Chapter 5
4. Did you save any of the papers you wrote for school? Why or why not? I don’t think I’ve ever saved a paper of mine out of pride. By pride I mean being so proud of what I wrote that I keep it and look back at it years later. Speaking on high school, I was very much a C student that only got by and did the bare minimum so with that being said I hated essays, if it didn’t lower my grade, I was happy. In college, specifically community college, I was much more determined to get As and usually did but still nothing in terms of pride. At Pacific, my dedication as a student was at an all time high. For 3 20 page papers, that consisted of the entires classes grade, for all three I got 100% and it was probably the most proud I’ve been of my writing skill. But still to this day, there are no papers that I have saved that I look back at and am proud of, maybe it is because I haven’t written any with 100% of my passion, the ones I do keep is in case I need to refer back to them for future assignments. 2. Sternberg says that “to be successfully intelligent is to think well in three different ways: analytically, creatively, and practically.” What are some methods schools could use to help students become successfully intelligent in each and all of these ways? Analytically: After reviewing key terms such as characterization, character development, foreshadowing, etc. Have a student analyze their favorite movie, TV show, or book. Having them breakdown and analyze their favorite character from a beloved series will be an easy way to motivate the student followed by having them use those same analyzing concepts on stories and literatures that school requires. Creatively: Schools need different outlets for creativity. In music, a plethora of instruments to choose from. Art, could be drawing or painting or both. Photoshop and video editing. Dancing and singing. Drama. These are a bunch of areas of creativity that schools are lacking in that students can definitely fit into. Students need a creative outlet and although it might not be academic, students who play instruments for example, are far more intelligent overall than students who don’t. Practically: Usefulness! Students don’t want to learn and practice things that are not useful. We are familiar with the term “knowledge is power” but the knowledge is only power because that knowledge can be used! Even if it isn’t academic such as reading novel or solving an equation, teaching a student how to use a computer, do taxes, organize themselves, make videos, and operate machinery goes a long way in other subjects in school and aspects in life. Chapter 6
Most educational experiences are boring! I’ve subbed for classes that had me giving worksheets after worksheets, or never allowed the students to do anything they found fun, even if it was academic. Educational experience reminds me of the food industry and how junk for is tasty and cheap while healthy food is gross and expensive, you wonder why America has obesity problems. It’s no wonder students find school boring, it is! School systems already overly prioritize ELA and math, and leave history and science out of it. Students watch TV and see shows of students blowing things up in chemistry, building volcanoes, going to history museums, and bringing ridiculous math problems to life, maybe if the system allowed teachers to run wild with their lessons students wouldn’t find education to be boring. 5. What would it take for you to want to be a mentor to a high school student two days a week at your workplace? Even as a substitute teacher, which isn’t the full teaching experience, as long as I could pick the classes I sub for, like my favorite locations, I’d be very content with letting a high schooler shadow me. When I’m subbing for my usually go to classes, I actually feel like a full time teacher because the teacher I sub for leaves me quality lesson plans and I’m able to have direction yet at the same time have freedom to do as I please in regards to teaching the students. Session 3 Reflections I’ve never used a mind map before so I’m eager to try one and see if it indeed helps me with organizing my thoughts in regard to the annotation project. When it comes to writing and doing big assignments, starting is the hardest part so I’m eager to see if it helps me out in getting started so that I can take this with me into other classes. If I’m speaking frankly, I am an unpleased-able student (I made up the word) in the sense that I will grill a professor for being to cookie cutter and boring, but also grill a teacher for being extra and doing “too much” for what should be an easy assignment so I’m flawed in that regard. I didn’t like posting the reflections to weekly because I felt that it would be much easier to just submit it to google classroom, but now I see myself using this with students I’d have later in life. I can easily see this being a creative outlet for middle schoolers in making their blog like a myspace while at the same time being a place for submitting work.
