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Blog #11

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We’ve done a lot of meaningful things this semester. I loved having an open dialogue with everyone. I hope the conversations we’ve had impact your teaching careers in good ways and we can all make some sort of change in the world. Not only did our conversations help impact me but so did the media we used to learn this semester. The first thing to come to mind is precious knowledge. This documentary impacted me deeply. Not only did it show how our biases can effect children but how we as teachers have a duty to do right but our students. It shows how it goes deeper than what we do in the classroom, but how we can fight for our kids to have better. I think that’s something very important for teachers to understand. The next thing to come to mind is the film Teach Us All. Again, another film about how biases are doing a disservice to children. Seeing this film made me think about how I can hopefully help my students with their success and how to consider their living situations. As we...
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Blog #10

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For this reading, I wanted to connect it to the picture above. For context, this picture is a popular saying in the queer/trans community. As this quote from the document says, “The Human Rights Campaign Foundation’s survey including more than 10,000 youth entitled, Growing UP LGBT in America, found that 42% of gender nonconforming youth report frequently or often being called names and 40% reported being frequently or often excluded. Further, over half of gender nonconforming youth reported that they did not participate in activities offered by the school out of fear of discrimination. Additionally, the Journal of Adolescent Health (2015) reported that transgender youth were more likely to report: being diagnosed with depression compared with students who were not transgender (50.6% vs. 20.6%); suffering from anxiety (26.7% vs. 10% ); attempting suicide (17.2% vs. 6.1% ); and engaging in self-harm activities with lethal intentions (16.7% vs. 4.4%).” As a trans person these statisti...
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blog #9

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One interesting thing in this reading was the school not dancing around disability. I think it does a great job of not only destigmatizing it. As someone who is autistic whenever someone dances around it, it feels like they see the word autism as an insult. It also feels like they don’t recognize its negative impact on my life. To me it often doesn’t feel like a “superpower” it just feels like a disability. Which isn’t necessarily a good or bad thing, to me it’s neutral. To me, it’s a fact of life. This also affects kids because then they don’t know how to deal with someone who has a disability. In my schools, we never had inclusion classrooms. Disabled kids often weren’t even in the same art or music classes. From what I remember this led to disabled students often being treated badly by my classmates. I think if we did have them it would’ve helped a lot with the treatment of disabled classmates. I also think it would’ve helped with my understanding of myself as an autistic ...
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blog #8

"Without question, it would have pleased me to hear my teachers address me in Spanish when I entered the classroom. I would have felt much less afraid. I would have trusted them and responded with ease. But I would have delayed-for how long postponed?-having to learn the language of public society." What I got most from this reading is the way language affects identity. I only speak English so I haven’t thought about language this way. I think this reading really opened my eyes on what ESL learners are going through. Also, I think it’s interesting to call English the language of public society. Mostly everything is in English in public in the USA, the reason why I find it interesting is because there is no official federal language in America. Yet it’s treated like the only language people should speak in America, especially in public. A lot of Americans also don’t learn a second language. “But the special feeling of closeness at home was diminished by then. Gone was the ...
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I think an important part of this conversation is to talk about the power education holds. “When rich children get empowering education nothing changes. But when working-class children get empowering education you get literacy with an attitude. It's exactly the kind of literacy that the folks feared who outlawed Bible reading for common people three hundred years ago. There is an important difference, how-ever. Three hundred years ago people could only imagine one social setup, the ruling class and the rabble. The fear was that literacy would make the rabble aware of the injustice they suffered, and they would attempt to overthrow the ruling class violently and take its place-same roles, same rules, only a switch in actors in the roles.” (Finn) From the preface, we talk about how education used to hold people back. It was used to keep people unaware, thinking they would overrule the top class if they were to become aware. Now seeing where we are, we can see that it hasn’t happe...
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Kohn

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This week we looked at Kohn and his assessments on what to look for in a classroom. It seems like most of these standards put more of an emphasis on community rather than achievements. One of the standards I especially like is the one of artwork being hung up even if it wasn’t done perfectly. This point specifically encourages creativity in children. Even though it's not the exact same as the others. I also think encouraging discussions of children helps break away from the mold of question from the teacher than answer. I also think the set up of students facing each other is very important for social development in children. I think another important part of the school structure is making it a place that people, especially children would like to spend time in. If a school is cold and uninviting it makes it very hard to want to be there. I think this is where we lose a lot of secondary students' interests. Moving from elementary school to middle school I feel it often loses ...
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Troublemakers

Reading this reminded me of my elementary school experience. Due to autism I was having a hard time learning social skills, when to sit still and often couldn’t. I would even get in trouble because my hand writing was bad, because my motor skills weren’t where they should’ve been. My teachers often seemed to assume this was purposeful. While reading this writing on troublemakers it reminded me a lot of these experiences. I somewhat understand how that was seen as misbehavior, however I think about the expectations placed on kids who are learning new expectations for the first time. While some kids had the experience of learning outside school I didn’t get that, so school was new to me when I went. Then all these expectations are thrown on. Along with a teacher shortage I see how these kids get failed so often. Oftentimes teachers have to deal with more kids than most people would all at one time. This makes it very easy for the kid who is struggling with an adjustment slip through. I a...
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