Shea was the last Cookie cutter staduim, so why not lose the cookie cutter curriculum

Among all the readings we have done, a lot of them have had to do with diversifying the curriculum, because everyone learns differently; why do cook cutter curricula still exist?

Embrace diversity, use alternative methods, every child is different… these are the things that I hear in my education classes each day. If I am being trained not to teach from to book and to use multiple methods to teach literacy, then why are my counterparts in the class room still using cookie cutter curriculums? The standardization of our schools is great for the sake of quantifying and rating schools against each other. However, that does not mean that schools and teachers need to teach in the same mechanical way.
Cookie-cutter curriculums exist is almost every level and context area of our curriculum, even though it isn’t the most effective teaching methods. Often the result of a standardized cookie cutter curriculum is the mass production and manufacturing of grades. When so much pressure is put on producing grades, there is little left for creativity and helping students that may need differentiated instruction. So in turn the student most hurt by standardized curriculums are the ones that most need the help, ELL for example. These teaching methods also forget to consider students of different races and social backgrounds.
Although many of us can agree that the current system isn’t the best, finding something better isn’t easy. Clearly the system has shown that it works (on paper), and how do you turn a standardized system into something that isn’t but that can still be held accountable and quantified? Perhaps this is why the rules of the game haven’t changed, we know that they aren’t great but aren’t quite sure as to how to go about changing it. Well like MLB, instead of throwing the whole book out how about we start with just small changes. MLB now has homerun review to help them make better calls, let us in the education business make a great call and reviews to create homeruns for our students.

Sweet 16

Even though ELL students are given special attention/instruction in learning English, their literacy curricula are significantly "dumbed down" (p.111 in Snake Oil) What will be the impact of this on their future success? Might this be intentional to keep them on the lower end of the socio-economic spectrum?

As seen in Literacy as Snake Oil, while English language learners are given special attention to help them learn English and integrate into their new environments. However when it comes to literacy, ELL students receive a watered down curriculum. Many teachers believe that by doing this they are making it easier for the students to pass and succeed, when in reality they are failing their students, by not challenging them. It has been proven time and time again that student do best when they are challenged. By not providing the ELL students with a challenged curriculum it makes the students feel like the school doesn’t think that they can do better. Just because a student has a language barrier, it does not mean that they aren’t smart. In a course on differentiating instruction, I learned that any students in special education classes are also ELL/ESL students.
This “dumbed down” curricula can have a devastating impact on the success of ELL students. Some critics of watering down instruction even say that this is done intentionally to keep ELL students on a lower socio-economic spectrum. This can also be compared to the backwards reasoning of NCLB. A school that performs below standards, loses its much needed funding, meanwhile schools that are already achieving their goals are granted extra aid to further widen the success gap. Shouldn’t the underperforming school receive the extra funding so that they can succeed? Shouldn’t the ELL student receive the maximum support and best efforts in education to grant them success?
While this issue is a problem in our school systems, teachers need to provide all that they can to help in the development of their ELL students, so that they can receive the appropriate education. This can be done by bringing real life examples into the classroom, to help student bridge the gaps caused by the language or cultural barrier. Students could also benefit from textbooks printed in their own language to help them stay on track in their content classes. There is no reason that teachers of ELL students should take shortcuts and skim out on the content of a lesson simply because of language issues.

