The Blank Slate - Assignment Example

The Blank Slate Explain clearly and in detail how often you assume a blank slate in your room and how sometimes assuming so leaves you in a difficult situation? “Traditional education is based in large part on the blank slate children come to school with and have knowledge deposited to it”, (p. 222) As a language teacher, I have to assume that students have a blank slate due to their backgrounds which isolate them from other languages except English. Most students have a blank slate- that is, no prior knowledge of Arabic-when they come to the classroom. I’ve found that assuming a blank slate doesn’t really put me in a difficult situation. Instead, students with no knowledge of other languages are sometimes able to learn more easily and their ability to receive information is usually faster than students with a heritage language. With those students, whose parents speak a foreign language such as Arabic, and who live in the U.S. where everyone speaks English, it can be more difficult for them to learn Arabic in a classroom. The reason is that they already have data which is integrated, but it might be different than the Egyptian and modern standard Arabic which is taught in my class. So, the student is sometimes more resistant to learning a different form of Arabic than the one he grew up hearing at home. One of the things which makes Arabic difficult is the fact that the written language is not always the same as the spoken one. Arabic also has numerous spoken dialects, each different from the other, depending on where one lives in the Arab world. For example, Egyptian Arabic is very different from Tunisian Arabic and it might be difficult for an Egyptian to understand a Tunisian. If a Tunisian spoke classical Arabic, he would be understood but would sound like “a book.” So, when a student comes into the classroom with a family background of Palestinian Arabic, he has to relearn Egyptian Arabic and forget some of what he knows of the Palestinian because the two aren’t the same. In my class, I always have different kinds of students who understand Arabic, but some can read it but not speak it, and some can speak it, although maybe not the same dialect as used in the class, and cannot read it. In these cases, the students do not come with a blank slate. This makes it more difficult for them to match what they know to what they will learn in class. As for the other students who come in with a blank slate, they tend to develop their language skills faster and they are more open to receiving new information. They will also work harder to develop this knowledge in order to compete with the other students who are more familiar with the language. The end result is a very good atmosphere for language learning. Education has been described by Pinker as a modern evolution that had been invented to restrict on the categorizations of the population to partake in the various forms of undertakings that are available. The knowledge that are gained and taught at school, including the skills deemed necessary, are technologies that are associated with man’s understanding of evolution. Pinker (2003) provides that “Far from being empty receptacles or universal learners, then, children are equipped with toolbox of implements for reasoning and learning in particular ways, and those implements must be cleverly recruited to master problems for which they were not designed.” This somewhat antagonistic attitude toward education can only be attributed as a by-product of the philosophical predisposition that favors a particular principle on human development that is inconsistent with the author’s own. It goes to stand that the assumption of a blank slate puts into practice the idea that learning is an outward experience that requires constant reinforcement that must be based on external stimuli. Here, it is reduced that education does not only happen in the classroom, though this bears truth, but more radically it insists that schools are not as indispensable as we pertain it to be. The book further sets straight the significance of morals as a matter of questionable reliance as an integral part of human nature and must so fall in the backseat of more logical and sensible paradigms proposed by other philosophers. Emotion can be a source of debate with regard to the appreciation of the cognitive functions of the brain and the uncertainty of where one stops and the other prevails. In this sense, by focusing too much on emotion, there is failure to give a more thorough import to the cognitive process of the brain and how it naturally processes information and react accordingly based on its own dynamism. Intuition cannot be made the main and only source of human function for this will surely be irrational and yet it is by our own practice that it has become the norm. But the Utopian vision, another of the many theories and concepts discussed throughout the book, provides for the superiority of morality as a means to address the social problems in the world but dispenses of tradition in favor of what is required of today’s standard. To support the arguments proposed on “The Blank Slate” will lean more on the disposition that goes drastically against the concept of conventional education and its very foundation. In the process of teaching language I have had experiences that can be addressed by the books so to speak while there are instances that I have come to regard must be handled differently. Language acquisition requires a different form of proficiency in contrast to other subjects and discipline. In the same way that different students would be at different levels in their level of the language proficiency, there will also be differences in the pace of language acquisition. At times, even when a student already has a background of the Arabic language another who has an aptitude in language acquisition will easily surpass the former if he keeps at the process of learning the language. In perspective, a student who has had exposure of a second language should have some form of stored knowledge that they will somehow relate to the lessons but this is often not the case. In assuming a blank slate, the students are placed on equal footing with one another and partiality will be eliminated because there are no expectations. This gives reason why I find that assuming a blank slate is often easier in language teaching. References Pinker, S. (2003). The blank slate: the modern denial of human nature. London: Penguin Books. Read More