Waiting for Superman

New Source 1:        

         The movie, Waiting for Superman, spoke a lot to the problems in the school system today. While following the lives of 5 children, the movie showed the options, albeit hard to achieve options, of children in low-income, segregated schools. One of the education reformers was Geoffrey Canada. His Harlem Children’s Zone school is a great success, but my question is how can it be applied to all of the children in America. I don’t think any children should be disadvantaged in their education. We have public education so that everyone can be educated, so I think that should be a more important issue than it is. I’d like to see a model of education that is affordable and practical. I started researching online how other countries did it, and didn’t find all that much quality information except in an RSA rendition of a TED talk. I found this English view on education reform to be very interesting from a number of different points of view. One of the most interesting parts to me was the reference to standardized testing. We talked a lot in class about the advantages and disadvantages to standardized testing in regards to No Child Left Behind and the new reforms that are coming out. I thought that the reported correspondence between ADHD diagnoses and standardized testing in the YouTube video was interesting. In a way, it is criticizing poor teaching around the world. I agree with the speaker, Sir Ken Robinson, that education should be more than rote memorization and learning of facts. Education should be about knowing how to operate within the society of the world effectively. That should include business and career knowledge, but also knowledge on how to interact socially with others and oneself. There are so many different forms of intelligence and creativity that I feel our current system is limiting. What Sir Ken Robinson advises is a complete rehash of the education system. He wants people to change their minds about the correct way to educate. It shocked me when he drew so many parallels between factories and schools. Yet like both Waiting for Superman and Shame of the Nation, this RSA video does not really give solutions. It just illustrates the problems.

New Source 2: Fixing Teacher Tenure Without a Pass-Fail Grade

         One of the main problems that we discussed in class was tenure for grade school teachers. We focused mainly on the problems with teachers having tenure, and a little on coming up with ideas to fix it. We aren’t the only ones who are thinking about alternative ways to deal with teacher tenure, though. A Time Magazine article, Fixing Teacher Tenure Without a Pass-Fail Grade, from the 27^th of January brings up the same issues. One of their points is that tenure protects both good and bad teachers from poor administrators all too frequently. School administration has been littered with poor management for a while now, and teachers still fear losing their job without good reason despite the effort that the government has been putting into raising the standard for classroom instruction. I think that bad teachers are there, and that there are good administrations that are trying to get rid of them, but I do not feel like it is as common as a lot of people make it out to be. This article referenced “a 2009 report by the New Teacher Project [that] looked at teacher evaluation across the country and found that less than 1% of teachers were rated unsatisfactory.” It is interesting to find that while bad teachers seem to be monopolizing education reform talks, they are not actually that common. This article reported on some new ideas about how states can fix the education system. It said that Florida and a few other states are working towards changing the teacher contract so that it is more similar to other professional contracts in that it does not give a lifetime guaranteed job. I think it is a good idea to get rid of tenure as we know it as long as it is replaced with something else to protect the workers. Still, it is not and should not be too easy to take a teacher’s credentials. I think there needs to be solid proof to verify that the teacher did indeed do something wrong. The problem is that there are so many restrictions that it is virtually impossible to get rid of a bad teacher. These progressive states don’t yet offer a change in the contract so that good behavior may be rewarded and bad behavior punished, but I feel that is what will come next in this process. It may be a small step in comparison with the ideal, but at least it is a solid step in the right direction.

I used some of the techniques I learned in the math tutoring training this Thursday. One student at IHAD did not come home with any written homework, so they gave him an order of operations worksheet. As he was working out loud, I noticed that he did not know the order of operations and I tried to explain it to him. I tried to just give him the Please Excuse My Dear Aunt Sally mnemonic device, but he was in such a hurry to be done that it didn’t work very well. So, after I allowed him to do it his way, I corrected it by writing out my work like I expected him to do to show him how to avoid mistakes. The great thing about this exercise was that I made mistakes along the way (they weren’t on purpose, but I am so glad that I made them). When I had him walk me through the steps I took, he really seemed to get it, and it was a priceless learning moment for him when he caught my mistakes and knew they were mistakes. I feel like I could use this process again, but maybe I could start the thinking out loud at the beginning. I feel like our time could have been better spent if I had him start off by writing out all of his work and thinking out loud as he went along, but I can try that next time and see.

