Terry Meier "Why Can't She Remember That?"

          The paper by Terry Meier titled “Why Can’t She Remember That?” was a very interesting read and opened my eyes to some of the difficulties children have. In today’s society, children in any particular school may come from a large variety of different backgrounds. This article explores examples of children that come from a different cultural background and their parents raised them with different methods.

          This article gave me an understanding of how different upbringings will provide a different type of learning atmosphere for kids. This can lead to misunderstandings in the classroom when children find that the teacher’s method of teaching differs greatly from the method that their parents teach them. The article gives as an example, the perspective of a Mexican-American child Marisa, an African-American child Lem, and white child Lindsay.

          The white Lindsey child is the only child were their parents read to them often and therefore Lindsey developed her social skills in a different manner, where as she calls on ideas she learned while reading to deal with life and education. The difference with Marisa and Lem is that they were not read many stories as children, relied on verbal interactions outside of the realm of reading, and they learned more from their interactions with adults and siblings than they did from books.

          This learned awareness outside of the realm of books by Marisa and Lem has its own worth in the real world that is valuable in its own unique way, but can cause problems when they enter the school system were the valued responses are usually derived from reading. Marisa and Lem do not feel books are nearly as important as Lindsey may feel, putting Lindsey and an advantage in the school system right away.

          This article seemed to make a lot of sense to me and opened my eyes to the issues facing the children from Hispanic and African America families. It never really occurred to me that their parents often may not read to them. It makes sense now that I think about it, if I was never read books growing up, I would probably not have been so fond of books and found them challenging. The children who are not read books as a child really are facing an uphill battle from the very beginning.

   It is very sad to see that our education system has not compensated to help these children. It seems so obvious now that not all children are being read to, so as educators we should not assume all children are read to, and that not all children have the same social queues that, in this case, the white child has.

If you were to change one thing that the early education system should do to help these children, who are not read to by their parents, what would it be?