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Chapter 3
1. What would a school that was “a little more human” look like to you? “I wanted my teachers to know their kids as well as possible, and I knew that size mattered.” “Why don’t they just build small schools in the first place?” “creating an atmosphere that is best for kids” All three of these statements elude to prioritizing the child! Classrooms having a ratio of 28:1 or more than 30 is the norm in the 21st century. We are shown movies or documentaries of single building classrooms with 16 to 20 kids with a teacher that they’ll be with for more than a year. In those same classrooms, the teacher is usually a really maternal figure that goes beyond teaching grammar and also teachers manners and morale. In the 21st century, the teacher is like a shepherd herding a bunch of sheep, there are even incentives to taking beyond 30-34 students such as taking a stipend for taking said extra students. That’s not human. Wanting a teacher to get to know the student shouldn’t be a conversation, we have the students for six hours a day for 180 days! To also expect a teacher to adjust to 25+ different minds and personality on a personal level is absurd, some of these kids’ parents don’t even understand their child, let alone the teacher. To make a school a little more human is to allow the teacher to know their students on a personal level, by reducing how many the teacher has. Allow the teacher to have a small school, allow the teacher create the atmosphere they desire without having to focus on getting the chickens on their coops. To make a school a little more human, is to take away the herding feel to it and make it into that movie or documentary we’ve seen where it’s a teacher with her 20 kids she’ll raise and educate, not the 35 kids she’ll look after for an extra check because there isn’t space. 2. How could a school go about showing its students that they are trusted and valued members of the school community? A school can show its students that they are trusted and valued members of the school community is to allow the culture to exist and be passed down. Allowing a culture to develop amongst the school that goes beyond race, region, and nationality is what show students that they are valued, because what they’re finding value in is important to the whole school. “Something I talk about all the time, and something it’s really important to recognize, is that it is the older kids who help carry on the culture of a school.” The little kids look up to the big kids, and theres no denying that, and they’ll do what the big kids do! What I think of when I think of the culture of a school, I think of the school I sub for the most, and how the whole school looks forward to the middle school versus staff events. The whole school pauses and they all come outside to spectate an extremely amateur game of volleyball between teacher and eighth grader. The little kids want nothing more than to be there one day being the upperclassman that challenges the staff. There is the value! There is the trust! The teachers value the kids enough to allow them to take a break from the rigorous educating for a little outdoor bonding. It may take away from the time constraint and valuable instructional time, but it also says that the staff trusts the kids enough to get back to the books and still be able to get back to learning. Chapter 4 5. Tell about a time when you were in school and your learning matched your interests. How was that experience different from times when your learning didn’t match what you were interested in? Sophomore year, first semester, second period World History. The experience to me, is what a class is:
Freshman year of college, spring semester, survey of American Literature. Every story I read was extremely long, and dense with interpretation. The professor only responded to answers that aligned with her interpretation even though the class was designed to discuss peoples different interpretations of the same story. Truth be told, I didn’t care about the yellow wallpaper that we were dissecting the same way I cared about learning about Pearl Harbor. 4. How do you get a student to want knowledge? Once you get them to want it, what are the best ways to help them get it? You get a student to want knowledge by making them GOOD at something. People in general, want more knowledge and want to master things that they are good at. It may sound farfetched because you have to learn something in order to eventually be good at it, but in order to (key word here) want to knowledge, we have to make the student see that they are or could be good at it. A student could be mediocre in every subject they take in school or even be bad at them, and they won’t want to get better at them because they’re bad at it, they’ll condemn themselves. But that one subject they are good at, they’re going to immerse themselves in it because they feel confident in it, they feel like the specialist it, and it’s our job as a teacher to amplify that and figure out how to make the student feel “good” at the subjects they may detest at the time. Reflection Session 2 Day 2 as a returning student after two years of not being a student. Today we did a mural where we had to put a sticky note on a plethora of topics that was organized into an organizer. The topics were Blended Learning, 21st century, and other things I had never heard of and I felt I had zero contribution to these topics. Once again, it’s the substitute with the full timers and it showed here. Fortunately I saw this as an opportunity to really listen and consider these topics as topics for me to touch upon for future assignments such as the Annotated Reference Project. Personally my brain is still warming up to being a student still, for example I’m still sweating bullets just trying to locate where things are in Google classroom and makes me feel like I’m the kids I sub for when I tell them to search for their assignments their teacher has left for them to do. Professor Griggs brought up how we technically didn’t have standardized testing this year for kids because of the pandemic, and it really made me think about how this could be an opportunity to revise our ways of measuring the students growth. Chapter 1
