Analysis Of Goin For Broke

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Part Three
There is a budding similarity to the previous two journals alongside the final article that I studied, titled “Goin’ for Broke”: Reaping the Rewards of Teaching
Toward Cultural and Linguistic Diversity. Written by Marcelle Haddix, this article emphasizes the importance of a teacher giving his or her all towards reaching all of her students and having the ability to value all of their cultural strengths and differences from one another. Moreover, Haddix makes the point that a good teacher is not merely someone who employs certain strategies to receive the results that she wants in her career, but also employs the correct mindset going into her career, which will help her to succeed when interacting with students of different cultures, and ideals. This is achieved when a teacher casts aside all preconceived notions of what a particular accent, dialect, or culture means in her mid, and instead starts with a fresh and open mind, which allows her to truly see the personal identities of the children that she is working with (Haddix, 2010). This practice, which encourages teachers to give their all in regards to being consciously open-minded and prejudice-free, is essentially what Haddix is referring to throughout her paper by constantly employing the term “Goin for broke.” Haddix contends that in order for a teacher to be truly successful in reaching all of her students equally, she must attempt to bridge the connections and similarities between herself and her students instead of highlighting and isolating their differences between different accents and dialects, cultures, and even socioeconomic groups (Haddix, 2010).
Haddix makes a point of highlighting that she also speaks in a dialect of African American English, whic...

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...n the students, or even through a peer editing activity done with a set of preadolescent students.
Personally, I have been exposed to speech samples in my primary linguistics classroom, and experienced the phenomenon for myself as we attempted to classify the voices of several people with what we believed that we could derive from their speech. Of course, though we could sometimes detect the origination of the varied dialects of English, we also came to various strong, yet incorrect conclusions about the personal traits, heritage, and even education level of the speakers we heard. To conclude, though it seems that dialectal discrimination is a relevant issue in our education system, it would be greatly beneficial to include a consciousness raising class for beginning teachers, especially in a country where the minority groups are beginning to become the majority.

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