Revised Paragraph:

In many schools there are programs that help students that need to catch up and learn what they need to succeed. The problem comes when these programs single out kids and make it known that the students in it learn in a different way, or have trouble with things that other students do not. This separation leads some children on a very different path away from literacy when the real purpose is to help them get closer to it. These programs that give students extra help, but not discretely, almost always end up with the student feeling like an outsider in their school, and with their friends. Kara Poe Alexander describes the idea of an outsider narrative in her article Successes, Victims and Prodigies as “Portrays self as an outsider in relation to something else in the story, such as literacy, pedagogy, other students, the school system, etc” (615). In this context an outsider is someone who writes about their literacy moment from the standing that they are different than everyone else, and specifically with this idea they were forced into feeling like an outsider. In a literacy narrative called Road to Failure written by Madison Derosa she makes a point of explaining the specific program that she was put in for extra help called Title 1, and although helpful it led to her feeling like an outsider as Alexander describes above. She describes her first time in this program “All the title 1 kids all had the same paper books. Not a paperback either… They knew we weren’t as smart as them” (Derosa). Alexander’s ideas of what an outsider narrative describes help to define what Madison felt being forced into this class. Although the class inevitably helped her, it made her feel lesser than her peers, and shunned by her school. In other words Alexander’s article helps to categorize Madison’s as well as to show what the full effect of this separation is as it cause her to shift from a success story to an outsider. In the end this program, although it helped her, forced her into a scenario where she was lesser than her peers, and more importantly to a young child, her friends.

For this paragraph, although revised for Tuesday, I went through with the new knowledge and outside view and corrected the mistakes found. I corrected sentence level issues and MLA formatting to make this paragraph easier to read and flow. Compared to the original paragraph, this version fits into, and flows better with the paper, and therefore helps to keep the reader focused on the topic and not poor flow throughout the paragraph. Especially towards the beginning and end of the paragraph, where my claims are, I revised the sentences to fit more around my claim than previously.

Revised Paragraph:

The idea that school pushes students further from learning isn’t strictly limited to singling people out who need help, but also people who can’t test well, and sometimes this leads to the school system itself being a negative sponsor. A sponsor is described by Deborah Brandt in her article Sponsors of Literacy as “Any agents, local or distant, concrete or abstract, who enable, support, teach, model, as well as recruit, regulate, suppress, or withhold literacy” (166). Sponsors can be anything, a teacher, a parent, even a program or school system. They can help a person with their literacy, or in these cases suppress and withhold it accidentally. A negative sponsor, as the school is in this case, refers to a sponsor that may withhold, or simply limit someone’s learning of literacy. In the case of Aiden Shaw-Pigeon in his narrative How I Graduated Study Skills he was suppressed and withheld from literacy by the school system when he was required to test for placement, which in his case he failed due to never being tested before. Aiden goes on to describe what occurred when he took these first tests, “Waiting to hear how I did on the test brought with it no anxiety, I was sure I passed. Turns out, I didn’t. It was the only test I had ever taken and I had failed, terribly” and then continues with “Eighth grade came and went, and I was on to the next chapter of my life, high school. I started high school with the attitude that I was dumb, and at this point I had just accepted it” (Shaw-Pigeon). With Brandt’s idea of sponsors, and Aiden’s specific experience, it is easy to see the negative way schools can affect a child’s literacy. A student who could have been extremely smart was shut down and made to feel dumb due to a test. A test specifically made to help put a student where they need to be to learn inevitably ended up making another child feel lesser than their peers. In this case the school system withheld his literacy and made him feel like an outsider when in reality he just didn’t know how to test.

For this paragraph I mainly focused on revising my claim at the beginning, sentence level errors, and MLA formatting. From the first draft to now I changed the wording around of my claim to help further develop it early on. Throughout the paragraph there was sentence level errors that put a hold on straight reading, and ruined the flow. So in this revision I fixed any issues I found that stunted the flow, and added parts where they were needed. As for the MLA formatting, I did not originally have the articles labeled correctly and had forgotten to put Aiden’s full name in it. The revision solved these problems, and in the end made the paragraph flow better, and better support my arguments.

Introduction:

We all remember our time in school, whether fondly, or negatively, but either way it got us to where we are now. This time, spent partly reading and writing, has been defined by specific moments we come to call literacy moments, or moments that changed the literacy part of our life. These moments vary from person to person, some were made to hate reading and writing, some were taught to embrace it. Some people, although they enjoy reading or writing, may have a harder time learning to do either and require extra help in order to catch up to their peers. In the United States this year there is about 56,000 schools enlisted in Title-1, with thousands of others with similar programs (ed.gov). These programs give federal money to schools in areas with high populations of poor families in order to provide extra help where is needed. The issue that comes from this is the ensuing loneliness caused by separation from their peers. Throughout this paper the use of not only specific narratives where this occurs, but also scholarly articles help to connect the ideas found to real life scenarios. Whether it is a class for extra help or higher level work, a standardized test or an entry essay, when a student is forced into it, it changes their outlook on literacy and pushes them further from literacy and their peers.

Tasks:

1. Towards the end I address what the true issue is with these programs that are meant to help
2. Although not directly introduced here, I explain what literacy I will be using for this project, and they are further introduced later on.
3. My perspective is mostly found towards the bottom of the paragraph along with task 1.