Though teachers are, at this time, forced to teach towards the standards and benchmarks, effective teachers do go above and beyond for their students. Finding new ways to reach out to their students is how we get students to do more than what they think they can. In this case study there was a students that needed that extra step to relate the content to their life. Being able to embed the content was vital to this students learning. Standards and benchmarks are important, but they are by no means the final say in a students achievement level.
Chapter 10: "Engaging in critique of new literacies should also be taken as an invitation to examine our own mindset as much as an invitation to judge a practice."
I am reminded of how we look at different scientific practices. It is a way to help the person being critiqued and the person performing the critique. We can critique what the other person is doing by making suggestions on how to do things differently, but we take away what they did well and we might use that in our own experiment. Do this enough times and eventually we have a refined process. At the end of the day it is jut another type of collaboration and is important to any type of research.
I like the quote you chose from Chapter 10, because the older I get, the more I realize I need to constantly examine my mindset in the classroom, because I can tend to get comfortable, strive for comfort, not want to change or be flexible, and it takes a lot of effort to continue to be open-minded. That's one reason why I love working with and being around young people, because the ideas and mindsets they have are often so different from mine, and they notice things I don't, do things I wouldn't. If the mindset of the youth is different from the establishment, we need to pay attention to it, because they are the leaders of tomorrow. Not only that, it's important to always question things and continue learning, because learning is a life-long process.
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