Blog #15 Packaged curricula, and the role of the teacher

As a kid growing up I always believed that teachers had it easy because everything they needed to know was in the answer key. Teachers didn’t have to do homework, they had access to the most magical know it all book, and like us they had summers off and still got paid for it. Today, as I am working to become a teacher my self I hear those same sentiments repeated by those around me; “Oh that great teaching is easy” followed by “looks like you won’t have to give up your season tickets since you’ll have summers off.” However as those of us in the teaching profession know teaching is much more than assigning homework and grading papers.
On my first day of observations I made the mistake of wearing a baseball cap to school, the Spanish teacher that I was observing kindly laughed and said “don’t worry teachers must wear many hats”. Teachers have to make sure that their students are not only performing to according to standards, while making sure that also well adjusted. As a Spanish teacher I will have to teach the language; which includes a wide range of vocabulary, pronunciation, and intonation, grammar, and culture, which involves much more than knowing where Mexico and Spain are or who Shakira and Julio Iglesias are.
I have quickly learned that teaching is far from easy especially when there is so much pressure in this “No Child Left Behind” world to achieve high test grades. Therefore ultimately the quality of what I teach my students is worthless if they do not pass the regents exam. So do I provide my class with meaningful and valuable lessons about Hispanic culture, or do make sure that they know enough grammar to pass the regents and enough vocabulary for a 10 exchange dialogue for the oral test? While observing a level C Spanish class a few months back I witnessed something in a class full of students that had supposedly done very well in their regents and were in this class because of their outstanding work in their prior Spanish classes that shamed my cooperative teacher. She had been discussing Peru and of handily said “you all know where Peru is don’t you?”, to which a student blurts, “yea, it’s in Mexico.” Clearly geography isn’t tested in the Spanish regents, does that mean that it is not important to know where the countries we are learning about are located? Of course it is important, but strict district curricula and not enough time to teach everything make determining what is important a hard struggle and some things must get cut.
Under NCLB schools and districts are faced with high pressures to perform or lose their funding. This has lead to what many refer to as prepackaged curricula and one size fits all lesson plans. Not only does this hurt students but it also hurts teachers that are forced to stifle their creative abilities. We are taught the substantial benefits of technology in the classrooms, and of all these different tools available through the internet. However try to actually use any of it in the classroom and you will find that access to such information is blocked; a crushing blow to what would be a valuable lesson. Basically we as teachers are made to feel that if it doesn’t fit into grade producing machine, it is not worth teaching.
In reality, teaching requires constant revision. If one technique is not effective teachers must revise and improve their methods. Some districts impose further standardized testing to quantify the improvements that are made. I however don’t think that the value of teaching can be measured through performance. As a student I was always terrible and I mean terrible at test taking, meanwhile in class I was constantly raising my hand and answering questions, I always understood what was being taught, I just wasn’t good at taking test. Now I bet that when my grades got sent back to Albany, it must have looked like I was a terrible student. Meanwhile I was passing all my classes with A’s. Luckily for me my teachers were able to focus on me as a student and not just a standardized test grade, they were then able to help me passed all my regents by teaching me how to take the test. The problem today is that there is such a focus on grades and not on the student that many students are being taught to pass the test before they are taught to fully understand the concepts and material. I think in doing this every child is being left behind, and it’s the role of the teacher to help change the pre-package curricula.

Movement to teach

Math is rarely a student’s favorite subject in school. The prize of favorite usually goes to lunch. In his article “Algebra and Civil Rights,” Robert P. Moses states that the literacies of math and science need to be changed in order to improve the way the subjects are taught. This is especially important in a day and age where technology is boss and more and more jobs require knowledge of technology, which by default can translate to knowledge of math and science.
As a future educator I am well aware of the growing deficit of math and science educators, and of the extremely high demand for such teachers. Through technology, such as computers and calculators, our society has come to think that math is unimportant since there are several tools that can readily solve their problems with out them having to think about it, thus creating a culture that thinks it doesn’t need math at a time when it needs it the most.
In recent times, many Americans have seen their jobs ship off to other countries. This is a sign of how important it is for people to strengthen their knowledge of all subject areas especially math and science. This also serves as an opportunity for people in minority groups to rise and better themselves socially and economically. I agree with Moses that more needs to be done to motivate students. As a future Spanish teach I am often discouraged when I see students that have no interest in learning the language simply because they don’t plan to visit Spain. These students are totally missing the point of how many more opportunities they will have in life if they are fluent in more than one language. As a bilingual speaker since early childhood I too was one of those students that didn’t care much for my foreign language education. Luckily I was able to learn that by speaking two languages that double the job opportunities that would be available to me. The same also translate to math and sciences.
As Moses stated our children need a broader education of math and science in order to broaden their futures. It is important to find engaging ways to present the materials because simply telling a teenager that learning something will help them get a job in the future does little to motivate them, since most of them live in the here and now. Our students can not be limited; they need to be taught more than just the basics and highlights of a subject. By expanding the levels of education provided, students will become driven to achieve higher levels of literacy and understanding.
I found Moses’ connection of Algebra and Civil Rights to be interesting and it made sense. In most cases inner city schools often populated by minority students receive little funding leaving them at a disadvantage when it comes to providing these students with the tools they need, similarly to the disadvantages faced by black schools in the Civil Rights era. I agree with Moses that we are at a point where every student should have equal access to technology and have equal opportunities for success. If urban schools aren’t providing quality educations, then how can we expect these students to succeed in the future job force?

