Why Do We Go To School?

"People are naturally curious. They are born learners. Education can either develop or still their inclination to ask why and to learn. A curriculum that avoids questioning school and society is not, as is communally supposed, politically neutral. It cuts off the students' development a, critical thinkers about their world. If the students' task is to memorize rule, and existing knowledge, without questioning the subject matter or the learning process, their potential for critical thought and action will be restricted."
Shor challenges the normal approaches to education, his goal is to engage the students, make them question their surrounds, in the hopes that this line of questions with propel them to become better students.
Shor wanted students to ask questions about their education...
"You must arouse children's curiosity and make them think about school. For example, it's very important to begin the school year with a discussion of why we go to school. Why does the government force us to go to school? This would set a questioning tone and show the children that you trust them and that they are intelligent enough, at their own level, to investigate and come up with answers" (Meier 1990, 7), A school year that begins by questioning school could he a remarkably democratic and critical learning experience for students."
This quote stood out to me in this reading i found it really important for anyone wanting to be a teacher. You must engage your students in the curriculum, its your job to keep your students interested and keep them on the road to success. If we don't ask our students questions, if we don't make them realize why they are here then we will lose them.
I relate this to the freedom writers because MRS. G was able to engage her students like Shor is explaining. She was able to make students really question why they were going to school and what they wanted to do. The students realized that school was a sanctuary from the outside world they realized that school was were they wanted to be. Although the poitics and curriculum tried to get in her way MRS. G did what was best for her students and created a success story. Much like i hope to do one day.

Citizenship in School: Reconceptualizing Down Syndrome

                           

Many have blogged about their personal connections to people with Down Syndrome, i don't have a personal connection but i do believe that everyone deserves an equal education. I think that a person should not be judged on their intellectual or physical disabilities, i believe that a person can surprise you and you have to give them the chance. 

Students with Down Syndrome are often segregated into special education classes and not allowed to branch out from the confines of their diseases stereotype.

     "Mia Peterson described what it was like to be segregated from the educational opportunities afford her non disabled peers. She wrote:

  I started to notice that i didn't like the classes that i was taking called special education. I had to go through special ed. almost all of my life. I wanted to take other classes that interested me. I had never felt so mad, i wanted to cry. (Peterson, 1994 p. 6)"

I think that it is horrible that in today's society there are students who are not allow to reach their full potential in school, i honestly find it mind boggling that we claim to be so accepting of everyone but yet there are students who hate going to school.

    My school was very involved in the meshing of special education classes and "normal classes" we had a unified basketball team, we had a mini special Olympics on Sundays where students with disabilities were able to work with other students in the school to accomplish athletic goals. Lunch time students came upstairs and had lunch with everyone, we also had elective classes that more independent students were able to attend. Our homecoming queen was the nicest girl I've ever met and she was part of the special education program. Students with disabilities, down syndrome, autism, any intellectual or physical disabilities deserve to have a chance to become all that they can be. 

Students should all have the ability to prove us wrong, every student should be excited for school and shouldn't be segregated based on their disease.  

Grouping and Tracking

In the reading "Tracking: Why School's Need to Take Another Route" by Jeannie Oaks

 the grouping of children in school is the topic. Is it the right thing to do? Is it the wrong thing to do? People argue the fact that there are good and bad problems with grouping kids in school, i believe that these people are not looking at education the right way. They are not looking at education for the individual. I believe that there are not advantages to grouping students.

This grouping of students strategies can hurt the students, instead of leaving students with opportunities to excel and become all  they can be it takes away from the students learning. The students are most likely to be stuck or trapped in the level of classes that they were put in the first place. I think that this is unfair and not a conventional way of dealing with students. If we want students to retain interest in school and have hopes of one day becoming more we have to show them that we have confidence in their abilities. Students who are categorized and subjected to this grouping and tracking method will not be excited to go to school most will not want to learn. I believe that this kind of education  is what causes students to lose faith in the education system, it is the reason that students ask the why questions. 

Why am i here? Why does it matter? Why do i care, if they don't? Why don't they care?

