1. Preschool: Learning about Colors
2. Elementary School: Birds, Earthworms and Bees
3. Elementary School: Rollerblading
4. Elementary School: Pokemon Cards

Learning about Colors

This chapter discusses an altercation that I had with a student in preschool. I was being picked on and I lashed out by kicking a redheaded boy in the shin. During this altercation, I first became aware of my status as a minority in the school.

I seemed to have been oblivious to that fact for some time. In my mind, I saw the redheaded boy as an easy target; he may have been laughing at me because of my pale, yellow skin, but I fought back easily because he was no less unique than me, with his red hair and his freckles. To others, I was an easy target because I was so physically different from them. My skin color, my eyes and nose, all showed that I was not like the majority of my classmates. After the fight, I remember an older student from the elementary school entering my classroom after recess and reporting the incident to my teacher. I was being picked on, yet I was sent to time-out. The title of this chapter is a reference to race and the colors of our skin and hair. Being one of the few Asian students in the class, I was quickly aware of such characteristics and now wonder why these were never a topic of discussion in class.

Maddy Beckmann
January 29, 2013
Table of Contents of my Education

Seven Schools in Thirteen Years

I. School #1: My Montessori Education, All I remember is making bread...
II. School #2: My Co-ed Catholic Education, I am not catholic...
III. School #3: My Public Education: Too many kids in my class...
IV. School #4: My Experiencial Education: Taking Ownership of My Learning...

Standing up at the podium with a hundred people in front of my I opened my mouth to speak. I am the last of my class to speak to the audience. At this point 27 students have gone before me and I know I must try to keep the audience’s attention for just one more speech. I opened my mouth to speak my first speech in front of an audience. It was easy. I spoke about my love for people and for helping them. I spoke about making the world a better place and what I love to do. I finished the speech and was greeted by the first standing ovation of my class.

Chapter One: Megan learns that schools can be shut down when they are too small and she is forced to move schools. 
Chapter Two: Megan attends English public school and spends most of her time pretending to twist her ankle at playtime to escape the cold outside
Chapter Three: Megan moves to the U.S. and learns the ‘Pledge of Allegiance.
Chapter Four: Megan goes to her first summer camp.
Chapter Five: Megan enrols at a Steiner school.
Chapter Six: Megan goes to ‘Hawk Circle’ with her class to learn how to survive in the wild.
Chapter Seven: Megan joins the ‘Midnight Run’ and is awakened to how the homeless live.
Chapter Eight: Megan does a ‘study abroad’ in Paris during her sophomore year of high-school.
Chapter Nine: Megan visits ‘Camphill’ which is a Steiner community and school for severely mentally handicapped children and adults. 
Chapter Ten: Megan writes a letter to a teacher after finding a class the teacher taught to be inappropriate and incorrect and the teacher redoes the class the next day. 
Chapter Eleven: Megan does shoemaking for her senior project and learns a trade.
Chapter Twelve: Megan learns in her Emily Balch Seminar Freshmen year from another student that the idea of being ‘color-blind’ is not a good thing like her all-white environment had previously taught her.

Chapter Thirteen: Megan learns that not everyone thinks that a Liberal Arts education is a good thing, or even the idea of going to college. She struggles with the privilege of these opportunities.

*

Field Notes – Week 7

More than a week away and the students are really excited about Winter Break – making them somewhat distracted at doing work.            - I wonder if there is a way to involve holiday festivities in student assignments/work? Maybe if the break was acknowledge in class rather than ignored it might make the students more excited about some of their work?

Students are working more on grammar – reading from packets together as a class  - These workbook packets always kind of bother me. I realize that they are necessary but I wonder if maybe they could just be graded to see how the students are doing rather than have them as the driving activity because students ere clearly bored going through this and didn’t seem to really be learning so much as just reciting things. 

Only the same student keeps raising his hand to answer. Mrs. Smith keeps calling on him asking, “how come no one else is awake today?” - I think this also speaks to the set up of the packet and the student’s interest. I talked with the student who was really excited to answer later in the class and he said that he wanted to impress Mrs. Smith. He didn’t talk about his love or enjoyment of the class material.

For my first reading response (on the first half of the Freire, Pedagogy of the oppressed text) I took a broader look at the text, instead of picking a specific passage.  Therefore, I will be responding to the first half of the text as a whole. 

            Having read Freire excerpts in previous classes I was prepared for ‘Pedagogy of the oppressed’ to be a dense text.  In reading the first half I was confused by his argument in relation to his text.  It appeared almost hypocritical.  Freire spends the first few chapters discussing the relationship between the oppressed, and the oppressors, the relationship between teachers and students, and finally the purpose and characteristics of dialogue. 

Sarah Moustafa

Critical Issues in Education

1/29/13

Paper 1

1. Who Will Read To Me Now? The Changes That Come With A New Sibling
2. How Much Will It Cost? Having A Support System at Home
3. How Much Interest Will I Get? How Neopets.com Taught Me About Money
4. So I’m A Smart Kid? What It Was Like On The Enrichment Track
5. So I Can Only Get It If It’s On Sale? Learning Math While Shopping
6. What’s White Privilege? The Things The Internet Taught Me
7. You Mean I Can Take Whatever I Want? How A Liberal Arts Education Is Affecting My Schooling

***

“Now listen to me and listen carefully.”

It was a warm day in the small town of Cape May, New Jersey. I was leaning over the back of a booth at my father’s restaurant when my father’s best friend and coworker addressed me. Countless similar interactions had prepared me for what was to come next.

“Ok, there are seven people going to dinner. Each person wants two slices of pizza and one soda. Remember that: 2 slices, 1 soda. Now, you can only buy the pizza by the pie, you can only order groups of eight slices. How many slices does each person want?” The man, like an uncle to me, paused in his elaborate setup to make sure I was paying attention.

“Two!” I responded, eager to show that I was focused on the problem at hand.

“Yes. Two. Good. Now, each pie costs 18 dollars and 50 cents. Each soda – everyone got a medium – so each soda cost 2 dollars.”

During a Curriculum and Pedagogy Seminar last semester we were required to teach a lesson in our field placement. I was placed in a first grade classroom at Bayside School with fifty first graders and two teachers. These are my field notes from that experience. 

Lesson Objectives: To teach students how to write a list, why lists are used, and to provide them with prompts to write lists of their own 

Number of students: Four

Four students gather at a table towards the back of the room while the rest of the class is split up into other stations that they will be working at for the next twenty minutes. Behind our table is the computer cluster where stuents are working quietly on reading and math activities. Next to us is a group of three students reading a large poetry picture book outloud to each other. There are not enough teachers for each station to have a supervisor so the computer cluster and the poetry cluster are working independently. On the other side of the room, two separate groups of students (about 6 kids each) work with each of the head teachers on writing and vocabulary. There is another group of four students in the library nook doing independent reading.