Utilizing Critical Literacy

Critical literacy is not limited to one specific mode of communication, nor does it require a written text. One needs to accept alternative forms of literacy, such as different types of media messages that our youth is exposed to on a daily basis. These messages once absorbs and interpreted become a form of critical literacy in a classroom setting. In “Critical Literacy and Urban Youth”, Ernest Morrell suggests that critical literacy education provides students with the tools and skills to better understand a text, by using a language that they are more accustomed to. I thought the way that Morrell combined hip hop music and poetry was a very creative idea to motivate students. This allows the reader of said literacy to make connections to what they already know.
Morrell provides several methods to providing critical literacy that students will be engaged in. The most common strategy is to relate the lesson to the student’s life. As with most things in life, they can be better understood once introduced to the concepts; be it the rules to a certain sport or how to prepare a meal. As a future teacher I believe that Morrell’s strategies and examples of how to incorporate critical literacy in the classroom were great, and would love to try to use them im my own classroom. I was also inspired by how he documented his strategies and would do the same for my own records so that I can better understand what works best.

Literacy as a second language

For many learners literacy can be a difficult achievement, especially those whose home language isn’t the same as the language used in school. Today learning a second language has become a more common theme in schools. As a Spanish teacher, I’ve come across many articles that show a growing population of Hispanic students throughout the country, which in turn has led to a growing demand for English as a Second Language teachers.

These differences in language affect the way students acquire literacy. Often students who are native to a language other than English get mislabeled as learning disabled, rather than receive the language help that they need in order to assimilate in to their new societies. Often times these students aren’t even literate in their native language, leading ESL students to find themselves completely disconnected from school literacy. It is important that students do not fall behind their English speaking counterparts. Therefore it is crucial that teachers change lessons to include different cultural backgrounds and make the transitions easier.

In Haneda’s article, she states that critical thinking can’t be introduced until the basics are mastered. Educators have to work to make sure that there is an even connection between school literacy and home literacy, and that they don’t come into conflict. ESL students are often seen drawing from other areas to express themselves in order to make up for their poor English. According to Haneda, schools need to engage students in ways to make them culturally literate, as opposed to them simply cracking the code and learning English. This can be done by assigning readings and writing activities that relate to their communities and culture.

Other examples of how ESL education can affect critical literacy were seen in the Lomawaima and McCarty article “Indigenous Bilingual/ Bicultural Education” about Native American students. According to Lomawaima and McCarty students that first learned to read and write in their native languages produced better test scores than their counterparts who receive an English only education. By mastering literacy in their primary language, students are able to understand material in their own contexts, therefore allowing them to transfer the skills and knowledge when they are ready.

Understanding how students acquire second language literacy is crucial in ensuring that both ESL students and English speaking students have equal and fair opportunities at acquiring a critical literacy. As stated in both Haneda and Lomawaima and McCarty article’s it is important to connect these literacies to the different environments of the student and these include; school, home, and their communities.

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You can't give up till the final out is made... till then keep those expectations HIGH!

