Public Schools: The Policed Institution

High school: the years of a child's life whenever you are expected to behave as adults in a adult world, but you are treated as anything but an adult. Kist brings up this important point in the last chapter of his book about the current public school system that calls for attention.

Yeah, teenagers make some pretty dumb decisions. That doesn't mean that public schools need to monitor their students so heavily. I think it's absolutely ridiculous that we expect high school students to act like adults, yet they have to ask permission to use the bathroom. It is not difficult to spot whenever a student abuses class time to go hang out in the restroom or skip class- simply paying attention to who leaves and for how long can be evidence enough for that. Having to ask to use the restroom is simply an atrocious policy in my opinion.

I think to allow students to grow into responsible adults, the institution needs to loosen the shackles and release the students from the cave to see the sun and feel the grass- cause hell, at this point I think it's safe to say that by the time most students graduate high school they don't even know what reality is and in that sense we have failed as a society.

Standardized Exams: The Plague of Education

Some seniors in Seattle run the danger of not graduating for not having satisfactory scores on a newly state mandated math test.

In my opinion, standardized tests are completely worthless and unnecessary. Just because a student is bad at math doesn't mean they should be excused from taking math courses or doing it- they should still be pushed to try and receive help when they need it, but all standardized tests do is push teachers to have their students learn a specific set of materials for them to pass a test and this, in my opinion, is not what learning is about.

Being smart isn't about knowing tons of scientific facts and laws, it's not about being able to solve elaborate equations, it't not about knowing tons of words. A proper high school education should give students the ability the knowledge at a basic level to operate in the world around them. But if this is done efficiently and correctly, there should be no need for state or federally mandated exams; The responsibility should lie within the schools and the teachers to determine if a student is proficient in a certain discipline. I see this all as a waste of time and money.

The fact that around 100 students may not graduate high school on time because they can't pass a math test, which consists of material that they most likely will never use in real life unless they enter a profession which requires them too and that they will forget shortly after leaving high school, is appalling to me. In high school, I took up to Pre-Calc/Trigonometry and my senior year a college-in-high school (CHS) statistics course. If you were to hand me any work or problems from my Pre-Calc/Trig class today, I guarantee I wouldn't be able to work them out. Same goes for CHS stats, although I do remember the important concepts and ideas about statistics that I apply quite a lot. That doesn't mean my education  and diploma is worthless or that I am not a intelligent member of society- it simply means that I do not care for much of math and I had no desire to really pursue it passed what I need to function well in society.

The Graphic Response to Literature

In Broz's article, "The Green Knight Should Be Green: Graphic Response to Literature," he goes through different assignments he gave his students throughout his teaching career that allowed them to respond to literature without the traditional essay.

I may be one of a minimal few, but I have never personally enjoyed creating graphic responses to literature especially when it comes to drawing or creating some sort of physical object like he has his students do in the article. They have always truly been more of a painful experience more than anything, and I've been this way ever since I was a child; I was always a child of words.

I hated art class in elementary school. Every time I had to go, I dreaded it. But I always undertook my own personal writing projects, outside of school requirements.

Even in college, I still find myself the same way. I've had a couple projects where I have had to draw something or create a graphic response to a piece of literature for a project and I found no joy in it with exception to the 20-Shot Short Story we did, but that was a completely different medium.

I'll probably always enjoy the written word over pictures and objects- that's just where my heart lies.

From the School to the Home

Read this very short article

According to the article posted above, the general displeasure and mistrust towards the American Public School system is driving more students into alternate methods of education- mainly homeschooling.

The article itself makes some good establishing arguments towards the promotion of homeschooling, yet I still have some personal reservation on the matter.

One major problem I have is that parents are not certified and may not have the educational experience to teach some things to their children effectively. Teachers are good for teaching students, and while I understand parent's dislike for the current state of the public school system, I cannot let the value of teachers, who have spent years in college training to do what they do, be completely undermined by it.

Not only that, but the article states that homeschooling is void of the achievement gaps through race, income levels, or gender with no true supporting evidence. However, I feel shaky on this too, especially when it comes to income levels, because a child coming from a low-income family (and also coming from a low-income or poverty stricken area) is most likely to receive poorer educational opportunities than those from high-income areas. And obviously, the child's parents may have been likely subjected to the similar or identical educational experiences and therefore would not be able to provide their child with any better quality education than the schools.

I'm not completely hammering down on the idea of homeschooling and saying that the house is not a classroom; I believe it can have it's positive aspects as well as negative. But the point is, the nature of education is changing and in a drastic way and we need to make ourselves aware of this and educated about it to be better prepared for the future.

What is Learning?

