Paulo Freire's "Pedagogy of the Oppressed"

There are oppressors and oppressed people all over the world.  Sometimes, we can't even recognize those people.  It is important in the education world to recognize these situations, and these few chapters really helped me to get a better outlook on how to do this.  Freire states, "Because it is a distortion of being more fully human, sooner or later being less human leads the oppressed to struggle against those who made them so. In order for this struggle to have meaning, the oppressed must not, in seeking to regain their humanity (which is a way to create it), become in turn oppressors of the oppressors, but rather restorers of the humanity of both."  This notion really didn't settle well with me. I don't think this is a good way to settle situations, and it will only make things worse in the end.  I completely understand that is a natural human instinct to fight back equally with someone, and I am often guilty of this, but I know from experience this isn't always the best approach. For me, I have never been in a situation where I felt oppressed, so I don't have a ton of experience or answers on how this situation could be fixed.  I would be interested to hear about other strategies that have been used by people and how they worked, that way I could use them in my future classroom whenever I run into this problem. 

After reading these few chapters, I can see how easily teachers could accidentally become oppressors to their students.  This was really eye opening for me and made me realize, this is not the way I want to be to my students.  I want to have good relationships with my students and I want to always give them a say in how they want to learn.  I think the foundation of teacher-student relationships is built off of respect.  The students need to have respect for the teacher, but the teacher needs to have just as much respect for the students as well.  This respect can be built from giving the students the chance to show their learning in different ways.  We as teachers can let the students have just as much say in the learning process as we do.  We do not need to be oppressors to them, for that will only cause them to want to be oppressors back to us.