Iain't writin' nuttin': Permission to Fail and Demands to Succeed in Urban Classrooms was a very interesting chapter in Lisa Delpit's book, The Skin That We Speak. In this chapter, Ladson-Billings talks about teachers that allowed students to not do writing assignments on the sole foundation that they didn’t want to. Every day we here stories about students falling through the cracks and getting lost in the system. However when schools and educators allow students to take control and skip out on the learning process, it’s more like they are being thrown through the cracks. One example that we see is Shannon the first grader that tells her teacher “Iain’t writin’ nuttin’.” In this case the teacher instead of offering an alternative to writing or an idea on what to write, allows Shannon to slide on by.
As stated by Ladson- Billings, “permission to fail” refers to teachers that allow their students to coast through school without having to do the required assignments, when instead these teachers should be providing these students with extra attention. I feel that the reason that these kids don’t care to try is that they lack the support system and motivation that all kids need. These students either lack having parents that care about their education or even worse they lack teachers that care. Teaching is more than a job with summers off, to spend traveling or in my case going to baseball games, teaching is a demanding career and the main focus should be on the students and their success.

What are the impacts of over-looking the relationship between resistance to literacy and resistance to schooling?

I feel that part that resistance to learn is directly related to resistance to teach. What reason does a student have to want to succeed when his teacher doesn’t care any more or less if he does the work? Student lack the will when their superiors have no real expectations of them. It has been said time and time again that people succeed when they have positive reinforcement, and by ignoring their problems and flaws, aren’t these so called educators providing their students with just the opposite? Children need to be challenged and motivated, the last thing they need is people giving up on them from such a young age.
It is crucial for a teacher to engage their students by any means necessary, even if that means incorporating out side literacies into their lesson plans. The same goes with reading and writing, maybe a student doesn’t like reading because they had a bad experience trying to understand Shakespeare or even Dr. Seuss. Some times a teacher needs to get down to her student’s level to prove productive, whether that means using baseball to help teach statistics or the Wendy’s dollar menu to teach “3conomics”. Above all a teacher can not under any circumstances grant her students “permission to fail” no matter how reluctant they are to read and write.

Literacy after the bell

Through the course of many course readings, I’ve come to see that “code switching” is not something I’ve experienced on my own, but rather it is an actually phenomenon that has been studied and researched. These multiple literacies exist all around us, in the classroom, the school yard, at your mom’s house and at church, each of which require a different level of literacy.

Depending on the background and environment on the person these different literacies will form a person in certain ways. It is important to not label these out of school literacies as stereotypical, since there’s are infinite types of literacies. In his book Jabari Mahiri mentions several including rap music, low rider cars, and comic books. While looking into rap music, he found that rap has a greater meaning as a tool of expression. These out of school literacies are usually the most important ones. They are the ones that influence a person into acting, behaving, and even identifying a certain way.

Perhaps they are overlooked because generally they don't fit in with the traditional values of literacy in institutions such as schools. However, to truly understand the students which we intend to teach, it is only fair and incredibly important that we take the time to research, explore, understand, and ultimately appreciate the values that accompany literacy outside the classroom.

There are many reasons as to why these types of literacies are over looked because they’re not understood or considered acceptable. However I think it’s just as important to be able to understand and accept our students for their individuality as well as it is for them to be able to present themselves accordingly. It may even be helpful for teachers to reach out to these out of school literacies and try to relate lessons to better inspire students. I expect my students to come from many different backgrounds, and after reading about out of school literacies I also expect them to have a diverse extent of literacy.

Colorblindness

Reflect and write on the ties between Lewis’ discussion of the ways that colorblindness benefits white speakers, and Gee’s discussions of upper-middle class teens’ “distinctive social language” used to “strategically distance themselves from everyday social interaction (p. 418 in Teenagers in New Times).

