Provocateur Piece*: The Paper Bag

In this creative nonfiction essay, the author recounts her first day of school and earliest experience with being publicly embarrassed by a school teacher; this event is one of her few memories of kindergarten. Now a literacy teacher educator, she understands and describes how this early experience with schooling was marked by a probable cultural mismatch. This piece has the potential to foster conversations in teacher education and literacy classrooms about the assumptions that shape teachers’ expectations for the funds of knowledge that students may (or may not) bring to the classroom.