Be Specific.

Ever since I can remember I always knew what I wanted to do. I always wanted to be a lawyer. Now, my major is Biology and I want to teach high school students. I really do not know why, something to deal with the effect my biology teacher had on me. I haven’t always wanted to do biology and I haven’t always wanted to be a lawyer. But between those to careers, there was always something. Something I was good at and wanted to do/share with someone else. My mom always told me I had to go to college and pursuit something I was good at and would make money for me. I haven’t always paid attention to the money part, but I have always pursued something I loved. I am thankful for my mom, because she always guided me in the right path. If it wasn’t for her, I might not ever think about my future, but she was the one that gave my conscience. If parents and teacher could target student’s interests and build on that, then students might be well off with what they are happy about. IN a previous post I talked about teaching styles, well if we used a teaching style that focused on what the student like more, then we could keep their focus more. Of course, they still need to be well-rounded, but since being in my major it is so nice to know that I have become so much more specialized in something I love. Sometimes I am surprised that I don’t spend all my time talking biology with people. I definitely think about it, but most people do not find interesting what I find interesting. Wouldn’t it be so much nicer to become specialized in something you like earlier on? Then you’d know sooner if you actually like it or not.

Get a Book!

“Nearly one-third of young Americans recently polled couldn’t locate Louisiana on a map and nearly half were unable to identify Mississippi.” (citation) That’s crazy….how do people in AMERICA not know where the states are. The same close friend of mine that I refer to is from a foreign country, told me that most Americans can only locate three European countries on a map. It is so annoying when you think about how little we as americans know about each other or other foreign countries. Are your proud of that? What is sad is that this statistic does not come from school children, teen-agers, or college students; it comes from adults or just American citizens. I love my country, and from what I am told, the land we have is a blessing, but it is so hard for me to be proud of the education we have when I see a statistic like this. I want to be proud. We need to do something. Give your kids books. Growing up, I never wanted to sleep; I was a night owl. When I didn’t want to sleep and I didn’t have the convenience of a TV, I had books. I’d look at these children house encyclopedias cover to cover just astonished at the things that I didn’t know about. People wonder why I know things that I probably shouldn’t know or never was taught, and I just learned early on. I sat down and was so easily intrigued by things that I read about. And I continued to want to find more things I didn’t know. I find many things very interesting that most don’t. I can definitely say that, but that’s not a reason for someone to not be able to identify states or countries. Not a reason at all.
**Citation for photo

Distractions

Being in the digital age can be quite distraction. When doing anything homework related such as this assignment that I am doing right now, I always become distracted. The internet is full of distractions. Essentially when I am on my computer the distractions are so in my face. I feel that is one of the many reason for children not doing their full capacity on their school work. Of course there are other countries with the same distractions, but I feel as though Americans encourage these distractions because they are not discouraging them. With things like facebook, myspace, email, photos, youtube, ect. The possibilities are endless in terms of distractions. I’d rather do work for a class that doesn’t involve a computer because then at least I know I won’t get so distraction. What’s more difficult is that more and more you see people with internet on their phone. So now distractions can follow them. When you add these digital distractions along with other modern distractions and daily general distractions, we as American can get easily sidetracked. We blatantly, I feel, find things to distract ourselves with. Maybe that’s why we constantly are inventing new technology, just so we can be so entertained that we subconsciously want to do less work/responsibilities. There is a video that displays interesting statistics about how teens are consumed in the digital age: citation
**PHOTO IS TAKEN BY ME

Divorce?

A close friend of mine was writing a paper on the effects of divorce on children's learning ability. I thought this was interesting considering America has such a high divorce rate. Could this be a contributing reason for our failing education system? We all have friends or family going through a divorce; it happens all the time. Children are the ones that get thrown under the bus in divorce. Its very hard for children to cope with divorces. %50 of first marriages end in divorce (citation). That is such a sad statistic. Many times the stress of the parents getting remarried is what causes the difficulty, sometimes. This could be why children have hard time learning, they are so focused on what is going on at home and not what is going on at school. If we could change this problem this could help more children become more focused in school. We could invent programs to redeem lost marriages and prevent them from divorce in order to save kids from learning problems in school.

Survival of the Fittest...

