallel Experiences

In Chapter 3 of Tovani, “Parallel Experiences: Tapping the Mother Lode,” Tovani provided a very illuminating exercise by having us read “Di Tri Berres,” the seemingly gibberish or Italian dialect version of the Three Bears (p. 28).  By doing the difficult task of trying to decode and comprehend what we were reading in that passage, we were able to experience a bit of how difficult the task of reading is for many of our students. Making sense of the text made us all aware of the processes that go into reading something difficult, something we expect our students to do every day. This reminded me of a math education course I took in which we spent a long time trying to learn a made up base-4 numeric system (as opposed to our traditional base-10 system).  The basics of the base-4 system were easy enough for most of us to learn (analogous to the phonemic and phonics part of literacy), but once we started doing more in depth math work in the system, it became very difficult.  It made us aware of the work we do when learning something new and all of the thought processes we take for granted.  
Exercises like “Di Tri Berres” and base-4 math show us how arbitrary our systems and the things we expect students to learn can be.  They make us stop and ask ourselves, “What is really important for me to teach here?”  They also give us educators a chance to be empathetic to the experiences that our students go through when they are learning something challenging or struggling academically.  I was recently at a workshop where we talked about how our cultural expectation that everyone becomes literate is a relatively new phenomenon in the history of humanity.  Because of this, there will always be students who have difficulty with literacy.  Those students will need the most explicit and intensive guidance; in order to provide that guidance we need to remember what it’s like to have trouble learning something new. By doing exercises like "Di Tri Berres," we become more aware of all the little places where trouble spots could occur for our learners.
What I got from Tovani was the reminder that we need to hold onto that empathy with our young learners, and remember all the processes that go on when you’re learning something new.  We need to put ourselves in our students’ shoes, especially when the learning is difficult, break things down at their level, and provide them with usable strategies while validating their struggles.  Tovani is able to work with both advanced and struggling learners and it seems that she provides them with appropriate opportunities to respond and needs-based levels of support and feedback.  Students in primary and secondary education won’t benefit much from listening to content experts.  Content is really just an arbitrary context to use for the real meat of teaching: how to become a self-directed learner.  Students really need the chance to try out new ways of thinking and learning.  We really need to remember that what might be an easy text for us, is more like "Di Tri Berres" for many of our students.


Brian Mahon