I think that the author did a great job describing Maria's emotions and thoughts in this book. It was easy to see the hurt that Maria felt being called by another name. In the story when Maria is called "Mary" by her teacher, she feels a loss of pride in herself and her family. She even acts differently around her new friends because of it. The author made it easy to understand how this character changed each time she was called by her new name at school by her teacher.
However, the ending of the book really was neat because it showed the character of Maria's teacher. She really read Maria's essay and was considerate of her feelings about her name. The fact that she let Maria sing made both Maria and her parents happy and it ended the story on a good note.
Each person's name is important and it is important to recognize and be considerate of that. That is what I learned from reading this book. =)
2 comments:
Hi Mallory! I agree with you that the author did a great job describing Maria's emotions and thoughts in the story. I think that a person's name is very important to a person so we as future teachers should do our best to acknowledge that. I do not think that we should assign names to students such as what Maria's teacher did. At first I thought the teacher was pretty cruel to do that. But I was glad when later in the story she realized how Maria felt about her name through her writing assignment and began to call her by her actual name.
What lessons we as teachers learn from this teacher: she is looking out for all of her students, she is open to learning herself, and she's very willing to change course when she recognizes that what she's doing isn't going as planned. We've got to pay attention to the whole student, not just the one who we want to write a paper, or take a vocab quiz. In other words, our students are more than names in our gradebooks.
Post a Comment