Have you ever had a teacher that you knew could not handle the classroom? And the other students knew it and took advantage of it? Usually these teachers would threaten to give detentions but would never actually give any. Maybe they were too easy going because they wanted to be the easy fun teacher, not the difficult one. For whatever reason they were liked this, if you were a hard working student you especially share my problem. You felt like the other students were pulling you behind by picking on the teacher’s weaknesses. So you’d sit there and wonder if you would ever learn anything. This is a problem for the students who want to excel but are hindered by a teacher’s incompetence to handle a classroom. This is a problem in which one of my other friends brought up. I can’t help but agree that I have encountered this too throughout high school and middle school. This is a problem that should be addressed by other teachers, parents, and students. If you feel like your teacher is doing a good job say something. Why allow your education to be hindered if you could fix it. Survival of the best teacher wins!

Leaving early? Think again!

In college classrooms, you’d think that the efficiency of the teaching would solely rest upon the teacher. Wrong. It’s both the student and the teacher. A major distraction in a college classroom is students coming in late to a classroom or leaving early. This is both the student and teacher. They could take attendance at the end of class so students wouldn’t leave. Or lock the door for those coming in late. The only downside of the solutions is that taking attendance for the class would make attendance as requirement as a whole, which doesn’t give students the freedom to decide if they should come that day or not. All in all, this is a major distraction in college classrooms. Can you brainstorm other ideas that could help monitor this?

Go the Extra Mile

In the below post you can see an overly crowded classroom. In an elementary school classroom, we tend to see some classes like this. Sometimes when parents feel like their kids need to be more focused or they are not involved enough; they join the PTA or become a room-mom. Joining the PTA can be a great deal of work, but I feel as though it will bring you closer to what’s going on in the school. If you feel you should be very close, then become a room-mom. The definition of a room-mom is a parent (usually female) that works with the teacher in organizing small events that go on in the classroom. With you being in the classroom and have a closer relationship to the teacher, it allows you students to know that the parent really does know what is going on. Both these jobs can be a tough responsibility. You must have some free time to put into these duties. But this is just one more way to get more involved in the classroom.

Crowded Classroms--homeschooling?

Next couple of blog entries we will be looking at narrowing some problems down so that you can get a good look.
Today this one is crowded classrooms. This picture displays a typical crowded classroom. We should not have crowded classrooms. It’s inefficient. You could fight this by opting to homeschool your child. Many parents do this because they disagree with the way their kid is being taught. Another solution could be a charter school. This has more influence from the parents and teachers. It is still a public school. So consider these solutions for your problems with public schools.
** Ciation for photo

Texting; Such a crime?

A close friend of mine told me I should talk about texting in clas. All students know its wrong, but we do it anyways. So why should I teacher spend so much time caring if it isn't distracting others. I understand if the phone ringer volume is up and makes noise and what not. But if it is on silent, why should the teacher care? Many teachers in middle school, high school, and in college spend so much time being bothered by phones, and lose time from teaching and then they become distracted from telling the student to put their phone up. This is a huge problem in the American school system, as well as other countries as well. (MUST READ MORE!!!!!)

Are you aware of learning?

The other side you need to look at it, is at the student’s point-of-view. These days the main idea of how students learn is meta-cognition; the idea of being aware of how you learn. Many time in college, I, as a student, will acquire new information. I think about what kind of information I am working with and then decide how best I will learn it. That right there is metacognition. The sad thing is that some students don’t realize how they learn best. But teachers are usually the ones who can spot what a student is going to need to do in order to learn. Why waste our education system with making every student learn the same way. It wouldn’t be very helpful to those who learn in very different ways or those who don’t even know how they learn best. But the teacher would be too busy having a strict class and so many standards she has to teach that she doesn’t have time to help the student during or outside of the classroom. We need to include what kind of learners we have when we are thinking about what teaching philosophy or style we are going with.
**Citation:
"Cognition; New Cognition Findings from Technical University Published." LexisNexis. NewsRx, 11 Jan. 2008. Web. 24 Mar. 2010. . The main focus of this article about the new cognitive style. The new cognitive style is called cognitive style—it is the idea that we think about thinking. When we see new information and we must study it, we think about the best way we can study it so that we can learn and know it.

Many Teaching Styles

There are many different teaching styles to use in a classroom. Teaching styles are usually based off of teaching philosophies. Some teaching philosophies include essentialism, perenialism, progressivism, existentialism, and behaviorism. Essentialism is much like our former President, George W. Bush, was pushing for this teaching philosophy. This classroom would be very disciplined and very basic in terms of the subjects taught. Perenialism is all about students being taught principles and being told to make up their own reasoning through experiments. In progressivism, the idea of the three ways of learning is included; audio, visual, and kinesthetic learners. This idea is based around that each person learns information differently. Existentialism is the most interesting of them all. This classroom is very laid back and students pick more of what they are interested in learning and learn through that way. This type of philosophy deals with student as an individual and wants them to be creative. The last one is behaviorism, the idea that you can condition students to do different things. The idea is called programming them. All of these are very interesting philiosophies. (citation)American education has been leaning towards essentialism when I feel like students need to have a broad and more well-rounded education. They should do creative things, and experiments, and every student should learn in a way that is best for them. Americans definitely need to consider what kind of philosophy they should put in their education system, one that will help students flourish.