I made a connection between this reading and the video "Between Barack and a Hard Place" because in the film the speaker talked about how students of Black or Hispanic background were put in lower classes simply because they were not white and they didn't believe that they could excel in these classrooms. And because of this they were viewed as less able and maybe less intelligent. I also related this to the movie freedom writers, this reading directly related to this movie completely and entirely 

Finn

What really stuck out to me in this reading was the section about the middle class schools...
      "one-third of the teachers grew up in the neighborhood of the school. Most graduated        from the local state teachers college, and many of them lived in the neighborhood of        the school. Some were married to other teachers, accountants, police officers,                  nurses, and managers of local businesses."
This quote describes my home town perfectly, talking to many of my friends after reading this they too said it was an accurate description of their teachers. This really grabbed my attention because of the fact that it felt like it was speaking to me about my life and that's a different reaction that i usually get while reading these articles. Usually i feel as though i have no personal connection in any way to these articles. As i read more into this section of the article i found an even more accurate description...
       "For example, when a child said that the plural of mouse is not mouses because "it             wouldn't sound right," the teacher said that was the wrong reason. The right reason         was that mouse is an irregular noun, as it says in the book."
and another...
       "Social studies classes involved reading the text, listening to the teacher's                           explanations, answering the teacher's questions, and occasionally doing reports.               There was rarely sustained inquiry into a topic."
These quotes too seemed to fit into my school career, not to say i had a bad education i grew up in a nice suburban school were the main ethnicity was white with one to two colored students in each graduating class. But this description of middle class schools is dead on.
Another thing that was also very true was the part where getting work done was finding the right answer, the only thing that the teachers seemed to care about was the student getting the correct answer as stated in the text. There was no explanation, there was no discussion or elaboration. This sometimes proved tricky for students but most seemed to adapt to this way of learning and learned the strategies to get the A. Now in college i realize that this way of learning actually impacted my skills, i now must learn multiple ways of arriving at a solution and learning that there isn't just A, but there is A, B, and C. 
        "Work rarely called for creativity. There was little serious attention to how students          might develop or express their own ideas."
This quote was probably the most significant and relate able for me...
         "The teachers in the middle-class school varied from strict to somewhat easygoing,              but for all of them, decisions were made on the basis ofrules and regulations that             were known to the students. Thachers always honored class dismissal bells. There             was little excitement in the school work, and assignments did not seem to take into           account the student's interests or feelings, but the children seemed to believe that           there were rewards: good grades lead to college and a good job."
My question is how do we escape this as future teachers, being raised in this way of learning are we going to teach this way? how do we break away from this suggested line of teaching? how do we not fall back on what we have learned?

Latina/o School Experiences

"In this article, Fairbanks, Crooks, and Ariail followed Esmé Martinez, a Spanishspeaking
Latina, from the sixth grade to the eleventh grade, focusing on her perspectives
of schooling and her shifting identities related to home, school, friendships, and
future. Drawing on the construct of artifacts, a sociohistorical concept that understands
skills, practices, and the means of putting them to use in social spaces, they
detail Esmé’s school history, the ways she was positioned there, and the resources she
used to respond and reposition herself. This examination offers a long-term profile
of the complex interactions that school entails and a nuanced reflection on agency
within institutional constraints." 

     i found this article to be extremely interesting, a long term study that watched over a students growth and progression in school and social aspects. I found it even more interesting that this article was on the experiences of a latina girl, this is because all semester we have seen how society focuses mainly on the white population especially when it comes to things like this. I enjoy learning that people are paying attention to the needs of minorities in school because that too is another thing we have learned this semester that those of minority cultures have the hardest times in school. 



"Our process took the concept of artifacts as its unit of analysis
and included multiple readings of all interview data independently to identify
the artifacts she implied or explicitly referenced; how they were implicated in
her positioning as student, daughter, or friend; and a categorization of her
responses for their content." This quote is a good seg-way to learn about this reading. The researchers follow esme through her school life, learning how sher changed and made way for herself. They talked about how she was  a quiet girl who occaisonly talked to her tablemates during passing to a determined young women with hopes of beauty school. i found this reading to be extremely empowering.



"Esmé’s willingness to be placed in “regulars” constituted an important
moment in her first year of high school for multiple reasons. First, her enrollment
in three honors classes along with enrollment in a reading class was an
unusual occurrence. Second, her decision to speak with the counselor represented
a kind of agency she had not previously reported. In middle school,
she might have wished to change her schedule, but now she requested the
change. Finally, removing her from all honors classes, however, illustrated
one means by which Esmé’s academic opportunities were constrained. The
school’s actions perpetuated her positioning as struggling in an “all or nothing”
way that failed to recognize her academic strengths, a process further
compounded by her enrollment in a remedial reading class that even her
teacher believed was inappropriate."

This part of the reading i hated to read, esme wanted nothing more then to better herself but was unable to due to the school's misconceptions and "inappropriate" actions.

Overall i enjoyed this reading and the meaning of it. 

More Than Just Race

I almost dreaded the idea of having to watch an almost 2 hour long video, but then i started listening to how this man talked during this speaking. The speaker made this a very comfortable environment to talk about a controversial topic, Race.

