What Are They Thinking?
Ellen Hays I interviewed a 5th grader that I nanny for named Jackson. I first asked him if he knew what "Industrial" meant and he told me he honestly had no idea. I was shocked, so I proceeded to ask if he knew what the Industrial Revolution was. He said he had never heard of that either and asked me what it was. Therefore, I went on to explain what the Industrial Revolution meant. After this, I asked him to explain what the term "child labor" meant. The first thing he said was "kids working". From here I asked him what he meant by this, like just kids playing outside? He said it is "kids working for money". I asked him how much money they got paid? Does this happen in America? Are there rules against this? He said " They work for money but not as much as other people and I think there is laws against it but I have no idea if it happens in America or not. It's probably more prevalent in China because there are more factories." I really had to pry information out of him and ask questions about what he knew. It was interesting watching him answer my questions because you could tell he had never really thought about child labor. This isn't a topic that affects his life personally so he hadn't done much thinking about it, or even learned about it in school. He told me after the interview that they didn't learn about it at school ever, he just had heard the term used before. This definitely affected my future teaching because I want my students to understand topics that might not directly affect them, but affects children their age all over the world. Teaching students about social issues is very important for their social studies knowledge. |