WebQuest

I thought the websites that I went to will be a Useful tool in my future classroom. The websites also made me think of how I could incorporate them into the classroom. I chose to explore the holocaust page in depth. There is so much info on this page including multiple perspectives. There is also an online exhibit you can visit or take your students to. I really liked this website and I will use it some day.

Four Freedoms Week & Anstey/ Bull Chap 4 & 5

I really enjoyed watching July 64′ this documentary really showed you the two different perspectives during 1964. Both perspectives were very interesting to see. I cant imagine what it would be like to have a curfew and also what it would be like to not be allowed to even sit on your own porch when it was 100 degrees. Some parts of the documentary made me a little uneasy for example, when the police officers were spraying people with the fire hose. The section of the documentary I enjoyed the most was the beginning when they showed what Rochester was like in 1964. I just moved here this semester and I learned a lot just from the first part of the movie. The history of Rochester is more than what it seemed.

I also attended the Panel discussion on school mascots. This panel discussion was almost uncomfortable to sit and listen to. The people sitting at the panel had some very interesting views on school mascots and how they represented their culture. I never really thought about how school mascots could be offensive but now I completely understand how they can be really hurtful to someone’s past present and future.

Chapter 4 & 5

The picture book is more than what it seems. In chapter four they outlined a literacy agenda for the 21st century and what it should encompass. Some of the points were, changes in society and technology will continue to challenge and affect texts and their representational forms, there may be more than one way of reading or viewing a text depending on a range of contextual factors.

“An individual needs to be both a reader and a viewer-that is, to be a reader of pictures as well as a reader of words.” – I related well to this quote from chapter 4… Currently in my field experience I observe students analyzing political cartoons. They do this almost every time I observe. They become better and better every time I see them do DBQs.

There are many types of New texts like, visual texts and multimodal texts. Visual texts are the culture of the visual has focused attention on the connection between text and visual text. The multimodal texts are those that rely on the processing and interpretation of print information, which blends with visual, audio, spoken, nonverbal, and other forms of expression produced through a range of different technologies.

CHICAGO, Nov. 6 — A school superintendent’s decision to suspend, and perhaps expel, about two dozen students who took part in a protest against the Iraq war at a suburban high school drew criticism Tuesday from the students and their parents, who demanded that their children be allowed to return to classes.In a statement issued after the protest on Thursday at
Morton
West
High School in Berwyn, a working-class suburb just west of
Chicago, the district superintendent, Ben Nowakowski, said the school’s reaction had to do only with the interruption of the school day, not with the students expressing themselves.The administration “did not say that the students could not protest,” Dr. Nowakowski’s statement said. “Rather, we asked that the students simply move their protest to an area of the school that would not disrupt the ability of the other 3,400-plus students at Morton West to proceed with their normal school day.”

Dr. Nowakowski did not return repeated calls seeking comment Tuesday.

- I can’t believe this actually happened, how could you suspend students for having a protest against the war?? Lets just erase more voices and opinions about the war in Iraq. If anything I would encourage more people to speak out against the war especially young adolescents. We are the future generation and we are the ones who have to undo everything that has been done!

Frankenstein & New York Times

Today we went to the Frankenstein event in Cleary Theater. There was a panel discussion about the Mary Shelly’s Frankenstein. Six students from Fisher conducted the panel talk. The first speaker talked about the bond between the creature and victor, she believed victor becomes more like the creature after
Elizabeth died. The second speaker spoke about Frankenstein and humanism. The third speaker spoke about Frankenstein’s personality development, nature or nurture or a mixture of both. The fourth speaker displayed his knowledge of the representation of fear. The fifth speaker was interested in technology; his main points were that people control technology and cause the fear of it. The sixth person talked about the benefits of pushing boundaries in science and she connected her topic to growing advancements in science today. I liked all the presentations they were interesting. I thought the best one was the last one about pushing the bar for science she made some really good points.

By DIANA JEAN SCHEMO and JENNIFER MEDINA

Published: October 27, 2007

At their son Jack’s second birthday party, David and Kim LaPierre noticed he was shutting out the other children, their first inkling that he was autistic. They enrolled him in a private preschool for children without disabilities and with more than 30 hours a week of therapy at home, he began to connect with others.

The school district in Springfield, N.J., became responsible for his education when he turned 3, and proposed moving him to a public classroom for disabled children. Fearing that Jack would backslide, the family kept him in private school, suing the schools to recover their expenses.

“It makes no sense to us as parents that we would have to put our son in a place that we knew wasn’t right for him, just so we could qualify for the school’s services or funding to help us.” said Mr. LaPierre, who estimates spending more than $60,000 a year on tuition and therapy.

