Blogs

I have decided to try writing my journal entries by hand, for now, because I like the idea of including some illustrations to supplement my text.  Below is a picture of my first entry.  I find it interesting to use an online blog format to present what is a very simplistic page in person, and I think the intersections of these mediums will be generative.  

A quote from the journal:

"Will you play with me?  No, I'm reading.  Why are you reading?  Shh, one more chapter.  Okay...has it been a chapter?  Shh, you should get your books.  No, I cant.  Did you try?  Yes, I tried.  Try again.  Now."

This quote is a scene as I remember it playing out in my childhood with my older sister.  She insisted that I could learn to read on my own--and that she would only want to associate with me if I did.  She thought that I was much too old at 4 to rely on others for reading stories or street signs or labels in the grocery store.  As it turned out, I really did only need the final push.  I sat for at least an hour with my Bob Books, which only presented limited letters at a time, learning to read.  I could read the first set of books by the time my sister thought to ask me how I had fared.

The reflections on pedagogy of both Dewey and Freire, read in tandem, show some interesting parallels, but also show some surprising differences in terms of conversations surrounding class, race, entitlement, and power. While both Dewey's "Pedagogic Creed" as well as Freire's Pedagogy of the Oppressed mention that education accounts for the individual as well as the "collective" (for example, Dewey: psychological and sociological aspects of ed), Dewey does not seem to account for the inherent entitlement to power and agency of mainstream (American?) students. While I think Dewey and Freire's pedagogies run parallel in many ways, Freire takes ideas of Dewey--the importance of self awareness; education as an engagement with the world around us; the importance of action/experience--and runs further with them to address what Dewey only hints at when he writes at the end, that the teacher "is engaged, not simply in the training of individuals, but in the formation of the proper social life" (12). Freire helps us learn how to teach from within a problematic societal structure, which Dewey doesn't do as explicitly. 

As I read your thoughtful writings about your goals and backgrounds, I thought of this recent article a friend shared with me: http://mathyawp.blogspot.com/2013/01/the-lesson-of-grace-in-teaching.html. It's about breaking with the tyranny of perfectionism!

Chapter 1 – The Big Move

Chapter 2 – Teacher Bound Upward Bound

Chapter 3 – You won’t make it to Harvard

Chapter 4 – Let’s take Harvard and Yale off Your List (They might be too far of a reach)

Chapter 5 – Education not Deportation/ Save Our Schools

Chapter 6 – Posse

Chapter 7 – So This is What Being the “Minority” in College Feels Like

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Chapter 4 – Let’s take Harvard and Columbia off Your List (They might be too far of a reach)

Table of Contents

1. Pre-K – Kindergarten: Shifting from Montessori School to Public School and Learning how to Read
2. 2nd-3rd Grade: Learning how to Behave in a School Setting and Classroom Etiquette
3. 5th-6th Grade: Shifting from Public School to Private School
4. 7th Grade: Learning What it Means to Cheat
5. 6th-8th Grade: The Hierarchy of the Privileged in Private School
6. 8th-9th Grade: Shifting from Private School to Public School
7. 10th-12th Grade: Beginning a Creative Education of Art
8. 12th-College: Shifting from High School to College

Educational Experience Paper

Shifting from Montessori School to Public School and Learning how to Read

            “I don’t want to go to school!” I yelled at my mom, the morning of my first day of Preschool.

            “School’s going to be fun,” she told me “You’ll make friends and play and you’ll be back home before you know it.”

Table of Contents

1. The First Grade

2. My First Kiss

3. America’s Next Top Model

4. A Peoples History Of The United States

1. The First Grade

This Christmas in my mother’s stocking was a clear square box full of cards. On the label the words said “table topics”. On each card was a question intended to spark either debate or conversation at any family gathering. My mother likes to be the one to ask the questions so one day on the car, with her cards in hand, she turned to me and asked “what was your worst fear as a child?” I didn’t know, I didn’t remember. I then returned my question to her, “I don’t know, do you remember?” “Yes I do” she nodded. Through a smile she said “It was Harriet Tubman. You used to make me check under your bed every night.” I laughed hard, that is hilarious! A little black girl terrified of Harriet Tubman! Hahaha! But after the laughter I started to remember, and I started to think, I was afraid of Harriet Tubman. I think maybe I was too young to be taught slavery when I learned it. I was in the first grade.

1) Preschool Adventures

2) Catholic School

3) Transition to Public School & the Stolen Gameboy

4) 4th and 5th Grade

5) AWKWARD YEARS

6) High School Fun

7) The 'Ford (in progress)

Chapter 2

I spent kindergarten, first grade, and second grade at Saint Catherine's, a Catholic school five minutes away from my house. In terms of the experiences that Dewey speaks of (whether helpful or miseducative), my time in Catholic school was full of them. In particular, St. Catherine's affected how I viewed myself academically relative to my peers and relative to how I was viewed as a student by people around me, which shaped how I viewed my studies and approached learning in general up until high school.

“Money is the measure of all things, and profit the primary goal. For the oppressors, what is worthwhile is to have more – always more – even at the cost of the oppressed having less or having nothing. For them,  to be is to have and to be the class of the “haves”.

When reading through Freire, I couldn’t help but agree with so many of the ideas he was presenting. I found myself underlining like mad and sharing some awesome quotes with my roommate as soon as I would come across them. He’s got a lot of amazing ideas with many possibilities within them but these possibilities are something I want to attempt to unpack some more, whether it be as a class or on an individual basis. When it comes to these types of readings (so much going on at the same time with so much possibility), I feel like I lose myself in the ideas rather than finding anything concrete.  With Freire,  unpacking brings up more interpretations and possibilities. For this reason, I find Freire so helpful and insightful in so many areas which also leads to my sense of confusion.  

Table of Contents

1)    The Black Apple

2)    Reading Quietly vs. Reading in Your Head

3)    Stay in Your Section: Missing Out on the Wonder of Children’s Literature

4)    Moving to Washington Jackson Elementary

5)    After School Mania: Homework, Snacks, and Oregon Trail

6)    Up into Space: The Space Shuttle Mission of Class 6-1

7)    A Love Story Between a Girl and Her Soccer Ball

8)   The Middle School Chronicles

9)    A Good Paper Doesn’t Equal Plagiarism

0)  And Then There Came High School

11)  AP’s, SAT’s, ASP, and other Acronyms for Success

12)  Accepting Change

13)  Tales From a Target Employee

14)  Truths from a High School Senior: College Apps, Football Games, Gidget Friday’s, and Watching Over my Freshman Sister.

15)  Everything You Learned was Wrong: College

16)  I Have to Become a Real Person!! Preparing for Life.

A Good Paper Doesn’t Equal Plagiarism