Talking Points # 10

　

　

EMPOWERING EDUCATION

Critical Teaching for Social Change

IRASHOR

1. "You must arouse children's curiosity and milk them to 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? "

I like this. I always used to wonder as a kid why we had to go to school and what I was supposed to get out of it. Eventually you figure it out, but I can imagine that as a child learning rhyme you must wonder why. We should let kids know the importance of school. I didn't really know until middle school why school is so important and by then if you slacked off or didn't care because you didn't know why it was so important, then you fell behind. Perhaps even if you told kids, "Hey who wants to be an astronaut, or lawyer, or artist? Well, you have to go to school to learn before you can become those things." I think that had I known I would have taken it more seriously from the start, rather than later. I mean imagine what a kid thinks. If a kid thinks that they can become whatever they want by going to school, which they can, then they will get more out of it.

2. "School funding is another political dimension of education, because more money has always been invested in the education of upper-class children and elite collegians than has been spent on students from lower-income homes and in community colleges."

We seem to be reading about this a lot lately and it definately is not fair. It really makes no sense to me why this is. I mean the upper class schools already have all the luxeries they need. Why not start replacing ripped up text books that the lower income schools have. Of course it all comes down to testing and ranking of schools. It is a viscious cycle. Why wouldn't schools with more resources, more experienced professors, endless funding, etc have better test scores. It would be sad if they didn't.  Who is helping the lower income schools. You see it happening everywhere the lower class always gets the short end of the stick. We see it everyday in politics. The government takes from the lower class and the upper class has all of these benefits. I also don't understand this because those families of elite schools have the money to contribute to the schools. Does it make sense then that the lower income schools get nothing. I really enjoyed when I recieved a print out from FAFSA on how I could afford college. They calculated how much money I supposedly have. I think it came to around 13,000. How do they figure this? I have a car payment, rent, I don't live with my parents, but if I did I only have my mother who is a single parent. Now where is this 13,000 that the government says I have to pay for school. I wish they would help me find it. It is dumb because here I am, I can't afford college but I work very hard to pay for it myself, and then there are others who's family has the money, but they also have more resources and know more people to recieve funding. Is it fair, of course not. I'm sure everyone if not most of you guys can relate to this.

3. "In sum, the subject matter, the learning process. the classroom discourse, the cafeteria menu, the governance structure, and the environment of school teach students what kind or people to be and what kind of society to build as they learn math, history, biology, literature. nursing, or accounting. Education is more than facts and skills. It is a socializing experience that helps make the people who make society."

It sounds really scary when you put it like this. It paints the picture in my head that schools are indoctering people. When thought of that way it scares me, but it is kind of true. Schools are shaping/modeling the next buisnessmen, congressmen, and people who will be runnong our counrty one day. Eventually our generation will be the one's taking care of buisness and it all started in elementary school.

This was not one of my favorite articles to read because I didn't find it as interesting. I understood it, made the connections, but politics is not something I have ever been interested in. I found it difficult to get through this reading because of it. It wasn't like the other reading where they talked about topics I may not have considered before. I had already thought of the education system as political so it wasn't an article that did anything for me or changed my views in any way as many of the past articles we had read did.

Autistic child is also math genius

Look at this video too! It also relates to my talking points. Go on Youtube and I am sure you can find so many more.

Texas Boy With Autism A Musical Genius - Shane McAuliffe - KBTX News 3

This video is a good example of how kids with special needs have the ability to learn and can have different skills that other people don't have.

Talking Points # 9

Citizenship in School:

Reconceptualizing Down Syndrome

by Christopher Kliewer

1. "It's not like they come here to be labeled, or to believe the label.  We're all here- kids, teachers, parents, whoever- it's about all of us working together, playing together, being together, and that's what learning is."

I really like this because I don't know how many times in school I have seen a person with disabilities get labeled. They are not aliens, they are people who just like you and me have feelings. It isn't about labeling them as different, but working together and getting by day to day with each other. We have to be able to work together because that is what life is all about. People learn best from others not from being outcasts or alone. Learning isn't something that people do just by sitting and listening alone. The best learning takes place when people work off one another and support/help each other. I'm glad that some schools see this.

2.  "Just because she is handicapped doesn't mean she can't learn."

This is so true. Handicapped people are not incompetent. Maybe it appears they can't learn because nobody gives them a chance. Some of the most brilliant minds are handicapped.Once again they are people and learning may be a little harder, but none the less they have the ability to learn just like you or I. I have heard of a lot of autistic people who have difficulty learning some things, but they are geniuses in another area that I could not begin to understand. Everyone can learn and everyone can grow. I remember in high school when the students with handicaps would all sit at the same table and whenever any student who wasn't handicapped walked by and got quiet. No wonder they probably feel labeled when nobody can even walk by them without putting their head down and avoiding eye contact. It is almost like people are pitying them. I would hate for someone to always pity me.

3. "That's what learning is. It's taking risks and seeing stuff in new ways...Maybe you don't read the book exactly like the author wrote it, but you're making sense of it... and then the next day, maybe your dance changes."

This is an awesome quote. I think what it is saying is that not everyone sees things exactly the same and that is fine. That's what makes us all unique and what makes learning so interesting. We are constantly changing and developing and this is all apart of learning. If everyone played it safe without any deeper connections to the material how would a person get a deeper learning. I don't have to learn the same way someone else does. The point is that I learn.