4. Do you agree that “learning is personal”? If so, how would you go about explaining the concept to someone who may not be as convinced? Learning IS personal, it is something I agree with strongly. Learning is like seeing a word search, and watching how students will pick a different first word from the search even though they all have the same one. Once one learns how to learn and how to think it becomes personal. A great example would be with how I teach martial arts. Students can learn visually, my demonstration of the techniques. I can explain the move, for those who are auditory learners. I can have them solo practice the technique, for those who are tactile learners and need to do it themselves, and I can have them work in partners, for those who are social construct learners. In demonstrating a technique that tackles all those learning aspects, students who learn differently, will still come to learn the same technique, the paths they took were simply different. To someone who is not convinced I simply ask, is there only way to get to Walmart, is there only one flight, one direction that leads to Mexico, is there only one path to get you to the top of Mission Peak? Learning is the exact same way as finding your physical destination, one must simply learn what their path is and take it, hence learning how to learn and how to think. 2. How would you define the differences between “learning” and “knowledge”? The difference between learning and knowledge is the same difference that is shared between the destination and the outcome. Learning is the journey and the path you took to gain the knowledge. “The Big Picture” states that learning isn’t memorizing. Learning is about being mindful. I interpret that the same way I interpret conversation with a person. You don’t listen to someone talk to memorize and to regurgitate what they say back to them, you ask questions, you challenge them, you reflect on yourself, and you’re being mindful of what the person is saying. Knowledge is merely the ingredients. Learning is using the knowledge, and turning the ingredients into a recipe, for you can’t have one without the other. Chapter 2 3. Have you ever thought about the idea that “the world is changing—schools are not”? What are some things we could do right now to bring schools up to pace with the changing world? We teach kids to answer the test question. We test them on a topic that they’ll never care to think about ever again. Heck, have you ever gotten to the last 4-5 questions of a test and just bubbled whatever in because you were so burned from reading a hundred passages to only answer a few questions per passage. Have you ever marked four C’s in a row and thought to yourself “one of these has to be wrong?” instead of just sticking to your logic and brain? Tests need to bring out the thoughts and challenge the person to critically think, that is immeasurable skill to have yet important none the less. The world is changing, how? An answer or fact is a “Okay google” away, or “hey alexa.” There apps that not only give you the answer but compute the work for your math. We can cut standard tests now. Challenge our kids to think and let em know it’s okay to be wrong and to have a different answer. 7. What is your definition or vision of a great school? How would you go about measuring each of the qualities you choose? “We learn best when we are using our hands and minds. We learn best when the work we are doing is real and relevant.We want to prepare our children for the world, so let’s not isolate them from the world.” A great school is filled with things, not paper. A clock for math, for learning how to tell time for the kinders. A school should have a class lizard, or to be able to see the cycles of the butterfly in 1st grade. A school should have the movie 1917 precede a chapter on world war one for sophomores in high school. Things! Not paper and workbooks. In my time as a karate instructor, I use weapons and obstacles to teach, have you ever read about a person who earned their black belt by reading all day? The less fortunate kid is going to want to go to school because it has everything he/she doesn’t. Session 1 Class reflection As a student who hasn’t been a student for two years, entering a class full of educators is a bit anxiety inducing to say the least. “What grade do you teach?” “What school do you work at?” Neither! I’m a substitute, a glorified baby sitter! I would eventually like to become a full time glorified baby sitter educating and making a difference in the kids a sit for 6 hours a day. The flexible and “real” nature of Professor Griggs also helps a ton. Although we know he is a person, the professor spilling the beans on his life and interests really makes him feel human and makes him less intimidating to approach virtually. Normally I’d stay muted, but the professors vibe allowed me to participate on the whopping first day with a bunch of teachers! The contribution I made was allowing kids to make mistakes, and get feedback, and to turn in revised work! I’m in college and I make mistakes all the time and love redos, why can’t a nine or ten year old do that? |