Unemployment Training article

The article was pretty brutal in the sense that it placed a lot of blame into different aspects of our life, but the majority of the blame was placed with teachers. As others have mentioned it is not necessarily the fault of a teacher to follow a student, especially one in an urban setting, and track their every progress. A typical teacher may only see the extreme student and focus their attention onto that student while another troubled youth goes unheard of.

After teaching in many urban settings some of the items the author mentioned does make sense but it must be taken with a grain of salt. The author mentions that just by showing up students may get by without learning; although this does occur it varies depending on a teacher. I know that when i was student teaching i made sure i had the attenion of my students and had active participation, that is, i would purposely pick on the students not paying attention, to answer questions. Some of my fellow student teachers would mention they just tried to get through the day and the subject at hand though. While I have had those days it is never the object of a teacher to just get by, we want our students to learn but too much emphasis and responsibility is always placed onto the teacher.


The author goes into several other factors and though they may be feasible they are not necessarily accurate. Each teacher will have their good and bad day, and as i mentioned earlier, we do want our students to succeed, but this does not mean giving them a passing grade. I know, again back to my student teaching semester, if a student did try and put effort into my class and still did fail a quarter then i was somewhat lenient. If they scored less that a 55 but tried i would still give them a 55 this way they were never too far behind and could still recover next semester. I also believe this way the school policy so i was merely following it but i do, whole heartedly, agree with a grading system such as this.

The author tends to make a lot of generalizations about urban schools and while some of them may apply it is not absolute truth. Each school system will vary as will each teacher so as i mentioned earlier this article should be taken with a grain of salt.

9/8/08

During these past week I was asked to begin work on my research internship. The internship deals with using data to try and improve the science scores on the CAPT tests for High School Students. I was asked to compile a list of all the students, in the previous year they would have been freshman, and organize them into alphabetical order. I also had to add what level class they were in during the time of the test as well as their teacher. I was asked to create a master list using excel which was unfamilar to me. I was then left to organize the data and create a master list but my comfort zone in excel was very little. I eventually started to figure out certain parts of excel and was eventually able to create the master list but it was an extreme challenge for me since i had not used excel in almost two years.

I have always been a person who believed that students learn by doing, not by listening. I was able to examine my supervisor this week in her classroom and saw they she implemented a non-traditional way of teaching, one i plan on using. She would ask her students a question and then have then talk amongst themselves and discover the answer. This was the way i thought science teaching and learning should be accomplished and i was extremely pleased to see such a method put into practice.

Coming from a science background it is extremely crucial for me to reconize my beliefs when walking into a science classroom. When i was a student teacher this belief was put into question when it came down to the lovely subject of evolution. Students, as some tend to do, will try to say they do not believe in evolution as a way to avoide learning the topic. I explained to them that i was not asking them to change their beliefs but to consider the information as they may need it in the future. I have a strong belief, especially in science, that it is a field that builds onto itself. If our students are to succeed in the future they must be equipped with all the knowledge they can have.