Student Teaching Journal

I watched Sir Ken Robinson, Bill Gates, and Barry Schwartz give TED Talks on www.ted.com and I’d like to comment on what I thought were highlights of each talk.

Sir Ken Robinson

The first point of Robinson’s that really grabbed my attention was that creativity is as important as literacy. I can see this statement being true in this day in age. One thing Sara often tells us in ED483 is that students can find any information they want on the Web nowadays. I’m an advocate of teaching spelling and grammar and other aspects of literacy, but now computers can check those things (with about 70% accuracy, I’d say) for them. Maybe all of this new technology can help students focus less on technical aspects of learning and focus more on creativity. (It almost hurt me to say that, because I’m a grammar/literacy freak.)

Robinson mentioned an educational hierarchy shaped as follows:

According to the website The Michigan Merit Curriculum, Michigan is following this hierarchy. In order to graduate from college, students must complete 4 credits of both math and language arts, 3 credits of both social studies and science, 1 credit of health and physical education, and the arts aren’t even mentioned on this particular website. Being a music major, wanting to introduce students to the passion for music that I have but being afraid that the Michigan Merit Curriculum is taking jobs away from music educators, the above hierarchy looks like a big scary monster to me.

There are a few other ideas of Robinson’s that I’d just like to mention.

1. Academic Inflation- Once upon a time, you couldn’t get far with just a high school diploma and you needed to get a college education. Now, after several more periods of inflation, without a master’s degree, you’re looking at a fairly low-income job. Maybe that’s somebody’s way of trying to turn everyone into lifelong learners. (That was a half-sarcastic statement.)

I found a funny comic about this topic:

2. I wonder how many more possible future award-winning Broadway choreographers are sitting in our classrooms right now being fed Ritalin and told to sit still.

Bill Gates

I didn’t realize that Bill Gates was a college dropout. That kind of goes against Robinson’s idea of academic inflation. I guess people can be successful no matter what kind of education they have. It’s just a matter of what they make of the education they do have.

Dropout rates are astonishing! 30% of high school students never finish high school, and 50% of high school students who are minorities never finish high school. Another surprising statistic is that students from low-income families have a higher chance of getting in jail than of getting a college degree. I hope that can be changed somehow.

I’ve heard that Bill Gates’ charter schools are pretty top-notch, and I remember from earlier in the semester seeing a quote from Bill Gates that the American school system doesn’t need to be reformed; it needs to be rebuilt. I would love to see one of his schools, such as KIPP (Knowledge is Power), and see if his schools would be a good direction toward which the national school system should go.

What surprised me most about Gates’ talk was how teachers are currently assessed. There is a limit of times that a principal can enter a classroom and the principal must give warning?! It makes sense now when I look back at high school. Teachers would announce when the principal would be visiting and tell us to be good and then the teachers would even teach differently when the principal was watching. He’s right. Something needs to be done about that.

One other little funny comment. When he announced he was giving everyone in the audience a free copy of the book he was talking about, I had to reassess the situation and figure out if I was watching Oprah or a TED Talk.

Barry Schwartz

Schwartz didn’t hold my attention nearly as well as Robinson and Gates did. The highlight of Schwartz’s talk for me was when he was comparing the improvisation skills needed in teaching and other professions to the improvisation skills of jazz musicians. At first, I thought, “What a great comparison! Teachers are constantly having to improvise based on behavioral situations, students’ moods, their moods, behaviors of co-teachers, and the list goes on and on! And they still have a basic set of rules they have to follow, but as Schwartz said, they have to kind of dance around different acceptable behaviors and actions within those rules.” Schwartz’s comparison made a ton of sense to me.

As I thought about it more, though, I thought about my own experiences with jazz improvisation. I was classically trained on the piano and when I joined jazz band in high school, I panicked whenever I was asked to improvise. “Just play notes in the chord!” my band teacher would say. It didn’t make any sense to me. There weren’t notes– specific rules– on the page for me to follow. Over the years, I’ve become much more comfortable with improvisation, but I would still MUCH rather have those basic rules laid out in front of me and know exactly what to do. That could mean one of three things:

1. I disagree with Barry Schwartz’s ideas.

2. According to Barry Schwartz, I won’t do well in teaching situations that involve improvisation.

3. Scores (specific sets of rules) work better for some people, and lead sheets (basic sets of rules with room to dance around) work better for others.