Cases like these have increasingly become a flash point in special education, pitting parents against school systems that say they cannot afford to pay to privately educate disabled children whose parents unilaterally reject their proposed placements.

The federal Individuals with Disabilities Education Act guarantees a “free appropriate public education” for children with disabilities. Most of the nation’s nearly six million special-education students attend public school, but the law allows parents to seek public financing for private schools if they can show that the public schools cannot adequately serve their children.

As of 2005, more than 88,000 disabled students were educated in private settings at taxpayer expense, an increase of 34 percent over a decade, according to the National School Boards Association. Often school districts acknowledge that they cannot provide an adequate education, and willingly pay for private tuition.

-Is there really such a thing as a free appropriate education? apparently not… If your child had a disability and the public school could not support his/her needs wouldn’t you want your child to reach their full potential? Well I certainly would pay the money for my child to succeed and not to fall behind in the public school system. I feel that these parents were right for trying to get the district to pay for their son’s education. If they couldn’t education their son to his maximum potential there would be no reason for him to stay in the public school system.

Z & D… 8 N’ 9

Chapter 8…Independent Reading Workshop in Content Areas

There are eight Benefits of Independent Reading Workshops, Some of the benefits are workshops promotes student buy-in because it enables the teacher to introduce individual choice into the instructional mix. workshops enables the teacher to employ interactive student involvement as significant element of instruction. Through a workshop structure, the teacher can provide students with individualized support. workshop allows the teacher to directly teach learning strategies or course content through mini-lessons, followed by immediate application.

Chapter 9….Book Clubs

I related to this chapter b/c a couple of my classes this semester had book clubs. I personally do not like book clubs only b/c not everyone pulls their weight in the group. Some of the notes people can take during book circles are the connector, questioner, passage master, vocab Enricher, Illustrator, and the researcher.

Writing about Writing

The writing process for our self-assessment was helpful. I usually always start out with something handwritten b/c it helps me spill out all of my thoughts. The free write helped and so did the list that we did for “popcorn.” You could really go back and reflect on what you really learned during the first few weeks of school.

SANDY SPRING, Md., Oct. 18 — When the football players here at Sherwood High School were not getting the message about washing their uniforms and using only their own jerseys, the school nurse paid a surprise visit to the locker room. She brought along a baseball bat.

“Don’t make me use this,” the nurse, Jenny Jones, said, pointing out that seven players on the team had already contracted a deadly drug-resistant strain of bacteria this year. “Start washing your hands,” she said. “I mean it.”

School officials around the country have been scrambling this week to scrub locker rooms, reassure parents and impress upon students the importance of good hygiene. The heightened alarm comes in response to a federal report indicating that the bacteria, methicillin-resistant Staphylococcus aureus, or MRSA, are responsible for more deaths in the United States each year than AIDS.

MRSA (pronounced MEER-suh) is a strain of staph bacteria that does not respond to penicillin or related antibiotics, though it can be treated with other drugs. The infection can be spread by sharing items, like a towel or a piece of sports equipment that has been used by an infected person, or through skin-to-skin contact with an open wound.

On Wednesday and Thursday, scores of schools were closed and events were canceled in Connecticut, Maryland, North Carolina, Ohio and Virginia as cleaning crews disinfected buses, lockers and classrooms. More closings are planned on Friday.

-I wonder what is causing staph to spread in school, I even saw that this happened to a school here in Rochester this week.

Third annual Brown Lecture in Education Research

     I thought that the guide o rama helped when reading this very long research. The reading was extremely long and a bit confusing with all of the statistics that were thrown our way. There were some quotes that I pulled from the reading that I thought were important. “Those who are undereducated can no longer access the labor market.” This is very true, it seems like today you cant get a good job without a four year college degree. Another important quote was, “other countries have been pouring resources into education-especially in Asia ans Scandinavia-both their achievement and graduation rates been climbing for all of their students, including recent immigrants and historical minorities, and many have created higher education systems that are quickly becoming equally productive.” My questions is, why are we stuck in a place where it seems like we are not progressing, it seems like we are frozen in a non-thinking generation where we have to teach a test. Its nice to see all of this “research” but what is it really doing? What are we doing about this problem? Who can change it? NCLB was created I think with good intent but its stuck and we need to evolve NCLB. The U.S. is falling behind the eight ball and we need to fix it and fix it now. Who is going to do it? 

~  “Interestingly, international assessments have shown that higher scoring countries in math and science teach fewer concepts each year but teach more deeply than tends to be true for the U.S. so that students have a stronger foundation to support higher order learning in the upper grades. Ironically, states that test large numbers of topics in a grade level may encourage more superficial coverage, leading to less solid learning.”

