Blog 6

1.     A game… (Since this is a game, I won’t bother to consider how the following would be paid for).

a.     Raise teacher salaries. You keep asking more and more of us. You need to pay us more.

b.     Restore education spending to pre-2008 levels (and compel states to do likewise)

c.      Enforce/require teacher accountability. There are simply too many teachers in the workforce going through the motions, waiting for their pensions. The ‘bad’ or ineffective instructors must be removed

d.     Re-work NCLB. I feel that the intent was there, the result (standardized tests etc.,) are so flawed that they (the measurement of success/failure) must be reworked.

e.     Establish a national guideline (accountability, standards) for education and give the states the ability to reach those goals in a manner that meets the needs of that state.

2.     What I got out of Ravitch was the fact that this country has been so political about education over the last several decades. It seems that the best interests of the children are not being fulfilled, just the needs of the politician and/or the special interest group. This results in a “flavor of the month” mentality, which as we can all see hasn’t had a great deal of success.

3.     All any teacher and citizen can do is strive to become the best member of society that they can be. This means that you must be able to collaborate or work with those, whose opinions do not necessarily match your own, for the betterment of that society.

4.     Over the next 3 years I would like to…

a.     See an expansion of historical sites (think museums) that reflect the broad culture in the Bay Area. These site would include:

                                               i.     Port Chicago

                                              ii.     Pittsburg, CA (Camp Stoneman)

                                            iii.     Dublin, CA (Camps Parks)

                                            iv.     Livermore, CA (Lawrence Livermore Lab)

                                              v.     San Francisco, CA (Hunters Point)

b.     Read the following books…

                                               i.     “A Peoples History of the United States”

                                              ii.     “The Russian Revolution”

                                            iii.     “The Years of Lyndon Johnson”

c.      Investigate…

                                               i.     The Chinese Civil War

                                              ii.     The Holocaust

d.     I am not familiar with this sort of event and can’t really comment on one that I would want to attend

e.     See…

                                               i.     Gettysburg

                                              ii.     Holocaust sites

                                            iii.     Normandy

                                            iv.     The Hermitage (Andrew Jackson’s Plantation)

Blog 5

1) Dr. Robert's presentation

Tuesday's presentation provided a fair amount of information about the increase in what our children are being subjected to with regards to media. However, the most relevant part of Dr. Robert's presentation was the one fact that he kept alluding to... Dr. Roberts presentation was outdated. The data from the latest study was 2-3 years old and failed to include some of the most current mothods in which our children are accessing media today. By not being able to include the effects of smartphones, tablets and other ereaders, the information provided could only be used to show that yes, the amount of media that our children are shown is ever increasing. What also stuck out to me was the lack of information that many of those in the audience have with regards to media and the use of devices that carry said media. As teachers we have a responsibility to make sure that we know of what we speak, instead of just blindly repeating what someone else has told us.

2-3) Read the NY Times article...

I am a huge advocate of online learning, having used it extensively in my undergraduate experience.

(Warning! Description of personal experience follows)

Because of the various cutbacks in education, I found myself unable to take a class I needed to graduate (the class wasn't going to be taught again for a year at CSUEB). I was able to find the class at a junior college, 50 miles away. The ability to take this one online class, without having to commute 100 miles twice a week, was extremely valuable to me!

In general, the advantages of online classes (offering students a greater curriculum, ability to study and 'attend' course from home,etc), far outweigh the disadvantages (accountability, etc). A student who access online education can broaden his education by learning from a greater variety of educators, the community benefits because the school or district can broaden the diversity of what is taught. As an educator, I can broaden my horizons, teaching for different schools, districts (or even different states).

