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What Happened? 

When I arrived at my field placement last Friday, the class was just finishing a math lesson on solving two-step stroy problems involving subtraction and addition. As is their routine, after the class was finished with the lesson, they played a math game independently. Today's game was called "Spin-and-Add"-Each student was given a spinner with a series of three-digit numbers, and they were supposed to spin the needle and add the first two numbers that it landed on. My cooperating teacher, Mrs. Dolly, asked me to work with two stundents, Wendy and Joel, both of whom do not have the "number sense" that their peers do. Their spinners were only numbered 1 through 9. For Wendy and Joel the goal of "Spin-and-Add" was to practice "counting on" using their fingers. 

Although I was working with both students, I found myself having to focus primarily on Wendy. Although Joel occasionally had trouble understanding that each finger he put up corresponded to one number, it seemed that he began to realize the process the more that he practiced. In contrast, Wendy did not seem to be understanding at all. She could add numbers that totaled less than 10, but struggled with anything that required more than two hands to visualize. For instance, on one of her spins, Wendy got a 4 and a 7. Our conversation was as follows,

Me: "So what two numbers are we adding?"

Wendy: "4 and 7."

Me: "What is 4+7?"

Sikun “Lamei” Zhang

                In school, it’s easy to tell the dividing lines for those who are “gifted” and those who are not with special classes for both the extremes (advanced classes for the “gifted” and additional classes for those who are below par). Just as Annette Lareau expresses in her book “Unequal Childhoods”, schooling is based on different kinds of capital. There is capital which is based on how much the family makes, and this capital is then invested into the children to give them cultural capital, which in turn, should come back as capital for the children. This ideology is overtly taught throughout most schools as what should be done for a child to be successful. Even I cannot escape from such logic because of how this educative world is run and taught. We are taught that those who are not only intelligent, but also talented in many other ways are the ones that have the “right stuff” to get them into law or medical school, or even the president’s chair. Just like the Tallinger’s Lareau interviewed, we have some discontent for this ideology, but we are in a continuous circle; we wish the system to be changed, but we are too afraid of failure to escape this flawed bureaucracy.

I found Lareau's categorization of child-rearing into two distinct methods, concerted cultivation and the accomplishment of natural growth, and her ascription of each method to a specific socioeconomic class to be very problematic.

The next day in class after reading McDermott and Varenne’s ‘Culture as Disability,’ the class was asked to line up across the classroom to show how strongly they agreed with a statement. One corner was declared the corner for those that strongly agree and the other was for those that strongly disagree. The statement was to the affect of ‘disability only exists because of culture.’ The class moved over to strongly agree. Those closer to the middle wavered tentatively. For me, it isn’t obvious.

Christine Newville

            I struggle with Freire because I agree with him the most, but also find the most problems with his ideas.  I would like to talk most about chapter two on the section titles “Respect for what Students Know”. I think this is an amazing concept to bring into the classroom; that the teacher should use the backgrounds of the students to enhance their own teachings. Even using the word ‘respect’ shows a great degree of humility required from the teacher, that the teacher should not come into a classroom with a superior and apathetic manor, but should evaluate each student as a person with a story.

            When I first read Freire, I could see this being a very effective way of teaching the humanities, using current world events to understand past social tensions, or taking personal backgrounds to understand a text, this to me is beauty in a classroom and would lead to good discussion and thought. However I struggled to understand how Freire would be applied to a science classroom, most of all a math. I felt that, because there was so little discussion in math classes to begin with, that math was, in fact, a set of rules and systems not to be reinvented or evaluated, that Freire would have a hard time involving personal backgrounds into the curriculum.

John Dewey: Experience and Education

            Upon reading this book I couldn’t help but compare my own education to the subdivisions that Dewey was speaking about. Was I a product of more traditional education or of progressive education? If I had to choose one I would say traditional. My school days before college were filled with routine, strict guidelines, top-down rulings, and other harsh descriptive words thought up during class. These negative words though seem to do injustice to my education though because while it might have not have been progressive it hardly seem old.

Leah Kahler

Professor Alice Lesnick

Critical Issues in Education

February 20, 2013

To my group members: I chose to analyze Freire because I had a hard time reading and am unsure if I’m misinterpreting his points, so if you got something different from the reading, please let me know. I chose three separate passages to which to respond.

“By ‘progressive’, I mean a point of view that favors the autonomy of the students” (21).

Looking back over the binaries that we established on the first day of class between traditional and progressive educations, the line seemed very blurry then. Freire puts it in obvious terms- a progressive education is one that grants the student to decide. But the question that follows his simplification is what choices exactly are the students making? Are they allowed to decide what to study? How to study it? And most importantly, is the array of choices discrete, or is the student allowed as many educative possibilities as his imagination can muster?

Leah Kahler

Professor Alice Lesnick

Critical Issues in Education

February 20, 2013

To my group members: I chose to analyze Freire because I had a hard time reading and am unsure if I’m misinterpreting his points, so if you got something different from the reading, please let me know. I chose three separate passages to which to respond.

“By ‘progressive’, I mean a point of view that favors the autonomy of the students” (21).

Looking back over the binaries that we established on the first day of class between traditional and progressive educations, the line seemed very blurry then. Freire puts it in obvious terms- a progressive education is one that grants the student to decide. But the question that follows his simplification is what choices exactly are the students making? Are they allowed to decide what to study? How to study it? And most importantly, is the array of choices discrete, or is the student allowed as many educative possibilities as his imagination can muster?

Marta Guerrero

Professor Lesnick

Critical Issues In Education

February 18, 13

Learning as a Form of Teaching

“To teach cannot be reduced to a superficial or externalized contact with the object or it’s content but extends to the population of the conditions in which critical learning is possible.” (33)

As I read “Pedagogy of Freedom” I am struggling because I do not necessarily agree but I also do not disagree with the stance that Paulo Freire has taken on what it means to be an effective teacher. The reason I disagree is because I do not see exactly how this can be entirely realistic. I understand how this form of teaching can function in some schools, but not necessarily in others. That goes back to the idea that there is not one template of educational form that we can use for all schools. But perhaps this is where the creative portion fits.

What Happened? The 6th grade class that I am placed in started a unit preparing them for the state standardized test today. Between periods, the main classroom teacher and the special ed teacher discussed at length the scores, progress, and IEPs in relation to the upcoming test. During this conversation they discussed methods of preparation to use depending on each individual students' needs. While the class will be taking the 6th grade level tests, the teachers decided to give some students in the class the preparation booklet for the 5th grade level test. These were students who the teachers indicated were struggling in class and were not on grade level based on pre-tests that they had administered recently. The next period, the teachers had me work through a a test-prep packet with a group of two students who were going to be given the 5th grade level packet (although the in-class assignment was at the 6th grade level). At the end of the assignment, the main classroom teacher handed out the packets and when John, one of the two students I was working with, recieved the packet clearly marked "5th Grade" he turned to the teacher and said "no offense, but ive already done this one before" to which the teacher responded "I guess then no offense, but you're going to get to read it again."