I was surprised to read an article like this because it is kind of different from what we have been reading, but I liked it. I"m always surprised by the articles because a lot of time I have thought about these subject subconsciously, everyday I go to school, but I never really got to think about them or decide my point of view. I'm going to be sad when we are done with these because I leaned a lot about my beliefs, morals, values, which all make up me as a person.. It really was a self discovery in many aspects.

Talking Points # 8

(chapter taken from Learning Power)

From Social Class and the Hidden Curriculum of Work

JEAN ANYON

1. "Scholars in political economy and the sociology of knowledge have recently argued that public schools in complex industrial societies like our own make available different types of educational experience and curriculum knowledge to students in different social classes. "

This is without a doubt true in my mind. All I can think about is "Freedom Writers". In the school shown in that movie those kids in the beginning were not even given a chance. Nobody wanted to waste the good books/textbooks on them. They wouldn't appreciate them enough, apparently. I think a lot of working class schools feel this way which is why higher learning isn't being done there because the people of power feel as though they wouldn't get it or couldn't get it. In upper class schools it is believed that these kids appreciate it more and understand more intellectually. It is wrong, but the truth. I only hope that when I become a teacher I don't treat students like they are dumb, but give them enough credit that they could understand the material if given the chance and if they had a little more encouragement.

2. "Work tasks do not usually request creativity. Serious attention is rarely given in school work on how the children develop or express their own feelings and ideas..."

I do not like this way of teaching at all. I understand things better when I am creative and think about things in a creative way. I am much more of a visual learner. I learn with taking ideas and recreating them in different ways. For example, I learned how to say the states in alphabetical order due to a song and to this day I still now them. Putting learning in the form of a song really helped me, which in itself is creative. Now if someone sat me down, gave me a worksheet of all the states, and said learn this I would not know how to. It is not how I learn or how I express what I know. I love presentations. To me I learn a lot more out of preparing for a presentation than taking a test and that is all because I am more of a creative/ reflective person. I would hate to be in a school where creativity didn't matter. In fact if I ever were in a school like that, I don't think I would have gained half of the knowledge that I have throughout the years.

3. "...the children may be brought into line by reminding them that "It is up to you." "You must control yourself," "you are responsible for your work," you must "set your own priorities." One teacher told a child, "You are the only driver of your car-and only you can regulate your speed."

I have been to a lot of different schools throughout my life because i have moved a lot. One school that I went to was the Executive Elite School in many ways. That high school treated us like semi-college level students. Attendance was only sometimes taken, but rarely. We were given outlines where is was up to us to learn the material and keep up with the reading. If a person feel behind it was up to them to seek help. Homework was checked periodically, but basically it was up to you to learn the material ad pass the final exam. If you didn't keep up you would be lost for future classes. We had a lot of group discussion and group presentations. I like this school because I didn't feel pressured and I learned in my own way. This is why I liked this quote because I was responsible for my work, and it was up to me whether I succeeded or failed. I was in control of my future and what I was going to do with it. Help was always available so you were not completely alone, but we had choice.

This article is one of those articles that I believe will always stick with me. Whenever I enter a school I will always be conscious of these things and when I teach I hope to be in a school that believes in their students ability. I want to be in a school where the students are not "silenced". I'm glad this class exists because it makes me have some hope for those schools where the students are silenced that maybe us new teachers can make a change. We are aware of the problems, but are we going to act on them and strive for change. I hope so. I really do hope so.

Kehinde Wiley

I learned a lot of interesting things today at Promising Practices, particularly in my first workshop where we talked about race. I liked this workshop because it talked about race in the media which we have spent a good deal talking about in class so I was already a little familiar. I learned of a painter named Kehinde Wiley. What he does is he paints black men in higher ranked white man poses. The example the instructor gave was the pose of Mary shown below. He painted a black man in this holy pose, why? I liked the different ideas discussed. Wiley is trying to break racial stereotypes. Here we have a black man wearing pink and purple who is surrounded by flowers. This is definitely not a dangerous image as we so often relate to black people as being violent. In this painting he is as innocent as Mary. Look at his tattoos. It says to me, hey without these clothes I may have tattoos and look scary, but I'm innocent. I couldn't hurt a thing.



I like that he poses himself as higher ranked white people such as the Virgin Mary, who is a prominent religious figure. He has done this with Napoleon and others as well. It shows the black man as equal to the higher ranked white person. He is definitely sending a message. I'm sure you can think of a lot of things that he is saying and portraying in this image just as I know I could go on forever talking about it. You can see more of his painting if you CLICK HERE!

So I Was Thinking

         So something happened today that really made me think about this class. I just got home from RIC and something interested happened while in my theatre class today. My teacher had given us rehearsal time so the whole class was sitting together rehearsing and talking about random things. We starting talking about the theatre shows that RIC puts on when all of a sudden a boy in my class made an interesting remark. He said that he never auditions because he is black and why would he be cast for a role where the rest of the people are probably white. He continued saying that it doesn't make sense to have a play about a family where all the characters are white and he is black because it wouldn't make sense. I told him that the theatre we have at RIC is gender and race blind, meaning they don't cast off of that, but wow. How horrible is it to have to think like that and I can see where he is coming from. It makes sense. Just think about movies. In every movie you always have the black friend, or the really smart Asian, but how many movies have a Chinese person as the lead, not many. They really gear entertainment toward whites. Like Delpit explains, there is a culture of power and we are it. Or even the Macintosh reading where white people don't even know that we are oppressing others, but we are. Look at this poor kid who loves theatre, but doesn't even bother auditioning. How sad. I hope that after talking to everyone that he changed his mind, but I fear he won't. I understand him, but I wish I didn't  have to.