4) Technology Resources for the Teacher

http://www.techsmith.com/download/jing/

What a great resource, this can be used to help model actions and activities that students need to replicate as they study and/or create their own work. Teachers can show students step by step how to accomplish classroom and homework tasks. This can also be extended in collaboration with other teachers, showing someone how I created a task, lesson or exercise. I often will work in a new environment and sometimes forget the exact steps that I took, making it difficult to replicate the process for others.

https://twitter.com/

I do not use Twitter, but this would seem to be an excellent tool to remind student of important dates and events in the classroom. Teachers can remind a single student of the entire classroom with a couple of clicks. Of course the teacher would need to make sure that all students have appropriate access and that the teacher uses Twitter accordingly, (imagine if the teacher made an assignment change and one or more students did not receive the change). The potential downside might be that students have too much interaction with the teacher outside of the classroom, (I imagine that this can be controlled by the teacher).

http://www.superteachertools.com/

Another cool site offering a variety of tools to teachers. Have you ever tried to make your own Jeopardy or Who Wants to Be a Millionaire. I have it can be very time consuming. Sharing games and even game templates can be a big timesaver. Make sure that you run through every aspect of the game or tool before using it in the classroom, as some download can contain links or advertising to sites that at a very minimum would interrupt your classroom.

http://titanpad.com/

Titanpad seems like a great collaboration tool, should teachers be working together, at the same time on a project. I suppose students could also use this, but I would be an advocate of students getting together to collaborate on projects whenever possible.

Interdisciplinary Teaching 7/17

Hmm at the moment there is nothing that I “commonly teach”, (I have taught what I have taught uhh… once and only once). However, I do get the premise here, so here goes..

The Holocaust is one of the most important subjects that any social science teacher can teach. With all of the information that is available on the subject it’s relatively easy to find something to bring to class. Yet, that is also the challenge… with everything that is available, there is a certain responsibility to create a meaningful lesson… something that goes beyond the horrors of an event that occurred some 70 years ago. You can take the short cut telling students over the course of a single class that yes, between 1938 and 1945, Germans killed a lot of Jews because the Germans blamed the Jews for everything bad that had occurred recently in Germany. Or you could include a variety of resources and give the students the ability to reach their own conclusions about this horrific of events. Having students read a first person account of their Holocaust experience could be one way to enrich understanding of the subject.

There are a variety of books available about the holocaust. One of the most well known is “Night” an autobiographical account by Holocaust survivor Elie Wiesel.

One possible way to teach the holocaust might be to read night over the period of a 5-7 days, while covering some of the historical record (dates, events, locations), while analyzing Wiesel’s book. Students could take a small passage, something like,

            “Crammed into the cattle cars by the Hungarian police, they cried silently. Standing on the station platform, we too were crying. The train disappeared over the horizon; all that was left was thick dirty smoke

            Behind me, someone said, sighing, ‘What do you expect? That’s war…’

            The deportees were quickly forgotten. A few days after they left, it was rumored that they were in Galicia, working, and even that they were content with their fate” (page 6)

 In the interest of space I’ll stop here. I would continue with this single page, asking students, possibly to do a Quick Write on how they interpret the scene that Wiesel describes on the page.

“Night” is available online as an ebook. It is available for sale at http://books.google.com/books?id=ELbHiPmYSM4C&dq=isbn:9780553272536. It is possible to scan the first few pages, if you wish to find the source quoted above.

Another resource for students is art. There is an abundance of art, from German propaganda materials (films, posters, etc.) to drawings and sketches by concentration camp prisoners, that is available to teachers and anyone interested in the Holocaust. The University of South Florida provides a great deal of this type of visual experience for students, (http://fcit.usf.edu/holocaust/arts/artVicti.htm).

Depending on which type of art that you wish to use you can have students reflect on how Germans treated Jews in the months and years preceding the Holocaust. You can have students describe what they see in camp art, having them respond to a prompt in an essay or presentation.

On a further note, (I used this tool in teaching a lesson and therefore didn’t feel that it would be an appropriate source), our very own Joan Peterson has a wonderful collection of posters that makes any classroom lesson feel like a walk in a Holocaust museum. Joan has a collect of some 40+ posters that she obtained from the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum. Through these posters students see visual images up close and in graphic detail, in a way that is quite different from seeing one or two images in a text book, or having a few images projected onto a screen.

While the Holocaust is an important topic, teaching it must be done with care. Students can be insensitive to the ethnic and religious differences of cultures that they are not familiar with. The over all maturity level of the classroom must be taken into consideration when working with such emotion prompting images. I would suggest that a fair amount of warning (even consider sending out a permission slip or at least a notification that you will be teaching a subject with very sensitive materials). However, by using some of the many, many resources that are available to teachers on this subject, an educator can help to broaden a students understanding of both the Holocaust and its causes.

