Administrators' Panel

My favorite thing that was said at the Administrators' Panel on Monday was that standardized testing is just a piece of the pie. It is not the sole measure of teacher effectiveness or the future success of the student. I have thought recently that we are worrying too much about NCLB and I think it was refreshing to hear that people who are currently involved in education don't feel as negatively as we might think they do. I agreed with the woman when she said that there is more than one way to teach to a standard or a benchmark. "Teaching to the test" doesn't always have to be negative, because presumably, the information that is on the test is what we want our children to be learning anyways. I think if you have a negative attitude about it "teaching to the test" will become a negative thing, and it really doesn't need to be. Another thing that I found interesting from the lecture was the idea that was brought up about education as a priority. It was said that for many children, education is not a priority, it comes after sports and other activities. Really, education should be the number one priority for our students, and cocurricular activities should come second. The "Activities Director" from the lecture made his opinions about it clear: if you're not passing your classes, you don't need to play in the football game on Friday night." I think that many kids get caught up in their activities and find it hard to make time for their schoolwork. They become overly involved and can't keep up. I'm not saying that I don't support cocurricular activities, I certainly do, but I think that there needs to be a balance. Some of our students can't find that balance on our own and thats where the school might need to step in. I enjoyed this lecture very much, and I found it very enlightening to hear from people who are currently involved in the schools.

p.s. The cartoon has nothing to do with the lecture...I just thought it was funny!

High Stakes High School

For many reasons, I thought that the mock school board meeting that we had on Monday night was very interesting and informative. I've never been to any meetings of that sort before, and to be put in that same situation was a little unnerving, but I enjoyed it as well. I was surprised at the discussion that was happening, considering that all sides taken were completely hypothetical and not really based on our own ideas. Despite this, many people were very very passionate about their "opinions". My group was representing a group of parents of high-achieving students. We supported the plan to raise standards for our children and teachers and increase punishment for standards not met. We argued that the bar should be raised so our children have something to strive for as well. If the standards are lowered for under-achieving, then our children will have nothing to work for. However, the parents of the low-achieving children could've also argued with the point of the zone of proximal development. According to Vygotsky, children can't learn things that are too far beyond their reach, and I think that this would've been a good thing for the parents of under-achieving children to have brought up. Also, our group mentioned that we supported the idea of higher standards of teachers as well, with mandatory workshops and weekly lesson plans to be turned in. We, as parents of high-achieving students, thought that this would lead to teachers' increased accountability. We believed that if teachers weren't producing results, that they should be moved to a school where students are less dependent on their skills. However, as a future educator, I don't support this idea. Sure, I do believe that teachers have to be accountable, and that it won't hurt anyone to have workshops, or mandatory lesson plans. But I don't really think that teachers should be moved out if their students are not showing a certain pre-determined level of progress on standardized tests. I think that perhaps a better way to deal with this would be to offer the teacher more assistance, and to work with that teacher in areas that might need improving. This might mean that the teacher would have to be observed in the classroom, and her students' test scores would be analyzed for patterns. If the teacher is merely moved to a school that doesn't challenge them as much, how are they to learn? This is not contributing to the solution, but rather, the problem. Ultimately, I'm still not exactly sure how I felt about the proposal, I certainly don't feel like it was either 100% wrong or 100% right, but I think I would've liked to have taken bits and pieces of it and rearranged it into something that I believe would be most beneficial for all parties.

Class Discussion 10/1

I've been thinking about the discussion we had in class on Wednesday for a while now. A lot of things were brought up that provoked much thought from the entire class. We talked about the different things that influence our children today, and how it compares to the influences of twenty years ago. I have to say, I was somewhat surprised that the media has the largest influence on today's children. I guess I was still hopeful that it would be peers, or family, as it was in the eighties. But it's fairly obvious that the media culture has had much effect on today's generation of children. When we talked about the media and its teaching value vs. entertainment value, it was suggested that maybe its ok for our kids to listen to explicit songs, or watch violent tv as long as they are just doing it for entertainment, and they know that the things being depicted are not acceptable. But, how can we deny that some of these children are unable to draw the line between fiction, and reality? Was it the influence of one preteen boy's parents that made him bring a gun to school and kill his openly gay classmate during class? I don't think so. And when children are watching programs that involve sexual promiscuity and "sleeping around", and then subsequently running their own prostitution ring, can we still say that the media is for entertainment purposes only. Do we really believe that children have some sort of filter in their brains that only allows them to take in the socially acceptable information? We can tell children over and over about the dangers of violence, drugs, alcohol, sex, etc. but when our messages get mixed in with the messages that they constantly receive from the media, which ones are remembered?