Camden’s Blog

Wow, I have to start all over on this one, I don’t even know how I lost it but it is completely wiped clean when I published it   It was good too

In Freire’s discussion of Fear he says there is always a relationship between fear and difficulty.  All truly great activists realize this and examine it in their work.   All the truly evil rely on it to do their work and utilize it to paralyze those that might impede their work.  Our insecurities can rob us of our courage if we are not careful.  So what to do since we all have fears?  Freire insists that we must think about and examine our fear carefully by:  objectively dissecting the reasons/sources, searching the possibilities for overcoming them, plan for overcoming them, plan again, grow our capacity to respond, and most importantly enlarge our ability to evaluate.  He warns that panic will paralyze us and provides us with illustration through our biggest fear – that of being a scholar.  Here Freire actually frees my own spirit and fear.  I relate to the examples he discusses in the fear of not understanding what we read.  It reminds me of the law school professor in Respect who felt as if he was a fraud as a scholar despite the accolades of his peers.  Only through pushing past those fears and writing did he finally feel worthy.  I really related to him and I believe that Freire recognizes this as a common fear of educators and that is why he tackles it head on in this letter.  He tells us that ” fear itself tends to be overcome and one is free to attempt to invent the meaning of the text in addition to just discovering it”  I absolutely agree that it “must be every author’s true dream – to be read, discussed, critiqued, improved and reinvented by his or her readers”.  It certainly isn’t to be feared.  So of course our challenge is to become activist within ourselves to inspire that in our students, who must have the same fears we do as scholars. 

The other aspect of Freire’s 2nd letter is that of difficulty.  He cautions that one’s ability may be less than what it takes to meet the challenge and then one becomes immobilized by their fear.  Which is not what happened to Jaeger in his article Silencing Teachers.  I found this article very interesting because I was part of a pilot program that trained on Open Court.  Now this wasn’t by choice because the school that I interned at was under initial stages of being “taken over” by the state and we were mandated to train in this program.  I spent two weeks in the summer of 2000 with this scripted program and naively embraced as a godsend to a novice teacher.  I spent the first half of the school year though undermining unconsciously by never following the script.  I religiously read every page each week ahead of time, pulled out all of the literature, poems, songs, writing and art projects.  I never went by the phonic script except during dictation for learning to blend.  I could easily see where these teachers had had enough after 3 years!  I would definitely have written this letter and the only difference here in Georgia is that I would have had plenty of company.  In Georgia, my fellow teachers will think it but because of the lack of representation they would face the elimination of their job in a second.  So we have to learn to be activist in a world of silence or we will have not platform from which to at least incorporate sign language.  As Martin Luther King Jr. says “ The ultimate measure of a man is not where he stands in moments of comfort and convenience, but where he stands at times of challenge and controversy.”  I look for ways to face these moments of difficulty through evaluation not fear and struggle not to get too comfortable. 

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