Teaching Hope: Disillusionment

I was glad for this chapter, because it shied away for a bit from the intense teacher/student relationships that dominated the previous chapters. It was also a bit more varied in the approaches to the testimonies, and by that I mean it seemed as if the reading seemed to encompass a lot of different issues that could fall under the moniker Disillusionment, rather than a specific theme like child abuse or racism (though there were a few stories that seemed to be linked by the military and teachers who were of middle eastern descent.)

I enjoyed some of these testimonies for their insight. It seems as though Erin Gruwell's horror story was not a one-in-a-million occurrence. I wonder if I will face any attacks on my teaching in my career. Also, the examples of teachers' personal lives, while mostly sounding whiny, brought me back to Earth. It made me think about what it is going to be like having a family with a job that requires you to keep tabs on 120 more children, or what kind of a relationship I will have with my wife after spending all of my energy at work.

I think that this chapter was fairly effective in taking the romanticism and philosophy out of teaching for a moment, if only to help me keep my profession in perspective.

Teaching Hope: Engagement

This chapter had a few characteristics that perplexed me. Of course, let me first say that I'm glad to see that we're moving into that portion of the book where at least a quarter of the testimonies are not heavy with descriptions of children in the midst of despair, death, and broken homes. The interesting things that I saw linking all of these stories together were race and a startling variance in teacher intervention.

Nearly all of the stories had to do with the students in focus trying to overcome racial stereotypes, something that I, as a Mainer and a student who has never been in a school with more than maybe 1% of a minority presence, have a hard time visualizing and identifying with. I understand that these issues exist, and I know the struggle that all of these characters must be going through in the midst of it all, but I feel as though this chapter was full of more those kind of issues that need to be experienced rather than relayed. My attitude on the chapter's effectiveness (i.e. in being a tool for beginning teachers) is that some of the stories are very specific in their situations to be of much help. I ended up asking myself, what can I take away from this? since the very first entry all I've seen is an abundance of ignorance in every community that these teachers seem to be working in.

This sentiment ties in with my other observation, which is that some of the teachers in these stories didn't seem to bring all that much to the table when faced with a pressing issue, a few teachers were spot-on in their reasoning and juggling of life lessons, and then there were those testimonies that made me wonder why in the world some of these people were getting so caught up in the issues of their students. Some examples would be, respectively: The teacher who had a student with defiantly racist views, the teacher whose student was rejected from the school play, and the author of that feverish and obscure retelling of an irresponsible trip to the American/Canadian border crossing.

While I can read these stories and make up my own ideas about why the teachers might be dealing with these issues in the ways they have, I have to keep in mind that I have not had a steady teaching job, nor have I ever gotten a chance to form a serious, trusting relationship with any students. This must be one of those issues that is so hard to judge for someone in my position, since I'm not currently teaching in Appalachia, I don't have any Hispanic students, and I will never ever put myself at risk of incarceration for any of my students. Most of all, I do believe that the issues in the chapter simply defy standard practice and rational explanations, so who am I to second-guess these teachers?

PBS Documentary Part 3

I feel that since I was born at a time when schools have been integrated racially for a few decades, I will never fully understand the extent of segregation in schools from the 60s to the 80s. I know I've learned about it in every history class I've ever taken and it's been mentioned in nearly every education course I've had, but this video gave me some direct information about the unfair treatment that many minority schoolchildren were faced with. I think I was mostly disturbed by hearing the testimonies of proponents of segregation in Virginia and other states who refused to submit to integration--their arguments for maintaining the sorely unequal facilities seemed so grounded in obstinant ignorance. It was interesting to learn that the Johnson administration came up with the allocation of federal funds only to schools that accepted the integration policies. It seems as though not much has changed since that period of American history, since the same kind of "carrot on a stick" approach to school reform is being used in many states today. I guess the quickest way to earn a state's support is to go straight for its treasury.

