The Finale!

Well, the year's over! We still managed to have a great discussion today, despite it being the last day! I especially enjoyed the conversation I had when discussing my philosophy during the finals meeting because it gave me another chance to explore the ideals that I've established throughout the semester.

One core value that I spoke about was the belief that if you hold students to a higher standard, then they are more likely to reach that level of success. What I didn't necessarily think of, however, was how to get students to reach a higher level of success without giving additional work or causing students to feel overwhelmed by the subject. I was able to discuss various ideas during the meeting and further analyze how this situation would apply to my everyday teaching. One question brought to my attention was how you can have a high level of expectation for students without giving them busy work. We were able to discuss methods of keeping students ineterested and eager to learn so that busy work won't be required and students will want to learn more about whatever subject and reach the goals that you set for them.

Current Events

This past week in class, we began discussing ideas that could be taught to students. During this activity, our group started to discuss the idea of using the current oil spill in classrooms as a teaching subject. Each teacher in different core subject classrooms could spend time discussing many different sides of the argument and relate it to all of the subjects for the students.

This conversation evolved into the observation that a current events topic could be incorporated into all classes every semester. In my personal experience, the thing that I lacked in my education as a child was exposure and knowledge of current events. Typically, I was a very good student and studied/learned everything that needed to be known in class, but I didn't waste my time learning about the things happening in the world at that time because I didn't believe it was necessary since it was not required of me as a student. Given the chance to create a curriculum for a general classroom for younger students, I would allot several days in each semester to which a current events topic could be discussed whenever it presented itself and would try to incorporate the event into multiple subjects.

Chocolate Milk

Following our discussion in class about foods offered to children in schools, I spoke to my mom about the topic. We discussed the Jamie Oliver presentation and I explained what was said and how much I agreed with it. To my surprise, however, she didn't immediately agree with me and, instead, posed the question, "Where do you really think obesity in children begins? At school or at home?"

I tried arguing for Jamie Oliver's perspective but soon realized that schools are not the only place where obesity is developing in children in today's society. True, many students get their breakfast and lunches from schools today, but they learn about what foods they eat and how big of a portion size is deemed as "acceptable" from their experiences at home. Although I appreciate Jamie Oliver's move to reform schools and their lunches, I also agree with my mom in that it all truly begins at home. I agree with his stance that because children simply are not knowledgable about some foods and, therefore, will not eat them, we need to teach kids about these foods and let them know that it's alright to try something they may not have seen or tasted before! In addition to this, strides need to be made to teach parents in addition to their children. An ideal situation is a dual program that teaches families as a whole at a school district about the types of foods they are giving their students so that the family can change their lifestyle at home and not just rely on schools to make those changes for them.

RPG: Role-Playing Government

While researching for a paper topic this past week, I came across an article that detailed a story of children learning about the government at an elementary school. The teacher in this class of young children was inspired by the election of Jimmy Carter, current President at the time, and decided to pose a mock election in her classroom. The teacher taught her students through a tedious process, explaining the process of nominating someone that would be a good candidate, teaching her students how to vote (without telling anyone who you voted for), and even explaining what a vote was.

With the election, the person with the most votes became president, the second most became vice president, and so on. This process seemed to work so well that the teacher continued it with a monthly election so that multiple students would have the chance at the presidency. Ultimately, these children were able to learn more about the who's, what's, and how's of the government. Parents of these children were stunned by how much their kids had learned about this complex ordeal. It also paid off for the classroom; as students took office, they took their title seriously and would step into the role as the leader of the classroom for the month. When the presidential position was given to a rambunctious child, the boy seemed to calm down and take his role seriously. This government role-play seemed to be very beneficial both to learn about something and also to maintain good role models for the classroom.

Cutting Back

This past week, I received some disturbing news from home; schools in the Des Moines area were facing serious budget cuts. The school's response was to cut back on the amount of time allotted to the art, music, and gym programs. By cutting the amount of time given to these courses, the administration reasons that they can then cut back on the number of teachers working.

My first concern was that the schools were cutting music programs since I will be licensed to teach music in just over a year. I was furious that the amount of time given to ensembles in a week was restricted because this meant that these musical ensembles wouldn't have an appropriate amount of time to rehearse. Music is something that is best rehearsed as an ensemble and cannot easily be given homework assignments outside of class time to complete. In addition to losing time, the decision was also made that the 5th and 6th grade band program would be cut entirely and students would not be able to begin until 7th grade. This sort of move could either eliminate the interest in band entirely, assuming that students find playing instruments "uncool" by the time they reach middle school, or turn into complete and total chaos when students from multiple elementary schools filter into middle school and decide they all want to sign up for the program. Teachers at this level would be given the responsibility of teaching an extremely large group of students that were more than originally bargained for while the high school music program would greatly decline in skill now that students are robbed of two years of learning. The end result, I fear, is an extinguished band program altogether.

Soon after realizing my fears for the music program, I found that the greater thing that I should be fearing is the elimination of time spent on physical education. Already, there is concern at the rate that obesity is rising in the children of America. Some schools believe that by simply taking out vending machines or changing the lunch menus will solve this, but I don't think that enough time has been spent looking at the physical education programs and how important they are to children. They are also key to elementary schools. Without gym programs for kids to get excess energy out of their systems, how do we expect them to focus and pay attention throughout the day? Everyone, no matter your age, needs at least some time to do something active to get the body moving and alert for the rest of the day to come! Cutting physical education programs is the absolute worst thing schools can do!

An Outsider's Opinion

This past week, I was absent from class and given the assignment to discuss our case studies with a student that was not in our Paideia class. I chose to speak with someone who is a biology major and got an interesting response from them on these case studies. For the most part, she and I agreed on how we would try to solve these issues, but she seemed to struggle slightly more to give a definitive answer.

As a whole, she seemed to take a much more scientific and data driven approach to solving this issues. As we moved from one question to the next, she seemed frustrated by how difficult they were to answer. Then, after hearing the question, she would often say that her answer would depend on so many factors that she didn't know how to respond, such as who the individual was in the story, what her role was at the school, and other pieces of background information. At one point, when discussing a case study that involved test scores, she essentially threw out the question because no numbers for these test scores were discussed and, therefore, the question was not valid! It was good to see a similar point of view, but also interesting to see how our way of thinking differed!

Case Study Discussion

In my discussion group's last meeting, we decided to go back to the case studies that we spoke about in class on Monday since we didn't have as much time as we would have liked. One of the questions that our group found the hardest to answer was which of the three students should be chosen to participate in an advanced program. Although we could agree somewhat on the first two students, the third to join the program ended up being the hardest to pick because everyone had a different opinion as to what was most important for a student to have. In the end, we all seemed to agree that the process would be somewhat easier to determine who would or wouldn't particpate in the program if we knew the students personally.

It was just as difficult to determine what to do if we were in a situation where we were supposed to paddle a student. All of us seemed to agree that we never would have gotten into a situation that would require us to harm our students, even if it was permitted by the school and their parents. We tried developing some alternative ideas that could be used as a means of punishing students and maintaining behavior in the classroom without physical harm towards the students, but we felt that the children would only see us as weak or without power in the classroom if we tried any other form of non-physical punishment.

Surprisingly, the easiest question for us all to answer was how to handle budget cuts. If we were forced to choose one of the options, none of us would have cut AP or extended learning programs like the group in class chose to cut. Instead, we all decided it would be better to increase the classrooms by 5 students. This would be the best method, we all believed, since there would be no loss of additional programs. Also, we all commented that our class sizes in elementary school were around 30 to start with, so it didn't seem like a room of 30 children would be unmanagable.