In Lewis’ discussion she claims that “colorblindness” benefits white speakers. White speakers claim colorblindness in order to protect them selves from possibly being called racists. In our discussions on culture of power we’ve discussed that the culture of power is controlled by those of wealth. I think Bloome’s article brought up an interesting observation about the locations of Starbucks restaurants in Columbus. This restaurants that target people of a higher economic standing had no locations in the poorer neighborhoods that in itself is a type of discrimination. In Gee’s discussions where he states that “upper-middle class teens use a distinctive social language to strategically distance themselves from everyday social interaction (p. 418 in Teenagers in New Times).” I feel that this means that they are simply using their culture of power to hide from things that their social studies teach would make them describe as “different”. They are taught to use different words in order to avoid being offensive. This goes back to the issue of claiming colorblindness in order to avoid being considered racist.

1,2,3 x Literacy = multiple literacies

Literacy can mean many things hence the birth of the term multiple literacy. When you think of literacy you usually think of being able to read and write. However in their article, Bloome and Encisco show that literacy is so much more. Literacy is also having the ability to read a neighborhood and to understand why certain establishments function the way they do. Part of literacy also involves knowing when to act a certain way, or as Delpit defines it “code switch”. I recently saw a special on Comedy Central, in which a black comedian makes fun of why his friends can’t get jobs and then they blame it on the (white) “man”. The comedian then goes on to explain the language used by his fellow black friends. He describes them as walking in job interviews with their pants hanging below their butts and walking in slang and Ebonics. In my opinion this is the most important part of literacy, and knowing when to use which language is having multiple literacies.

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What is Worth Knowing...

To who? The question is who is this worth knowing to? Depending on the who and the environment in which they live what is worth knowing changes drastically. Therefore I will tell you what I know. What I feel is important to know, and the things that I know that I feel others should know.
I am 21 years old from NYC with a heart for travel and a thirst for knowledge. To me there is NOTHING trivial about trivia, and here is what I feel is worth knowing...

As a citizen of the world:
*speak more than one language
* general knowledge of the world's major religions: Christianity, Judaism, Muslim, Hinduism, etc
*Ancient civilizations: Maya, Inca, Aztec, Roman, Greek, Egyptian, Chinese, Native American
*Different types of government
* 7 continents
*wars, acts of wars, historical events: dropping of the atomic bomb, Pompeii, WWI, WWII, Great Depression, 2004 Tsunami, "guerra sucia", Spanish American War, Sinking of the Titanic

Arts/ Music:
*Picasso *Frieda Khalo *Andy Warhol
*Beethoven *Beetles *Bach
*Mozart *Spice Girls *Pink Floyd
*Jackson Pollack *Leonardo DaVinci *Michelangelo
* Britney Spears *Madonna *Sean Combs/ Puffy/Pdiddy
*Tupac *Hannah Montana *Diego Rivera
*Monet *Georgia O'keeffe *Salvador Dali
*Van Gogh *Michael Jackson *Frank Sinatra

Literature:
*To Kill A Mockingbird *Cien anos de soledad
*A streetcar named Desire *Don Quixote
*Romeo & Juliet *Tale of two Cities
*Harry Potter * The Bible

As an American:
* the Pledge of Allegiance
* Star Spangle Banner
* God Bless America
* Preamble to the constitution
*Be able to name at least 2/3 of the 50 states, and their general locations
* be able to name at least 20 US Presidents
*major Supreme Court cases; Roe v Wade, Brown v BOE...

Sports:
MLB: American League: RED SOX/ National League: METS ;)
NFL: AFC: PATRIOTS/ NFC
NBA: NETS
NHL: DEVILS
NASCAR: DALE JR

Health:
First Aid
CPR
How to swim
ride a bike
cook
Good hygiene
good eating habits
Cold remedies

Spanish:
Culture of Latin America & Spain
Spanish & Latin America literature: Cervantes, Marquez, Pablo Neruda, Isabelle Allende, etc
geography/ regions of Latina America
Grammar
vocabulary


There's so much more, however I do not know all that I know. ;)

So I wanted this pic to be on my header... but I kept losing my title, so here it is instead ...