I commented on the following blogs...

Tom's 
Dayana 
Andrew

Mind the Gap: Session 2

“Mind the Gap”: Session 2

1.  Chapter one:  In recounting her journey through many educational reforms, Diane Ravitch makes a number of provocative statements.

Choose two, quote them, and personally respond.

“Those who make policy are most successful when they must advance their ideas through a gauntlet of checks and balances, explaining their plans, submitting them to a process of public review, and attempting to persuade others to support them”.

While I tend to agree with the statement above as it pertains to the well being of the public education system, this also seems to be the definition of bureaucracy. During the review process, everyone would want to chime in to make sure that their special interest was protected. This would also seem to explain why a) it takes so long for any policy to be adopted and b) why the ‘pendulum keeps swing from one political side to the other. Education policy in the US currently seems to be like a giant jigsaw puzzle, where the shapes the color of the pieces are all the same (can it ever be properly assembled?)

As I read through this book I am beginning to think more and more that federal education policy should be a broad framework, allowing the states a great deal of latitude.

“… I began ‘seeing like a state,’ looking at schools and teachers and students from an altitude of 20,000 feet and seeing them as objects to be moved around by big ideas and great plans”

(I took ‘state’ in this context to mean nation-state)

Overall I found Ravitch’s tone in Chapter One to be somewhat apologetic. She has realized that she has made some mistakes along the way and apologized for (or at least justified the change in her position) them, “I kept asking myself why I was losing confidence in the reforms. My answer: I have a right to change my mind.”

The quote above seems to underscore that Ravitch realizes the enormity of the responsibility that the federal government has with regards to education. It’s one thing to ponder, study, criticize and comment on what others are doing or have done, but it is something else entirely to be the one making that policy for a nation of 300 million people. How could anyone expect to make significant change for all 60 million students, especially over the last 20-30 years when federal policy seems to be saying the we must please all of the people all of the time, (NCLB is a good example of this belief)

2.  Chapter two:  On page 16, Ravitch gives a brief definition of a well-educated person.  How would you characterize a well-educated person?

What should any well-educated person know in today’s world?

(I have no idea where “page 16” was in my e-book. In addition, there is no qualifying what a well-educated person is demographically. How old? What ethnic background? What socio-economic group? And so on.)

A well educated person should be one that has command his/her language (written, oral and reading) and should be fairly versed in what his/her society as deemed as meeting the requirements (math, literature, social norms) for their age group, taking in to consideration a person’s ability to access the tools necessary to achieve these goals.

In my world a well-educated person also has a inclusive perception of the world around him/her (encompassing all religious, ethnic, socio-economic, etc). In short any well-educated person must be both “book smart” as well as “street smart”.

To me, there is an underlying premise that all citizens of a society should never stop learning, never stop improving who they are. Only then can they be productive members of their community.

3.  Thinking about the class discussion on the book, what stands out for you?  What would you have liked to say that you did not say?

Thus far I am saying pretty much whatever I happen to have on my mind with regards to the text. I enjoy the discourse and appreciate the comments from the class. I certainly do not agree with everything said as we all come from different places and therefore have a different perspective on teaching, education and such, (obvious I know),

4.  Choose one gap you listed from your subject area and identify 3 resources: a web site, an article, and a book that can help you fill that gap.  List these and discuss what you learned from one of these.

I have a weakness or a “gap” in my knowledge of Jacksonian Democracy. I am reading The Reign of Andrew Jackson: A Chronicle in the Frontier of Politics, have read Limits of Political Engagement in Antebellum America: A New look at the Golden Age of Participatory Democracy (an article from the Organization of American Historians) and have visited the website “The American Presidency Project”, (http://www.presidency.ucsb.edu/showelection.php?year=1824)

The website provided me with a fact that I was quite surprised by. Vote turnout between 1824 and 1828 increased by some 70 percent, which was quite a large increase over a short period of time. What was the cause for an increase of this size? Was it simply population growth? Was it a newly found responsibility to vote? Were more people allowed to vote?