I think– and hope– the third idea is true.

Filed by emstrazz at 5:37 pm under Uncategorized
No Comments

3. Go Paperless

How I Lost 20 Pounds in One Month on a Paperless Diet

• Carry a USB drive wherever you go.
• Back up files once a week.
• Use Wikis and Google Docs rather than your hard drive.
• Pay $50/month for a Verizon wireless card so you can get Internet access anywhere with cell service.

Do More With Less By Going Paperless

• Beacon High School in Manhattan- entirely paperless
• all students carry flash drives
• 2 out of 139 students did not have Internet access- found ample resources at libraries, cafes, school, and other people’s houses
• everything done electronically

17. Help Your Students Stay Organized

What’s Up? A Hello Friend Student Planner

• calendar
• assignment notebook
• project planner
• skills development program
• information resource
• home-school communication system
• $7 each
• I can’t find the website for it.

Filed by emstrazz at 6:30 pm under Uncategorized
No Comments

My Personal Learning Network (PLN) has sort of been growing. More than some other people’s, I suspect, but less than others’, I’m certain.

Although I’ve been using Edublogs, Wikispaces, and Delicious very frequently, I have found my PLN to increase the most through the use of Twitter. I must admit, I found a large portion of ED483 to be geared toward “How to use Twitter Professionally.” I thought it was quite ridiculous for a while. I would visit it for two reasons:

1. I couldn’t decide what to put for my status on Facebook, so I would put one on Facebook and one on Twitter.

2. Someone would start following me and when I went to the site to follow them, I would see “at passing” what was going on on my home page.

One day, I thought about when Sara mentioned in class that how you use Twitter completely depends on who you’re following. I decided I would get a look at how Sara uses Twitter by taking a look at who she follows. From her list of “followees,” I added WLUC TV6 and got mini-news updates whenever I wandered on to Twitter. After that, whenever someone followed me, I would add them and one other person they were following. Through that process, I started following Sir Ken Robinson, who gave one of the TED Talks we were assigned to watch, a couple of different educational resources, and a person/group called MusicNoodle, which basically just asks random questions about music education to start discussion. What really got me hooked was when MusicNoodle replied to one of my Blog feeds (Twitter updates my status whenever I add a post to this blog) about the TED talks and suggested a TED Talk to me by Barry Schwartz, a music education advocate. I watched the TED talk and learned a ton. Like I said, ever since then, I’ve been hooked.

Twitter helped me a lot with my Reflective Toolkit for ED361, too. About four of us Education majors updated our status with new resources we found, the status of our projects, and questions we had. We were sort of like a support group for each other throughout the process, via Twitter.

I’ve been using the other resources introduced in class on more of a personal level. I read other classmates’ blogs, but I think I would call that a temporary PLN, since most people in class will discontinue blogging after tonight.

I hope to expand my PLN on Delicious… I just have to figure out how. I’ll keep learning!

Filed by emstrazz at 3:52 pm under Uncategorized
1 Comment

On Sara’s Blogs to Follow page, I came across the article New survey shows school budgets take another hit
on the blog Tech & Learning. The article summarizes the effect the current economy is having on school districts, stating that 75% of administrators surveyed in the past 6 months think their districts are inadequately funded. Schools are looking at cutting personnel, academic programs, and extracurricular activities, increasing class sizes, and deferring maintenance.

I saw my old school district face these challenges personally about two weeks ago. I heard about cuts that Gwinn was facing: cutting the band director and making the current choir director teach both band and choir, cutting all art classes, cutting the middle school jazz band and the beginning middle school band and combining 7th and 8th grade band, deferring maintenance to the current middle school and closing it down altogether, shuffling 7th and 8th graders around to different schools… It seems that the effects of the budget cuts are endless. I attended my first school board meeting ever– not necessarily to see what decisions the board was about to make, but because of the students’ response to the proposed cuts.

