What Kids Wish Their Teachers Knew Analysis

All around the world, a wide variety of emotions and feelings can be found within different students. However, for a teacher, unfolding and deciphering which students are experiencing what emotions can be difficult if no extra effort is made. In Donna De La Cruz’s New York Times Op Ed article, “What Kids Wish Their Teachers Knew,” she addresses the life experiences of Kyle Schwartz, a third grade teacher at Doull Elementary School in Denver, to publicize how much there really is for teachers to get to know about their students. At her school, Ms. Schwartz took an attempt to unveil more about her students lives by asking them to complete the sentence “I wish my teacher knew.”. This resulted in many unique responses that were powered by a mixture

To strengthen the argument in her article, De La Cruz uses multiple examples of other teachers who have incorporated Ms. Schwartz's "I wish my teacher knew..." activity with their students. This provides a larger sample of examples and feeds into the logos of the article by showing readers a variety of testimonies as opposed to just that of Ms. Schwartz. These testimonies provided responses from teachers and parents. One parent responded in agreement of the effort to build relationship between teachers and students by saying, “I always want my sons’ teachers to know what their challenges are, what they like, just more about them.” This lead into a different quote from a fourth grade teacher who stated that she had “taught over 500 kids so far in my career and parents in every grade want to know how their child is doing socially and emotionally, often times more so than whether they can multiply or divide quite yet.” These two testimonies are excellent uses of logos because it appeals to the readers sense of reason and logic because according to the quotes, a student’s relationship with their teacher is often viewed by parents to be more important than the actual education they receive. As a result of this, the argument that all teachers and students should try to get to know one another better becomes even more

To further persuade her readers, De La Cruz attempts to make her article more personal. This is accomplished by appealing to the audience’s emotions with pathos. Throughout the article, various responses from students are found that finish the statement, “I wish my teacher knew”. When reading these responses, emotions such as happiness, sympathy, hurt, and more are sparked within readers. One example that stands out amongst the rest comes at the end of the article where De La Cruz describes a mistake that Ms. Schwartz previously wrote about in her book. In this situation Ms. Schwartz had a particular student who loved science, so she secured him a spot at a science-based summer camp. An act that would generally be greatly appreciated by any student, however, Ms. Schwartz “was unaware of the family’s financial struggles and it turned out that his parents could not afford to take time off from work to get Chris to camp”. This example is easy for students and teachers to relate to because opportunities like these are fairly common. When reading this particular example, readers put themselves in the shoes of both Ms. Schwartz and the student, and in both cases are struck with a feeling of sadness and disappointment. This element of pathos feeds into De La Cruz’s argument because nobody would want to experience that awkward and upsetting situation, resulting in both students and teachers attempting to strengthen their relationships