Friday, April 30, 2010

Talking point 8

Jean Anyon - Social class and the hidden curriculum of work

"In the affluent professional school, work is creative activity carried out independently"
This was a novel idea for me. School for me usually involved worksheets, tests, and one-word right-or-wrong answers. I think this is why I still prefer objective testing styles over subjective ones, because this is what I am familiar with. I think that as a teacher it would be a great idea for me to show my students that I value their ideas and thought processes enough to want more than a one word answer from them.

"In the executive elite school, work is developing one's analytical intellectual powers"
Another foreign concept for me. Even in college I have had classes where the professor only cared if you could come up with the one correct answer, not the route you took to arrive there. I have actually had a college professor say to a student in a freshman psychology class "You're a freshman, you don't get to have an opinion yet"

"School experience, in the sample of schools discussed here, differed qualitatively by social class"
This is a main issue of this article. Unfortunately, it's obvious to everybody that schools definitely differ greatly amoung the social classes. This just serves as one more roadblock placed in the way of lower social-class and minority populations by the "culture of power". It is one more way that certain people are kept "in their place"

Sunday, April 18, 2010

Talking point 9

"I wanted to take other classes that interested me"
I think it's so sad that someone in this country can be denied an education that they want so badly.....denying educational opportunities to somebody because of their percieved inadequecies is not only unfair, but outright discriminatory. It would hurt noone to give people a chance, worst case scenario someone can be switched to different classes if the one's they are in are too advanced for them to handle. This is just another example of how children in our country become labeled and sorted into little boxes that there is no escape from.

"so what if you don't fit exactly like your supposed to? You know, it's not like I fit many people's idea of what a teacher is supposed to be like"
This is my favorite quote of the whole article.... imagine how wonderful our educational system would be if all teacher's thought this way in regard to all children!

"It's about all of us working together, playing together, being together, and thats what learning is"
This quote is so true. Education is not all about textbooks and standardized tests, it is about the learning experience, learning life skills, learning to work with other people, especially those who may be different from us.

This article was very interesting to me. I do have experience with people who have down syndrome, my sister-in-law has down syndrome and I have had the pleasure of attending many events with her that were specifically for people with down syndrome. One of the major things I have noticed is the huge differences amoung those with down syndrome, some are capable of living on their own, and some are not, etc. There is a huge range of capabilities amoung people who have down syndrome, which makes labeling them as capable or incapable at particular things impossible. Individuals with down syndrome have many abilities and qualities that would be a wonderful addition to any environment, especially a classroom. It makes me so sad to continously be reminded how narrow-minded and short sighted our educational system can be.

Sunday, April 11, 2010

Talking Point 7

Whoops somehow completely missed doing this post last week, better late than never....I hope :)

While researching gender and education online, I did find that almost all of the results focused on higher education, there wasn't very much information on gender and k-12 education. what information there was seemed to focus either on single-sex classrooms or females and science and math classes. This website has links to many different articles, again, most of them focus on higher education but there is a lot of interesting information in them. Doing this reaearch has opened my eyes to a lot of things, before this assignment I would have said that I did not notice any differences in the education males and females recieved in the schools I attended as a child, once again my "lens" has been cracked and my eyes opened to things I never noticed before, such as the middle school I attended had both male and female students both take woodworking and sewing class, however the girls could somehow earn an "A" in woodworking by sweeping the floor and cleaning up the sawdust from the boys projects. If a female student did attempt a project of her own, the (male) teacher was right there, practically doing the whole thing himself. This class just keeps adding more and more things that we need to be aware of as we become teachers, I'm starting to feel like another knapsack is being added to my back, filled with all of the stuff we are learning in this course, and it is much heavier than the "white priviledge knapsack".