Let me first say that I have a fairly close professional relationship with a lot of the students currently attending Gwinn High School. I directed their fall play this year, played piano for their musical, and I substitute teach in the Gwinn District quite often. When I heard that several of them were planning to speak at the school board meeting, I was excited to attend.

We music education majors are frequently reminded that we will probably have to defend and fight for our jobs. Music programs are often the first to get cut from schools because they’re not usually required classes. Attending the school board meeting made me realize that if I run a quality music program and it is threatened, my students will be behind me in that fight.

The students in Gwinn held two silent protests, wearing shirts saying such things as, “You silence the arts, you silence me.” I think about 13 of them spoke up in front of about 200 people in attendance at the school board meeting. Their speeches were professional, well-prepared, demonstrated good writing skills and public speaking skills. All in all, I was amazed. TV6 and The Mining Journal both took great accounts of the event. An example of one’s student speech is as follows:

“The day after the last board meeting, Tuesday, March 17, around 2:00, a group of students, some of whom stand before you this evening were called down to the office. We soon realized that we were the group of students, minus the seniors, who spoke during public comment at the last board meeting. When we got to the office, Mr. Maino brought us into one of the conference rooms and told us to take a seat. In this room were the nine of us, and Mr. Maino.
Mr. Maino started out by telling us how proud they, meaning you, the members of the school board, are that we care enough and were brave enough to speak at the meeting, especially because we are all underclassmen, but that only lasted about two minutes. He proceeded to explain to us that there are proper ways to voice our opinions. He told us we shouldn’t be sarcastic, or disrespectful. Also, he told us about how the school board has been discussing these cuts for months, and how, though they didn’t like them either, they have to happen.
He went on to explain that the goal is not to cut classes, but rather staff salaries, along with funding for minor sports. I raised my hand and asked who decided what sports were minor, and which ones were major. He responded by telling me that football, basketball, track, volleyball, and cheer leading were major sports simply because they always have been.
At this point, more students began asking questions. We wanted to know about the funding for sports and art programs, and what would happen if we could fund the sports themselves, etc. After a short time, Mr. Maino gave up trying to answer our questions and said, “Now you’re all just trying to get out of class.” Someone asked about the economic effect of losing students to other districts as a result of these cuts. He replied by telling us that, it doesn’t matter, students will leave regardless and this is a direct quote: “I’ve got some advice for them, they should carpool!” In the midst of declining enrollment, we were astounded that the prospect of losing roughly $7,000 in funding per student doesn’t matter to the superintendent. It was shortly after this comment that we were all sent back to class.
This meeting took roughly 40 minutes, during which Mr. Maino attempted to convince us that his plan was the only viable option for the district. The analogy he used to explain the situation to us is as follows: “Pretend you have one dollar. Bread costs one dollar, and milk costs one dollar. You want both, but you can only have one. Both are good for you, both are tasty, but you can only have one.” Even to our young minds this was an oversimplification of the issue at hand, because he did not acknowledge that the grocery shopper had $2,000,000 in the bank or the option of buying lesser quantities of bread and milk. It is our feeling that Mr. Maino does not believe that we understand the situation we as a district face. Let us assure you that we do understand. We understand that our school district is losing students and money. We also understand that by cutting all these programs, the district will only lose more of both. Mr. Maino began our meeting by congratulating us on behalf of the board. We are now left wondering if his statements regarding student-loss due to programming cuts reflect the feelings of the board as well.
Thank you for your time, and continued consideration of these difficult issues. It is our sincere hope that you will carefully consider all options available to you and make the best choice for our district.”

The students were successful. The school board began to look at alternatives to cutting music and art programs. This economy makes situations in school districts difficult, but I think there is a creative solution to everything. As one gentleman at the school board meeting said, “If I was given a dollar to buy either milk or bread and I could only buy one, I’d buy milk. And then I’d ask my neighbor for flour. And I’d ask another for eggs. And together, we’d make bread.”

I hope that someday I’ll have a teaching job in a district with such supportive students and community members.

Filed by emstrazz at 3:39 pm under Uncategorized
1 Comment