The beginning of chapter 5 in our reading for Kist this week talks about Brett Moller using Facebook as an educational medium in the 21st century classroom. A very important point about education is brought up whenever Kist says, "...this project [using Facebook] was a kind of mind-shift for the students, in that they had been trained that school is about 'regurgitating information.'" That concept of "information regurgitation," is harmful to a person's educational development and is something that needs to be changed in the modern day school systems- especially public schools.

For example: K-12 history classes. All history classes are based on in elementary and high school, at least in my experience, is repeating "facts" back to the teacher in class. Yes, I did put "facts" in quotations marks for a reason, but that's another discussion for another day/blog. Unfortunately, this setup causes kids to mostly despise history classes, such as myself.

However, my freshman year of college I had a professor named Dr. Senecal. The first day of her class, I was intimidated because we had no textbook (we read novels the whole semester), and all of her tests and quizzes were essays with absolutely NO multiple choice at all. I ended up loving it though. The class was amazing and I learned more than I have in any history class ever. I got A's on every quiz and high B's to low A's on every test. Some memorization was involved, obviously, but it was simply memorizing minute and trivial details. Those details contributed to ideas and those ideas are what we used in our understanding of the history being taught to us.

More of this needs to happen in public schools, and not just in history courses, but EVERY course.

A Small Digression

Hey guys, this has nothing to do with the class or readings but if you could take a couple seconds to help my brother out a bit.

 If you're into post-hardcore music like Bring me the Horizon, Attack! Attack!, and Emmure check out his band, Awake and Create, on Facebook and take a couple minutes to listen to their debut single and vote for them to help possibly get them on the Ernie Ball stage at Warped Tour this year.

Any support is much appreciated, and thank you all.

Cultural Variances in Education

This article talks about how schools in Iran are beginning to implement lessons of abstinence as early as kindergarten, as well as being taught (the women at least) of wearing the hijab. The article states that the purpose of these lessons are have children adhere to Islamic traditions more closely.

Growing up in American schools, issues as blatant as this never truly arose during our time in public schools. However, since most of you reading this will be educators, or are already, understanding what the role of the public school holds is crucial.

I'm asking you as knowledge hungry and eager college students (or just knowledge hungry person), what you think of this policy? Should public schools be able to implement religious measures such as this (the article explicitly states these practices are of a religious manner)?

Just to jump start any discussion that may occur: I don't believe public schools have any room taking this kind of action. I believe religion should be a truly personal experience and shouldn't be forced onto children like this. Truly, this is nothing more to me than a violation of children's free will.

Progression with Collaboration

In chapter 3 of the Wilbur we all had to read for this week in class, he talks about how many educators don't recommend Wikipedia as a valid source, even though some research may suggest that it is actually more accurate than many other sources students may be using on the Internet, because absolutely anyone and everyone can add and edit information on any page on the entire website. I've had teachers even freak out about using Wikipedia and I personally don't trust it all that much myself. He talks about how "collective wisdom" is something marvelous.

He brings this point up again in chapter 4 when he talks about how a blog is a "multiauthored texts whose meaning changes  through the interplay of the main posts and comments."

Collaboration is wonderful in perspective, as long as it is kept in check, and the people who are writing aren't just throwing things onto the screen of the depths of nowhere. Collaboration between people can lead to great things if done well, and not just in writing or posting information. This is a skill the human race could truly evolve if we grew it to a level where we utilized it well, but, sadly, we don't have that ability right now.

As an ending note: this post and topic makes me think of this song.

Blogging

This blog is my second one for the week about the "anything educational," even though I'm going to reference another one of our readings for the week in it.

 Kist talks extensively about blogging in Chapter 3 and about how teachers have used it in the classroom, its benefits, etc.

I thought keeping a blog for this class was going to be a lot more tedious and "more-work-than-it's-worth" starting the semester, but I have come to actually enjoy writing posts and reading others, and it has allowed me to reflect more on the readings and class topics than I thought it would. the obvious yet somehow eluding reason for this is that I actually make good use of the tool given to me. I don't simply just breeze through the work for this; I give things actual thought and time and that's how this has become beneficial to me. Probably more beneficial than any simple personal journal about my thoughts of the class would have given me because I can compare and contrast my thoughts with my classmates anytime I desire.

Overall, I feel if its used correctly, as with any physical or digital tool, the blog has a lot of potential as an educational medium. Whenever, I enter the big bad world of teaching, I might try employing something of the sort with one of my classes given the opportunity supports me to.

Expanding but Not Forgetting Literacy

The beginning anecdote in our reading from Kajder this week, tells of a boy named Leo who becomes excited to share with his English teacher a newspaper article delivering statistics that reveal that more people are reading fiction works. Kajder goes to explain though, that these statistics are a little bit misleading as not a lot of students are able to read at a proficient level, but that doesn't mean that they aren't reading or aren't developing important skills in the types of reading they engage in.

