Girls, Cell Phones, and Of Mice and Men
School isn’t fun. It really isn’t. Sure, some stuff in school — lunch, recess, talking to girls — is fun, but overall, it’s just not. At its most basic level, school goes against everything a kid wants to do. You’re asked to sit still and listen when most kids want to run around and ask questions. You’re asked to go home and read and write papers when most kids want to go home and play games or go to sleep. It’s not that fun, and it’s not that easy. But that’s okay.
Where schools are going wrong isn’t in not being fun, it’s in not utilizing ways that it can be fun. I’ve been in school for 17.5 years. That’s a long time. I’ve read countless books, journals, articles, you name it. And lucky for me, I’m a strong reader. I enjoy reading. But, unfortunately, everyone doesn’t share that. Some people struggle with reading, don’t like reading, or can’t even read traditional texts. Does that mean they aren’t literate? Absolutely not. Are they treated as if they were? Sadly, yes, in some cases. Are there ways for them to show their literacy? Yes, and hopefully, in the near-future, they will.
In Margaret J. Finders’ Just Girls: Hidden Literacies and Life in Junior High, there is a section that discusses “School-Sanctioned Literacies” (Finders, 1997, p. v), but what is worthwhile is what schools do not sanction as literacy. The girls in question in the text admit that they do not like reading — “Ask them if they read and they will say no” — but at the same time, there is ample evidence that they do read and write frequently (p. 79). This evidence shows that they use non-school sanctioned literacy abilities and that they are in fact literate. The text says, “They’ll tell you they don’t like to write, but volumes of notes they have written to each other remain cherished, stuffed in shoeboxes under their beds” (p. 79). Now, keep in mind, Just Girls was written in 1997, a time when maybe your parents had a cellphone, but it was probably fashioned in a bag, and you, a middle school student, certainly did not have a mobile phone. You passed notes. And, if you weren’t caught by the teacher and forced to read your note aloud to the class (we’ve all been there), you
communicated to your peers during class this way. Everybody did it. CNET, a technology device company, reported earlier this month that: “83 percent of middle schoolers…have a mobile device” (Cheng, 2016). Now, translate the information we absorbed in Just Girls, and apply that to the 21st century. Kids have cell phones and they know how to use them a hell of a lot better than we do, and certainly the generation before mine. Much to the chagrin of teachers across America, kids text in class. Are they not using words, pictures, videos, sounds, songs, and emoticons to express their feelings and ideas? Are the recipients of these messages not acknowledging, understanding, and responding to them? To simplify these two questions — are they not being literate? Yes, they are.
I know that it is a far cry to say that all school work and research should be done via cell phone or electronically. It’s unfeasible. Kids need to read Shakespeare in a book, 8th graders need to read The Outsiders in a little paperback that smells like your grandma’s house. They need to experience going to a library, picking up a book, and escaping through its pages. That has to happen. But is that it? In all of the advances and improvements we’ve made as a society, is books all we have to offer kids? No, we have so much more. Literacy is not being able to read Of Mice and Men, it’s being able to hurt when George shoots Lenny. If using a medium other than a book helps kids understand that, I’m all for it.
References
Cheng, R. & Nieva, R. (October 4, 2016). One-Fifth of Third-Graders Own Cell Phones. Retrieved from https://www.cnet.com/news/one-fifth-of-third-graders-own-cell-phones/
Finders, M. J. (1997). Just Girls: Hidden Literacies and Life in Junior High. New York, NY: Teachers College Press.