~  “most high-achieving nations focus their curriculum on critical thinking and problem solving, using examinations that require students to conduct research and scientific investigations, solve complex real-world problems in mathematics, and defend their ideas orally and in writing.”

-We should take some of these ideas and reform NCLB and our ways of teaching curriculum.

Rigor + Support = Success

This reading was about teaching in poverty, there were come great things actually happening in some of these schools. My favorite example was the Elementary school in Oregon that had 10 parents speaking three different languages to help students develop better reading and language skills.

I Stand Here Ironing

I thought this was a really good story, it really puts things in a different perspective. It showed how a mother and daughter were affected by socioeconomic status. The father left before Emily was a year old, and her mother had to work her first 6 years when there was work and the Relatives had to watch Emily. Emily faced many issues along the way but she found comedy and stage to be her niche and she really loved it.

New York Times….

WASHINGTON, Oct. 9 — With his domestic agenda in tatters, President Bush tried Tuesday to prod Congress into reauthorizing his biggest domestic achievement, the 2001 No Child Left Behind education law. But lawmakers have yet to come to terms on the legislation, and prospects for a deal this year appear dim. 

“We don’t necessarily agree on every issue, but we do agree that education is a basic civil right,” Mr. Bush said, adding that the nation “has reached a defining moment in our struggle to secure a good education for every child.”

It was the second time in as many weeks that Mr. Bush has used his presidential platform to draw attention to the education bill, an intensifying effort that suggests he is concerned that his signature domestic achievement could come undone before his term is out.

“The bill would remain in effect even if it is not renewed, but the administration is seeking changes to it, and some opponents would like to see it thoroughly revamped. If Congress reauthorizes the bill with its basic components intact, it would be a welcome, and rare, legislative victory for Mr. Bush on Capitol Hill, one that could help cement his legacy in education policy, an issue he has cared about since he was governor of Texas.”

Finally some good news!

Pod Cast respose and “Teacher Man”

Dan Brown & Jonathon Kozol 

Wow, when I heard we had to listen to a 40 minute podcast I was not that excited, but wow I really enjoyed it. I can’t believe how many perspectives there are about NCLB. I agreed with everyone except Doug, I felt like he was trying to recover after every time John and Dan spoke. He was stiff just like the regents; I didn’t like any of view points. The way John and Dan spoke of students was very nice, students are people first and they should be treated that way. I liked how Dan mentioned “I learned so much from the kids and I hope they learned something from me, we did have some of those breakthroughs.” Dan brown also talked about how NCLB is skill and drill and the tests are a very narrow look on the students. One test shouldn’t determine whether a student is a successful one. Tests are useless; they come back 4 or 5 months later when the students are already gone. Schools have lost gym, recess, nap-times, and music classes because of these high-stakes exams.

“Teacher Man”

I need to start this book from the beginning. This book is so funny I couldn’t put it down when I started to read my section for the jigsaw project. My favorite quote was from Chapter 5, “You’re just another teacher, man, so what are you gonna do? Stare down the whole class? Fail the whole class? Get with it, baby.” There were so many quotes and points that he made, he was a little out there but he made a lot of sense. 

 Article of Interest

I am not going to talk about NY times this week; my interests were directed to something one of professors brought up in class. There is a school in Massachusetts called the School of Shock. When he started to talk about this I thought it was a joke but its not, here is a little bit about the school…..