I want to start at a point close to the end where the speaker talks about a time where he talked to younger students about their views, these children may have only been about 10 years old but they had their own ideas about race. Through TV shows and the society in which they have grown up in, i thought this idea of students formulating their own ideas and maybe even bias's due to social media and society directly connected with the conversational topics that have been discussed in our classroom the last couple weeks. I found this fact very interesting that there are more people out there that find it important to look at the young minds in our society, you can really learn a lot about how the rest of society thinks about a situation or problem by talking to young kids. These children are like sponges, they pick up everything around them, for good and bad, they begin to formulate their own opinions early in life. They do this just by listening to the adults in their lives and the way they themselves views ideas and political topics such as race.

I know for a fact that there are many kids when i was growing up that "stole" their parents political and social views. I say "stole" because instead of learning about these topics and formulating their own true ideas they would say they believe it because its what their parents believe. I remember one year in school we had an election, they held fake elections for Obama or Romney, one girl asked me who i was voting for, at the time i really didn't know because i didn't really have an opinion. She told me that i had to vote for Romney because her parents make a lot of money and Obama would hurt her parents and make them pay more in taxes. More shocking is what she said after, she said her parents didn't like black people, that the president had always been white and that is how it was supposed to be. Then i really didn't understand how someone could be so mean, i had asked her what she thought  and she simply said she believed what was right... This i feel is a continuing problem, children are picking up on their parents ideals may it be social or political and applying them to their own lives, i believe that most don't see how big of an impact their opinions have on youth. We need to show people that your own opinion rather then the one you adopted growing up is most times better.

This speaker of course touched upon several other important topics such as the astonishing number of white people who say they have multiple black friends while the black population polled said they only had one white friends. These results contradicted the population variable of white to blacks in the nation greatly, so who is lying?

I still wonder to this day why Race is such a barrier in our society, we have come so far you would think but it still seems we are stuck in the age of the oppression, is this because i am white? Does the color of my skin act as a veil to the real problems? I like to think that i don't judge, but i know myself to make judgments because of the social stereotypes i have become so familiar with. Is the speaker right, is it hard for white people to recognize racism, do we only recognize the serious offenses?

Affirmative Action, Equality, Discrimination

"Fierce Urgency of Now"

Shirley Wilcher -"race knows no economic bonds" 

• Roosevelt and Truman were among the first to order successful executive orders in the name of Affirmative Action and Equal Opportunities.
• John F. Kennedy was the first to use Affirmative Action

The Philadelphia Plan- had to do with the construction industry, which is one of the most difficult to integrate. Now the Philadelphia Plan is used as a model.

Civil Rights Landmarks
1949: Desegregation of the US Armed Forces
1954: Brown v. Board of Education
1955: Montgomary buscott
1963: Betty Friedon
1964: Civil Rights Act Signed
1966: EEO-1 Private Sector Report if company has more than 100 employees
1969: Stonewall Riot
1973: Rehabilitation Act
1990: Americans with Disabilities
1991: Civil Rights Act of 1991
1997: Cali. banned all forms of affirmation action
1998: Washington state abolished affirmation action
2000: Florida bans using race as a factor in college admissions
2007: Michigan banning preferential treatments of minorities

Quote from President Truman:

"Freedom is not enough, you do not wipe away the scars of centuries by saying: Now you are free to go where you want and do as you desire, and choose the leaders you please. You do not take a person who for years has been hobbled by chains and liberate him, bring him up to the starting line of race and then say, "you are free to compete with all the others," and still justly believe that you have been completely fair. Thus it is not enough just to open the gates of opportunity. all our citizens must have the ability to walk through those gates..."

Why can't women get jobs above a certain level?
Why are minorities jumping from job to job?
WHY? Where is you Affirmative Action Plan? 
"Plans for Progress" ? - during the Kennedy Administration contractor, reportedly designed to take positive action and prevent discrimination lawsuits

• Employers need to take Affirmative Action in the work place and in the hiring process - you cannot exclude a person because of race, gender, looks, etc. !!!
• Affirmative action program is a management tool designed to enforce equal opportunities.

• Student Body Diversity is Constitutional!
• Grutter v. Bollinger and Gratz v. Bollinger
• Abigail Fisher v. University of Texas - "discriminated her because of her race"
• several colleges had this problem, in some aspects the colleges were not always at fault.
• Affirmative Action protects LGBT
• poor white kids do better on standardize tests then poor kids of color, why?

"To get beyond race you have to first take race into account"