You can't give up till the final out is made... till then keep those expectations HIGH!

Iain't writin' nuttin': Permission to Fail and Demands to Succeed in Urban Classrooms was a very interesting chapter in Lisa Delpit's book, The Skin That We Speak. In this chapter, Ladson-Billings talks about teachers that allowed students to not do writing assignments on the sole foundation that they didn’t want to. Every day we here stories about students falling through the cracks and getting lost in the system. However when schools and educators allow students to take control and skip out on the learning process, it’s more like they are being thrown through the cracks. One example that we see is Shannon the first grader that tells her teacher “Iain’t writin’ nuttin’.” In this case the teacher instead of offering an alternative to writing or an idea on what to write, allows Shannon to slide on by.
As stated by Ladson- Billings, “permission to fail” refers to teachers that allow their students to coast through school without having to do the required assignments, when instead these teachers should be providing these students with extra attention. I feel that the reason that these kids don’t care to try is that they lack the support system and motivation that all kids need. These students either lack having parents that care about their education or even worse they lack teachers that care. Teaching is more than a job with summers off, to spend traveling or in my case going to baseball games, teaching is a demanding career and the main focus should be on the students and their success.

What are the impacts of over-looking the relationship between resistance to literacy and resistance to schooling?

I feel that part that resistance to learn is directly related to resistance to teach. What reason does a student have to want to succeed when his teacher doesn’t care any more or less if he does the work? Student lack the will when their superiors have no real expectations of them. It has been said time and time again that people succeed when they have positive reinforcement, and by ignoring their problems and flaws, aren’t these so called educators providing their students with just the opposite? Children need to be challenged and motivated, the last thing they need is people giving up on them from such a young age.
It is crucial for a teacher to engage their students by any means necessary, even if that means incorporating out side literacies into their lesson plans. The same goes with reading and writing, maybe a student doesn’t like reading because they had a bad experience trying to understand Shakespeare or even Dr. Seuss. Some times a teacher needs to get down to her student’s level to prove productive, whether that means using baseball to help teach statistics or the Wendy’s dollar menu to teach “3conomics”. Above all a teacher can not under any circumstances grant her students “permission to fail” no matter how reluctant they are to read and write.