We are a melting pot?

So this is what our solution is looking like so far:
- Fix the no child left behind act
- Get more funding for our education system
- Create programs for children that take place out of the classroom
- And we need to found a solid ground in which we go by our teaching
We need something that says THIS IS AN AMERICAN EDUCATION SYSTEM. We have always done things differently here. I mean we are called “the melting pot” so shouldn’t we have an education system that applies to many learners?

What matters Most...

“According to national assessments only 7% of 17-year-olds in the U.S. can solve math problems with more than one step”( What Matters Most 5). (This is an article you can find on the internet by typing in “What matters most: Teaching for America's future. Eventually you will come across a giant report about 150 pages long. In this you will find the authors talking about these statistics.) I find this baffling. I feel 17-year-olds should be able to solve something like this. I feel a main requirement in high school these days is to take up to algebra 2. How could a student achieve so low. I believe it’s because these students slip between the cracks. They either drop-out or they do go to school but because teachers would prefer to pass students and standards are low enough for them to pass the student, students end up graduating. It’s a shame that we cannot point out how poorly a student is and find a way to get them help with what they are struggling with. We should have programs to target certain problems. There could be after-school clubs for these students. Many students do not want to go to these kinds of clubs because they don't want to look stupid, but we as parents and teachers need to encourage free help. In order for our education system to do better, parents and teachers should work together to find solutions to finding ways to give proper help to students.

Budget Cuts :(

Check out this video on budget cuts for Georgia Southern University. Dr. Keel, the president of GA Southern University, talks about restrictions that will be put in place to meet budget cuts.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wttThUNntvE

Budgeting

As this is late, but I must mention it because I said I would, was that the poorest state happens to be the bottom three in the best education system in the U.S. I think having money contributes greatly to a state or country’s education system. You need money to pay teachers, make more classrooms, have arts and sports programs, etc. Learning is sometimes not enough to make students enthusiastic about going to school. They need an outlet to focus their attention on. If you cannot pay teachers a decent amount then why would they continue to stay with that career and go to college to teach if they think they wouldn’t make any money. The government does not provide enough funding for their education programs (Citation). Because of this, class sizes get smaller because they can’t afford the teachers they need. We see this on all levels of education, including college (citation). Colleges are what helps those who want to go to the next level and who want to go above and beyond. We should not take away their funding. We all know we are in an economic crisis, but taking funding from education isn’t going to help it get better. If we want to see our education system get better, we need to write to our congressmen to tell them they need to stop taking away funding for programs that we find vital to us, our children, or our friends. We need to tell them to supply more funding to education. We want great people to be attracted to this field so we can have great teachers in our classrooms. I have seen to many teachers who are not properly educated in their field or do not belong teaching. So many things can come from more funding. Why not help students? They didn’t cause this economic crisis.

Sorry

Today as been a very tiring day. I meant to create a blog entry for today but am too tired and feel as though a blog entry on a day where I am not tired would be better.

No child Left Behind...?

So as you can tell I have been really busy because I haven't logged on to post something. I was carefully watching my blog though for comments as well as letting my first post marinate on the internet.
We talked in the last post a little bit about solutions. I feel like we do have a problem. In the United States there are just too many citizens that do not get a great education. Well before I begin talking about solutions I wanted to talk some about the No Child Left Behind Act. If you have some personal insight or feelings about this, please share!
At first I thought the No Child Left Behind act was the idea that no student will stay behind a great anynmore and that everyone will move on. But as I was doing my research for my paper about teaching, I found that my assumnption was wrong. What this act meant, was that schools would have more standards and would have to meet them. This was backed by more standardized testing to assess students on standards. (citation)In all this was a great idea, because those schools that do not produce good students would have to raise their standards. This was good till you found teachers cutting corners and blantantly teaching material that was going to be one the standardized testing. This does not help teaching really at all. If the schools then didn't meet these standards they would recieve extra help or people could get excused form attending that high school. If this high school continues to do bad they would get taken over by the government. They were hoping this would increase standards for schools, but many schools still cannot meet standards.
So the first order of business to refine No Child Left Behind Act. Agree?