It was also enlightening to know that I had probably been giving Brown v. Board of Ed. too much credit for socio-academic reform. According to the documentary, the court ruling went largely unnoticed among states whose segregation policies were long-standing. It was not until the aforementioned federal fund ultimatum that states began to adopt any kind of change. Still, it says a lot about the all-white supreme court council that they could have arrived at such a fair and balanced decision on race discrimination in their time.

PBS Documentary Part 2: 1900-1950

One of the most enlightening things that I learned from this video was the cyclical nature of educational philosophy in the United States. It makes me wonder whether or not we are in the midst of a pedagogical sea change today. I was excited to learn of the "Gary plan" and the strides it took to teach students on an individual basis and its revolutionary ideas on giving students well-rounded experiences in school. It saddens me to know that it this plan was beaten down because of child labor accusations. Who knows where this country might be educationally today if the Gary plan was allowed to continue? What sort of education experience might our kids be offered had the plan been able to go through decades of evolution, tackling social issues as they came and taking on more and more students of increasingly diverse backgrounds and interests?

After hearing of the atrocities put in place by the IQ tests, I was more unsettled to hear that the SATs are an offshoot of this test. Though I can't say how much of a fact that is, the nature of the SATs sure seems to fit that of the early IQ tests. While SATs are not mandatory, they are forced upon high school students by many school administrations with a threat of earning the school's disappointment if they decline. These tests are still used to "place" students, and while they are probably not as culturally-specific as the IQ tests, the scores cast expectations on the students' view of their own future, and it also influences the views of institutions on the students' merit before anything else.

Article: Mixing and Managing Four Generations of Employees

This article both outlines the differences between four generations of Americans and explains why their individual traits often lead to conflicts at work and in society in general. The author stresses generational communication throughout the article, focusing on what he believes to be the main reason the generations have trouble joining their ideas. His concerns rest mostly on the methods that each generation uses to get information, and the kinds of information that each generation retains. While Veterans and Baby boomers are more personally and educationally oriented, Gen Xers and GenYers are more used to indirect communication and educationally skeptical. The author offers a few ideas on how to manage employees of different generations. Most of his solutions involve pairing employees of compatible generations together. The success of the method of pairing hypothetically comes from the traits that he has assigned to each generation.

While this was a good article for informational purposes, I don't think that it has much merit towards the latter half. While it was interesting to know some broad traits of each generation, and to have the names of each generation spelled out for me, the article seemed purely hypothetical to me. Sure, there were some good observations about how each generation learns, communicates, and which values they adhere to. The problem is that the separations of each generation are admittedly vague, and I feel as though coming up with scenarios for workers of a certain generation based on the traits outlined in the chart in the article is misleading. All in all, the article was enlightening, but I think that the author could have stopped at his early observations. It would have been sufficient to raise awareness of differences and come up with some ideas for inclusion, rather than make specific hypothetical situations based on the workplace to exercise some ideas.

Teaching Hope: Challenges

This chapter dealt with situations and issues that made me pretty nervous, because I know that there must be a high frequency of these kind of confrontations and confessions going on in every school--I know I'll have to face it eventually, but the chapter seemed merely testimonial to me, and I'm not sure if it really gave that many answers. I guess that is a good enough quality, that these teachers are talking about some of their more harrowing and desperate moments, but aside from giving the reader a range of things that might happen to you depending on where you are teaching, I don't feel like I took that much away from it.

I do think that I learned a great deal about what constitutes appropriate student/teacher physical contact. There was an awful lot of hugging and throwing of arms around students, and it made me cringe every time, because all I've ever been told in my teacher education is that it is really never okay to touch any of your students. I thought about this for a while, and I decided that I can't really judge the actions of these teachers because I haven't been teaching a group of kids for an extended period of time, I haven't had to deal with a student confiding in me or attempting to kill himself in my class, so there's really nothing I can say at this point about what is the appropriate reaction. Unfortunately, this chapter doesn't really shed light on an answer to what is appropriate action, but I think it might be another one of the many paradoxical teacher issues that is so hard to come to a definite moral solution.