“Rob Santana awoke terrified. He’d had that dream again, the one where silver wires ran under his shirt and into his pants, connecting to electrodes attached to his limbs and torso. Adults armed with surveillance cameras and remote-control activators watched his every move. One press of a button, and there was no telling where the shock would hit—his arm or leg or, worse, his stomach. All Rob knew was that the pain would be intense. Every time he woke from this dream, it took him a few moments to remember that he was in his own bed, that there weren’t electrodes locked to his skin, that he wasn’t about to be shocked. It was no mystery where this recurring nightmare came from—not A Clockwork Orange or 1984, but the years he spent confined in America’s most controversial “behavior modification” facility. In 1999, when Rob was 13, his parents sent him to the Judge Rotenberg Educational Center, located in Canton, Massachusetts, 20 miles outside Boston. The facility, which calls itself a “special needs school,” takes in all kinds of troubled kids—severely autistic, mentally retarded, schizophrenic, bipolar, emotionally disturbed—and attempts to change their behavior with a complex system of rewards and punishments, including painful electric shocks to the torso and limbs. Of the 234 current residents, about half are wired to receive shocks, including some as young as nine or ten. Nearly 60 percent come from New York, a quarter from Massachusetts, the rest from six other states and Washington, D.C. The Rotenberg Center, which has 900 employees and annual revenues exceeding $56 million, charges $220,000 a year for each student. States and school districts pick up the tab. The Rotenberg Center is the only facility in the country that disciplines students by shocking them, a form of punishment not inflicted on serial killers or child molesters or any of the 2.2 million inmates now incarcerated in U.S. jails and prisons. Over its 36-year history, six children have died in its care, prompting numerous lawsuits and government investigations. Last year, New York state investigators filed a blistering report that made the place sound like a high school version of Abu Ghraib. Yet the program continues to thrive—in large part because no one except desperate parents, and a few state legislators, seems to care about what happens to the hundreds of kids who pass through its gates. In Rob Santana’s case, he freely admits he was an out-of-control kid with “serious behavioral problems.” At birth he was abandoned at the hospital, traces of cocaine, heroin, and alcohol in his body. A middle-class couple adopted him out of foster care when he was 11 months old, but his troubles continued. He started fires; he got kicked out of preschool for opening the back door of a moving school bus; when he was six, he cut himself with a razor. His mother took him to specialists, who diagnosed him with a slew of psychiatric problems: attention-deficit/hyperactivity disorder, post-traumatic stress disorder, bipolar disorder, and obsessive-compulsive disorder.” By Jennifer Gonnerman, August 20, 2007

What do you think about this???????

~If you are intersted in more go to the wesite I went to…. 

School of Shock  

New York Times, “Bush Trips Over ‘Children,’ and That’s the Official Truth”

I thought this article was humorous, I clicked on it expecting to read something about NCLB but they were more excited that Bush tripped over his words once again….“Childrens do learn,” the president said, “when standards are high and results are measured.”

For a president who likes to joke that he can barely speak English — and whose every malapropism is dutifully recorded by the White House press — the mistake was hardly out of character. (As a candidate, he once asked, “Is our children learning?”) But when the official White House transcript of Wednesday’s remarks appeared, the “s” in childrens was nowhere to be found.

and also…The president pronounced himself pleased by a recent report that math test scores have improved, citing it as evidence that the law is working.

Zemelman & Daniels chap 4&7

Reading Chapter 4 & 7 connected very well to what we did in class last Tuesday. I really liked how in chapter 7 they actually gave us ideas of other materials we could use in our future classes and how we could do this cost effectively, that’s always important when you have a budget. Some examples that I thought were important in chapters 4 & 7 were… The national curriculum standards consistently say that we should go deeper into a smaller number of topics, which means we need to step outside of the text book. We need memorable content for our students, engaging material, some topics that connect to students, and some topics that make students want to debate. I really liked the “Choice vs. Assigned” section where it said, “But real readers, lifelong readers, assign themselves.” This is so true, I feel that we could have more students like this if we engaged students in what they were reading and we could have more life long readers coming out of our high schools. I also believe that we should use more primary sources rather than secondary sources. We need to keep the bias opinions out of our text. In chapter 7 I liked how they said, “it’s important to help students understand along with our passion, we adults also experience confusion and uncertainty, especially with new idea or new skills.” I think this is very important because students need to know teachers are there to help and that their role as students is to help the teacher too.

NY Times Article “Education and Schools Are a Focus for Edwards”

          This article connected well to what we have discussed in class. Democratic presidential candidate John Edwards has come up with a great plan for our education system. Mr. Edwards came up with a plan that will evaluate students more effectively. When I read this I was skeptical at first because in my opinion we need fewer standards for our schools to improve. After reading what his plan entailed I was more receptive to what he was saying. “First, every child should be prepared to succeed when they show up in the classroom,” Mr. Edwards said. “Second, every classroom should be led by an excellent teacher. And third, every teacher should work in an outstanding school. These three principles should guide our reform.”  I do agree with this statement that every child should be prepared to learn and every teacher should be prepared to teach but unfortunately we do not have a perfect world and this goal is very demanding and probably hard to complete. Addressing one of the most criticized aspects of the No Child Left Behind law; he said, he would overhaul the approach to standardized testing as a means of tracking the progress of students and schools. Rather than what his campaign called “cheap standardized tests,” Mr. Edwards’s plan would develop “higher-quality assessments that measure higher-order thinking skills, including open-ended essays, oral examinations, and projects and experiments.” I feel that these “higher-quality” assessments may be very subjective to teachers but may help students pass and actually learn more than just taking a test with choices a, b, c, and d. I am not completely sold on what Edwards is proposing; I would like to see more of his plan to make my decision.