Truthfully, I have always been a skeptic of how technology benefits students. Being in this class has opened me up a little more to the digital world, but I still find myself asking a lot of questions and realizing a lot of things. Kajder's opening anecdote revealed to me something to think about: people are simply just losing interest in the book and prefer reading on a more brief and digital level. I'm not saying that this kind of reading is void of benefit, there can be some, but I also feel that students should not lose sight of the benefits that deep-reading from a traditional print based medium can deliver. It is more about integration, not replacement, and I feel that teachers recognize this but students do not- especially the younger ones.

This chapter also caused me to raise a lot of questions I feel worth looking into such as: What are the benefit of audio books? I could think of a couple reasons off the top of my head that they would be inferior to the actual print, but I would still be interested in learning how students learn from them and to what degree. I feel like that would be a research project worth experimentation and looking into.

Teacher Becomes the Taught

          The teacher in society is given the image of an all-knowing member of society to his or her students. One that has most, if not all, of the answers in regards to the subject area they specialize in. The English teacher knows how to spell all the words, knows which all sentences are run-ons, and the math teacher can solve any equation or word problem given to them. We all know this isn't really true though, and while this seems to be a moot sort of point, I feel the need to bring it up because I have had teachers that believed they were all-knowing and flawless and used that against their students in anxious situations. All teachers are human, just like the students, and they learn just like the students. especially when it comes to the expanding technological world.
          Chapter two of our Miller and McVee reading bring this up. How the teacher should not be afraid to ask the students questions whenever they do not understand something that one of them may have better knowledge of. This teacher-student relationship is very important, and one that can really aid future educators to effectively teach their children if it is made right. The teacher should not be placed on a pedestal above the student as a being of supreme knowledge, rather the teacher should learn alongside the student in today's ever changing world.
          Now, I am not saying that a teacher should be completely unknowing of what he or she is teaching a class. They should, indeed, be very knowledgeable. I am making more of a point that a teacher should not be afraid to learn alongside his students whenever they do not know something or are teaching something incorrectly.

The Language of Signs: Koko the Gorilla

         Humans communicate are able to communicate in a various amount of ways: through language, signs and symbols. All of these system work with one another and allow us to perceive the world the way we do.

          However, we also know that many other animals of this wonderful planet communicate too. Yet, to my knowledge anyway, no other animal uses all of our communication systems the way we do- usually they are limited to one certain method.

         Take a look at one of our possible evolutionary ancestors: the gorilla. Unbeknownst to many, the gorilla is capable of truly extraordinary communication through signs. They use it in their own habitat with one another and even are capable of inter-species conversation!

          Exhibit A: Koko the Gorilla.  I learned about Koko in my Cultural Anthropology class during my Freshmen year in Shippensburg University. Koko is a gorilla who was raised by humans was taught sign language- our sign language. As Koko began to develop, she began to develop just as we would: her vocabulary increased, she began to understand complex ideas, and began to express herself freely.  Koko was given a kitten as a pet one day and fell in love with it instantly. She could tell her owner about her happiness through sign language. Upon the cat's death, she was even able to tell about her sadness and even displayed different behavior from her emotions for a while after. Not too long after, she was given another cat and she fell in love with it just as easily as the first one. Koko loves cats.

          I believe Koko can teach us a lot about ourselves as a race. Specifically, how we interpret and relay signs to one another and how exactly they work. Hers is definitely a story I encourage all to look at. Not to mention. . . Gorillas are just awesome.  

         

Technology and Learning: Multimodality Concerns

          Even though I am youthful and grew up in an environment that utilized technology sufficiently, I developed a wary attitude toward its use in the classroom. I recognize that some tools on the computer do have certain benefits to the education of people who use them, yet I have my concerns.

          Two of the readings for February 11th brought up certain points about multimodality that have been brewing about in my mind since beginning the class, and that were sparked by my reading of Nicholas Carr's book, The Shallows, which states, in short, that the Internet is a tool of distraction and is destroying the human mind. Through these couple of readings and permitting myself the time to dwell on the subject though, I have come to theorize that there are very fine distinctions between the argument Carr makes and the arguments made for multimodality.

          The problem isn't that technology use is increasing, it's that how the technology is being used is what is causing the degeneration Carr talks about. Larry Rosen talks in his article, "Rewired," about how teens have become "rewired" to the digital world and that schools needs to catch up with them. "With all the technology that they consume, they need more from education."

          Multimodal learning styles, including technology use, help to improve people's learning. The issues occur whenever people try to work with too many things at once and multitask which reduces learning. Kajder even plainly says, "When online digital youth typically engage in more than one digital medium at a time." This is how the Internet is constantly used which is why Carr's argument seems to accurate.

          All in all, the medium is not the issue, but how the medium is being used is.