Week Two

In Kozol’s The Shame of the Nation, he talks a lot about how money, or rather the lack thereof, greatly affects the education of colored children. Because of the shortage of funds, there is also a shortage of resources and teachers, not to mention quality ones. Regardless of how good of a teacher one is, working in such an environment places restraints on the sort of education you can provide. On page 125 he reflects, “In overcrowded urban schools where it is common to find 28 to 30 children in a class, teachers do not often feel they can afford – or are specifically advised that they cannot afford – the luxury of listening to answers which, for lack of obvious, immediate, and literal responsiveness, do not advance the necessary forward march to those objectives that are posted on the wall.” When everything is so dependent upon whether or not students pass a test, teachers just cannot afford to teach their students anything extra. While all grade school teachers feel the pressure of standardized tests, it is even more stressful on those teachers in overcrowded, underfunded urban schools. Not reaching expected growth can actually shut down those schools, giving the children no where to go, and causing the teachers and administrators to have to move somewhere else to get another job.

A more immediate response to the lack of attention children receive about anything other than what the teacher is interested in is that children feel unimportant and like no one cares about them. This state of mind leads to children seeing it as pointless to apply themselves in order impress adults that don’t care. I think everyone has experienced a situation in which we stop caring about the quality of our work when we feel the person we are doing it for doesn’t care. The I Have a Dream (IHAD) foundation works to mediate the effect of both teachers and families that are incapable of listening to and taking the time to give personalized help to the children. They work hard to give tangible rewards to kids, which allows them to see the value behind working hard in school. This personalized attention allows those children who would fall through the cracks to have equal opportunities as the wealthier children. They are praised for expressing themselves and asking questions about topics that interest them. They are rewarded for hard work and taught that it is a good thing to strive diligently in school. The only problem I can see is that there are more children to care for than IHAD has funding for.

Children are also labeled different levels based on their performance in school. I can see how it would be useful to designate students to certain levels, but telling all the students where everyone stands is just negative reinforcement of the students who are in the bottom levels. It also leads to children being made fun of by others and feeling like the risk of failing is too great to attempt to succeed. Any effort should be praised, not criticized. Mistakes are just as important in the learning process as successes. I agree that honor rolls are good motivators for children to succeed. The good thing about them is that you either make it or you don’t, and you are only recognized for success. You are not publically criticized and humiliated for failing something. During the math tutor training, we were taught to accept children for who they are and attack the subject together, so as to make a team between student and teacher with the problem as the opponent. This level labeling inhibits the process of students teaming up with a teacher or fellow classmate who is not in their level to learn something new. I believe that high expectations only work if teachers are willing to give the amount of aid that it will take for every student to achieve those expectations if they apply themselves.  When I went to a Math Talk last year, the professor told us that in his class, he always gave a percentage of the final grade to a “failure grade.” To get a good grade on this, the student would have to write about a failure they experienced each week and how it helped them learn. I thought this was a very exciting concept because I always learn so much from my failures in life. Those are the times when I grow and learn how to adapt to new situations the next time they come around.

Education is not exclusive to the classroom. The community plays a huge roll in the process of a child growing up. Children need roll models and a place to go where they can just have fun, be themselves and be respected as such. Thinking about a whole community raising the children, I remembered a song, “It takes a Whole Village,” my mother used to play all the time when I was a child by a band called “Up With People.” I attached it here for your listening. It talks about how the community gives children different reference points on how to act and than just one adult or place. I think the points the song brings up are still pretty apparent today. The IHAD foundation helps to rectify this by giving children that place of community and roll models they need when they are growing up. I think that bringing in college students to work with and motivate the kids is such a great idea because it shows the kids that it is cool to learn and gives them an actual person to know that has achieved it. With knowing the college students comes knowing some of the faults and mistakes that they made and make yet still succeed. I think that it is always beneficial to know that the people you look up to aren’t perfect. And when they mess up, it is helpful to watch how they go about fixing things. That is why it is so great that the IHAD foundation brings in college students who have what the IHAD kids are striving for.