Teaching Hope: Anticipation

For much of this chapter, I found it hard to ignore those two little voices that are my cynicism and my inexperience as a teacher. That said, I did find a few of the passages enlightening, mostly because I felt like the experiences some of the first-day teachers were having sounded like experiences I might end up seeing when I start teaching. Most of the first-day experiences I identified with for this reason were usually the ones centered on getting the attention of the students and giving them some idea of what kind of a teacher they are going to have. That said, I didn't agree with a lot of the actions of the teachers, a few were:

The man who told his students they had three birthdays, the man who created a "teachable moment" by allowing his classroom to verbally berate one of his students for the rest of class, and the teacher who, instead of allowing his lessons to accommodate "Tommy" and the kid's obvious interest in the map on the wall of the classroom, forced him into academic submission by traveling to his house and, among other things, coercing Tommy's grandma to help rearrange his bedroom.

I feel like I am not reading the same stories that these teachers want me to read, but when they are all placed next to each other, their remarkable situational similarities all end up becoming one easily-defined characteristic, which takes a back seat to the actions and personalities of the individual teachers. So, while I noticed that there were some testimonies that I was not quite on board with, there were a number of teachers who seemed to have a real ability to think on their feet, as well as a desire to help students become individuals. The teacher who created the cultural history research project comes to mind, and I hope that there will be more entries that showcase the kind of forethought and execution that he (or she) did. I guess that means that while I am optimistic about what I could learn from this book, I know that there will probably be a lot of teachers out of the 20 that I will have a hard time sympathizing with.

Pam Burke Guild Diversity Article

In this enlightening, yet poorly balanced article, Guild defines some of the more subtle nuances in differentiated learning. Guild points out some of the flaws in the widely-accepted schools of thought concerning differentiated instruction and expands on the theory of multiple intelligences, putting particular emphasis on the idea that there are many types of learners within their own overarching learning styles categories. Guild is also persistent in explaining that teachers should strive towards diversity in their instruction, keeping it from being solely based on a surface disparity in learning styles and taking into account the instruction's effectiveness: “To provide an equal opportunity for all students to be successful in school, educators must first develop a deep understanding of individual differences in learning.” Guild examines problem areas with recognizing learning styles in students such as cultural background, race, and the influence of a student's innate personality on learning. Differences in cultural and racial influence on groups of students are also addressed, and Guild cites a number of studies that show learning styles apply loosely to certain racial and cultural groups, but the learning styles of these groups also depend on individual learning characteristics. The author continues to ask versions of the same question throughout the bulk of the article: “How should we accommodate differences in learning styles?” The answer almost always involves an emphasis on raising awareness of learning styles and differentiated instruction, and ultimately, “...improved instructional methodologies and practices for certain students will result in improved instruction for all.”

Guild does a good job of raising important questions concerning multiple intelligences. It seems to me that educators love to speculate all kinds of instruction based on the surface features of many of Gardner's categories, but it almost always ends up being a method for educators to flex their lesson-planning muscles. Guild makes sure to emphasize how easy it is to create instruction that will ultimately make things worse. Citing a number of concerned researchers who make this argument, Guild makes a good point when she encourages educators to be more selective in their differentiated planning—taking all factors into account before doling out instruction for broad learning styles, factors such as culture, race, personality, and subtler characteristics of researched learning styles categories. Guild's cases for the differences in learning styles across cultures and race were a convoluted mess, however, and the second half of the article becomes hopelessly redundant. She ends up asking the same questions time and again, always circulating back to the all-encompassing answer that educators just need to be more aware of learning styles. The article's flaws become more glaring and frequent—i.e.: the personal bias-laced freudian slip “Many reports contend that African Americans or Hispanic Americans or girls learn in certain common ways.” and the vague, possible translation-error “Many of these instruments are self-report.” The article's disjointedness eventually works against Guild's otherwise intriguing areas of focus.