5.  Your annotations of resources are meant to be both scholarly and brief.  In the blog, discuss in detail why/how any two of these articles were useful to your topic/question(s).  Consider such things as listing specific information you learned that you didn’t know before; how this new learning leads to other questions or sources; why this writer was convincing; whether you would seek this writer out for other articles he/she has written, and anything else you’d like to state in a blog that others can learn from and read.

I have found that with the 4^th of July holiday, I am running a little behind with regards to this question. Stay tuned as I will follow up and revise here shortly.

6. Meg, did you do anything special for the 4th? OK, something more relevant. You have seen my questions regarding Jacksonian Democracy. How would you narrow the topic, given the context of the end product that we will be producing?

I viewed the following blogs...


Ashley's
Marcy's
Alex's 

First Session Comments

First Session Comments

1.  Describe how outside-school experience(s) have expanded or deepened your subject area content knowledge, and tell how it enhanced or changed your understanding.  Include at least one specific experience. 
As a social science teacher, I have the opportunity to connect real world current events with a variety of subjects. I can discuss this weeks Supreme Court decision regarding “Obama care” with a government class or I can discuss how current US and Russia cooperation contrasts the initial days of the Space Race. In addition, as an older adult, I can connect my life experiences (crossing into East Berlin a week before the Berlin Wall came down gave me a small idea of how East Germans lived during the Cold War; watching the Challenger explosion or the events of 9/11 on live television and being able to express real feelings and emotions instead of reciting someone's versions of these events), with topics and themes that might only otherwise be found in a students textbook. History is connected to the events that occur today and one’s own life experiences play an important role in being able to connect the subject area with students.

2. Respond to the class discussion of Ball's 'The Subject Matter Preparation of Teachers.'.  Have your initial judgments or opinions changed based on the discussion?
The Ball article seemed to emphasize what many of us realize today. More and more is being required of teachers every year. The Ball article really didn’t come right out and say it directly, but a teacher’s career is (or should be) one of progress and evolution. I will be a better teacher tomorrow than I am today. I will know more about my subject matter every year that I teach (and therefore study) it. In addition, every year I will improve upon my pedagogical practices. Will I improve each and every year that I teach? I’d like to think so, but there are in fact too many examples of teachers who have given up and are simply biding their time to retirement.

Ball points out that teachers do not enter the classroom ready to teach, hinting that the liberal arts is not a valid place for teachers to learn the content sufficiently, (“What students actually learn about subject matter from their college and university liberal arts courses is both an open and critical question.”)

In short. my initial opinion hasn't really changed based on the in-class discussion, although reading the Ball article reaffirmed some of my thoughts on the profession.

Ball seems to hint that students should be directed toward the education path much earlier in their college career, an idea that cannot easily be argued. As stated during the discussion of the first class session, 25-35 units of US History has not fully prepared me to teach the subject.

3. Where are you in developing and pursuing a line of inquiry?  What is your question?  Are you satisfied with your question?  At this point, what do you know about the research available in this area?  What ideas do you have for possible experiential learning sources?
 I currently have a line of inquiry, however, I think that I am too broad and am not sure of which direction to proceed. As stated in my second post here (“Who really won the Presidential election of 1828” & “How did American Democracy benefit from the election of Andrew Jackson?”) still seem too broad to address properly. The election of Jackson changes American politics forever, the remnants of that election we still see today.

There is certainly plenty of information (primary and secondary sources) available on the topic although I am concerned about the experiential element (there’s no local Jacksonian Democracy museum located anywhere near here). However I may be able to connect the events of that era, with how political campaigns are run today, (I will consider any and all ideas mentioned here). In addition, I am attempting to interview some of the present day experts on the topic.

I commented on Tom's, Lloyd's and Marcy's blog.

5 guiding questions...

1. Who really won the Presidential election of 1828?

2. How did American Democracy benefit from the election of Andrew Jackson?

3. Could the Holocaust occur today?

4. What is the role of the teacher in preparing today's youth in an ever-changing world?

5. What's the most important quality for a teacher to excel in?

1st post

This is my first post on a blog of any sort, so I may ask a lot of questions looking for help.