Week One

            There are many different views on meaning. I think that the search for meaning is an essential part of being human. In the film, Examined Life, Avital Ronell speaks to the difficulties faced in the search of meaning. She talks about the human drive to find meaning and how it places one in a situation to be easily manipulated by dogmatism and nationalism. What she proposes is a question: Does everything need to have a meaning or can we just let things be and come to grips with the spontaneity and randomness of life? She implies that no, not all things need to have meaning. I would say both yes and no. I believe that meaning is a driving force for humans. It makes life livable. It is unfortunate, but true, that organizations (both political and spiritual) manipulate this drive in order to control people. Yet why should exploitation of a human trait devaluate it? I think that the search for meaning is a beautiful and truly human drive that should be appreciated and accepted. While the search is beautiful, I do not believe that meaning is always discoverable. All of the great religions of the world ascribe to some sort of faith system when you really get down to it to explain meaning. Maybe it is the search that is important and not so much the outcome.

            Personally, I believe that life is about how one reacts in the situations one is placed in more so than successes or failures. I think failures are the best and only way to grow despite the popular opinion that failure is weakness. It takes quite a bit of courage to put oneself out there in a confident way, risking failure, and then to admit it when it happens. Like this week for me, I procrastinated over the weekend thinking I would have time to do this blog on Monday, and then I was slammed with other work then and all week so I am posting this a week late. I failed at turning my assignment in on time, but I made a point to schedule out my weeks and weekends better so that it won’t happen again for me. I guess the point I am trying to make is that life’s little lessons (failures) along the way about how to function and flourish within society, as well as connections (successes) with other people, are what I feel the meaning of life is.

            While reading “Shame of the Nation,” the apparent differences between mainly Black and Hispanic schools and White schools were shocking to me. I knew that there used to be a big problem with separate but not equal, but I thought that the busing and integrating of schools in the 70’s took care of that problem. I am sure that Kozol spoke accurately about his experience in the most segregated states in the nation, but I believe that the problem lays more places than just the school system. Where I grew up, the students in my school were mostly white, but that was just because that area of the state isn’t very diverse to begin with. I can’t speak for anyone else who comes from my hometown, but I was raised in a very open household that did not tolerate racism in any way. My mother was raised in Cleveland, Ohio and she saw the horrors of racism growing up. She taught me all my life that everyone is the same and that basing any judgment about someone on something they could not change was wrong. I was never allowed to describe anyone by his/her skin color. I feel that being raised in this way gives me the opportunity to notice what a person is doing or what clothes they are wearing first before their skin color ever registers as an identifying factor. Of course I can see difference in skin color; they just aren’t nearly as important to me.

            I agree with Kozol that, regardless of why, something needs to be done so that all children in America are provided with quality education that is equal to what any other child in America would receive, period. While he was mostly focused on equaling educational experiences for children districts apart, it made me wonder if something could be done to equalize the educational experiences between children cities or states apart. I’ve met so many people who come from a different part of this state or a different state that had so many more opportunities than I did, causing them to be so much more prepared for college. I always thought this was very unfair because it is such a competition to get into college without the added anxiety that even if I took advantage of every opportunity I was offered and excelled at it, somebody who went to school in a wealthier part of the country was a more attractive candidate. I think that “No Child Left Behind” may have been trying to fix this problem, but it is failing miserably. That is another thing that confuses me. I have heard nothing but poor reviews of this program, yet the government still insists on using it for funding as it is without revamping it so that it actually works.

            I watched the talk by Damali Ayo this past Thursday. One thing that struck me was that she recommended that colored people form close bonds with other colored people and that white people form bonds with white people so that they each have someone to talk to about racism. I will say I do not agree with this, but this sort of advice may be one reason why there is still so much segregation. If everyone sticks to their own and trusts that the others will stick with theirs, then how can everyone come together in equality to enjoy our similarities as humans? And since the colored and white areas of town are probably the same as they were before the civil rights movement, it is logical to think that it would take a lot more money to fix the formerly colored only schools than the white ones. Regardless, I believe that the solution is open communication and compassion for one another for no other reason than our common humanity. It is in everyone’s best interest for all of the children to be educated equally because they are the future.