Warm-up #2. Rose, Ch. 5 & 6 - 9/17/08

3. What did you notice about the language schools used to refer to the students Rose featured in this chapter? How did this language mark students as “insiders” or “outsiders” to school? How do you think these labels might have influenced students’ literacy development later on?

Labels are a good way to categorize students. Labels are also good ways of creating a self-fulfilling prophecy syndrome. A student labeled correctly or even incorrectly feels an association to the label and may just fall into the category and define themselves by it. Some students may even use their label as an excuse of why certain negative behaviors may exist. Labels are a dysfunctional necessity in schooling. We need to categorize and place students on similar levels in order to reach them as fully as we can, but sometimes those labels are the same reason of why a teacher may not reach out or why a student may not try. I think that a label of being in a remedial track ahs a negative influence on literacy (Harold’s file being a prime example of the negative influence of a label), while an advanced track probably has a positive influence on literacy, using the same principle as above. A student may try to fit the label and a student that was once regular, may now try harder, because he or she is in the advanced class. Rose touches on this on page 128 when he is talking about how children internalize the labels that they are handed by the schooling system. It becomes a part of who they are and how they identify themselves.